In Hell They Wear Necapals

In Guatemala I was accosted by many an evangelist waving pamphlets, many a prophet preaching precautions against the fires of hell.  On one winding road in the gathering gloom of a mountain storm I was nearly held by force by a preacher standing in the road with slicked back hair and a golden watch, telling me that the time was near and the path was straight but that the light had come into the world.  But though I was given many a glimpse of the lurid flames of the inferno, nothing put the fear of God in me like the time I wore a necapal.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

After my near miss in Rio Pajaritos, the weather cleared and the scent of pine wavered heavy in the hot air along with the sound of a thousand crickets shrilling their occult songs.  I hiked down and down and with every step I took the air became hotter and the land drier and the scream of the crickets louder.  I arrived at the outskirts of Sacapulus where a sweet green river rolls by parched banks and a family invited me to sit in the shade and drink water.

"Would you like to stay the night here?" they asked me.

"Well, I don't know... it might be better to keep going a bit.  I want to get to...."

Just then I caught a glimpse of three beautiful young women coming up the path from the river, in multicolored skirts and crisp white shirts with bundles balanced on their heads.  They swayed and undulated with grace as they balanced the loads they carried.  They passed on a different path and went into one of the rooms in the cluster of buildings belonging to the family that had given me water.

"Um, like I was saying... I'd love to stay here for a while.  I help out with whatever you guys need."

And so it was that I found myself walking the three miles up the path back toward Rio Pajaritos with Uncle Herman to carry fire wood down so that the women could cook.  We split wood (which I finally got the knack of.  Or maybe I just thought I was doing well because there was no 80 year old indigenous woman around to show me up).  It came time to carry down the wood, and Uncle Herman produced the necapals.

The Russian Gulag itself could not have produced a better instrument of torture.  The necapal consists of a thin strip of fiberglass that serves as a headband (yes, fiberglass, that same material that leaves thousands of inexctractable shards of glass in your skin when you handle it and is so nefarious that it doesn't return back to its natural state in millions of years.  Radioactive material decays hundreds of times faster than this hideous fabric).  This headband bears the full weight of the load. From both ends of the fiberglass strip extends a rope, not a nice slick silky cord, but a rope gnarled by weather and use and rough as burlap.  These ropes pass under the armpits, in the most tender spot for maximum abrasion, and wraps up and around the bundle of wood to tie it off.  Imagine yourself to be a giraffe with a car dangling from a cable tied around your head you get a sense for how this thing feels.

I had seen workers all over Guatemala with the necapal,  hauling 100 pound sacks of coffee, bundles of wood, great sacks of grain.  Even the school boys carry their books in a sack on their backs with a strap around their head.  Workers wearing necapals would often stop and chat with me in the road, sustaining the weight like it was a straw sombrero on their head, and then move on.

"If they can do it there is no reason I can't do the same," I thought, eying my pile, half the size of Uncle Herman's and ready to be tied off.  "I'll carry the same as you're carrying, Uncle Herman." I had visions of myself sauntering triumphantly into camp, bearing my load as if it were a bundle of feathers, while two of the young women wiped the light sweat off my brow and the other took the wood I had brought to make me a savory meal.

Uncle Herman look at at me skeptically and put a few more slivers of kindling on my pile.

Pain exploded across my neck as I hoisted up the load and the weight of the wood settled onto the necapal harness.  I took a wavering step and as I set my foot gently down the jarring in my neck felt like I had landed from ten feet up instead of ten inches.  Every fiber in my neck popped and twinged in pain as we set off down the trail.  After about five minutes I was doubled over, my nose bumping my knees, so that the weight of the wood would rest on my back rather than my neck.  We were about a twentieth of the way down.

Uncle Herman was strolling behind me whistling a mindless tune.  "Hey it's easier if you stand up straight," he offered by way of encouragement.

I straightened up and my neck snapped back as far as it would go so that I was gaping open-mouthed at the hot sun overhead, leaving my feet to blindly navigate the rocky path. I tried lifting the load with my hands to take the pressure off my neck but my arms quickly wore out.  My vision wavered as the hazy heat and veil of pain became one and the conviction engulfed me that in hell there are no torturing flames, there is no endless darkness, there are only necapals laden with thousands of pounds that can never be taken off.  I saw a vision of wretches bent double after centuries of wearing the necapal, croaking for water.  If there was only a one and a million chance that hell was like that I did not want to risk going there, and so I prepared myself to fall to my knees and confess my sins to Jesus. Oh Lord spare me thy wrath and the necapal!  But before I got the chance to kneel on my own accord I fell to my knees because I tripped over a rock.

I collapsed to rest and Uncle Herman, not the savviest salmon in the sea, finally realized I was struggling and offered to come back for my load.  But due to some streak of perversity in my nature (maybe something to do with me being a distance runner), I refused.  I was sweating copiously.  The ligaments in my knees were slackening and threatening to buckle sideways.  The burnt-grass wasteland began to spin around me and the river seemed so far away.  I was breathing in short gasps as I stumbled into camp and fell down into the dust.

There was a clamor in the compound as the kids ran to and fro.  They were getting ready to go down to the river for a swim!  Someone offered me a cool liquid and I revived enough to sit up straight. "Come on!'  they yelled to me. "We're going swimming!"

