The Road Less Travelled

My girlfriend and I decided to take a trip to Hidalgo, Mexico to a natural ecological park run by indigenous people. We took a bus up a steep road across the mountains until we arrived to a river.

We quickly set up camp.

The next day, we saw a flyer on a wall that read:
“Night hike tonight at 6 p.m. ” We asked the locals and they vouched for it.

We arrived to the designated place at 5:00 p.m., this being Mexico the guide arrived an hour late which got everyone pretty annoyed.

Our main guide was Jose. He told us we were going to go on a “special hike.” The rules were simple: don’t leave anyone behind and always stick together.

We were walking calmly a long a trail when Jose suddenly yelled “run.”

The other guides egged us on to keep going. We jogged through the woods at a slow but steady pace wondering what we were escaping from.

It had gotten pretty dark and we could see tall tree branches covering brightly lit stars in the sky. We came upon a marsh full of mud. Men, women and children from all nationalities helped each other across. A few people lost their shoes. Everyone got muddy.

We arrived to a dirt road. Jose told everyone to get down behind some bushes and to keep quiet. A jeep with bright blinding lights stopped next to us. A stout man, who happened to be the receptionist at the camp, got out and jokingly asked himself where the “illegals” were in a fake American accent. After a few minutes, he got back in and drove away. We got up and ran across the other side.

We came upon a clearing in the forest. We were asked to make a circle.

Jose’s demeanor changed.

He asked us to hold hands. We were all given blindfolds. We put them on and were led together to an unknown location. It's hard to say but we probably walked close to ten minutes.

I heard running water. We were back at the river. Jose told us to stop and take our blindfolds off.

No one expected what we saw next.

All around us hundreds of fire-buckets illuminated the mountains. A silent sonorous wave of awe engulfed us. The reflection of the fire burned in the stillness of the river.

Jose told us that we were bound by our humanity and that an undocumented immigrant travels hundreds of times further than what we had just experienced to get to their destination.

Afterwards, we sat around a bonfire telling stories and recounting our hike, admiring the vastness of the sky until the fire withered away with the light of morning.