I woke at four-thirty the next morning to the blurry, surreal image, through the mosquetero, of Fernando stoking the fire. My clothes were still wet with sweat, but everything was wet. The hot, dry organic vapor had condensed early that morning, soaking everything, a natural bath of sorts. My body was stiff and sore, but managed to creak out of the hammock. When I stood I was brutally reminded of the blisters on my feet. I sat down and removed my socks to gauge the severity . . . not good. Then I noticed that my legs were itching violently. When I raised my pant legs I saw that my calves and ankles were covered in dirt. What the . . . ? I shined my headlamp: it wasn't dirt, but hundreds of almost microscopic insects.
"Fernando, mira esto." I wanted him to look at this.
"Tiene garrapatas," he said.
They were ticks.
I spent half an hour picking them off, but it was dark, they were tiny, and there were hundreds of them-and they kept coming, from where I knew not. I tried scraping them from the flesh with a knife, but they were endless. I gave up.
Fernando handed me a cup of hot coffee. He offered sugar.
"No, gracias."
"Tuck your pants in your socks today," he said. "It will keep the garrapatas out. It's going to be a long day, and we must reach El Mirador by nightfall."
Fernando began to break camp, while I cooked eggs, onions, chiles, and tortillas for breakfast and for almuerzo later. Then we packed our gear into burlap sacks, stitched them together with twine, hoisted them on the mule, covered everything with a canvas tarp and tied it on. It took about half an hour. Still don't understand how it stayed on.
Fernando looked at the mule and chuckled. "Él es chiquito, ˇpero fuerte!"
It was true. The mule was small, but strong.
"ˇVamos!" Fernando yelled, and he popped the mule. They were off.
My pack was across camp, leaning against a tree. I ran to it, threw it on my back, and adjusted the straps. When I looked up, Fernando and the mule had disappeared. Gone. No más. Which way did they go? This is not good, I thought. I reasoned by the remnants of our campsite the direction whence we'd arrived, and thus the direction of continuance, and set out, chasing after them, hoping I had reasoned correctly. It took me fifteen minutes to catch them. Damn, they were traveling fast.
By the time I'd caught up with Fernando and the mule, I was drenched in sweat. After an hour, the ripe blisters on my feet opened, filling my boots with fluid. It wasn't long before my rested body returned to the level of pain and exhaustion endured at yesterday's end. This would be a long day indeed.
Our pace was intense through the cool, damp morning, over roots, over fallen trees and under fallen trees. When the mule couldn't make it over or under, we hacked new trails through dense jungle, around the blockades.
Just before mid-morning, the sun was at such an angle above the jungle that its heat began to penetrate the canopy, vaporizing the condensed moisture and transforming the jungle into a hot, dry oven. Sometime later, on the verge of collapse, we stopped and sat on a fallen tree at a trail crossing. This was the only other trail we'd seen till that point.
"You roll this one," Fernando said.
So I did.
As we sat there, a chiclero rode by on horseback, pack mule in tow. He and Fernando exchanged greetings and entered into a dialogue of formality, ritual, and respect. The chiclero complimented Fernando on our mule.
"Sí, él es chiquito, pero fuerte," Fernando replied.
They discussed the state of the jungle, shared news from its distant reaches, talked about the water situation. The chiclero told us that the lack of water was growing critical, that there was only one wet spring within two days' journey in any direction. I vowed silently to conserve my water. The chiclero bid us buen viaje, tipped his hat and rode on.
We smoked the jungle herb. I noticed several trees along the trail that bore X-shaped scars of machete hacks, some thirty feet off the ground. Fernando explained that they were chicle trees and that machetes were used to crosshatch a tap for extracting the chicle.
The herb numbed the pain, or at least made it distant. We drank water, reset the mule pack, and were off.
After a while, the trail became more and more difficult to recognize; finally there was no trail. We hacked through thick, dense jungle, and stopped often. Fernando bent branches on trees as markers and we hacked our way to somewhere. I hoped he knew where, because I sure as hell didn't. I grew increasingly concerned, but then we emerged onto a faint trail and soon came upon a waist-high pile of thin, leafy branches. Fernando broke a similar branch from a tree and set it on the pile and told me to do the same. I never asked, but assumed this was some sort of collectively maintained trail marker.
The trail eventually regained its normal size-the width etched by the passing hooves of a packhorse-and our race with nightfall resumed. Hacking through the jungle had cost us precious daylight, and Fernando was not pleased. The broken blisters seared. The fire in the muscles of my feet, legs, and back raged, but it was less painful than the extreme tendon stress in my ankles and knees, which would shortly be overtaken by the excruciating bone stress in my feet, ankles, knees, and back. My arms were swollen and bleeding and tormented by the itch of mosquitoes and the venom of bees. I had never endured pain like this. It was a new world, completely foreign. Never had I ventured this deep into the wilderness of inner sustenance, and I was without a map. It was uncharted territory.
