-by Eric Alexander
2002
This story is dedicated to the Jungle,
that we might protect you,
that you might continue to teach.
And to the mystical Phoenix,
may you continue to soar,
showing others the way.
Please let this happen!
We had just loaded a hundred dollars' worth of provisions into a beat-up taxi parked on the edge of the mercado. He was taking them to his home for the night. All I could see now was the back of his black leather bush hat in the rear window of the car, getting smaller as it drove away. He was a seventy-year-old man, named José Fernando Santiago. He gave his full name upon introduction, with proud emphasis on "Santiago." I had known him for all of twenty-four hours and was less than confident that he'd show the next day with the provisions. I had one option . . . to trust that he would. Fate would either grant me the adventure I had dreamed about since childhood, or teach me a bitter lesson in sending away a hundred bucks' worth of provisions with a relative stranger-I'd know by eleven o'clock the next morning. That's when we were to meet at the bus station in the bowels of Santa Elena's chaotic mercado, a swarthy, snarled port of dilapidated buses bound for the fringes of civilization.
Proper narration requires a brief regression at this point. I had planned to spend a week fishing in a remote jungle lagoon, then visit Tikal, then make my way to Belize City, and in no event would I cross back into Mexico, as that would take me north, and I was firm in my resolve to push only south. The intricacies and subtleties of the path during that two-week stretch are another story altogether. In the stead of lengthy elaboration, I will list, in chronological order, the path's capricious seductions during those two weeks: a missed colectivo (a pickup truck with a cargo frame on the bed, used throughout Guatemala for the transport of human stock); failure to jump from a colectivo at the correct crossroads; miscommunication with the driver of a colectivo (who knew there were two San Benitos in Guatemala?); a river barge that set sail two hours earlier than scheduled; a three-day wait for the next river barge; a missed bus; a bus driver who refused to pick up a gringo; a ride offered out of the blue by a stranger; my trusting enough to accept that ride; that stranger's becoming a good friend; a bus stranded in the middle of nowhere with a melted axle casing; an aborted expedition into lost jungles of Guatemala; a vision in Palenque . . . Mexico (where, in no event, was I going to return); and a sick child.
So there we sat, in the front yard of José Fernando Santiago, the afternoon before I sent him away with the provisions. Outside his thatch-roofed home, sweating profusely and swatting mosquitoes, we worked out our itinerary for the next week and a half. We planned to load ten days' worth of provisions onto two large packhorses and trek into the wild and remote jungles of northern Guatemala's El Petén. The route would deliver us to some of the grandest cities in the Mayan world, buried in a thousand years of jungle, only recently discovered.
Fernando spoke Spanish. That first day, I understood little that he said. I left our meeting with, at best, a fuzzy concept of our itinerary, but the next day I understood enough to send him away in a taxi with a hundred bucks' worth of provisions.
When I arrived at the bus corral the next morning, Fernando was exactly where he said he'd be. I was ten minutes late. I had humped my pack twenty minutes to the bus corral, wearing jungle pants and a T-shirt. It was hot as hell, and humid. I was soaked with sweat. Fernando was in jeans and a collared shirt. He wore the black leather bush hat with "Ganador" branded on its brim. "Winner." Quite possibly the coolest hat I had ever seen. He was stocky and a head shorter than me. A thick black moustache marked the Spanish line of his mestizo blood.
At the last minute, Fernando firmly suggested that I buy a sombrero and a long-sleeved shirt to repel insects in the jungle. The only long-sleeved shirt in the mercado large enough for my frame was a flannel. I donned the sombrero and the shirt, and we boarded the bus for the four-hour passage to the distant settlement of Carmelita.
We were packed in the bus like sardines, three to every seat, aisle jammed, standing room only, no standing room left, everyone gasping for air through the suffocating heat and dust. Before the bus had even started its engine, the new shirt was drenched and the hat had already soaked up a thick band of sweat.
My long legs had been brutalized on many a previous chicken-bus journey, so I felt lucky to have the aisle seat . . . blood trickled from only one knee. Fernando sat to my right, and a huge Mayan woman stood in the aisle to my left. Her largeness engulfed my arm; it felt like an oven. Above my lap, from her right arm, hung a basket, its contents covered with towels. For most of the journey, those contents would poke out from beneath the towels: a gawky head of mangy feathers, filthy beak, and terror-stricken red eyes. More than once the creature would chirp at me as though I somehow held the answer to its existential crisis.
