On investigative travels and assignments, author Scott Thybony is no longer surprised by the unexpected questions — and answers — he gets. Thybony remembers some surprising interactions he’s had along the way in this month’s Canyon Commentary.
Assignments often take unexpected turns. Sometimes it’s an offhand remark during an interview, and sometimes an innocent question from a child.
For a story in northern Mexico I decided to drive in order take my family. We tried preparing our 4-year-old son for traveling to another country where people spoke a different language. Even the signs would be in Spanish, we warned him, not English. As I put Erik to bed the night before the trip he wondered about the strange land where we were heading.
“Do people in Mexico dream in Spanish?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him.
“It’s hard to imagine,” he said.
After thinking about it for a while he asked, “Do pigs oink the same way in Mexico as they do up here?”
“Yes,” I answered with a smile, comfortable in my grown-up knowledge of the world.
We crossed the border and reached the city of Casas Grandes. In a grocery store we bought Erik a comic book in Spanish, and as Sandy started reading it with him they made a discovery.
In the ballon above the head of a barking dog were the words “Gua! gua!” [Gah-gah] instead of “Bow-wow!” And that got me wondering about those pigs.
On the same assignment I had an unexpected chance to interview one of the last eyewitnesses to have served with Pancho Villa. An old farmer with a thick Zapata mustache stepped from his adobe home at the foot of the Sierra Madre. Tito politely said hello while buttoning up his cardigan sweater against the cold. He spoke English with a Texas accent.
In his 90s and still working his fields, he had grown up during the violent years of the Mexican Revolution. As a boy he had guided Pancho Villa’s men through the mountains, and I asked him his opinion of the man many saw as a hero and others as a vicious bandit.
Tito was reluctant to stir up memories long put to rest. But to be polite he told me, “Some say he was a very bad man. I don’t know. There were lots of bad men in those days. All I know is that Villa came in and killed those men who were killing us.” Tito had learned at an early age the stark equation of survival.
Successful people who started off in life with everything stacked against them often recounted the events of their lives in unexpected ways. On an assignment in West Texas I asked a rancher about her struggles growing up during the Great Depression. “We were so poor,” she told me, “my only pet was a tumbleweed.”
At Zion Canyon I asked a microbiologist about life in rural Japan during the grim years after World War II. “We were so poor,” he said, “we had to argue with each other for entertainment.”
A sense of humor also helps river guides make it though the season. When a boatman on the Snake River in Wyoming told an improbable story, a passenger asked him if it were true. “Everything I say is true,” he answered, “because I’m not creative enough to make it up.”
During a winter trip to Yellowstone our snowcoach passed through a long stretch of trees standing skeletal white. Wildfire had swept through in 1988 killing them, and over time their bark had weathered away. A passenger asked the driver, “What kind of trees are those?”
“We call those dead-dog trees,” he answered and waited for the follow-up question he knew was coming.
“Why do you call them that?”
“No bark to them,” he answered with a straight face.
The world comes at us in surprising ways, and often it reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously.
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and air on the last Friday of each month.
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