Farewell happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells: hail, horrors!

-John Milton, writing on a Monday, I’ll wager

So we’re leaving Mérida .

We were over two hours early for our flight. We got evicted from our rental house early in the day, and security screening at the aeropuerto took less time than we had any right to expect. We took an Uber ride to the airport. We’d never Ubered before we went to Mexico, but it’s very much a way of life in Mérida. Today’s driver was a cute young woman, a first for us. We had been carted to and fro by a cadre of amiable men of various sizes and shapes and ages for the rest of the week. She listened to peppy Mexican pop the whole ride and was generally jovial and made us even less enthusiastic about leaving, if that’s even possible.

We visited parts of the airport we missed the first time, because we’re walking Spanish out of the country this go-round, instead of invading it. We walked through long, spacious and airy corridors, all floored in that nifty tawny stone they have all over the place. If it were tile, it would be a dreary wasteland of patterned patternless ground to cover, but each tile is lightly veined in endless variation, with the occasional substantial splotch of renegade stone mixed in by an unseen artist a million years ago or so.

There are multiple checkpoints, each manned by formidable musclebound military police with automatic weapons, looking like they haven’t heard a good joke since high school. Just kidding. Why does everybody think Mexico is Mad Max with tacos? Only the little strip of dirt on either side of the US border is a disaster zone filled with enough violence to compete with east Saint Louis. In Mérida, each waypoint is staffed with diminutive beauty pageant runners-up in smart sportscoats and too much makeup for their young years. They smile and apologize for their poor English skills using a vocabulary unknown to valedictorians in American schools. They just ask you if you have any food or foolishness in your luggage, and then send you off along the line with cheerful smiles.

Eventually you reach the final boss, who smiles broadly if you attempt any Spanish, no matter how feeble the assault on his language. If you’re expecting an interrogation, you’ll be disappointed, unless being asked if you had a nice visit counts as one. He dutifully stamps your passport and sends you on your way into the concourse.

The concourse had many strange things appurtenant to it. You could actually buy one of those ridiculous pool-cover-sized sombreros covered with sequins and other assorted tacky flair. It’s exactly the kind of hat no one in the country will be caught dead in. They all wear what my wife and I started calling “hippy-hoppy” trilbys, if they wear any headgear at all. Panama hats are definitely a thing here. They’re actually called jipijapa hats, but it comes out sounding like hippy-hoppy to our gringo ears. Selling Panama hats to tourists is the second most common job in Yucatan, I think, after making them, I guess. I suffered through so many sales pitches for them I could recite one from memory. I’ll spare you a full recitation. You can only hear that a hat was made by hand by children in a subterranean cavern so many times before you interrupt the sales pitch and offer to drive to the cave and get those kids out of there. This stops the sales pitch dead, generally. They are nice hats, though, but too rico for my blood.

There are cake shops in the mall. My wife puzzled over them. Who wants to buy a giant cake in an airport? It was mysterious enough as a concept, but when we saw a woman buy a whole stack of them, and watched the clerk sorta duct tape them together into a tower of confectionary Pisa, we went from curiosity to downright disbelief. You’re bringing a pillar of cake onto a plane as a carryon? Some people are built different than us, is all we could figure.

Then we encountered, finally, real fear. Terror, almost. We’d been warned by everyone about Mexico, and they were finally right. We ran smack dab into a fire-breathing, wirehaired goblin, his huge mouth agape, his raiment in tatters, beckoning us to our doom. Yup, Guy Fieri has a restaurant in a Mexican airport.

We had two hours to kill, so we ate in there. You have to sort of unhinge your jaw like a snake to get your mouth around the hamburgers. They come wrapped in a paper winding sheet, which was somehow appropriate, because you’ll need a stent for dessert if you finish the thing. They served us lemonade in a crystal skull, for obscure reasons. I’ve never sipped non-alcoholic drinks from the craniums of my enemies, or even my friends. I have to admit that sticking your thumb in an eye socket makes it easier to grip a beverage.

By arriving so early, the correct gate was still in use for another flight on another airline. “Viva” is another airline around there. We were on AeroMexico coming and going. It was very buttoned-down and efficient. I gather Viva is a cut rate carrier for shorter hops and vacations to places sensible people avoid, and similar destinations. I don’t really trust an airline with any form of enthusiasm in their name, like Viva! I don’t care for any excitement added to my air travel. I generally eschew any wild and wacky hijinks at 20,000 feet. I prefer airlines named like serial killers. I think they should even have middle names, like Wayne, to further banish any attempts at conviviality.

All the remaining steps in our travel home were steps down. The further we got, the more annoying and unpleasant things became. Atlanta was a zoo. The AeroMexico flight arrived early, which is a blessing when you have another plane to catch. Of course Atlanta didnt have a gate for it. We taxied to and fro all over the gigantic tarmac carpet, while Atlanta tried to make up its mind about about where to park our plane. By the time we got off, we had to scurry to make it to the next flight. The airport security personnel were literally crazy. At one point, we were made to go through one of those interminable switchback mazes designed to handle overflow crowds, even though there were none, just to approach the machine that x-rays your luggage. The whole time, a female linebacker shouted over and over, “We hain’t got no trays! Put everything in your pockets in yo luggage. We hain’t got no trays!” At the next checkpoint, two security personnel were breakdancing and rapping, while a third waved us past wordlessly.

The flight was a misery, but we expected that. The weather had turned cold. We got off the plane in the middle of the night in Portland, a dreary, desolate place. It was raining in sheets, and we couldn’t find our way out of the parking area. We came up against one barricaded exit after another, and finally discovered a self-serve stanchion that would process our parking ticket. It cost more to park for a week at that airport than a meal for two at the most expensive restaurant in Mérida .

The machine intoned: PLEASE inSERT your PARking ticket, over and over, in a crazy Teletubbies singsong. Of course the machine didn’t work. We tried several times, without any luck, until either a homeless man or a parking attendant without portfolio (they’re stamped at the same mill in Portland I gather) walked up to our window and told us our ticket must be dirty. He wiped it on his greasy camouflaged poncho, and failed to get it to work, with extra steps this time. He suggested we back up, and head to the only open attendant booth in the airport.

The woman in the booth was about two feet from us, but somehow didn’t see us as the minutes passed by on the clock. She was very busy, because no machine anywhere on the premises was working, and she was yelling instructions to travelers unseen into a microphone, and pressing various buttons with vigor. I was starting to get peevish about being ignored for so long. I’m sure her spider sense started tingling, and she opened the window between us, and my anger immediately morphed into pity. Her booth was wired to lord knows how many self-checkouts, and she could hear every one say, PLEASE inSERT your PARking ticket, over and over, all at the same time. I wanted to rescue her more than a hippy hoppy child laborer in a cave, I tell you what.

We drove home in silence, exhausted, hours in the car added to our traveling penance. When we got to the stop sign about a thousand yards from our house, the timing belt in our old Volvo let go, the valves stayed open, and the pistons slammed up into them and destroyed the engine.

Our car is perhaps more sensitive than us, but we understood how it felt. It would rather commit suicide than go back home.

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