Michoacan 1998: White butterflies as big as your hand fluttered among the pines and avocados in the balmy November sun, while ahead of us on the trail, a schoolgirl walked to a tryst with her boyfriend. We crossed a bluff and zigzagged down the cliff to the bottom, where the waterfall Tzararacua surprised us, landing in a pond with great misty force.

I was working in Bosnia. Last fall I went to Mexico, to visit my friend Kim. While staying in the market city of Uruapan in Michoacan, we took a day trip to the woods to see the waterfall. As Kim relaxed, I crossed a stone bridge, heading over the next hill and another to find the waterfall's little sister, Tzararacuita. The schoolgirl met her muchacho. A half dozen youngsters in bathing suits showed me the way to the waterfall, hidden in the dense woods, and they wasted no time jumping into the pool.

Leaning on the guardrail of the bridge on my return path was a tall gringo with a camera. He wore blue jeans, a plaid shirt, and a bushy brown beard, and he said to me, "Bway-nis Tar-dis." Back up on the bluff, I sat with Kim in an outdoor refreshment stand with an astonishing three-sided view of the surrounding cliffs, the green woods, ravines, and farmland. Two barefoot kids served the guests and played in the dust, their mother off tending a baby somewhere. I told Kim about the gringo in the plaid shirt. "I bet he's from Seattle," I said, "probably from Ballard - between Market street and 90th." (Ballard is a pleasant but unremarkable neighborhood where the modern-day working class of aging hippie carpenters tends to settle.) Kim ventured that he goes to contra dances, but I wasn't confident about this. Kim went to buy us a Coke. As she did so the gringo arrived, and we chatted.

I said, "Where are you from?" He said, "Seattle." I said, "Are you from Ballard?" He said yes. I said, "Then are you perhaps from between Market and 90th?" His eyes got big. "Yes." I asked, "And are you maybe from the east side of 15th Ave Northwest?" No, he was from the west side. I missed this one. In fact, I knew where the plaid gringo was from. I had his number. The plaid shirt ruled out Bosnia; his height ruled out Mexico and most of the rest of the world. The accent said West Coast, and everything together said Ballard. Deep down I even knew he was from the west side of 15th, but my own quirkiness made me guess wrong. If I were spiritually purer, that is, if I ate vegetarian food, meditated, and drank only water, I would have been on the mark. The three of us talked. The gringo used up the rest of his Spanish introducing himself, "May yommo Mark Parker."

We talked about Kim's decision to resettle in Mexico, and our respective itineraries. Mark Parker told us about his trip to watch the indigenous Indians of Lake Patzcuaro and to observe the midnight rituals of the Day of the Dead. He said it bothered him to see the changes taking place in the local communities. "People are getting electricity now, and pretty soon they won't be living the way they used to live. I think the government should subsidize these villages, so they will keep their old way of life."

Mark Parker asked Kim where she got her taste for adventure. She spoke of having been carried on her father's back through the Grand Canyon at the age of two months. Something about the time we were in Gaza during the Intifada. Later I asked Kim what "adventure" means. Myself, I don't consider such travel an adventure; it's more of a necessity. To me, "adventure" sounds like something wild, such as space travel, where you land on some rocky planet and you are walking around in a space suit with special shoes that somehow keep your feet on the ground, and you have to be careful to evade the giant monster worms that come bearing down on you. But your force field protects you, and your helmet has a device that somehow keeps the visor from getting fogged up as you are running away. Visiting Mexico is not an "adventure" for me, because I don't need a force field. I ride around on buses and stay in cheap hotels because I want to see how Mexicans are like me, not how they are different from me. It's not an adventure for me because I know about enough Spanish to read the graffiti on the wall back in the center of Uruapan: "October 2--Commemorate the 30-year anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre: because the color of blood is not forgotten."

The color of a Mexican's blood is the same as anyone else's, the same in Bosnia, the same in Ballard. The only difference between us all is our luck. People from Ballard are very lucky. Most of them work, and most of those who work are paid enough to pay their rent. The people of Bosnia are not so lucky. The Tarasco indigenous of the area around Tzararacua are poor and not very lucky. But they are lucky that they still possess their own language, unlike the natives who used to populate what is now Ballard, Seattle. They are lucky that gringo tourists will come and pay to visit their magnificent waterfall. They are also lucky they don't live further east, in the state of Chiapas, where the rich people, subsidized and ignored by the U.S. government, take the land away from the indigenous and pay death squads to massacre them. With all respect for Mark Parker, I wish the indigenous of Mexico had electricity and could change their way of living. I wish at least some of them had computers and telephones and e-mail, so they could communicate with each other to figure out what to do about their vicious government and the rich folks who steal their land and kill them. Maybe that would be some kind of adventure.