BY Robin Schauffler

Today in Morelia a glittering shopping mall stands along the ridgeline called Cerro de la Loma Larga, where once we hiked among gray and white volcanic tuff and dry golden grasses. Gray-green creeks tumbled, boulder-slowed, down hillsides shaded by tall eucalyptus. We skirted wire fences and low stone walls, paused to watch skinny cows and horses graze in rough pastures, vultures cruising above. From that ridge we looked out across the city, past the dozen church towers, to higher hills beyond.

The developers who built the shopping mall say it is the biggest, the grandest, in all of Latin America, though I haven’t ever confirmed that. I don’t plan to go there. I prefer to keep my memories of Loma Larga, and the other hills and mountains we roamed twenty years ago, safely stowed away where today’s changes can’t touch them. La Mȧscara, La Joya, Pico Azul . . . I see them all still. In a flash, I can bring back a little grove of oaks with leaves of brilliant yellow, the sky shimmering blue, the contrast almost painful to the eye.

* * *

Late afternoon, sun getting low, we mingle with a herd of goats, also going home in the low buttery light. Their human guides saunter behind them and occasionally switch at their heels with a supple twig. From their dozens of little feet dust swirls up to become part of the sky. We follow wobbly lines of boulder fences, pass adobe huts with chickens pecking about in the hard-packed earth. We tread red dirt roads among cornfields dotted with rotting squashes, past shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe draped in plastic flowers.

This was how it was to hike in the hills outside of Morelia, Michoacán, at the turn of the century.

* * *

When we arrived, in 1997, the hills surrounding the city looked delicious—sensuous in dark green and pale gold, strung together with curving ridges. We looked up into that rolling country for a full year, yearning for long, rambling day hikes.

We couldn’t get any of our friends—Mexican or U.S.-American—to take us hiking. Trails? There were no trails, they said. No maps.

We found that many had a fear of what might be out there past the edges of town. Maybe wild animals: bears, panthers, wolves. The hills didn’t look like they would harbor such creatures, but how would we know?

And as we asked around, we heard rumors of assaults in the backcountry; not by wolves or bears, but by people. Everyone seemed to know someone whose brother’s friend or aunt’s neighbor had been attacked or even murdered by outlaws, gangs hiding in the forests.

We hesitated to strike out on our own, as we would have at home. We worried about not knowing the rules: private property, fences, guard dogs, risks we didn’t even know about. And maybe the rumors were true, and there really were dangerous men or animals out there.

So we met our hiking needs by walking around town, doing errands and visits on foot rather than taking buses or taxis.

Peter’s altimeter lay on a shelf, telling us we were living at 6,000 feet, the elevation of our favorite alpine meadows in the Oregon Cascades, and reminding us we were not hiking. Mexico does have high snow-capped volcanoes. But with no car and little time, they were out of our reach.

A piece of me was missing. If I couldn’t roam in wild country, who was I?

* * *

Then Peter found Hans. In a small city with few gringos, you eventually meet all of them.

Hans was a Dane who’d worked as a tree biologist with the U.S. Forest Service for forty years, often cooperating with foresters in Mexico. He and Marge met and fell in love when they were both in college in the U.S. She had traveled in Mexico as a teenager, and she told him, “I’ll marry you, but only if you promise me we’ll live in Mexico someday.” He promised, and when he retired from the Forest Service in northern Wisconsin they moved to Morelia. Now, at age 77, he was over twenty-five years our senior. Despite his decades in the U.S. and Mexico, he still spoke both English and Spanish with a hint of a Danish accent. Hans was completely comfortable with Mexico and Mexicans of all ages and classes; completely comfortable in the outdoors; completely comfortable with U.S. expats—because he was entirely comfortable with himself.

He brushed off the stories of assaults. “I’ve been hiking out there for thirty years,” he said.

“Where do you go?” Peter had asked. “Are there any trails?”

“Are there trails? There are trails everywhere.”

No, not graded, built, sign-posted trails, as in the United States. But, yes, trails. Everywhere. And he knew plenty of Mexicans who loved to hike in the backcountry, friends he’d worked with for years. We just hadn’t met any of them yet.