The rhythms and their cohorts cast their spell, and I was helpless. I pressed on, gripped by the trance, grinding through the pain, concentrating only on the next step, watching the trail at my feet.
Slam!
Damn, that hurt!
Snapped from the trance, I realized that one of the dagger vines had whipped back from the passing mule pack with enough velocity to open a wound in my shoulder. I let fly a good helping of curses, in English and Spanish, and stopped to attend to the wound. I guess Fernando heard me, because he stopped the train. After inspecting the wound, he decided we'd take lunch and rest, but only briefly. We had to reach El Mirador by nightfall.
The cold eggs, onions, chiles, and tortillas were excellent. Fernando rolled more herb, this time plucking a green leaf to construct a filter. We smoked. I dressed the wound, and we were off.
We walked all afternoon, passing through several Mayan suburbs or outliers buried in jungle, all looted. They would have been easy to miss had it not been for the scars left by tomb raiders. The jungle floor was littered with stone tools and artifacts. I immediately dismissed the impulse of adding the weight of those souvenirs to my pack.
Fernando stopped and backed up the mule. He was nervous. Four feet off the trail was underbrush, nothing special except that beneath it was only blackness. He hacked away the underbrush to reveal a pitch-black hole roughly three feet in diameter. I couldn't understand the Spanish he used to explain the hole, so he had me drop in a rock. Not a sound. I dropped another. Nothing.
"Hay muchos esos en la selva. Cuidado," he said.
"Yeah." I got it.
The afternoon wore on and the pain grew unbearable. I thought for sure that I had stress fractures in my feet. Mosquito itch, garrapata itch, bee sting, muscle burn, tendon stress, bone stress. No English for days. Jungle voices. It was dismantling all that I thought I was. It was playing with my mind. Touches of delirium. The trance seemed to carry me, just above the breaking point. I wasn't sure whether this strange aid was benevolent or sadistic. Was it sustaining me simply so that I might endure more torment? I began questioning everything. Everything. Crying, screaming, wailing in my mind. Concocting every conceivable strategy to get Fernando to let us stop, make camp there, in the thick of the jungle. Anything to end the pain. But what would I say to a seventy-year-old man? "We have to stop, because I'm not tough enough"? It took every ounce of discipline, more than I'd ever summoned, to keep my mouth shut. But the screams in my mind were deafening, and very much real.
"The jungle is a different world, with different rules," I remembered Fernando saying. It was true. The jungle had its own stick and carrot. The stick? Pain. Heat. Rhythms. Voices. Mosquitoes. Bees. The carrot? Camp. Hammock. Horizontal relief. Mosquito net. I walked, mouth shut.
The pitch dark of night descended on us. We had failed to reach El Mirador by dusk. I wondered what we would do, but Fernando said nothing. I remembered from the night sky above the airstrip in Carmelita that the moon was but a sliver. Yet it wouldn't have mattered if it had shone in its full splendid glory. Moonlight would not penetrate this jungle. Sunlight barely did. We walked. The air cooled, not by much, but every degree lost was appreciated. The blackness was a welcome relief. It was different. Anything different was welcome. It muffled the rhythms, broke the trance. I had my mind back. I had discussed nightwalking with firsthand sources in the jungles of Mexico. It was used in the rites of passage of indigenous mystics the world over. Now I was doing it. Without vision we relied on something else. Something I had never tapped before, some new vantage point. Raw. Primal. Animal. It was ecstatic. The walking became easier. Instead of conquering the jungle, we were now cooperating with it, being guided by it, feeling it, knowing it from some inner place. It was tranquil and calm, communal. The jungle voices whispered now, soft and supportive. I loved it.
As intoxicating as nightwalking was, it did not remove the pain. We had walked from dawn till dusk, and I was shredded. I could no longer feel my muscles, only the heat radiating from the embers within them. My tendons were dried fan belts, smoking, about to snap. My bones splintered with every step. This was it. I was done. I surrendered. Then it happened. In a way that to this day I do not fully understand, surrendering into the pain, accepting defeat, took me across the threshold of pain, some separation of mind and body, of material and ethereal. I could have walked all night, and I was prepared to do just that.
Then we arrived at El Mirador, camp. Twelve hours of trekking, two hours of that in pitch blackness. I was light as air, and we hadn't smoked the jungle herb for more than six hours.
We built a fire and boiled water for coffee. I heaped in a mound of sugar.
Fernando laughed. "ˇFresca!" he exclaimed.
We made camp, cooked eggs and tortillas for dinner.
Fernando smiled at me and chuckled. "Long day, huh?" he said. We talked for a while and I realized how grateful I was to this man. He had taken me to places within myself that I never knew existed, into uncharted territory. Now I had a map of those places, and I knew in that moment that that map would guide me for the rest of my life.
That night I stared through the mosquito net into the stars, and drifted to sleep.