We went down the path and dove off a rock into the cool current.  I let my body relax as the water bore me slowly swirling down the stream and lapped at my dusty face and abraded sides.  The kids laughed and wriggled like fish in the water.  The three young women came down and waded in to their waists and waved like willow saplings.  The bottom was soft sand and the river sound soothing.

"Hey!  Time to get out!  They're releasing waste from the gravel pit!"

The current was suddenly brown and gritty and we all splashed up on shore, dried and dressed.  As we walked up to the house, Isabela, one of three young women told me her story.

"We just came here six months ago from the city.  Our mother was murdered, we don't know who did it but we think it might have been jealousy over her business.  The six of us were left alone... my two brothers, these two sisters, and the baby of the family, Silvia.  So we came where our mom's brother lives and are trying to make ends meet... my brother commutes to the city and works construction and we sell tamales."

I later found out that their father was alive and around but was a drunkard and wouldn't talk to them.  That night the six insisted on giving up one of their three beds and I slept soundly in their sheet metal shack with a sloping dirt floor, crawling with ants searching for crumbs.

The next day I found out most of the family was going back up the mountain to where we had cut wood.  "I will not wear a necapal, never again!"  I let them know.

"Don't worry.  We are just going to carry down a few sticks to fix the roof," Isabela told me.

And so we went up through the burnt grass wasteland again and into the pines where Uncle Herman was already at work lopping off branches for us.  As we sat and waited Isabel and I fell into a conversation about religion.  Isabel and her sisters belonged to the evangelical church in town and went every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night.  She asked about me.

"Well I grew up in a Christian home but now I'm not so sure... what kind of God is supposedly loving and then there is hell and all kinds of pain... how does that work out?"

"You can't think of it that way.  God is good.  We owe him our existence."

"And what about people whose existence sucks?  I mean you've seen it.  I just think that it's messed up that God could actually do something about it and doesn't.  Better to not believe in that kind of cruelty."

"You can't speak of God that way.  If we obey him he will welcome us into heaven. "

The conversation was heating up and we weren't listening to each other any more so I went off to help Uncle Herman.  But I didn't get very far because I stepped into a hidden ditch and fell flat on my face.  Everyone laughed at me. "God is smiting me!" I yelled.  I found the "sticks" that Uncle Herman had cut for me and found them to actually be two small tree trunks.  As I hoisted them crosswise onto my shoulder the rope wounds in my side split open again and I was again doubled over under my burden.  I wobbled down the hill, my arms draped over the crosspiece and my shoulders already burning.  The logs pressed onto my neck and the pain of yesterday came flooding back.

About a mile down the hill I gave up carrying my tree and began hurling the logs, one by one, down the hill.  They would crash and thunk through the brush and come to a stop and then I would come up and either drag them a ways or hurl them again.  As I was lugging unsuccessfully on one of the logs to extract it from a bush, the sisters caught up to me.  They each had a log balanced on their heads, touching it occasionally with a staying hand.  They stepped gracefully around me, never missing a step, and continued on their way as I muttered and tugged on the log.

By the time I got back and rested night had come and the cactus stood out, spiny and succulent, against the fading western light.  The sisters came back from church, elusive shadows under the stars that sometimes streaked from their places and burned into ruin.  We all went into the shack and prepared to sleep.

We couldn't sleep because Uncle Herman, who'd decided to huff glue since it was Friday, kept banging in and out of the door and slurring indeciferable phrases.  We blockaded him out and went to sleep but in the middle of the night we were awoken by a sobbing outside the door, and a begging to be let in out of the cold and to be allowed to speak to the youngest, Silvia.  It was their drunken father.  The simpering went on and I could feel the shame of the daughters well up as deep as the source of the springs that feed the river.  The oldest got up and silently let him in and gave him a blanket.  He lay on the dirt floor and all around his dark shape red ants moved across the ground carrying their heavy loads.

Lynch Mob of Rio Pajaritos: Part Two

The day after the villagers detained, searched and threatened me, I got up early. Chico agreed to let me work with him for at least a few hours weeding the onion field as a way of giving thanks for their hospitality.  It had rained in the night and mud globbed thick on our boots and the onion beds were dark and loamy.  The air was fresh and still and there was no sign in our surroundings of the turbulent unwelcome I had received from the community members the day before.  But Chico told me that the community was not happy and that it would be best if I left around midday.  "Sorry," he said, "but as we say, the one pays for the multitude."  As we swiftly plucked the weeds he told me some of his story:

"I am an orphan, my parents were killed in the civil war.  You know there was a terrible war here that lasted more than a decade and ended in the early 90s.  The peasants were living in misery and rose up against the government who did nothing for them and then were crushed by the army that got guns and money from the United States.  When the soldiers first came I was young, maybe eight or ten years old.  They marched into town and chopped the branches off all of the fruit trees like that one by the house.  We were doing nothing; neither fighting nor complaining.  But if we had so much as even looked at the soldiers while they were destroying our year´s food supply, they would call us over and shoot us dead right then and there."

The mud was collecting thicker on my hands and feet, making it harder for me to shuffle along and reach for new weeds.

