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His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short. He wore cowboy boots, white jeans with a western
belt, and a black jacket.
We struck a bargain. I'd pay him the standard $45 taxi fare, and he'd take me to the falls,
point out the sites and get me back in three hours.
We talked all the way to Tónachi. We stopped near a Tarahumara lumber mill, in front
of a monolith stone where a niche had been carved out for a large statue of the Virgin of
Guadalupe. Then we stopped at a second shrine. It was a cave along the riverbank, also
with a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
We forded two shallow streams; the tires kicked up a spray of water.
A bridge with massive stone supports was under construction at the first river. I felt like I
was back in the woods along the Truckee River near Lake Tahoe. Lucas stopped for me
to take pictures of Tónachi, the church and the “laundry.” Clothes, all in brilliant colors,
were drying over a chain link fence.
We drove past Tónachi, into the river onto a rock pan. Lucas said, “This is the dry season.”
We walked on the blue-gray rock pan towards the falls. Instead of one giant, wide cascade,
as I had seen in the photo, there were three narrow, smaller, falls, like white ribbons tum-
bling in the sun.
I took a number of photos. I stood where, in the photo in Hotel Melinda, a torrent cascaded.
A front view would have taken us on a long route; we did not have time.
Lucas looked for an open store on our way through Tónachi. On the way back, we stopped
at the Consupo, the government discount store. It was like an old general store. A counter
cut the room off from the merchandise. All the stock was behind the counter stacked on
shelves.
Lucas asked for tuna and a man at a counter brought him a can. Lucas had purchased a
stack of hot tortillas just before meeting me on the street. Now he finally had something
to roll inside his tortilla.
Lucas dropped me off at Hotel Melinda just before 11 a.m. I caught the Transportes Ballez-
are for Parral. It was a Third Class bus. We stopped frequently. Anyone who waved halted
the bus and boarded. The driver, Daniel, left the bus door open for the breeze. He said that
Third Class buses are shorter, and this one did seem like a truncated school bus.
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