The bus was finally so crammed that no additional human movement was possible, and thus its passengers became intimate neighbors. Cooling was a group effort. My sweat cooled the people I was pressed against, and theirs cooled me.
The bus stopped midafternoon at a military checkpoint. All men were required to exit the bus and provide the soldiers with proof that they were neither guerrillas nor narcotics traffickers. Naturally, when they saw I was a gringo, the hassling began. No sooner had it begun than Fernando stepped in. My seventy-year-old companion gave the young soldiers a stern lecture on reason and the affair was terminated. Just like that. I was really starting to like this guy.
Back aboard the bus, Fernando and I entered our first conversation beyond the business of the journey, our first earnest effort to get to know each other. He informed me that I was the only gringo he'd guided into the jungle. I felt special.
The jungle along the road leading north from Santa Elena was little more than a sickly, decimated expanse of unbridled deforestation. My heart sank and I prayed that our expedition would deliver us to forgotten corners of the world, as far away from the hand of man as possible.
Fernando's mood seemed to change from relaxed confidence to seething anger. He glared out the window, his face tightened; he shook his head in disgust. "Todo por vacas," he said.
The jungle grew thick as we gained distance from human population, and eventually soaring walls of vegetation hemmed us in on both sides. Late in the afternoon we arrived at a wide grass clearing-an airstrip for the export of chicle, the sap tapped from chicle trees, used to produce chewing gum. Hardened men called chicleros disappear into the jungle for days at a time to harvest the sap, pack it on mules, and haul it out to the airstrip. Fernando had been a chiclero for thirty-five years.
The airstrip was lined with a few thatch-roofed huts, one tin-roofed bodega de chicle, and the towering edifice of jungle. Horses and mules roamed the grass airstrip, grazing and mating, running free through the only open space of that size for fifty miles. No electricity, no running water. The road ended here. This was Carmelita.
We stayed the night in the home of Guillermo, a longtime amigo of Fernando's, and a fellow chiclero. They had braved the jungle together since they were young men, extracting its nectar and learning its secrets. Guillermo had assisted the archaeologists with their early discoveries of El Mirador and Nakbe, two massive Mayan cities three days by foot from Carmelita. He proudly showed me photos of himself in worn and faded National Geographic articles-a "local native" holding pottery.
I found it interesting that archaeologists had "discovered" those cities, as Fernando told me that the chicleros had used them as encampments for as long as he had been harvesting. I now believe that the word "discovery," as used by some archaeologists, has a slightly different import from its commonly understood meaning.
Guillermo had one of the few homes in Carmelita with a tin roof. We slung our hammocks above the dirt floor of the front room, a large rectangular space, every wall covered in the yellowed newsprint of fútbol heroes, Hollywood actors, Guatemalan beauty queens, pop stars, politicians, boxing champions, prize livestock, and talking animals. We broke down our gear and provisions, to be repacked on the horses in the morning. Guillermo's wife and daughter were in the cocina at the rear, slaving over a stone hearth. Young hens-gallinas-scratched in the dirt floor of the kitchen. Chirping chicks darted for cover from human feet. Beyond the cocina was an enclosed dirt yard with an outhouse, chicken coop, and barbed-wire clotheslines. More than thirty hens and a rooster scratched and pecked the yard without pause. Guillermo's wife grabbed one of the gallinas from the kitchen floor and gave it to her daughter to prepare. The Señora cooked the gallina, esteemed for its tender meat, along with some vegetables and tortillas. We ate well and washed it down with coffee.
I headed for the outhouse after the meal. Boiling in its blackened depths was a living, demonic, vile, teeming, bacterial sludge. It triggered dry heaves. I left the shack and chose a nearby patch of jungle instead.
Fernando and I paid a visit to another of his friends, one of Carmelita's elders. He owned most of the horses used by the chicleros. We had planned to hire two large packhorses to carry our gear and provisions. We would travel by foot. The elder explained that because of recent events, he now required that one of his sons travel with the horses to ensure their proper care, and that the boy must be paid daily and fed. We did not have enough provisions for three people, and paying the boy would have blown the budget, so I asked Fernando to figure out an alternative. The only other keeper of beasts in Carmelita had but one available, and it was much smaller than those of the elder, and it was a mule, not a horse. After mulling it over for a few minutes, Fernando decided we could take the one small mule, break down our provisions, and leave three days' worth with Guillermo in Carmelita. We would retrieve the provisions left behind on our swing south from Nakbe.
