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.

A Petal on a Wet Black Bough

I was adrift in Mexico City.  At first I would close my eyes and point to a place at random on the metro map, just to give myself a farcical purpose.  Later I just began riding, not really getting off, just changing from line to line.

 Masses of anonymous people moved through, enroute to somewhere.  Their faces are masked.  How does one act in the in between?  We were neither at home nor at work-- we were in the dark monotony of an underground tunnel, the place between places.  We were in the place that is always changing, always in motion, but always the same in its constant motion and constant shifting of faces. We were in the pass-way to light, awaiting some finality, awaiting death or rebirth, in the canal to arrival.

And I found myself in this place, lured into the underworld by the promise of constant motion in the moist dark air.  Sometimes I read my book; my book was my mask.  Sometimes I watched people, breaking the unspoken rule of the train.  Immense new possibilities like opaque bubbles bumped their edges against the train and receded into darkness before they could be caught or popped.  Time languished.  My past and location dissolved-- I was a private eye sleuthing the city´s secrets, I was a circus performer without my garb, I was foreign author abroad to escape my fame.

And then I saw her.

We were going south on the blue line, about five stops out from its end in Tasqueña.  She was seated, and I standing, my back braced against a pole.  She had on black skater shoes with a splash of pink.  Her eyebrows like the finest watercolor brush.  Her earrings small, round and deep red.  Slender, she swayed with the train and her serenity was complete.

I was the mysterious stranger, the silent foreigner.  I was a clandestine poet, renowned elsewhere, but unknown in these parts.   I whipped out my little notebook and began to write a poem to her.  There wasn't much time.  I had no idea when she would get off.  The poem was only a few words long, mostly just a description of how she looked to me riding along in between destinations.  She noticed me writing. I finished it.  I tore it out and then just stood there, suddenly bashful.

The train lurched to a stop and suddenly everyone got up out of their seats and began to file out.  It was the end of the line! There would be no second chance after this!  There would be no sweeping forward into the dark anonymity of the tunnel!  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may!

I still hadn´t put my email on the sheet.  She was in line to exit.  I couldn´t find my pen.  In my pockets were bills, my pocket knife, phone cards, my copy of Jack Kerouac`s On The Road, but no pen!  Her foot was about to touch the concrete of the station.  She would soon be beyond my reach, one of the many anonymous faces of the metro... but I found my pen, scribbled my email, and folded the paper.  I tapped her on the shoulder.   She turned, startled, and I wordlessly handed her the leaf.  "Thanks," she murmured and then turned and was lost in the flood of people.

For two days I explored the city, eating from the taco stands, watching the clowns in Chapultepec, going to the places we are told to go to.  And then the email came.

Her name was Erika.  She signed it at the bottom with pattern of dots ..::Erika::.. like some encrypted message in Mayan glyphs.  She said she had left the subway with a smile on her face.

So we were to meet outside of the palace of Belles Artes on a Monday at 6:30.  I arrived first. I was wearing my tennis shoes, the best I had, but they were still filthy inside from my adventures in the mountains of Michoacan.  I couldn´t have been more conscious of them if they were on fire. Then I saw her across the plaza.  She hadn´t seen me yet.  I pretended not to notice, with the feeling of stalling before jumping off a tall cliff into cold water.  She was coming toward me. 

"Erika," I said, and greeted her with the typical Latin hug and kiss to the side.  We began to walk. 

She was a dancer and a student of anthropology.  She was working on a project to write down the dances of the disappearing indigenous cultures using special notation so they might be preserved forever, no matter how much Old Time might be a-flying.  She was a skateboarder, shredding through the skate park, and liked alt rock but sometimes listened to heavy metal.  She made jewelry out of bright seeds and jade, but never to sell, only to give away.  And she was a listener.  She sat with intelligent eyes and heard the my stories of adventure, humor and hardship

As we walked she went into a bookstore to pick out a picture book to give as a present to her coworker's kid.  We bought churros.  We took them back to the front of Belles Artes to eat.

"Why did you write me that poem?" she asked me.

"Well, just something about the way you were sitting on the train, serenely..." I was dancing around the issue.

She raised her eyebrows questioningly. 

"Ok.  But it was also because you are very beautiful."

I could not read her reaction.  I got up and said, "Let`s walk, but I don`t know where" and she got up and said, "It´s better to walk not knowing where you are going."   But time had hurried and she already had to go and we walked to the subway and I said goodbye.  Encrypted Erika went through the turnstile which shut like the iron gates of life. Then she entered the metro which swept her off to a thousand possible destinations in neighborhoods with millions of lives beginning, playing out, and coming to a close.

I left the subway station and wandered the gray streets.  I found another station and went in.  I melted into the metro dark, riding at random the lines once more, seeing apparitions of beautiful faces flickering on the tunnel walls.

¡Viva Mexico and all your sultry salsa parlors!

Mexico City... a place of passion.  A land of Latin languor.  Where figures clad in red dance a steamy salsa late into the night in an ardor of whirling and entangled limbs.  This was my Mexico!

But not in the way you might think. I learned salsa in what you might perhaps call an unconventional way.

It all started when I met Israel.  Israel is slightly on the portly side, with a wry smile rarely seen.  His sense of humor matches his smile.  For instance, in Mexico every calls Facebook Face and nothing more.  With this in mind, witness the following dialogue:

Me: Hey Israel, do you have Face?

Israel: Yeah.  It`s above my neck.

Me: Thanks wise guy.

Israel: Any time.          