But, danger? Animals? Bad guys? Hans laughed. Humans had eradicated most wild species here a century ago—hunting for food, and logging, and clearing land for subsistence crops and to protect livestock, like the cows and goats browsing the hillsides. Maybe once he had seen a deer in the forest on the slopes of Pico Azul. He dispersed the scary stories of outlaws with a practical Danish shrug. “I find,” he said, “that if you talk pleasantly to people, always carry a few coins for children, and mind your own business, everyone lets you be.”

And, he’d told Peter, this was the time—November, the beginning of the dry season—to start hiking again. In the rainy season the trails were too muddy, and the rains too fierce. Now the days would be sunny, the trails dry, the wildflowers in their full glory. Marge didn’t like him to hike alone these days—he’d had “a few little heart problems”—and he was eager for company.

So, one Sunday morning, we walked up the hill from our little house to Hans and Marge’s more-elegant home. From their back patio we looked out over Hans’s lovingly-tended garden toward those same hills we could see from downtown. But they were closer now.

Hans’s skin was browned by long years in the outdoors; his face rugged and creased. His short, slightly bowed legs had a lean muscular look, like a teen track star’s. He was dressed for hiking in natty khaki shorts, worn but excellent leather boots, gray wool socks, a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt, and a beat-up gray felt cowboy hat. He tucked a water bottle and his hand-sewn cloth lunch bag into a venerable gray daypack. This would be his uniform for every hike.

The three of us waved goodbye to Marge—not a hiker—and set out, passing the herd of donkeys that strolled the neighborhood. We had no map, no helpful signs with destinations, mileage, and an arrow pointing the way. We had only the map embedded in Hans’s very being, through decades of walking these hillsides.

He was taking us on one of his favorite hikes, to the top of the mountain called El Venado, The Deer. As we walked, he listed the names of other destinations, places we could hike to one day: “Las Tetas, Cuitzeo, Amanacer . . . or, you can take the trails to the villages. Ichaqueo, Atécuaro, Cuaréndaro, Jesús del Monte. . . .” Just hearing their names, I wished to hike them all.

Little lanes and paths led in all directions, but Hans took one only he saw, leading us always up and up. We passed soccer fields on a bald hilltop and tiny corner stores and rough-built shacks stuck like burrs to the skirts of the hills.

At a creek, a boy knelt to fill two plastic buckets, strapped them to the sides of his burro, and toiled up to a scrappy wooden house perched on the hilltop. Younger children ran out and asked for pesos and offered us a drink of water. Hans politely turned down the water, but handed out a few coins and spoke sweetly to them, instructing them that they must share the pesos.

Past the edges of town, a narrow road led among dry cornfields dotted with green squashes, through a forest of twisted oaks. Peter pulled out his altimeter and said we’d climbed a thousand feet. My feet danced and skipped, and I kept breaking into delighted laughter.

We entered a stand of long-needled pines mingled with thorny cactus, and crossed open meadows of multi-colored wildflowers: red salvia, blue lupine, pink and white cosmo. Vultures soared and tilted over us.

Hans whistled Danish Boy Scout songs as we walked. His keen blue eyes, seeming younger than 77, searched the landscape for details he could share with us. He seemed to know the trees personally, had watched them grow from saplings. He could tell us their life stories, the lightning strikes and seasons of drought they’d endured.

The city’s smog and noise were far behind us now, and we were in another world. Fields of corn and sorghum colored the hills gold and rust. Walls of rounded, rugged stones followed the slopes, in long sinuous curves, showing that for centuries human beings had claimed and divided this land.

We arrived on the broad open crest of El Venado, above the tops of the pines, and sat on large white boulders to eat our lunches. We were facing south now, away from the city, and the hills went on before us until they blended with the sky. In the distance, a village nestled at the head of the valley and dust flew behind a bus running on a gravel road along the valley floor.

Hans whistled an opera tune. Peter scanned the scene with his binoculars, I got out my watercolors and made a swift painting of a century plant standing on the ridgetop, sending up its spire of rare blossoms. I thought of how, on a hike in Oregon, I would shrink from any sight of human use—a building, the sound of an engine, an abandoned campfire, a power line. This wasn’t wilderness, and although we were at almost 7,000 feet it was nothing like the high, remote alpine country I loved back home. But I felt content with having stretched my legs, breathed hard, reached a viewpoint—whatever the view. Like the century plant, a part of me bloomed again.