"Perfecto," I said, and we made the deal for the mule.
We returned to our quarters, broke down the horse packs into two smaller packs for the mule, and stowed three days' worth of provisions in a back room, including two plastic drums of water, called tambos. We packed only two tambos, instead of the originally planned four. I knew it was dry season in the jungle, and this concerned me. Fernando assured me that two tambos would be enough water. Not that it much mattered; it was our only option.
The evening grew late and Guillermo's family retired to their sleeping quarters, one small room in the rear of the house, strung with hammocks. Fernando and I entered the cocina, lit only by the low light from the hearth and a candle. We boiled water for coffee and Fernando handed me the sugar.
"No, gracias," I told him. "No tomo azúcar."
I had never taken my coffee with sugar. When we were buying provisions, Fernando threw a pound of sugar into the basket. "What the hell are we going to do with that much sugar?" I asked. He responded simply that we were going to be in the jungle for ten days. I assumed he was indulging at my expense, and wrote it off. If he wanted sugar for his coffee, fine, not a big deal, but a pound?
We spent the next hour in the dark cocina, frying a chicken, making tortillas for the next day, and getting to know each other at a whisper. Fernando repeatedly assured me that he was responsible, honest, and dependable. Long past midnight, we slipped into our hammocks, exhausted. It had been a long day. The night was hot and muggy and without breeze. The mosquitoes were active. It took forever to fall asleep, but finally I did . . . slept horribly.
"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.
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, ¡pero fuerte!"
It was true. The mule was small, but strong.
"¡Vamos!" 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. "¡Fresca!" 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.
The next morning we slept in until seven. We had earned it and our bodies demanded it. When I crawled out from beneath the mosquetero, I saw that we had made camp in a large clearing, the first open sky since Carmelita. The morning jungle was a cacophony of birdsong and monkey howls. Some of those aviary melodies were the most exotic, the most inexplicable, the most beautiful, the most wondrous sounds ever to grace my ears. Toucans and parrots took flight, splashing their color across the sky. Troops of howler monkeys patrolled the clearing's perimeter, roaring their cries of dominion over the dawn. The early-morning condensation began to vaporize, rising through the canopy, forming wisps of cloud to be whisked away by the desolate jungle winds.
I sat upright in the hammock and pulled my legs in for examination. There were now hundreds of small pus bulbs of infection where I had cut the garrapatas from my flesh. In several places, the garrapatas had launched their first wave of attack in clusters, and thus clustered the agents of infection.
The infections had merged into large, dangerous areas of red and white flesh, amplifying the itch, pain, heat, and burn. I drained the bulbs with a pocket knife, poured water over them, applied anti-infection ointment, and wrapped the major wounds with a makeshift dressing held in place by duct-tape, a favorite material of my late grandfather-I thought of him and smiled.
While Fernando watered the mule, I built a fire and made coffee. Gave both cups a nice heap of sugar. We ate a hearty breakfast of sausage, eggs, tortillas, onions, and chiles, relaxed and took in the morning.
Later, we led the mule into the thick of the jungle and Fernando gave me the rope.
"Hold him," he said.
I stood with the mule, and what happened next was astounding. Fernando climbed thirty feet up a thin tree, cut off its leafy top, and this he repeated with two other trees. Did I mention that Fernando was seventy years old? We gathered the treetops into a pile for the mule, tied him to a tree, and left him there to feed.
We spent the morning exploring the ancient ruins, an entire city-state buried in jungle. Buried. Every structure transformed into a hill or a mountain, covered in the same vegetation and trees found throughout the jungle, indistinguishable save for their loft and the scars inflicted by tomb raiders. Around noon, we climbed El Dante, the Temple of the Tapir, the highest in the Mayan world, piercing the canopy twenty stories into the heavens. The summits of these tallest temples, at the border between heaven and earth, are the only Mayan structures in the jungle exposed by natural forces. The surfaces of the crowns are shaped like three king-sized beds lined side by side. The scouring winds sweep them clear of enough soil to prevent full-blown organic takeover, permitting only small trees, scrub brush, and exquisite flowers. Far below, as far as we could see in every direction, was a sea of jungle, an endless ocean of green.