"So I was raised by my grandmother, and worked a tiny patch of land left for me by my father.  We worked that land as hard as we could to get every last grain of corn and move upward out of bare poverty.  When I got older I found how to make money as a coyote.  I find people here that want to go to the United States and bring them to the county seat where someone else takes them onward.  I get paid for every head I bring.  Look where I have come; see our house, see the other rooms up the hill in which you stayed.  See how my children now go to school.  My son is 18, and is at the age when many are long married with a kid but I say it is better for him to continue studying and find his wife later.  A man should work hard for what he owns."

The weeds were very thick in the soil, taking advantage of the nutrients in this rich land, spreading with a riotous and aggressive growth. As I stood plucking them, the mud was sucking my boots into the ground.  Luckily it was not my own boots that I would have to continue walking in, but a pair of rubber boots they had lent me.

"And I know what the hard life is, so I say give people, like you, the benefit of the doubt.  I was on the committee of leaders for the town once for a spell and we fined people if they didn´t fix breaks in their part of the water line.  I would go and warn them to fix the problem first before fining them.  If after a warning they do nothing then that is their problem.  But we must have mercy and first give people a chance before extracting a fine that may result in them going hungry."

His phone rang.  He wiped his muddy hand on his pants and answered it.  I tried to clean my hands and feet up but ended up more mired in mud.  Chico hung up. He addressed me with terse urgency.  "They are coming for you again. There is no time to lose.  You must leave in secret out of the back entrance of our town.  Thank you for your help, now GO."

I struggled out of the muddy boots and sprinted up the slippery path to the place where my stuff was, past the elementary school where rusty swing screeched and clanked and the kids screamed "Gringo, Gringo" like a crazed flock of carrion birds.  In the room with my backpack were Juan´s younger brothers, with whom I had played soccer the night before.  They saw my haste, and one went outside to keep lookout and the other helped me haphazardly shove my things into my backpack.

"Hurry, Hurry, here they come!"

I jammed in my sleeping bag, threw in my shoes.  I picked up the bilingual Carlos Fuentes book I had been reading the night before and Juan had been coveting.  I was ten pages from the end, right on a cliff hanger.  I had been hoping to finish it so I could leave it with Juan, who wanted to study English so badly.  I made a split-second decision. I shoved ten dollars between the pages.

"Give this to your brother.  Tell him to buy a dictionary with the money.  Tell him he can learn English if he keeps at it.  Will you remember?"

He nodded. The lookout dashed in. "They are almost here!  If you leave now you might make it!"

I swung on my pack and took off sprinting down the road, my knees jarring heavily with every step from the weight on my back, sweat pouring down my body.  I did not dare look back.  I passed an old man who stared at me.  I smiled at him and tried to look nonchalant, a difficult feat for a gringo at full sprint with a giant backpack in the middle of nowhere Guatemala.  I sprinted for a half mile and then got to an uphill and slowed my pace.  There was no one behind me.  But for a few scattered houses, I was out of the village.  I considered breaking off into the woods and hiding or taking a long and trail-less route over the mountains to another town.  But since I saw no signs of any pursuit, I again slowed to a very swift walk and kept my way.

And then the pickup truck rumbled up behind me.

It was packed full of men and did a U turn in front of me.  The men got off the back and fanned out over the road, facing me.  The mayor of the village was in the center leaning uneasily on his staff of authority.  Mean Eyes was at his right hand, giving me a cold stare of hate.

"Get in the truck."

For an instant I weighed the risk of dropping my pack and running.  I figured I could probably outrun them since I had some thirty meters head start, but I was loathe to leave everything I owned and at this point trusted more in the ability of my tongue than my legs.   So I climbed into the truck.  We rolled grimly back toward Rio Pajaritos.  Up ahead in a rise in the road were gathered all the men of the town, and some of the women too.  They were milling and moving and looking at the approaching truck with hard, unreadable looks. I got down from the truck and stood all alone in front of the crowd on the hill.  What was I to them?  A mixture of horrid memories of a brutal U.S. backed war? Older memories of the European conquest of their land? More recent memories of servitude on sweltering U.S. owned sugarcane farms and banana plantations?  Would the one pay for the multitude?

The crowd hesitated at my arrival. I decided to take verbal control immediately while I had the chance. "Buenos dias," I greeted them, "como estan?" looking each one in the eye.  "I'm sorry for taking your time. I can answer any of your questions."

My knees felt week.  Where was Chico?  I saw not one friendly face in the crowd.  The alcalde stood with shifty eyes in front of me.  "We are  well organized around here.  An unknown person can't just come into our community..."

Mean Eyes interrupted him, yelling.  "We told him to leave and he didn't.  He already had his warning..." and launched into Kiche.  The men began an animated discussion in raised voices.  I did not know what they were saying and had no way to defend myself.  I had to be part of the conversation.

"I will tell you my story from the beginning," I said, and I again had the floor.  I told them about my studies, and my work preserving land against things like mining.  I told them stories from my travels in Mexico, and in Guatemala.  I threw in all kinds of detail.  People began to get bored.  Good, better bored than excited.  Maybe they would bring this to a quick and harmless close.  Where was Chico?  I was now surrounded completely by people and they pressed in closer.  I began to take things out of my backpack again and explain them.  To take away the fear of the unknown.  To demythologize my possessions.

