"Chico, chico. Levántese," I heard from somewhere beyond my dreams.
"Huh? What time is it?" Indiglo glowed, "four forty-five." Jeez, this hurts.
We built the hearth fire in the dark cocina and once again made coffee, speaking in hushed voices as the family slept. Fernando passed me the sugar. "No tomo," I told him. He handed me the pack of bologna from our provisions and told me to fry it and sandwich it with raw onion on white bread, for later in the day. Fernando left to prepare the mule pack.
I met him out front before dawn, on the edge of the airstrip. He had the beast, and was ready to pack it and set off.
"What you don't need, leave here," he said, "especially if it's heavy."
Good idea, I thought, we don't want to overburden that little mule. I took out some books I'd been traveling with and some other gear I didn't anticipate any use for in the jungle, and put them in the back room with the provisions being left behind.
I helped Fernando pack the mule. Packing a mule is an art. After a week of doing it two or three times a day, I was still able only to assist at best. To this day, I'm not sure how the pack stays on. Anyway, that first morning I mostly watched.
Dawn was about to break, and the mule was loaded except for my pack.
"¡Vámonos!" yelled Fernando, and he popped the mule.
"¡Un momento!" I said. "¿Mi mochila?" I pointed to my pack.
"Yeah, put it on," he said, motioning. "¡Vámonos!"
He might as well have smacked me in the face with a two-by-four. That's how it began.
We walked the length of the airstrip, and the mule was less than excited about leaving Carmelita. I wondered what he knew that I didn't. It took both of us to drag him into the jungle. Dawn broke as we stepped from the light of the airstrip into the dark recess of vegetation.
I wore on my feet a $3 pair of rubber boots. I carried on my back a $120 pair of trekking boots. We trudged all morning through calf-deep mud riddled with deep holes left by hooves. The hoof craters were harmless in the wet mud, but in the places where the mud had hardened, they were treacherous to the ankles. So we trudged, through the forgiving mud where possible.
Water settled and mud congealed anew with each fresh rain and passing beast. The result was a twisted weave of shifting trails, all heading in the same general direction, but never revealing with clarity the true path. The mule sank into the mud, becoming stuck continually, and every time we pulled him out, heaving and struggling, the pack shifted out of balance. It took twenty minutes to reset the pack. We must have reset it five times that morning.
The galoshes were lost to the mud more than once-a pain in the ass that left me balancing on one submerged and immobile foot, top heavy with the pack, while trying to re-insert a clean sock into the mocking mouth of a rubber galosh, protruding only toes above the muck. Worse, though, was that after two hours, the soles of my feet were no longer soles-just deeply worn blisters.
The going was slow, but five hours later, we made it to solid ground, no more mud. Fernando told me to wait with the mule, and in a blink he vanished into the jungle. I peeled the galoshes from the blisters, changed into the trekking boots, but the damage had been done. Besides the blisters, both ankles were twisted and strained, fallen victim to the dried hoof craters I had been unable to avoid. The weight of the pack was driving its presence into every fiber of muscle. Early on, I'd unbuttoned the flannel and rolled up its sleeves for ventilation-my arms were now swollen with mosquito bites and bloodied from the underbrush. I was in significant pain, and beginning to question the wisdom of the journey.
Twenty minutes went by with no sign of Fernando. "Have I been scammed?" I asked the mule. He snorted. I talked to him for the next few minutes, wondering how I would be able to retrace the chaotic maze of trails back to civilization on my own. Then Fernando materialized from the green.
"Siéntese," he said. "Descansemos un ratito.
I didn't argue. I sat.
We ate the fried bologna and onion sandwiches. Never knew fried bologna could taste so good.
As we rested, Fernando spoke.
"I don't smoke or drink or listen to anything but Christian music. I go to church every Sunday and have devoted my life to God. But the jungle is a different world, with different rules."
He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a wad of semi-dry leaves wrapped in soft, worn paper.
"This is what I was gathering in the jungle. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a young chiclero, I was introduced to this herb. In the jungle it's necessary. It eases the pain"-he looked at me-"and prepares you to hear the spirits of the jungle."
Sold to the gringo with the blistered feet and aching muscles! I thought. Anything that will ease this pain is a friend of mine.
We rolled the leaves in paper torn from my journal and smoked them. It did ease the pain, and later, the jungle would speak.
We relaxed in our newfound lightness for a few minutes, drank some water, and then set out once more. With the mud behind us, our pace quickened. We were covering ground at furious speed. Moving that fast, one must be ever wary of the trail below to avoid stepping on tree shoots turned to stilettos by the diagonal hack of machetes, or tripping on one of the innumerable exposed roots and falling on one of those stilettos. But one must also be wary of the dangers above. The same diagonal machete hacks transform peaceful vines into hanging daggers, harmless enough when inert, but dangerous when snapping back from the pack of a passing mule. And of course, as Fernando stressed that morning, one must be ever vigilant for the barba amarilla, the fer-de-lance, one of the most venomous snakes in the world, made deadlier by its notoriously aggressive behavior.
