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The long telephone message had come from the Bonar College people, who were camped out down there on a river bank, mapping a Mayan ruin called Ektún. Dr. Ritchie or one of his people had called my hotel from the Palenque bus station, the nearest telephone, and given Beatriz a shopping list of things they needed.
    I had everything but the embrague por la Toyota—a Toyota clutch. That was the Spanish word for it all right, but in Mexico, where so many automotive terms had become Americanized, it was generally called a cloche . What kind of Toyota? Car? Truck? What year model? Did they want an entire clutch assembly? They didn’t say or Beatriz didn’t bother to take it down. Refugio and I had helped them carry their stuff in, and I couldn’t remember seeing a Toyota.
    Probably they had fried the disc pulling down trees and dragging blocks of stone around. But I wasn’t going to buy one and then go through the agony of trying to return it. As a rule you get value for your money in Mexico, but it’s hard to get any of it back, to get a deposit returned or any sort of refund. In their financial dealings with gringos, the Mexicans employ a ball-check valve that permits money to flow in only one direction. It can’t back up. Buy the wrong one and I would have to eat that clutch, throwout bearing and all.
    No embrague then, but I had everything else. Peanut butter they craved, and Ocosingo cheese and a sack of potatoes and flashlight batteries and two small hydraulic jacks and canned milk and pick handles and 35-millimeter color slides and bread and twenty-five gallons of gasoline and so on. I also had an old Servel gas refrigerator for Refugio. He had asked me to be on the lookout for one. It was too tall to transport upright—my camper shell was only cab high—so I stowed it sideways and hoped for the best.
    Mérida, for all its associations with the Maya empire, is not really very close to any of the major ruins, except for Uxmal and Kabah. Mayapán and Dzibilchaltún are nearby but they don’t count for much, not as spectacles. I had a good 300-mile run ahead of me, south to Palenque on paved road, then another seventy miles or so of rough track through the woods. At Champotón on the coast I bought two buckets of fresh shrimp, one for Refugio and one for the college diggers. Refugio was crazy about shrimp.
    I reached Palenque in the afternoon and worked the ruins there for an hour or so with my Polaroid camera, taking pictures of tourists at five dollars a shot. Hardly any business. The hippies, sunburnt and dazed, had no money, and the older gringos had their own cameras. I left the Mexican tourists alone, lest I be reported. As a foreigner I wasn’t legally permitted to do this sort of thing.
    Louise kept telling me the term “hippie” was out of date. She couldn’t tell me why. These words come and go, but why had that one been pulled? The hippies hadn’t gone away. There were even some beatniks still hanging around here and there in Mexico, men my age, still thumping away on bongos with their eyes closed, still lying around in their pads, waiting for poems to come into their heads, and sometimes not waiting long enough. I did perhaps use “hippie” too loosely, to cover all shaggy young Americano vagabonds. Refugio called the real hippies aves sin nidos, birds without nests, and los tóxicos, the dopers. These were the real hippies, the viciosos, the hardened bums, kids gone feral. I knew the difference between them and the ordinary youngsters knocking around on the cheap with their backpacks.
    They came now the year ’round to Palenque, which is everyone’s idea of a lost city in the jungle—real hippies, false hippies, pyramid power people, various cranks and mystics, hollow earth people, flower children and the von Däniken people—such as Rudy Kurle, with his space invader theories. At night they sat on top of the pyramids