I came to my notebook and remembered a song I had written there, taught to me by the children at Dona Gilberta's.  I began to sing, "Soy puro Gualtemateco, me gusta bailar el son.  Con las notas de la marimba, tambien baila mi corazon."  I caught them by surprise and most of them laughed.  A guy my age near me tried out some English: "What's up man?"

But Mean Eyes was not happy.  The heated discussion broke out again and thank God, there was Chico, speaking up and lawyering on my behalf.  There was talk up shutting me up for the day until the evening meeting.  Chico was harshly reprimanded for giving me the heads up that the rest were coming.  The conversation again escalated and people began to get impatient and lose their tempers.  No one could decide what to do.

"How about this," I yelled.  "You have already wasted a lot of time on me.  Your time is valuable.  You now see that I carry nothing harmful nor have robbed anything from the town.  I will pay for all the time you lost and you can go on with your work."

After my antics with the song, the mob was now with me.  They discussed a bit and then agreed.  "This is not a fine," the alcalde told me,  "but give us what your conscience tells you to give."

He posed me a tough challenge. Chico had asked me as we were working in the field, "Why is it so poor here?"  I took out my wad of 100 Quetzal notes and began to count them out.  Eyes widened.  People gasped as I tried to hand over $80 dollars, the equivalent of months of income for some of them.

"That is too much," they said, unanimously.

"Listen.  I had the fortune to be born in a place with access to more money than you have access to here.  So this is what I can give to you because I earn more there.  I know many of you want to go to the United States, maybe some of you have.  I know also that it is very hard and sometimes impossible to cross.  So I bring you some of the good fortune I've had."

In the end they took half.  I tried to apologize for my insensitivity in staying the night instead of realizing I was clearly not wanted there.  "We don't want to hear it," they said.  "Get out of here."

Rain started coming down as I walked up the narrow path.  The wet ground quickly turned to mud which caked heavy on my shoes.  I tried to shake the mud off my feet as I left the town, but it stuck to me with the tenacity of a campasino toiling in the field for his existence.

The Lynch Mob of Rio Pajaritos: Part One

All the time I was in Guatemala I heard rumors of unfriendly groups of indigenous people, of killings and lynchings and tortures.  Once near the Cuchumatanes Highlands two Japanese tourists had been lynched because the locals thought they were trying to steal their children. This story I knew to be fact.  But I personally had encountered very little suggesting these dangers and thought that most of the warnings were due to an affect well known to me at this point: people always say the ones over the hill are the bad ones.  But when I got to Rio Pajaritos, my perspective changed.

I had come up over the misty green ridges of Nebaj, through birch forests with grass as short and green as a closely tended lawn.  The wind came up near the top and whipped up the drifting mist like a fork beats through the white of an egg.  I was all alone in the shifting shapes and dripping wood.  But as I came over to the other side of the mountains the clouds cleared and I came to an exuberant Kiche indigenous village, the women dressed in fluorescent floral gowns.

A few kids followed me yelling, "Father, Father," confusing me with a white and bearded Catholic priest that sometimes  came to town.  "Bless you, my children." It was not the first time this had happened, and many other times people had commented on my likeness to Jesus in physical appearance.  I think I know the painting they all have of him, in which he looks remarkably like the 16th century conquistadors that ransacked Guatemala and left it in poverty. But I went on through their town and over a small stream to where Rio Pajaritos begins.

The sun was getting low and lighting up the blue green of the onion fields and the clouds heaped up over the range, and true to the name of the town, the little birds were chirping beside the river.  I passed a few workers who naturally stopped and chatted with me about what I was up too.  One eighteen year old, Juan, walked with me, curious about my life and journey, and invited me to come see where he lived.  In front of his house two boys were selling watermelon and I bought a slice and sat down on the step with the succulent fruit.

Two men appeared in front of me, one with mean eyes and the a other sullen fat man in a grubby shirt.

"Under what authority are you under to be here?  Who sent you?"

"Errr... no authority.  I just wanted to pass through here because it's the shortest distance between Nebaj and Sacapulus."

"You are here illegally.  We have a law that no unknown person may enter our community.  What is your mission?"

Great question.  I could try to answer that on so many different levels.  I decided this might not be the right moment to get metaphysical on them and explain that they were asking the exact question I was asking myself and that I had traveled for months and for thousands of miles looking for a simple answer to give, so instead I went with a stuttering "Uh, I-I-I'm just here passing through, getting to know what life is like around here."

"Right.  You wait right here."

I sat down eating my watermelon.  Soon a few more men showed up, one with a carved staff that apparently signified communal authority.

"We are well organized around here. We are going to review everything in your backpack.  What mining company are you from?  We know you are here to steal our gold and who knows what else under this land.   See these wires here?"

I looked up at some power lines heading toward Nebaj.

"They just installed them without our permission.  We have reason to believe that those lines take our water and pipe it to the United States. So we are going to look through your pack and if we find a suspicious apparatus, we will take you to the prison."

"Then we will decide whether to lynch you or not," said the fat man in the grubby shirt.

"We are well organized around here," someone reiterated.

So I went on trial for purposelessness, or at least for having a purpose so undefined that it gave me no real reason in their eyes to be in Rio Pajaritos.  In this town where everyone planted onions and worked them from dawn to dusk, how could they fathom that someone would have time to just go wandering across a country to see what's there, much less that someone would want to waste energy walking when they could go by public transport?

