The Things I Left Behind

There were a few attitudes I had to adopt from the outset while trying to walk across the Guatemala.  The first was not to think about what I would eat nor where I would sleep.  I looked at the lilies of the field.  They weren't worried about weaving clothes for themselves nor plotting for their own well-being.  I had some and water in my pack, but not enough to go more than a day.   And I also had a tent, but most of the places would be almost impossible to camp in– either private property or steep vegetated hillsides with no place to do so.  So I left behind my worries and walked, trusting that somehow it would work out.

The second attitude was to not be set on getting to any one place.   I had a map, a very good one, but entire towns were still missing from it.  Asking directions from people who think the United States is on the other side of the mountains turned out not to be the best idea.   When given an estimate of anything over four hours walking time to get to the next place, I quickly learned that usually meant, "I actually have no idea but I'd rather not let you know the truth that I've never left this valley."  So rather than weave back and forth across the land I went by two rules: face the rising sun and go up.  I learned that instead of trying to get somewhere it was usually better to realize that I was already somewhere.  Usually the best somewheres are in the highlands. So I stayed the course and stuck to the highroad.

The third was to leave things behind.  I had long been taught not to store up my treasures on earth where they can be eaten by rats and rust, but had never really put it to the test.  Besides my major stuff purges in San Cristobal and with the van drivers, the first thing I left behind was a sturdy day-pack with a family of sheepherders. 

I met the sheepherders after the first day of walking.  In the morning I had crested ridges as fingers of sun felt forward into green dells, passed verdant banks bobbing with flowers, and plunged into a 500 foot deep gorge only to pick my way up the other side, clawing at roots and groaning under the weight of my pack.  The thick foliage began to oppress me in the afternoon heat.   Then the sun lowered and children began coming down the mountains between coffee bushes with thick bundles of firewood balanced on their head to use to cook supper and heat their house.  Would I find a warm house for the night?

Yes– that of the colorfully dressed Maam woman Modesta and her two daughters.  They barely spoke Spanish, rather the Maam dialect, one of 23 languages among the indigenous descendants of the Maya.  I found myself seated on the dirt floor in their tiny kitchen as darkness came on. I was handed a steaming bowl of...  cow hoof soup!  They invited me to herd sheep with them, and I agreed and so we turned in early to rest for the day of work.

It rained in the night and at dawn we drove the sheep out of the pen and down a green mountain path and all the leaves shone bright and clean and the air was pure and mist floated across the tops of the Cuchamatanes high above.  We arrived at a remote meadow surrounded by trees and I watched the sheep as two of the women pulled out their weaving they had stowed under tarps in the meadow.  Their artistry is an intricate crisscross pattern of wool threads, so finely done that it takes a month and a half just to do a shirt front.  The women began talking in Maam, pointing out where the threads were frayed on one of the looms.  A rat had eaten through a few threads, undoing 15 days of work.  But they kept weaving without expressing any sort of dismay, while I, who had woven none of it, half choked at the thought of having to redo 15 days.

It turned out that wool thread wasn't the only thing the women were weaving.  They contrived our jobs so that I was sheep-herding alone with the youngest daughter.  We talked about our respective countries and she made sure I knew all about their marriage customs.  Her mom then made sure I knew about the nearby gringo who had married a Maam woman and was very happy.  We went after sheep when they strayed, we cooked lunch over the fire (even the dogs got their tortillas heated up... "Maybe I will stick around," I thought), and the women continued their various weaving. Then it was time to go and the women loaded me down with firewood to bring back to cook dinner. 

When we got to the house I offered my firewood chopping skills to hack at the logs I'd carried.  After about 10 minutes I found myself, for the second time in my life, appealing to the help of a tiny indigenous women to do what I could not wielding an axe.  Modesta shattered a gnarled old log with a few blows and then handed me the axe back. The tapestry of my trip is full of redesigned symmetries.

We went to bed with the sun and the next day they again invited me to herd sheep and again told me happily-ever-after stories of gringos and Maam women.  But despite all the enticements of a lifetime supply of handwoven wool socks and tunics, I decided not to get entangled with the youngest daughter but rather to keep going the next morning. 

"Where will you go today?" they asked me.

 "I dunno," I told them. 

"To infinity and beyond!" they suggested to me in English, enthusiastically. 

"Sounds good to me," I said, wondering how in the world they'd come across Buzz Lightyear.

I gave them my day-pack to thank them for my stay and, since it was the bulkiest thing inside my big pack, to lighten my load considerably.  I felt strangely ashamed of giving them the expensive but machine woven and monochromatic backpack.  "It's to carry your weaving so the rats don't get it.  Or to carry firewood so you don't force wandering gringos to do it," I told them.  

I went upward.  The road rose up over the fertile blue-green valleys below Todos Santos, where people worked the cornfields on impossibly steep slopes.  It brought me into Concepcion Huista, a sordid town perched in a splendid  ridge-top location.  Up I climbed for days, along uninhabited ridges with views of distant looming volcanoes, into cold pine forests, above river gorges.  I arrived at Angel Gate.  At Angle Gate the trees end and the huge plateau of the Cuchumatanes begins at almost 13,000 feet.   In this barren land all is exposed to the roving eye of the sun and the sometimes snickering sometimes sighing wind.  The land hides nothing, does not dissimulate, and makes dissimulation impossible. Puerto Angel, a village of two dozen of wood-shingled houses, was silent, as if the rapture had come and all were found true.  Smoke curled out of one chimney.  I was out of water so I called out.  There was no answer.  Silence where humans live is the deepest silence. 

Up ahead two Maam men were hacking at the hard ground, readying a field to plant potatoes in a land that I could imagine nothing growing but tenacity.  I hailed them and asked if they knew where I could get water and they came to me with their bottle and offered it all to me, though they had a long day of work ahead of them.  I drank a few mouthfuls and kept on the road to the highest town in Guatemala: Tzichim.

There I made friends with an 16-year-old young man who ended up offering me a place to set up my tent outside of their two room house with I-lost-track-of-how-many family members.  The wind was icy and to keep warm I ran around with the kids, yelling the words "quickly" and "slowly," which I recently learned in Maam.  As darkness came and the cold bit deep, someone let their fire go free and flames clawed at the sky and razed the dry grass, ransacking the plain in an ecstasy of  liberation, demons of heat unleashed across frozen tundra. 

At night there was a heavy frost and at dawn the world blazed with bright ice above the Angel Gate.  The women had on skirts with no leggings and the children chattered.  I, swathed in my zero degree Mountain Hardware sleeping bag, was immune to the cold.

It was time to go, but what could I leave behind this time? The easy stuff was gone.  I had on a hat woven by women in Bolivia, given me by my sister.  It had many bright colors like the blouses of the Maam women.  On it were embroidered animals, grazing, leading their careless lives.  I chased down the littlest girl, who ran away thinking we were still playing the "quickly" "slowly" game.  I caught her and put it on her.  She grinned.  I said thanks all around and turned my face to the sun that was rising over the shining plateau.