I thought the jungle was flat. It isn't. In every direction, on every horizon, were mountains of green, connected to other mountains of green by undulating serpentine mounds of jungle. On the distant horizon whence we'd come rose La Florida and El Tintal. I gasped. Fernando laughed at me. It was hard to believe how far we'd trekked. Giant city-states in every direction, connected by elevated roadways, suburbs, and outliers. In their prime, these stone structures were surely surrounded by vast tracts of housing constructed of timber and thatch, long since consumed by the jungle. It seemed obvious to me that during the height of the Mayan civilization, there was no jungle here, or virtually none; it had been chewed to pulp and cleared by ferocious urban sprawl.
Long captivated by the Mayan mystery, I had come searching, seeking clues, needing answers. It was shocking to learn that the dense mass of sprawling mounds on all horizons was cities and roads. I had never expected it; never saw it coming. It took my feeble brain a moment to process the information, and then the realization hit me with such force that, for a brief moment, my breathing stopped. The clues and the answers I sought were now in front of me. There was no mystery here, only the natural cosmic mandate of existence. I was disappointed for weeks afterward, because the answers I found shattered the mystery that had driven me for so many years. It wasn't until much later that I realized the profound personal import that those answers held, and how much more valuable they were than the continued belief in a mystical tale. And I learned that the true magic of such tales lies in following them to their source, in finding one's own answers.
I knew a sprawling metropolis when I saw one. The Maya were not a fully enlightened human race that had ascended into the heavens without a trace. They were an advanced civilization, arguably as advanced as their European counterparts, an organism that, like all terrestrial creatures, depended on the bounty of the Earth for survival.
That organism had evolved as a species over thousands of years into a highly advanced, complex, ordered superorganism. It had started as a babe, at the mercy of the jungle's intricate web of life. The organism began to cluster. Safety in numbers afforded some protection from the harsh dictates of the environment. The clusters grew and learned to tame the jungle, to bend it to their will, to harvest its fruit, to drink of its mother's milk. Somewhere the organism passed the inflection point. The clusters grew fat, and peaceful harvesting progressed to the voracious feeding of adolescence and growth. Always growth. The jungle's fragile balance of life shifted. The clusters began to merge into one biological web of city-states, the only organism in the jungle that could destroy the jungle itself, and indeed it did destroy the jungle, its womb, its mother, its host, and in the process it destroyed itself.
The jungle is a living monument to efficiency, a perfectly balanced system of maximum production, with no waste. It commands complete buy-in, total obedience and participation from its subjects. There is no deviation from its laws, and no tolerance for error. Its energy and nutrients are perpetually recycled between its towering canopies and thin soils, supporting an incredible wealth and diversity of life. Specialist organisms from miniscule tree frogs to fleshy seed-bearing fruits to parasitic vines to pillar trees are all eventually refolded into the soils, where insects and fungi transform them to mulch nutrition, from which the cycle begins anew.
While temporarily destroying the jungle, the Mayan superorganism was unable to conquer it, to conquer nature. Every relationship that develops askew, too far from balance, ultimately expires under the crushing weight of its own imbalance, to be recycled, to seek balance anew. Like every other organism of the jungle that destroys its host, the Mayan organism was recycled. Its cells and structures and vital systems disintegrated and dispersed, returning to their basic units, still visible in the genetic markers of the Mayan and mestizo villages to the west. Extropy devoured by entropy. All that remains now of the mighty Mayan beast is its stone skeleton, and in time, it too will be devoured completely.
Perhaps the Mayan fate was an essential example of polarity, of duality, of balance, the cosmic mandate, escapable by none. All life struggles to create order, systems, support platforms from which it might leverage more growth, more order. Is it true that evolution supports life? Or is it the wolf in sheep's clothing, the opposing force, entropy-the sly agent behind the veil, continually dismantling the ingenious attempts at order? The eater of the cosmos, worshipped in rituals of fire the world over, ever oxidizing the universe.
The net consequence of this eternal opposition of forces is change, the only constant. And fortunately so, because therein lies the secret that our realities are but fleeting holograms and that anything is possible. Anything.
I wonder how long it would take for an abandoned Manhattan or Hong Kong to be reclaimed by the earth. I ask this of others, and they invariably reply that it could probably never happen, because the structures are so tall, and made of steel, and so on. I wonder if the Maya thought similarly.
We sat atop El Dante for at least an hour. The sky was blue, without a cloud, the sun high, the wind stiff. "Aire fresco," said Fernando, "calidad." He inhaled deeply, and motioned for me to do the same. The purity of the air was astounding. Fernando explained that it blew in from the Caribbean and the canopy scrubbed it like a filter. He showed me how to identify trees in the canopy below. We watched birds and troops of monkeys from above. Waves of wind rolled across the endless ocean of green beneath us. There were no mosquitoes, and no garrapatas, only butterflies.
