One summer, a friend of mine and I decided to drive from the Northeastern United States to Mexico. We had only a small amount of money—a couple of hundred dollars between us—and no bank checks or credit cards. My friend brought his car—actually his parents’ car—which was about twelve years old. We were going to take turns driving, and we planned to spend the nights in a pup tent.

After our first day on the road, we pitched our tent in a cow pasture in Virginia. In the morning, the wife of the farm came to wake us up. I was embarrassed, because I thought it might have been improper to sleep in a private pasture. But my friend was amiable. He told the woman where we were going and why, and she wished us luck.

The second night, we slept in the car. We parked in a rest area on the Arkansas-Texas border and tried to stretch out on the seats. But no matter how we placed ourselves, our knees were always bent. In the front, my friend slept with his head under the steering wheel. When we woke in the humid sunrise, we took our regular seats and hit the road immediately.

As we drove, we composed stupid songs. For one, we took the name of a roadside town, Okalona, and put it to the show tune “Oklahoma,” so the phrases came out “Ohhh kalona, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain. Ohhh kalona, where the wind comes right behind the rain.” At one point, my friend said, “You know, you have a good speaking voice, but you can’t sing at all.”

At the Mexican border, we had trouble getting a tourist visa. We waited a long time next to a clerk’s window in a bare-walled room. Using what I’d learned from television, I tried to bribe an official. I walked up to the clerk and asked, “Can I give you some money to speed up the process?”

“I don’t take bribes,” he said.

“I’m not messing with you,” I said. “I’m serious.”

“I’m always messing with you,” he said. “I’m never serious.”

We waited another long spell before we received a “Turista” sticker for our car’s windshield.

In a town not far from the border, we wasted no time in sampling the local food. We went to a street stand and asked for tacos and iced tea. The taco sauce was unbelievably hot, and the tea looked like cloudy tap water. Each glass held a 1-cubic-centimeter piece of ice. We ate the tacos and drank the tea without hesitation. Aside from a corrosive sensation in my stomach lining, I felt fine.

Our first night in the country, we tried to pitch our tent on the desert floor. The caked mud and wouldn’t hold the tent stakes; every mallet blow crushed the mud to powder. As we worked, we saw thousands of ants marching across the hard ground. When we finally got the tent to stand, a strong wind blew it over. We went back to the car to spend the night. This time, I got into the front seat, where I snoozed with my head under the steering wheel.

When we woke, we saw vultures circling low over our vehicle. The winged scavengers seemed to know we wouldn’t last long in our new environment.

When we reached a sizable town, we decided to spring for a hotel room. The cost, converted to American money, was $4 a night. Dinner in the affiliated restaurant was $2.50. We could handle those prices. We planned to stay for a couple of days.

One evening, we met a man who said he was a priest. He wasn’t wearing priest’s clothing, but his English was good and his claim was convincing. He asked if we would bring him in our car to a convent in the south. As a reward, he would arrange for us to stay in the convent, he would give us a tour of some local towns, and he would lead us back to our hotel. We agreed readily.

At the convent, some nuns fed us a dinner that included breaded beefsteak. The meat was slab-like and dry. After dinner, the nuns gave us a room as clean and minimal as a hospital ward. We went to sleep, and when I woke I noticed I was sick. I could feel gastro-turbulence. As I meditated on my condition, I heard my friend playing the convent’s piano. The nuns were piping the music through their public address system—the whole town could hear his performance.

I was so sick I wasn’t able to drive. I rode in the back seat while my friend drove and the priest navigated. At times, they stopped the car to look at unusual architecture. Sometimes, I joined them to look at Spanish gothic patterns overlaid with Mayan corn motifs. Other times, I dozed in a fever haze. Often, I asked to visit a toilet. I didn’t mind that toilet paper didn’t exist in Mexico. I was happy to see a porcelain bowl.

After our tour of central Mexican architecture, my friend and I noticed that half of our money was gone. We had less than $200 between us. So we turned back for the States. We dropped the priest at his home as we headed north. “I will pray for your health,” he said to me as we parted.

We started sleeping in the car again, at the side of the road.

One morning, the car engine wouldn’t start. We opened the hood and brought out our only tool, a pocketknife. After some poking and scraping at the battery leads, we realized we couldn’t fix the ignition. We sat by the car and waited. While we waited, I found a cactus stand that could function as a restroom stall.

In time, a ranchero came by on a horse. He looked at the engine and trotted off. Presently, a group of rancheros gathered around. They called the car a female dog in Spanish. They wanted my friend to sell it to them. We understood that buying the dog might be the only way these men could acquire a car, and the only way we would make progress on our trip, but we didn’t hand over the keys.

The rancheros sat on the ground and patiently broke rocks with other rocks. They seemed to have no other duties to attend to. After a while, we joined them. We learned that if we hit layered stones cleanly, we could split them in two. At times, the rancheros took breaks to drink from a large puddle beside the road.

Presently, a man on a motorcycle came by. In the realm of horses, he was king. He opened the car hood and pulled some wires apart. He reconnected them differently and got the engine to run with a loud knocking sound. We gave him a couple of U.S. dollars and shook hands with all of the rock breakers.

As we drove off, we noticed that the car wouldn’t go above 30 miles per hour. The engine sounded so rough that we were afraid to stop, even at intersections. At one crossroads, a bus rolled toward us with its horn blaring. We waved out our windows as we passed within inches.

We stopped a service station in the first town we reached. There, a mechanic adjusted the engine’s timing by holding the bare end of a wire in one hand and taking electric shocks as the cylinders fired. As a teenage assistant turned the key, the mechanic’s body jerked. When they were finished, the engine roared.

Just as I started feeling better physically, my friend got sick. So I drove while he slept in a fever.

At the Texas border, we hid some beer under our front seat and tried to pass through customs. An official lifted the foot mat and saw the bottles. “Destroy them,” he said to another official.

I thought the authorities were going to destroy us, but apparently they planned to destroy only the bottles of booze. Even so, they removed the front and rear seats and brought a dog to sniff the car. The officials found a pack of cigarettes called Delicados and said, “They aren’t very delicate, are they?”

When the officials saw our pocketknife, they asked, “Did you buy any switchblades down there? Give us the blades!”

We paid $5 per smuggled bottle of beer and headed into Texas. I told my friend I wanted to go through Oklahoma. “It’s on our way,” I said. “It’s where the wind goes sweeping down the plain.”

My friend looked at a map. “Oklahoma isn’t anywhere near where we’re going. Okalona is, though. We’ll go past Okalona.”

Together, we said, “Where the wind comes right behind the rain.”

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