I began to unload things from my pack. "Are you going to rob me?"

"Of course not!" was the emphatic answer.

I gave speeches about every item in my pack, suspecting that part of what was going on here is that they had never met someone like me and were really curious but didn't really know how to express it.  I showed them my books and told them how I love to read and write.  I showed them my map and pointed out where I had been and they ogled over it.  I showed them my passport and my official Guatemalan stamp, which impressed them not one whit.  My first aid kit caused a stir with all its pills.  My compass was suspect as a gold-finding apparatus meant to rob them of their riches.  To demonstrate that my harmonica was benign, I had to play a riff and do a jig. 

"So what's your decision?"

"You may go."

"You won't lynch me."

"No.  But next time you must go through the proper authorities.  In every town in Guatemala it is prohibited to enter if you are not known by its people.  Be warned."

The small crowd dispersed and I began to pack up my stuff.  Juan had shrunk ashamedly into a corner during all of this and finally came out.  "Would you like to stay the night here?"

"Man Juan, I would, but I think that would be a bad idea.  I'm not welcome here."

"Yeah but it will get dark soon and you won't make Sacapulus now.  Plus if you go right away they will think you are fleeing and that won't be good."

I saw a member of the leading committee still around.  I asked him what he thought.  He shrugged and gave me a noncommittal, "Yeah it's probably OK."

It was late and so against my better judgment I accepted Juan's offer.  Juan explained to me what was up:

"The leaders have decreed it: the American will come some day and take our land and live on it, and who knows where we will live."

"Like we´ll just come and take over your land just like that?"

"Yeah."

Sounded like a pretty crazy philosophy they had going on here.  But on second thought, given history, maybe not so unfounded.

Juan continued. "Plus when we go there they don't let us pass. You come here to learn what our lives our like and we want to do the same but cannot.  They must have some resentment against us."

I wanted to vindicate myself, prove to the town that I was no evil corporate outsider, no emissary of manifest destiny.  I laid out my sleeping bag on Juan's floor and in the remaining dusk played soccer with his brothers.  All the kids in the neighborhood paraded by the house, seeing a gringo for the first time and shrieking with fear and delight as I made faces at them or imitated animals.  One kid was scared to the point of tears and ran for his mom, but when he came back he was laughing.  "Colon, Colon," he yelled. 

"What does he mean?" I asked Juan.

"He is trying to say Columbus, like Christopher Columbus who discovered America.  He has a picture book with Columbus, and the drawing looks like you.  His mom told him you are Columbus and now he's not afraid."

We went to bed when it got dark but both stayed awake reading; he was studying and I was reading a Carlos Fuentes novel that had both Spanish and English.  I had shown it to Juan earlier, and now he was watching me read it.  I knew he wanted the book because he had spent hours looking at it and comparing words between the translation.  He dreamed of learning English and traveling to the States. We finally flipped off the lights and the wind howled up under the eaves of the tin roof.  I tossed and turned and finally went to sleep.

I woke up to bright lights and the door banging open in the wind and heavy boots on the floor and I lying prostrate before a dark figure in the doorway.  A truck engine rumbled outside.  Juan sat up and began talking to the figure in Kiche and they were pointing and looking at me.  Finally Juan addressed me in Spanish. "This is my dad, Fransico, who was in Sacapulus today."  Lying half naked in my sleeping bag I reached up to shake his hand.  He smiled.  "Most people call me Chico."

They went on talking and I nervously fingered my sleeping bag.  Something had fallen on it, maybe some plaster fallen from the wind.  Then the something began to wriggle.  By reflex I threw it against the wall where it immediately rushed back toward me.  Suddenly a heavy boot came down right beside my head, and the carcass of a four inch long millipede jerked in its death throes.  "Careful," said Chico.  "Those things are really poisonous." 

"Thanks."

"Look," said Chico.  "I don't judge people before I know them.  And God wants us to help those in need, those who are wandering.  So you may stay here tonight.  I would love if you could stay with us for a week, but the community is not happy with you here.  Sleep here tonight and tomorrow we will talk."

I didn't sleep much under the rattling roof next to the still spasoming carcass.

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.

The House of Doña Gilberta

La Esperanza, Huehuetenango, Guatemala

Meet the house of Gilberta:

 

 

 

Matriarch Doña Gilberta: (Bottom right) A taciturn and pious widow in her mid fifties.  She speaks little and gently but has a spine of iron.  When her husband died years ago there was no man to take over the job of milling, washing, raking, sacking and hauling the coffee harvest.  So she did it herself.  Now she presides with a passive power over the mid-sized and prosperous finca, employing more than fifty people in harvest time.

Baby Belen: (top left) Baby Belen was terrified by me from the outset.  About the cutest toddler I have ever seen, she would scamper around blissfully until catching sight of me-- a large, slightly unkempt blond man with a chunk of metal embedded over his eye. She would instantly wail and run for the cover of her mothers' skirts.  It became my mission to win over Baby Belen, a goal not made easier by the favorite game among the other kids, which was "make Baby Belen cry by carrying her over to the Gringo."  But after a long time she would finally sit down by me and babble happily in an invented language.  At this point my work was done; I left soon after.