* * *

The hike became a Sunday routine. Hans would sing, whistle, tell stories— of sleeping in barns with the Scouts, of being in the Danish Coast Guard during World War Two, of the giant spruce tree he’d planted and raised to full height that was chosen as the White House Christmas tree, of travels in Mexico with Marge, of the night he and his daughter skied along the Racine River in Wisconsin under a full moon.

He saved little treats to show us. With a delighted twinkle he’d hint he had a surprise in store, a secret place: a sudden canyon of spikes and towers carved deep into soft buff-colored stone, like a miniature Bryce Canyon; a brick factory, asleep on Sunday, a low-slung structure of loosely-layered bricks, roofed in black corrugated steel. Shafts of light seeped into the dim interior, slanting across perfect rows of pale red bricks; a geometry of light and shadow and clay.

Sometimes his friend Cuautémoc, a Mexican forester, would accompany us, providing yet deeper intimacy with the trees.

The stories we kept hearing of murders in the mountains were partly true, Hans explained, but they were all versions of the same single story that everyone knew—an incident years earlier, just after he and Marge came to town. A group of young people, college age, went camping overnight. They took sleeping bags, built a campfire, and drank a lot of beer and tequila. While they were partying, another young man came to the campfire and threatened to rob them. He told them he had a gun, and made them give him all their money. One of the guys recognized him, and said, “I know you! You live on my street!” The young thief panicked and fired his gun. Perhaps some were injured; maybe the would-be thief had gone to jail.

“They made some mistakes,” Hans said, “but there was no gang.”

At the end of the day, we’d sit on Hans and Marge’s back patio under the giant jacaranda, look out at the peaks we’d just traveled, trace our route again with our eyes, and have a cold beer and share a dish of peanuts. We’d tell Marge of our day’s adventures and inspect the latest blooms in Hans’s garden. Then Peter and I would shoulder our daypacks and walk back down the hill to home.

Soon Peter and I became independent of our guide, bolder about exploring, and sometimes we’d get in more than one hike a week, short or long, revisiting Hans’s favorites, or striking out on our own for new trails, new vistas. We covered miles and miles of territory, slowly putting the land’s contours into our own bodies. We hiked every hill Hans had named, went to every village, and beyond. Gazing back into the mountains from anywhere in the city, we could spot each of our viewpoints along the skyline. Between my English classes at the university, I would lean on the balcony railing and, with my eyes, follow last week’s hike. “You are crazy,” one of my students said, and the others agreed.

* * *

But to me it wasn’t crazy at all; it was essential. I had always hiked, and the farther from towns and cities and roads the better. Before we lived in Mexico, Peter and I backpacked a hundred miles a year. We preferred to get off trail, to lose ourselves in a remote valley where no one else traveled. We were comfortable in wild country, maybe more comfortable than anywhere else. The self-sufficiency and the simplicity of experience restored my balance—just us and a mountain, a cold creek for water, stars. I sucked up natural beauty in deep gasps—sparkling glaciers, craggy peaks, jewel-green meadows, bright wildflowers—storing it to rescue me when I was stuck in traffic or in a maddening too-long meeting, or when life just seemed too complicated.

I treasured a day when I saw no human footprints but my own and my companions’. I could feel my blood and muscle and bone stretch, grow stronger, restore damaged tissue and cells. I felt my heart get bigger and my fretting mind relax and open. In wilderness I knew I was alive.

* * *

There is so much about the United States of America to question, so much to doubt, so much to regret. But I do love its Wilderness. I love the fact that over a century ago we set aside and protected vast acres of land where we can roam at will, sleep anywhere, feel the magic of beauty and solitude. Our nation did so many terrible things as we stormed across the continent, destroying lives and cultures and habitats. But at least we held a few pieces of the land safe. In the United States, those regions designated Wilderness cannot be used for commercial purposes, cannot be mined, grazed, built on, populated, developed. Of course, humans have been using the land for thousands of years—there is no such thing as land upon which humans have had no effect. But there is land upon which our effect is older, lighter, less visible. I thrive on that, on the sense of freedom it brings. I felt, back home, that those Wilderness Areas belonged to me—and in a sense they did, they do: they are public land, just one more unearned privilege of being a citizen of the United States.

