The men who live forever (September 2007) by Christopher McDougall
The men who live forever
In the hills of Mexico, a tribe of American Indians outruns death and disease. Discover how the rest of us can catch up
Salvador, our amateur guide and semiprofessional mariachi singer, is throatily butchering something about a bra-full of bad news named Maria when the song suddenly dies in his mouth. His eyes are fixed on a big, red van with smoked-black glass that just burst through the dust ahead on this dirt gully of a road.
“Narcotraficantes,” he mutters.
Drug runners. Salvador edges our truck as close as he can to the crumbling edge of the cliff on our right and stops, granting the red van every bit of road he can spare. No trouble here, is the message he’s trying to send. Just minding our own, non-drug-related business. Just don’t stop. Because what would we say if they cut us off and came piling out, demanding that we speak slowly and clearly into the barrels of their assault rifles while we explained just what the hell we were doing out here in the badlands of Mexican marijuana country?
The Tarahumara are practically immortal: their incidence of disease is just about zero in every category
We’re not federales, we’d have to stammer. We’re not searching for drugs, but for a people who are guarding something far more valuable: the secret of perpetual health and happiness. The phantom Tarahumara Indians are said to have found a way to party all their lives and never pay the consequences, living on a diet of carbs and beer but still being able to hop up and run more than 150km at a time, even in their sixties.
I’m still rehearsing this speech when I notice that the van has rumbled past, its crew invisible behind black windows. Salvador watches in the rear-view mirror until it is again swallowed by dust, then slaps the steering wheel. “¡Bueno!” he shouts. “¡Andale pues, a más aventuras!” Excellent! On to more adventures!
Gradually, parts of me that have clenched tight enough to crack walnuts start to loosen, but I suspect it won’t be for long. We set out yesterday from Chihuahua, driving all night across the desert and deep into the Sierra Madre, heading towards the upper rim of the Barrancas del Cobre – Mexico’s Copper Canyons, a maze of twisting gorges that run wider than the Grand Canyon. There are no roads where we’re headed, or even mapped trails, which is just the way the Tarahumara like it. In other words, either you know where you’re going or you are not going to get there.
A few hours after our encounter with the death-mobile, that seems to sum up our situation. We went off-road a long time ago and are now crunching over a bed of pine needles, winding deeper and deeper into a darkening forest with no sign that any human has passed this way before. Salvador, however, is still belting out tunes, making turns based on trees he thinks look familiar.
We’re screwed, I think.
And then, with the sun just setting, we run out of planet. We emerge from the woods to find an ocean of empty space ahead – a crack in the Earth so vast that the far side could be in a different time zone. And in a way, it is, because standing nearby are three Stone-Age men in togas, motionless as the mountains, as if they’ve been there forever.
This tribe may be one of the most ancient cultures on the planet but, as I discovered in my research, its members actually have a lot in common with the modern Western guy. Tarahumara men have a taste for corn chips and beer, for instance. They’re hard workers, but come down time, they party like a rap star’s roadies. According to one of the few outsiders to witness a tesguinada – a full-on Tarahumara rave – women were ripping each other’s tops off in a bare-breasted wrestling match while their husbands watched in glassy-eyed, drunken paralysis. Tarahumara men love sports, booze and gambling so much, they’ll stay up all night to watch a game, down enough beer in a year to spend every third day buzzed or recovering, and support their teams by literally betting the shirts on their backs.
Sound familiar? It should. But this is where we part company with Tarahumara men, because while many of us will die of heart disease, stroke and gastrointestinal cancer, almost none of them will. When it comes to the major health risks we face, Tarahumara men are practically immortal: their incidence rate is at or near zero in just about every category, including diabetes, vascular disease and colorectal cancer.
Age seems to have no effect on them, either: in 1993, at the age of 55, a Tarahumaran runner won the 160km Leadville ultramarathon in the Rocky Mountains. And their supernatural invulnerability isn’t just limited to their bodies. The Tarahumara have mastered the secret of happiness as well, living as benignly as bodhisattvas in a world free of theft, murder, suicide or cruelty.
| More like this |
|
CENTER