Alvin, Angelica, and Orida: (The two kids under my picture and the cross-armed sombrero girl) The pot-bellied children of the distant relatives who lived seasonally in a cramped concrete room across the patio. They came for the coffee harvest and it was probably the best period of the year for the three, who got to share the toys and some of the special treats of the rest of the kids.  But not enough-- Oreida was always desperate for a hug from me, Angelica barely talked at age four, and Alvin was very small for his age. 

Madaí: (Third down on far left) The youngest of Doña Gilberta´s five grown daughters.  Shy, she hid in other rooms until the second day of my stay.  She was crippled by polio at an early age and now walks with a lurching painful gait. 

Muscle Man Mariseldo:  Mariseldo is an in-law... well actually technically he is an in-law candidate.  You see, there had been many suitors for Madaí.  Through the last testament of her father the house was left to her and anyone who married her would probably get a good share of the coffee profits as well.  Suitor after suitor was rejected by her mother and four older sisters, who recognized that the suitors just wanted Madaí's money and so tried to protect her from a life of misery married to potentially abusive men.  Mariseldo, from a poorer but not impoverished family, fell in love with her at church youth group, and she loved him.  But she was trapped by her older sisters.  They had experience and did not believe in true love.  But Mario swept in with twenty glistening stallions and carried her off to live on his estate forever and ever.  Well, not exactly, but she did leave to live with him, after which her sisters consented to a sort of trial for Mario.  So they live together in the house of Gilberta, and Mario works hard on the finca to prove his earnestness so that permission may be granted to marry.

I spent most of my time working with Mariseldo in the coffee harvest.  Gigantic bins above the house were full of the plump red berries brought from the workers from the shady groves of coffee trees climbing the steep hillsides.  We ran the coffee through a machine that takes off the red fruit and leaves the white bean in a long trough flowing with water.  The better beans are dense and sink while those of lesser quality float and are siphoned off.  But the trough remains deep with white, lustrous, well formed beans that we shove out into a draining mound.  If the weather is right we then spread them out on the broad patios and terraces carved into the hillside where steam lifts off of them in the equatorial sun.  For days our work is raking out the coffee, sacking it and trading it for half dry coffee in storage, and piling it up again to tarp for the nightly dew.

Sometimes it would threaten to rain and all of us– men, women and children– would rush in a mayhem of rakes, shovels, brooms and dustpans to gather and cover the coffee before days of work were ruined by the rain.  One time the rain arrived at the same time as the shoe vendor that came to sell to the women.

 "It´s going to rain," yelled Mariseldo at the cluster of women ooing and ahing at sandals and flats and high heels.  While usually an announcement that takes precedence over everything, there was no response this time.  Mariseldo and I were huffing and puffing from our hustle to gather all of the coffee. A drop fell.

"Hey ladies! Look at us here, you´ve got us dancing!  A little help!"

Madai and her sisters clustered around a glittering pair of red high heels. The rain began to fall harder.  The women scrambled to protect the shoes with a plastic bag.

"Uh, are you going to help us or not?"

But his pleas fell on deaf ears and I said, "I think this is one we're not going to win," and Mariseldo and I continued sweating and dashing around the plaza to save precious days of work.

There came moments in the hottest afternoon sun when Mariseldo would stoop to one knee and scoop up a handful of parching beans in his palm and grind off the small husk with his other hand.  He would put one in his mouth, and with a far away look as if he was listening for the distant rumors of movement in the earth´s crust, he would slowly chew it.  Then he would drop the beans which rattle like spilled Skittles and declare the coffee ready to sack.  We would fill bag after fiberglass bag and sling them onto our backs, doing our best to act like they weighed nothing although they really weighed over a hundred pounds.  We would lug them to a big warehouse up the hill where it was sold. The warehouse had a monumental Starbucks logo painted on the cinder-block wall, and stood above the trashy dirt square of the village and the tin-and-stick huts of the pickers.

When we weren´t working the coffee, the main mission of Gilberta and her daughters was to make me so fat that I couldn´t possibly walk away from the finca if I had wanted too.  On the second day they killed the old red rooster and made a the traditional dish of Ki Kik for me.  Breakfast was sometimes hot dogs and eggs slathered in mayonnaise, of course with bottomless tortillas.  One of the daughters had worked as a manager in a McDonalds in the states and as a very special treat they got patties and condiments and fried up some hamburgers MacDonalds style... I´m Lovin´It.  But the chief of all delicacies was cow hoof soup, served one day for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Recall to mind that hooves were used in the olden days to make glue, and you´ll have a pretty good idea of how the soup went down (but never went far enough down).

The  house of Gilberta.

While I arrived only intending to stay the night, the combination of three hot meals a day (of whatever quality), the opportunity to work, the offers to do my laundry, the joy of little kids running around, the friendship of Mariseldo, and the motherly affection of Gilberta and her daughters was enough to make me stick around for almost two weeks.  But after that time I was starting once more to feel the pull of the road, and decided to leave the next Monday, which happened to be my birthday.  I planned to get up in the predawn and leave quietly, having said my thanks and goodbyes (and delivering a goodbye poem) the night before.  I set my alarm for 5:00 AM.