I have come to understand that the protected Wilderness Areas of the United States are a luxury, not a given. It’s another assumption we make as U.S.-Americans: that it is reasonable to have land that humans can not alter, beyond building trails to get there.

* * *

From the top of El Venado or La Mascara or Pico Azul, the city of Morelia was dwarfed by mountains; the traffic and bank buildings and shopping malls disappeared, and the wildflowers and century plants and towering pines took over. But signs of human use of the land were everywhere around us in the simple economy of the countryside. Melons grew among cornstalks, burros wandered the steep slopes, horses and scrawny cows scavenged for fodder. Green motor-oil containers waited at the base of long grooves in the pines, collecting pitch from the trees’ veins to be sold for turpentine.

Along muddy stream banks beneath the oaks, old men loaded burros with burlap sacks of earth to sell to the fancy gardens in town. Trees showed the bright raw scars of machete blows, where kindling had been stripped off and tied in giant bundles. On steep hillsides in the forest, long ditches marked the tracks of the evergreen trunks that men and boys sawed by hand into boards. They strapped the rough lumber to tough skinny horses, two boards twenty feet long on each side, and the horses trotted into the lumberyard miles away, dragging the lumber along the forest floor and onto paved streets in town. Now we knew where the horses that passed our kitchen window in the early mornings came from, the sound of the boards scraping along the pavement and the clopping of the horses’ feet a part of our morning music, connecting our kitchen to the far hills.

Patches of blackened earth showed where limbs had been cut and piled and burned into charcoal, the low fires tended for days and nights, until fresh wood was reduced to fuel.

Little girls scrambled up tree trunks to gather wild orchids, load them into their revosos, and sell them door to door in town. Always, somewhere, we heard the distant jaunty music of a mariachi or norteño band, from someone’s radio or boom box.

“Wildlife,” Hans said, with a wink.

Over time, these things—the bricks, the goats, the melons, the fields of corn, the stone walls—became beautiful to me, as beautiful as the grand pines and the ripples of graceful blue hills drifting into the hazy horizon. More so, possibly, because of the honest use they served. These hills were providing sustenance to families and villages scratching what living they could from the land.

One of the things I most longed for when I first came to Morelia was protected, true wilderness, where humans could only visit, not plant corn and squash, not build a wooden hut, not run sheep or goats or raise a flock of chickens. Sometimes I would miss it so much I would whimper out loud. But the slopes of El Venado taught me to love walking where I encountered campfire ashes and plowed fields and ancient stone walls, where at any time I might meet children running an errand for their mámá, a man walking behind his burro, a woman carrying a plastic basket of corn husks, a tiny shop selling milk in waxed boxes, dried beans, tortillas, soap, and candy and gum for the children.

Back in Oregon now, I still love to be alone with Peter and a few friends in a wild landscape, far from any roads. And yet I miss our tamer Michoacán landscape as much as I missed my Oregon wilderness when I was in Mexico. Our adventures there opened my eyes, changed my view of what is worth exploring.

The face of that Michoacán landscape has been altered again, this time by commercial development. Shopping malls and ranks of new houses climb the slopes I knew so well.

What would I see from the top of El Venado today? What has become of the goatherd, the charcoal-burners, the solemn-faced little girl Esmeralda we chatted with on her ragged wooden porch, the skinny gray kitten picking its way over the doorstep and the turkey chicks underfoot in the mud? I mourn the simpler, more human uses of those slopes.

Robin Schauffler frequently writes of her long experience living and traveling in Mexico. Her work has appeared in Cargo Literary, Timberline Review, Aji, Hawaii Pacific Review, Ocotillo Review, Street Roots, and forthcoming in Silk Road Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and misses Mexico every day.

Process Note: My writing process is haphazard and rambunctious; I have no routine, no special writing nook. I write any time of day, anywhere—notebooks, laptop, paper napkins, backs of envelopes, discarded receipts. As a child I produced tiny stapled-together books featuring the adventures of horses and wolves. I have 60+ years of scribblings, and my desk is littered with scraps. I slam out acres of words, fast and furious, and spend ages revising--my favorite part of the process--in consultation with mentors, teachers, classes, critique groups. I fret and fuss over every comma.