A Great Escape : ‘Woman Traveling Alone’ Evokes Latin America’s Mysticism, Magic

Author Mary Morris had just received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and was looking for a place to finish her first book of short stories in 1978 when a writer friend encouraged her to go to Mexico--to San Miguel de Allende. “It’s a wonderful place to write,” he said.

Morris was 30 at the time, a transplanted Midwesterner living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and making ends meet by teaching creative writing. She had just ended a relationship and had no other obligations.

“I just picked up and moved,” Morris recalled. “I was tired of New York and of America, and I felt like I needed an experience I had never had before. So I had it.”

Indeed, what Morris had planned as a three-month stay in San Miguel, a dusty pueblo in the high desert of central Mexico, turned into an 18-month odyssey--a sometimes dangerous journey that would take her from the high desert to the steaming jungles of the Mexican lowlands; from the highlands of Guatemala to the tropical rain forests of Honduras.

Along the way, she met bored U.S. expatriates, armed revolutionaries and natives not far removed from the Stone Age. She also met a Mexican man named Alejandro, who became her lover; a Nicaraguan revolutionary named Arturo, who tried to seduce her in his fortified house on the outskirts of Managua, and Lupe, an illiterate Mexican peasant woman who became her friend.

In the process, Morris learned a great deal about herself.

That experience, as rich and as varied as the landscape she travels through, is now a book, “Nothing to Declare” (Houghton Mifflin, $18.95). Morris, writer-in-residence at UC Irvine, will be signing copies of her book at Fahrenheit 451 Bookstore in Laguna Beach from 7 to 9 tonight. Subtitled “Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone,” “Nothing to Declare” has been described by Kirkus Reviews as “a stunning nonfiction debut--part Central American travel memoir, part exercise in spiritual and emotional map-making by a woman traveling into regions of poverty, mysticism and magic.”

It is an evocative and, for women in particular, inspirational book that, as a reviewer in Cosmopolitan magazine said, “makes you realize how silly it is to feel inhibited by a waiter in a posh restaurant looking cockeyed at a woman dining alone.”

Morris, 40, taught in the undergraduate creative writing program at Princeton University from 1980 until moving out of her apartment in a Manhattan brownstone last fall to begin a two-year appointment at UCI.

An inveterate world traveler, the Chicago-born author of one novel and two collections of short stories was ready to have what she calls “a California experience.”

Morris, a single parent, is renting a house in Laguna Beach where she and her 14-month-old daughter, Katie, are within walking distance of the beach.

With the living room picture window framing a panoramic view of the ocean and Laguna behind her, Morris, barefoot and wearing a baggy pale blue sweater, provided an East Coast perspective of her new surroundings.

“I think California is culturally a hard place to be in,” she said. “You cannot live in New York City and not bump into people, and this is very different: You have to make a plan to see people.”

On the other hand, the well-tanned Morris said with a smile, if she were in New York she wouldn’t be able to spend her lunch hour at the beach.

Laguna is many years and many miles from San Miguel, a place of great beauty--of bougainvillea, colonial buildings and cobblestone streets, but also a place of “blind beggars, naked children, broken-spirited donkeys and starving dogs.”

From the day she arrived in San Miguel with two suitcases and an electric typewriter, Morris kept a detailed journal that became the basis of “Nothing to Declare.” Although she noted in her journal that maybe she would write about her Central American experience someday, she didn’t begin writing her book until 1986. It took that long, she said, for the material to become real to her. Until then, “I don’t think I understood the impact of the experience.”

Her $88-a-month townhouse in a slum on the outskirts of San Miguel was her base as she took trips throughout Mexico and Central America, often traveling on bumpy roads in hot, crammed buses with no shock absorbers.

Her vivid accounts of the people and places she encounters as a woman traveling alone prompted Kirkus Reviews to describe “Nothing to Declare” as no less than “a feminist advance in travel writing.”

“A lot of male travel writers tend to deal more with the external reality rather than the dialogue of inner and outer,” Morris said. “They don’t tell us about their inner selves--their loneliness, their love affairs on the road. I couldn’t have done it any other way.”

Morris--whose book is laced with ghosts, dreams and Indian mythology and Mexican mysticism--sees “Nothing to Declare” as “a kind of visionary travel book,” one that “seems to speak to the experience of a lot of women.”

“I don’t even feel as though I’m the narrator, even though a lot of it is my experience,” she said. “I think I was a lot whinier than that narrator. I mean, some of the places were really bad.”

Mexico, she said, is a land of contradictions: a place of great beauty yet widespread impoverishment, a place where people have parties in cemeteries (on the Day of the Dead), a place where the food is great, yet you have to be careful about what you eat.

“I think everyone in Mexico, unless you live in Acapulco, is living on the edge a little bit,” she said.

Referring to the book’s subtitle, “Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone,” Morris said it is not just the physical aspects of travel she talks about in the book.

“There are a lot of ways women travel alone, particularly women of my generation who have made a lot of decisions in their lives,” she said. “Traveling is a metaphor for the way we live our lives.

“For example, one thing women need to learn is not to take more than you can carry, and I mean that in terms of physical baggage and maybe kind of an inner baggage we carry with us such as dependency--wanting somebody to take care of us. And I think the women of the post-’60s generation are making decisions to have children alone, to raise families alone, to live in relationships that may not be exactly traditional, to go out and work. And these are also, in my mind, journeys alone that women are making.”

Morris dedicated her book to Guadalupe Martinez Medina and the children of San Antonio, the slum outside San Miguel where she lived. Medina, referred to as Lupe in the book, was 36 at the time and the mother of six children.

“She was an illiterate peasant woman, but she was my friend in that we shared,” Morris said. “If you got past the cultural differences, as women we really wanted the same things, and the way our relationship grew was through that understanding.”

Over the years, Morris has made nine trips to Central and South America.

“That Central American reality really moved me. It’s a very special place. When I’d come back from market, carrying groceries on a dirty, filthy road, I just felt very alive in that experience. Here, it’s not quite the same closeness with life.”

Morris said she’s a better person for having made the trip to Mexico.

“The trip put me back in touch with a part of me I left in the Midwest,” she said. “I had grown up with a feeling that it was people that really mattered, but somewhere along the way that got altered. And I think living in Mexico got me back in touch with the importance of people, as opposed to more selfish, materialistic needs.

“It renewed a sense of community for me. I really relearned the values of friendship.

“Another thing I learned is that men have a sense they can change their options. I was too dependent and didn’t feel there were options for me.”

She now feels more in charge of her life, she said. “I don’t have to be somewhere I don’t want to be.”

Morris, who picked up her love of travel from her mother, has lived a year in both France and Italy. She has also made solo trips to China, Tibet, the Middle East and the Soviet Union and is contemplating traveling with her daughter for a year.

She said she is thinking of going to India, although she’s concerned about the risks of taking such a trip with a small child.

“India seems to be calling to me,” Morris said, then smiled: “But the South Pacific is another thought.”

Morris is completing her second novel, “The Waiting Room,” which will be published in 1989. Set in America after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the book “is about the effects of war on the lives of people who made themselves distant from that political reality--in this case, a family of a son who went to Canada to escape being drafted,” she said.

When she’s not busy writing or running the undergraduate creative writing curriculum and teaching short-story writing at UCI, Morris has been exploring California life. She said she has even attended several New Age channeling sessions.

Morris said she is not sure whether she’ll ever write another nonfiction book, but she might if another experience affects her the way Mexico did.

“Who knows, maybe it will be something about California.”

Is she keeping a journal during her stay here?

Morris smiled.

“Yes, I am.”