But at 4:30 AM I was started awake by ranchero music booming from a stereo outside my door.  "Happy birthday to you" the singer wailed in a very bad accent.  I staggered out of bed bleary-eyed and opened the door to Gilberta, Mariseldo, and half the family awkwardly grinning at me as the birthday music blasted on.  Mariseldo stepped forward and presented me a cap they had gone and bought for me.  Doña Gilberta loaded me down with treats and food and medicine for the small cold I had.  One of the little ones stepped forward and gave me her little plastic ring. 

I had intended to go through Guatemala with less and less in my backpack as time went on, always leaving things behind.  As I stepped out of the gates of Gillberta's house with a pack laden with their gifts, I realized that might be harder than I thought. 

Through the Gates of Guatemala

"It is a good thing to experience everything oneself... Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my ears, with my heart, with my stomach."

 Herman Hesse Siddhartha

I drifted down through Oaxaca like the dust that sifted through the cactus spines on the hunched brown hills. In a ghostly Mixteco town far from any highway, I sat on a mound of earth containing unknown ruins and listened to slattern notes on the trumpet blown by a teen in the deserted concha. The sun-- drugging, dripping, dazing sun-- was finally showing its full tropical force. The torturous Oaxaca roads carried me over and around the mountains and down into La Ventosa where the arms of windmills beat the wet ocean air in the night.

There was no place to stay in the town, but the officers at a migration checkpoint let me camp on their front patio.  Through a crack in the blinds of the office I saw a sort of scoreboard on the wall with the numbers of immigrants from various Central American countries they had nabbed:  Gualemala 5, El Salvador 7, Honduras 3...  The chief of the station was a 6' 6" Mexican of huge girth from Monterrey, and boomed at me in bad English when I showed up.  I nervously enjoyed the irony that I, an illegal in Mexico, was encamped by invitation in the lion's den.

Next came San Cristobal in Chiapas, a town of deadlocked Argentinians and super left-leaning Spainiards mixed with the descendants of Mayans wandering the isles of the supermarket in what looked like the skin of a slaughtered bear. It all seemed at a distance.  I had been moving so long that even when I stopped I still had a feeling of motion, as if all the objects in the world were floating in a river, always floating away. It was there my plan was born to begin walking.  I would try to walk across Guatemala.

While up until now all my travel had been focused toward the south, starting in Guatemala the continent swings east-west for a spell.  I would now always face the rising sun.  The most narrow place east-west is in the jungle lowlands of the Peten, terrain I had no interest in passing through.  Nearly twice as wide are the highlands farther south which reach to Guatemala City before tapering down to the agricultural lands of El Salvador.  This was my route.  I knew that 23 different languages are spoken in Guatemala and also that the people of the rural highlands areas are extremely poor and sometimes don´t even speak Spanish.  Apart from that I had no idea what to expect.

I prepared for a few days... scrupulously consulting maps, buying food, trying to lighten my pack.  I struggled to hoist my pack into the gear rack of the bus to Guatemala; it probably weighed sixty pounds.  I knew I would have to get rid of a lot of stuff on the way.

The bus was spacious, cool, and quiet as we descended the slow incline out of the piny Chiapas highlands into the flat wet plain of the borderland.  Hard on the border loomed abrupt ridges wrapped in mist with gashes spitting out rivers from hidden lands. I walked into these wild gates across the border and into the jungle of vendors and money changers in La Mesilla.  My plan was to take a bus a few miles down the Panamerican Highway to where I could start my walk on a dirt rode.  Everyone looked at me like I was crazy when I told them the tiny village I wanted to go to.

"What do you want to go there for?"

"Well, from there I´m going to walk to Conception Huista."

"But what do you want to go there for?"

"Well, from there I´m going to walk to... I just want to explore that´s all.  You know, get to know what´s here."

"Look, there´s a bus that goes from here to Lago Atitlan.  You´ll meet all kinds of gringos there.  Or you could go straight to the capital.  They have very beautiful malls and shopping centers there."

This would not be my last conversation like this.  I was going against the Gringo Flow, not behaving as I was supposed to.  But finally I talked to a woman selling tamales that got excited when I told her I wanted to go to Hixouc but need help finding a ride.  "Hixouc!  Oh look, that van up there will leave you off at the intersection where the road goes up to Hixouc!"

A great hunk of rusting gray and spluttering metal was already swaying away from its stop.  A goat was standing on top of it, tethered to the rack, and would crash hard onto its side with every slightest bump.  I sprinted up the road yelling and the van put on its brakes.  The goat did a faceplant into the roof.  I came around the van to the side with the sliding doors to see about 40 people and about 80 eyes, all fixed on me from inside this 16 passenger van.  I was hustled inside, crouched double and facing everyone, with the gear shift in a precarious position between my legs.

Everyone stared dumbly at me.  I stared dumbly back.  The fare collector decided that the springs would snap with one more person and so hopped into the bursting entryway, holding on by one finger and one toe. The van began to roll.

"So.  How´s everyone doing?"  It was getting plain awkward just crouched there in front of everyone, like they had all come to see a play and I, the lead actor, was just sitting on the stage doing nothing.

Their faces all lit up when they heard me speak Spanish.  I began asking questions about Guatemalan Spanish, to see what the differences were from Mexico.  They asked me about my journey.  They listened open-mouthed to my explanation of what skiing is.  The driver offered me a job as a fare collector.  I considered, then looked at our fare collector waving like a piece of survey tape in the wind, and politely declined.

