Finding a personal gem in Nogales.

We went camping this past weekend at Patagonia Lake State Park near the Mexican border. It wasn't hard to talk ourselves into popping over to Nogales, Sonora for a few hours on Sunday at Sr. Amigo.

Sr. Amigo:
1. After the border turnstile, turn right, walk down Internacional Street to Benito Juarez.

2. Left on Benito Juarez to Campillo. Cross Benito Juarez then cross Campillo (careful!) and walk along Campillo until you can turn left up an alley (before you get to Avenida Obregon) lined with vendors.

3. Run the gauntlet to Sr. Amigo which is on your right.

Have a drink, watch the show.

One of our favorite pastimes is sipping beers while watching gringos run the vendor gauntlet.

"Hey come see my shop."

"Lowest prices in town."

"If I don't have what you're looking for, I'll steal it for you."

Julie nodded at an exasperated man, hunched over with shopping bags in both arms, who was trying to keep pace with a gray-haired woman. The woman seemed to ignore him as she pointed her head this way and that.

"That man looks like all he wants is a drink," Julie said.

A few minutes later he plopped heavily down at the table behind us.

"Can't find my wife," he moaned. "She went into that shop and disappeared."

He ordered a beer, drained it in five minutes, gathered his bags and trudged off.

Years ago, Julie and I burned out on shopping in Mexico and vowed to stop buying anything that we couldn't immediately put down our throats. We haven't always been successful at this, and as the afternoon shadows crept over our table I slipped on our vows once again.

A man, who was so quiet that I didn't even hear him approach our table, held a rectangle in front of me. I was transfixed. It was a small painting of two snow-capped mountains which I immediately recognized.

Last fall, I went on a trekking/mountaineering trip with two friends to Pico de Orizaba, the highest peak in Mexico. This giant volcano plumps up on the eastern edge of the state of Puebla. To the west are the second and third highest peaks in Mexico: Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. These were the two peaks in the painting.

Pico de Orizaba rises above the cornfields of Puebla.

Those three massive volcanoes border the Valley of Puebla, a high rolling landscape of agriculture and history where pyramids of cornstalks line fields once traversed by Spaniards on their way to conquer Mexico. When I was there, the air was like a blue, hazy coating.

Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl from the slopes of Orizaba.

And what stopped me in mid-swish, what made me abandon (temporarily) my Dos Equis, was that the artist had captured the color and light exactly as I remembered. He had captured the air.

Ruben Huerta's painting captures the air.

The quiet man was the artist: Ruben Huerta. He is originally from Mexico City where he received mentoring from a famous painter whose name I did not catch. He showed me newspaper clippings of articles about himself and his brother, another landscape painter. He had traveled to the frontera to make money, but complained that people here did not appreciate art. Mexico is full of talented artists with nowhere to go.

I immediately bought the painting. He had one other that showed the teepee-like cornstalk stacks so prevalent in the Valley of Puebla, but I had to have the first one.

Sure I broke our no-shopping vows, but sometimes a little gem appears in an unlikely place and you just react. Now to find a place to hang it. Hmmm.