But he`s not annoying about it; one rarely wants to kick him in the shin.  His sincere side balances out his sarcasm. He bent over backward to make me feel welcome in the city.  He is also a philosopher.  We met over coffee in the Condesa, a bohemian part of Mexico City brimming with youths wearing hip rectangular glasses that say ``I love to pretend to love reading theory and discuss Nietzche over coffee and to prove it to you I am wearing these glasses.``

Well... when in Rome. Israel and I talked about Nietzsche over coffee.  Only I didn't have the rectangular glasses.  And I had a beard.  And I was wearing tennis shoes.  Strike three you`re out.

Regardless of what pretensions I or anyone else might have had, Israel really actually digs the philosophers and has genuine and interesting reactions to their ideas.  We synthesized Hegel's dialectic.  We alienated each other over our opinions of Marx. We struggled to master Nietzsche's will to power. In short, we nerded out until we shorted out. Then we went for a walk.

We walked to meet Israel`s friend, Arturo, which I later found out was Israel's partner.  Arturo is  soft spoken, sensitive, and very genuine; the anecdote to Israel's sarcasm.  Arturo is a photographer and had just won a fairly high level prize for a portrait he took of a mechanic in Netzahualcoyotl, one of the outlying slums of Mexico.  The exhibition and reception was in a few nights and they invited me to come.  So I went (there were more rectangular glasses, or actually now there are some big honking roundish things that people wear that apparently scream I LOVE READING POSTMODERN THEORIES ABOUT PASTICHE AND LIMINALITY!!!).  But Israel and Arturo were down to earth... making fun of the pretentious photos, complimenting the ones they really liked; both cool but obviously proud of what Arturo accomplished.

Well I was getting to like these guys so when they invited me to come out with their Brazilian friends I went along.  Vinny and Marlu were a straight couple in Arturo`s photo class: Vinny a curly haired wisp of a thing and Marlu a little sprite that went around in pajama-like pants and slipper-like shoes.  We went and ate mole (pronounced mo-lay). We had scintillating conversations about Mexico City, about Oaxaca, about Brazil, etc.  We went and saw a movie (some overwrought French thing with an anguished love triangle).  We went and had coffee and spoke not a word of Nietzsche.  And then it was time for the nightlife.

We arrived at The Oasis. "This place is really great," I was promised, "especially when everyone gets to dancing!" The recommendation and the name together conjured for me a vision of a sleek bar with potted palm fronds and island beats with sultry beauties sipping margaritas and coyly batting their eyes at me.  "Oh boy," I thought.

When we walked in there was not a woman in sight.  Well maybe one.  There was one person I wasn't so sure about.  Instead were legions of mustachioed Mexican men, attired in tight pants (you just gotta cinch um), and licking their lips lecherously.  No one was dancing except for one biker-looking dude whose well endowed belly wiggled and wobbled out from under his midriff shirt as he performed supposedly seductive hip hop moves.  On the big screen Katy Perry`s California Gurls music video was being projected, only the lyrics were switched to California Gays and the visuals substituted for scantily clad and well oiled Californian surfer babe-dudes (it`s a toss up which version is worse). 

Well there was nothing for it but a stiff upper lip, a nice frothing beer and a close watch on my backside.  Things went well and I was able to forget my surroundings for a bit and chat with Israel, Arturo, and the Brazilians until that nice frothing beer started to pass through my system.  And I had to pee.  Bad.  I got up to go to the bathroom, the eyes of many in the room following my passage (the new guy, the blondie, mmmm).  I opened the door to find an appalling trough-like apparatus, without dividers, as exposed as St. Athanasius fasting in the Sahara desert, and occupied by several users.  But necessities trump prejudices, and so I huddled on the far end until my mission was accomplished, and then headed back to my friends at the table.

And that's when the salsa music started.  They turned off the infernal music videos.  Biker guy in his belly shirt cleared off.  The syncopation and tambors of the music made people bob in their seats.  And before you knew it those tight-panted mustachioed Mexican men were down on the dance floor, whirling and spinning, stamping and swinging, swaying those hips like there was no tomorrow.  Oh could they dance!  One man, slender and in a respectable buttoned-up blue shirt, was suddenly off in the wild flight of his dance, with beautiful flourishes and whorls and an intricate play of feet while his partner, larger and statelier in a suit, supported him with cool controlled movements.  Everywhere there was an intense focus, an incredible concordance of movement and will. 

I was just sitting in my chair in awe.  I wanted to learn how to dance like that.  What skill! What finesse!  Alas for my fear of dancing with partners, for the paralysis that overtakes me at the first studied steps of a dance with a female!  Was I to be forever exiled from this paradise of motion, this beautiful artwork of the human form?  Nay! said I.  So I accepted one of the many offers men were making me to dance.

My first partner was a dignified gentleman, maybe about forty, who respected my desire to learn the steps and was a able teacher.  From him I gained the first inklings of the steps to cumbia, to salsa, and to Durangense.  My second partner was a sweating and slightly oily juvenile who tried to dance too close (leave room for Jesus, as they say, which brings up an interesting question, what would have Jesus done in this situation?), but soon respected my space and helped me a little farther along my path to Latin dance enlightenment.  My third partner was Israel.  And with him I really begun to learn.  I already knew him and trusted him and so I knew he would have patience with me when I messed up and clumsily stepped forward when I should step back, or spun him round when it was not the right moment.  Good old Israel showing me how to move and shy Arturo silently cheering on my progress from the table so that one day I could go and win a woman with my sleek Latin style.
 
By the end of the night my feet were moving in approximately the right place, and my rigid protestant white boy hips that had hitherto only moved in straight line directions during cross country races began to show the first hints of a Latin sway.  As we all went out of the bar into the pulsing night my inner Mexican, shaken loose by the salsa, welled up and I shouted, "¡rrrrrrrraaah ha hi! ¡Viva México!"