We pulled into the turn-off where vans collect and the road leaves for Hixouc and everyone was calling out goodbyes to me and wishing me good luck.  I was in a deep gorge and the roads seemed to climb away forever to cloud-obscured mountaintops.  I hauled on my pack.  My knees almost buckled.  I had to get rid of stuff now.

"Hey!" I called to the van driver who was hanging out near his vehicle.  "You want some stuff?"

Beginning of the road. 

Soon my pack was considerably lighter and there was a crowd of about 30 goggling van drivers and fare collectors around me, some of them wearing Whitworth Pirate track clothing and others wearing Blue Sky raft guide apparel.  It was getting late and so I said goodbye to them and turned to the road.

I was almost immediately in the midst of coffee fincas, the red waxy berries hanging thick from all the branches, appetizing as cherries but quite bitter in reality.  Whole villages turned out to stare at me as a passed, first with startled fear in their eyes which soon melted to a smile after I greeted them and talked to them for a little bit.  The road was steep and my pack was still quite heavy and what looked like a short straight line to Huixoc was a mass of switch-backing and contouring.  I got to Huixoc, but couldn´t actually tell where the town is-- it was just a collection of fincas like the ones I had been passing through.  Darkness would come soon.  I had no idea where I would spend the night.

I gained the ridge and as the light died I looked down over a verdant and folded land, with coffee farms reaching up impossibly steep ridges to the summits and the lights of tiny towns beginning to gleam in every dell.  A motor-cycle with two silhouettes whizzed by and then braked and stopped.  When I caught up they greeted me and made conversation.  They invited me to come spend the night with their families just a little further on down the road at their finca.  And that´s how I ended up at Doña Gilberta´s, working the coffee harvest.

Citlali, Monarch of Mexican Volcanoes

Pico De Orizaba, Mexico: I left Mexico city and soon was out of the smog and rising to the east toward two great volcanoes towering and snow-capped over the altiplano.  Popo and Itza, the Smoking Mountain and the White Woman, the star crossed-lovers of Aztec myth.   Popo throws up hot ash from his height at 17,802 feet as if still rumbling with anger and pain over his tragedy of losing Itza.  And Itza reposes, cold and remote under her glacial shroud.  But beyond the tragic prince and princess is the king, Citlali, or Pico de Orizaba.

Citlali means star in the language of the Aztecs and, with a vertical relief second in the world only to that of Mt. Kilamanjaro in Africa, its large glaciers can be seen shining for hundreds of miles around and even from ships coming into port in Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico.  It stands at 18,500 feet above that gulf, the highest volcano and the third highest mountain on the continent.  I wanted to receive my crown from the king.

From the indigenous village at the base I found a ride with some mountain guides up through pine forests and scattered potato fields.  We rose above the trees and arrived at a stone hut set in the icy wind that crackles down from the glaciers hanging high above.  By the time we arrived it was dark and so I saw nothing of the imposing wall of rock and ice that people refer to as the Labyrinth looming over the hut.  I listened from other climbers of extreme winds aloft and temperatures well below zero. But worry would not get me one step closer to the summit, so I turned in for the night.

I got up at 2:30 in the morning.  A few climbers were moving around in the dark, the wood frames of the bunks creaking.  I climbed down and looked out.  The night was breathless; the stars slicing down from unreachable altitudes.

I soon was packed and on the trail up the mountain, still with only an impression of where I was headed from the pale outline of the mountain in the gossamer light of the moon.  Ahead bobbed three lamps, the first three climbers out of camp.  I soon overtook them, a Californian and two Austrians, and we climbed on.  When we got to the chaotic ice and rock of the Labyrinth, cracking and sharp and the predawn freeze, we put on our crampons and took out our ice axes.

We reached the glacier at 16,000 feet, a steep sweep of ice stretching to the summit.  The others were slowing slightly and the route was now clear.  I pushed ahead and turned off my headlamp. 

The night was still and the air was rare and there was no movement on the swath of ice and for a moment I felt as if I were a polar explorer in the endless Antarctic night, the only human being on a whole continent, a flawless solitude.  And the stars also in their solitary places shone their cold light as the moon began to float downward and I moved on toward the highest pinnacle of the crown of the slumbering king.



First sun on the crater walls, looking out over the bank of clouds
hiding the tropics of Veracruz and the Gulf of Mexico.

A small light kindled in the east and with it the cold became sharper and the stars began to lose their luster.  The lights of Puebla shimmered on the altiplano like a million candles and the far below me cloud-tops took on blurred moon-shadows.  I pressed on, my breath coming faster as the air became lesser.  Soon only Venus, the brightest star in the sky, shone directly over the peak of Citlali.  The mats of clouds hiding Veracruz from view began to whiten and as I strained a few more steps up the squeaking ice to set my foot on the crest of the crater the sun burst over the cloud bank, its rays spreading as poured water fans out over smooth ice.





The intricate gilding on the King´s crown.



The monarch casts a long shadow.





After an hour of solitude on the summit, the others joined me. We celebrated our ascendancy to the throne... 

...and we descended alongside the rivers that Citlali sends down from his ice to slake the thirst of all of his peoples.