Interviews

At an intersection about a mile from my house, right where the excellent Tigre Del Norte taco truck usually lives, a huge maroon mobile home/tour bus is parked with what I suppose is a converted horse trailer hitched to its rear bumber. The trailer's paint job matches the tour bus, and the back end of the trailer, the end that faces oncoming traffic, has been converted, at some expense, into a department store window display featuring a life size statue of Our Lady of Fatima.

Our Lady's feet are buried in plastic orchids, the kind you usually see weather-faded on the side of the road stapled to white wooden crosses. At her right foot is a painted reminder in English not to climb on her altar; at her left is its Spanish translation. Gentle, unidentifiable music plays from two speakers feeding out from under the altar window, which looks to be about six feet tall. At the bottom of the altar, almost bumper height, is a shelf on which are displayed several boxes of laminated cards with the rosary printed in English on one side and Spanish on the other. They're 50 cents apiece.

On one side of the horse trailer is a tiny door with a little step stool in front of it. On the door is an "OPEN" sign and along its upper edge is a small string of Christmas lights. The space inside the trailer is economically partitioned into a small shop with pegboard walls, and everywhere, jingling and sparkling when someone steps into the trailer and shifts its weight, are little bundles of religious key chains and crosses and rosaries and charms and cards and pamphlets and statuettes in all sizes. A swinging gate whose top edge is a tray with compartments for tiny charms for sale separates the store proper from the small dark corner where the cash register is. There is room for one person to stand here, and his back is directly against the plywood wall that forms Our Lady's stage lit backdrop.

I saw the mobile shrine on my way back from the base gym. I had climbed 1, 930 feet to nowhere, and once I reached that imaginary plateau, I ran an invisible and vanishing line for two and half miles. My legs hurt and I was covered in a sheen of sweat and the embarrassing heart-attack redness of the fair-skinned, but when I reached the taco truck intersection and saw Our Lady instead, I made an elaborate and illegal series of turns to investigate.

I'm supposed to be writing an original piece of "immersion journalism" for my literary journalism class this semester, which sounded like lots of fun until I realized it meant presenting myself to strangers and asking if I could hang out. I have a hard time doing this to people I know who have written down their numbers and emailed me precisely so I would do this, so with strangers it's even harder. Plus I have to explain to them why I'm interested in talking to them, and up until recently I've been under the mistaken impression that one should be honest about this.

That's how I scared off my first subjects. I told people who modeled nude for art classes that I was interested in their subjective experience of artistic nudity-- how's it feel being up there with your business out and people looking at every inch of you? How do you confront the taboo of semi-pubic nudity? How do you feel about exposing the private stories of your visual body? Do make any special grooming preparations? It took me a while to figure out that what I was asking for was precisely what a nude model doesn't exactly want to spend a lot of time thinking about. At least, not the ones I queried.

So when I approached the tiny door of the mobile shrine and found an older couple inside hanging woven leather crosses on pegs, I made a mental note not to start with the admission that I find it hilarious, the vision of Our Lady bombing down the interstate at 80 miles an hour and looking back beatifically on her tailgater with arms outstretched. I should also not mention that the two Harleys parked outside the shrine were funny too in their practicality. After all, you can't drive Our Lady through the Jack in the Box drive-through. Instead, I stuck with the statement that I'd never before seen a mobile shrine and wanted to ask some questions about it for a paper on local culture.

They seemed suspicious of me. When they started talking, I noticed they were foreigners-- Portuguese is my best bet, because after a little Wikipedia research conducted later that day, I found out that Our Lady of Fatima is really just another stage name for the Virgin Mary, only this refers to a vision of her that appeared to three shepherd children in a town called Fatima outside of Lisbon-- and what I was wondering is, of all the versions of Mary you could be hauling around the Central Valley, why this one? Wouldn't the Virgin of Guadelupe make more sense, seeing as how most of the migrant workers around here are from Mexico?

"You can write, but you must write the way we want," the woman told me sternly. "People, they come here and say, oh I saw you off the interstate, and oh, I work for this or that newspaper. And then they write, and people, they come in the middle of the night and knock on the house door and ask for food and clean socks. You can't get socks here. We are not a mission. There are no socks."

"I understand," I told her. "I've just never seen anything like this and I want to learn about what you do. I mean, like, Saint Fatima?" Oops. Again, Wikipedia came later and I didn't realize what a blunder this last part was.

"You were not raised in the church." The was a statement, not a question.

"No, but my mother's family was Catholic. Sort of."

"We will be here a few days. We close at 8 in the night and you can talk to my husband."

This was kind of a relief because her husband seemed nicer. As I stepped out of the trailer, he followed and hoisted a red plastic gas can which he used to top off one of the Harleys and then feed the tour bus.

I'm actually kind of intimidated and not sure I want to go back. What I really want to know is how you get to the point in life where you sink loads of cash into a rig like this and run off taco trucks to spread the Word. I want to know what it's like to disappoint midnight Mexicans with dirty socks who see the Virgin of Guadelupe smiling down at them from a horse trailer while she gently warns against climbing. I want to know what problems and questions people bring to a roadside shrine, and if all those carefully priced key chains and rosaries feel like an answer. What I'm afraid I'll get is a bracing dose of Old World Catholicism with a chaser of judgment and the sense that it's probably already too late for me.

Other options, which again seem less scary as they're in their conceptual infancy and not yet at the "Hi, I'm Rachel and I want to write about you" stage:

1) Mutton busting at the Laton Rodeo this weekend. I'm going to see this anyway because one of my best long distance friendships was formed over an uncontrollable giggling fit over whether or not this event is fictional. The debate led to Google image wars, and then to printed out pictures of kids in bike helmets clinging bareback to wild-eyed sheep tearing around a dirt arena. I may place bets and holler critiques from the bleachers. Maybe the kids or their parents will talk to me.

2) Interviewing the bartender at the Officer's Club on base. He's a nice guy, one of the few gray-haired dudes I see on our curiously old-people-less base, and I think talking to him would be fascinating because he basically runs the adult version of a "No Girls Allowed" tree house. Technically, women are allowed, but it's such a bizarre, macho pilot world that it always feels like I'm trespassing in an Elk's Lodge or something. Plus, he's got to remember all these rules about whose personalized mug is whose, and that the new guy always gets the "FNG" mug, for "Fucking New Guy." I wonder what he's seen.