Surrounding me at waist level was a perpetual swarm of mosquitoes, hovering in and out of the rare shafts of light that reached the jungle floor. Peripheral vision soaked in the passing of an endless sponge wall of green, with its unique rhythms and subtle personalities. The rhythm of walking, the rhythm of the mule, the rhythm of mosquitoes, the rhythm of the passing jungle, the rhythm of silence, the rhythm of insect song, the rhythm of light and shadow, the rhythms of leaf litter, the rhythms of ants marching, the rhythms, the rhythms, the rhythms. The rhythms combined with silence, pain, heat, exhaustion, and the jungle herb, induced a very real trance state. Perhaps the trance state opened me to hear the voices of the jungle. I don't know. But the jungle did speak, and I was obliged to listen. That's how it happened. That's how the jungle got inside.
I thought the jungle was flat. It isn't. That afternoon, the trail climbed large hill after large hill. We passed through an hour of these oversized mounds. Up and down, up and down, quads on fire. The mule was wheezing, and I would be too if we didn't stop soon. Finally we did stop, for a water break, and more herb, and then continued.
A few hours later, more hills. I thought the jungle was flat. It isn't. Up and down. Legs burning. Then I saw it. One of the mounds had a large vertical gash in its side, exposing rows of stone. It was a temple. They were all temples. These were not hills, but an entire city buried in jungle. I realized then that we had already walked through one city that afternoon, and here was a second. This was La Florida, Fernando informed me. We'd be making camp on the outskirts of the next great city, El Tintal.
We went on, passed through another small city, perhaps a suburb or an outlier. The pain now was beyond anything I had ever experienced. I couldn't continue. I had to stop. I was about to collapse. Then we arrived to a small clearing. Camp. Dusk. The day's push was over. Ten hours of solid trekking. Couldn't believe I made it. We rested and set camp as it grew dark.
Fernando built a fire and made coffee, handed me a cup. He offered sugar.
"No, gracias," I said.
We ate the chicken fried the night before, cold, with tortillas and raw onion and chile. Delicious. I crawled into my hammock fully clothed, too exhausted to undress. Ah, to be off my feet, to have the spine horizontal. Could it get any better than that?
I thought about the day's events, how I had more than doubled my previous pack-humping record, a paltry four hours. I basked in pride for a while and my pride began to drift among previous adventures, before settling on an experience in a scenic valley near Nebaj, a small town in Guatemala's western highlands.
At a comedor, over fresh tamales and a thick cup of organic coffee, I'd made friends with a Mayan gentleman by the name of Jacinto. He wanted to discuss the influx of gringo tourists overwhelming his small community, how it might be controlled, how he might profit from its development. I wanted to explore the neighboring valley. So we went for a hike.
Taking a shortcut to the valley, over the mountain behind town, we passed an altar, blackened with ash and blood, draped in beads, covered in melted wax, littered with the windswept remnants of piles of chicken feathers. This, Jacinto explained, was a Mayan altar, where rituals of fire and sacrifices of flesh still took place on a regular basis, conducted by the shaman of his people.
Was he a shaman? I asked. No, but his best friend since childhood was. We dropped into the valley and the conversation turned to shamanism: its complex of beliefs, its benefit to the community, its existence threatened by the aggressive assaults on the minds of the people by Catholic and Evangelical churches in the region.
A river wound through the valley. We followed it past pigs, chickens, and cows, past cascades and springs, to a foaming pool below a massive waterfall pounding from the forests above. We traversed a thick tree that had fallen across the rapids, and came to the base of the cliff supporting the waterfall. The rushing vertical river on our right slowly drenched us with its spray. On our left, a limestone formation reached to the sky where the waterfall had once run its course. An earthquake had changed that.
We scaled the slippery limestone route, digging our feet into the moss and pulling ourselves higher by the few exposed roots, until we reached an expansive cave just below the summit. The ceiling swayed with a squeaking colony of bats, and the floor was thick with excrement. It smelled horrible.
The cave, Jacinto explained, had been concealed by the waterfall before the earthquake, and was a shamanic ceremonial site then. He showed me the retired altar, blackened with soot. When his people were being attacked by the Guatemalan military, his best friend, the shaman, brought several families here, including his own, to hide from the gunship helicopters. Jacinto lost a father, two brothers, and a sister to the massacre. With care we slid down the limestone formation and began the walk back to Nebaj, by way of the longer, scenic route through the valley. We passed elderly women leading cows, carrying buckets of water and bundles of firewood. I asked Jacinto why women of that age were engaged in such strenuous physical work. He said they had no choice. Their husbands had been murdered in the government's slaughter of his people.
The women seemed ancient, sunken beneath recesses of deep wrinkles, tiny, bent, shriveled. And yet they labored, steady. They supported the loads of wood and water on their backs, but a strap across their foreheads bore most of the weight. Those cords of wood were every bit as heavy as my pack, if not more so.
My pride at breaking the previous record retreated in shame.
I begged for the painful throbbing to recede so I could fall asleep. Enveloped by the mosquito net, lying there, like a fish in the sea, I listened to the wind in the canopy overhead. The immediate surroundings were still, connected to powerful surges high above, sonic waves of infinite wind-driven leaves. Their rustling exposed the exact position of each surge: far away . . . to the left . . . behind . . . directly above. Every few minutes a breeze swept the hot, still, muggy jungle floor . . . infused the mosquetero . . . carried the heat from my sweat. Those rare currents were nothing short of luxury, breaths of life. The waves rolled across the canopy, gently rocking the jungle, singing their lullaby, drawing me into a deep sleep, cradled by the hammock.