August 10, 2006 Issue                                       

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

‘Mexican Days’ the next best thing to being there
by DAVID CROSS

Samantha Brown, of the Travel Channel, apparently does not need a partner for her trips, but if she ever does, David Cross will be first in line.

Seems like everyone I know is traveling these days — going off to spas at the Grand Canyon, to the Greek Islands, to Disneyland with the kids, to Europe. But not me. No sir. I’m too busy, busy with work and with the hours of reading and writing it takes to keep my loyal readers apprised of the latest literary trends. Plus my dog needs me.

Okay, so I’m poor. I’ll admit it. How poor? I have just three words for you — Romano’s Tomato Puree. Yes, that poor. So my traveling is currently confined to episodes of The Travel Channel (usually with Samantha Brown, the gorgeous, gregarious and truly funny visitor of Great Hotels and European retreats) and, of course, my books. This week I was able to visit Mexico, with the help of Tony Cohan and his engaging book, Mexican Days.

First a few words about Cohan. He isn’t a wonderful travel writer; he is a wonderful writer, as he demonstrated in his well-crafted memoir, Native State. In that book Cohan described his love-hate relationship with his father with searing honesty and unusual insight. Along the way he invited his readers into his youthful world of jazz drumming, drug dealing and (on one night and one night only) potential male prostitution. Check it out if you get the chance.

But he is best known for his travel writing, having broken into that field with On Mexican Time, a book about his escape from 20th century America (cell phones, faxes, car alarms … you know the place) and into the 16th-century hill town of San Miguel de Allende.

At the start of Mexican Days, the 20th century is once again knocking on Cohan’s door, this time in the guise of a Hollywood movie (Once Upon a Time in Mexico) being filmed in his own idyllic small town. What to do but take to the road, especially when his editor gives him the idea of visiting various towns of Mexico to gauge the feel of the country, post 9-11. At the time of the editor’s offer, Cohan is caught up in what most call wanderlust but what he terms his “dissociative fugue,” which is a disorder illustrated by — so says The Merck Manual of Medical Information — “one or more episodes of sudden unexpected and purposeful travel from home . . . during which a person cannot remember some or all of his past life.”

Like all great travel books, Mexican Days is far more about the internal journey taken by Cohen, and not the external one. Thoreau was the first to use travel as a pretext for escaping the shackles of modern society, and his philosophical treatise, Walden, is the text by which all other similar ones are measured. But Thoreau had it easy. When he ran from modern society, he also ran from adult responsibility. His abdication of what it meant to be an adult male of his time was total and complete. The issues facing Cohan and others are far more complex. How does one avoid a life of mind-numbing normality while still maintaining adult relationships and responsibilities? In other words, how does one live — really live — while still being a supportive spouse and getting the children through college?

One way to do this is to become such an incisive observer and talented writer that people will pay you to do what you love to do — which is travel. Still, the question hovers over this book — when does travel change from being an escape from the mundane and into mere movement for movement’s sake? Hinted at throughout the book but never directly confronted is Cohan’s marriage, which is becoming more and more defined by the time he and his wife, Makato, spend apart rather than together. One senses that his dissociative fugue may have more to do with marital crisis than he confides.

But hey, what do I know? I’ve never even met the guy! What I do know is that his travel through the different and differing towns of Mexico made me want to go there. (I’ve been eating Mexican food and listening to Mexican music all week — a poor man’s substitute for travel. Not that I’m whining.) From La Gruta to Cierra Gorda, through the coastal Caribbean towns of Veracruz to the ruins of the Yucatan and the high priced hotel in the Mayan jungle — it all sounds good, mainly, I suppose, because it is all quite explicitly not here! As Bob Dylan says — “I wish I was on some Australian mountain range/I got no reason to be there, but I imagine it would be some kind of change.”

So, while I remain quite resolutely here at least until Samantha Brown of TV’s Travel Channel says she needs a partner on her trips (she does look so lonely and wistful eating all those meals by herself …), I at least have the solace of Cohan’s evocative book, a book that wonderfully describes the sounds, smells and languor of a long, thoughtful, meandering vacation in an unfamiliar region.