We continued our exploration of El Mirador, hiking for miles, from one temple to another. Fernando taught me about the jungle, about which trees contained useful resins, and which plants would blind you with their fluids if hacked by machete. He showed me the parasitic vines deposited as seeds by birds high in the canopy, from which they would launch their parasitic existence, down to the jungle floor, growing as large as the host tree itself, appearing unified and strong, solid and sturdy. It was an illusion, he said. The vine would ultimately bring the massive tree down, along with itself, to be recycled by the agents of the jungle floor.
"¡Como mujeres!" he joked. Like women.
Late that afternoon we climbed El Tigre, the Temple of the Jaguar. We spoke little at the summit. I spent the bulk of that time breathing and watching an eagle soar and hang and be on currents of air below. I could feel Fernando's deep reverence for this place.
On our return to camp we ran into one of the guards on the payroll of the archaeological team and its financial backers, stationed at El Mirador to prevent the removal of artifacts from the site. Thus guarded, the archaeological team and its financial backers would, in time, be able to remove artifacts from the site.
Fernando asked the guard if there was any water for the mule. The man replied that there was, and quoted his price. We bought the water and headed for camp. Fernando was furious. Never, in all his thirty-five years in the jungle, he told me, had anyone charged him for water. The jungle was changing.
At camp we stripped down to our underwear for a short afternoon siesta in the hammocks. Fernando and I took turns cutting garrapatas from each other's backs. Fernando then used a shaving mirror to locate and remove them from the rest of his body. It took him twenty minutes to remove his, and then he dozed off. I couldn't understand why I was infested and he wasn't.
For the next two hours, using Fernando's shaving mirror technique, I searched my legs and body for garrapatas, cutting them from my flesh with a pocket knife. They had advanced north of my knees to places where they were most unwelcome. They were drunk and gorged on my blood, and were no longer tiny. Removing the duct-tape dressings from my legs hurt like hell, and revealed that the infectious bulbs had grown during the day. I cut them open again, drained them, applied anti-infection cream, and applied another dressing of duct-tape bandages. Never did take a siesta.
When Fernando woke up, he handed me the machetes and a metal file, showed me how to work an edge, and put me to the task. He'd be back later, he said. For the rest of the afternoon I ground the hell out of those rusty machetes and felt pretty good about the edge I put on them.
Fernando returned with a sack full of fruit that he'd gathered from the jungle. Oranges-naturally packaged juice-and a host of other fruits I'd never seen before, succulent fruta pura.
Just before dusk, we climbed to the top of nearby El Mono, the Temple of the Monkey, to watch the sun splash into the chlorophyll horizon. El Mono, El Tigre, and El Dante, roughly equal in height, form a large triangle at the heart of El Mirador. Fernando rolled the jungle herb and we smoked. The sky was clear-no haze, no moisture. Still, the setting sun split the horizon into discrete shades, light and dark, of yellow, orange, and red.
In the dimming twilight, I noticed Fernando's eyes. They were crimson like the horizon, ancient, wild. I hadn't noticed them before. I wondered whether the jungle made them wild. Then I wondered what my own eyes looked like.
I commented to Fernando that from atop the temples, the jungle resembled a green ocean. He said he'd much rather be in the jungle than on the ocean. He'd taken a ferry once from Livingston to Puerto Barrios and gotten sick.
"I don't like the up and down of the waves," he said. "I don't like the ocean. It's too dangerous."
"More dangerous than the jungle?"
"¿Cómo no?" he replied-of course it was. "You can drown in the ocean. There are sharks in the ocean, and other monsters. There's no fresh water, no wood to build signal fires."
I thought about our own shortage of water, the garrapata infections, the barba amarilla, about what a force this man was in the jungle, tough, rawhide. I could only laugh.
Back at camp we built a fire, made coffee for our sugar, rested. We fried onions, dumped in a few cans of sardines, and shoveled it down with tortillas. 'Twas excellent. Fernando continued to tortillar for the next morning.
In Santa Elena, when Fernando had indicated his affinity for sugar by tossing a pound of it in the shopping cart, I decided I'd introduce him to different kind of sugar, and threw some into the cart as well. At the campfire, I whittled points onto two thin, green branches, skewered some marshmallows, and held them over the coals. Fernando looked at me like I was crazy, and did a poor job of hiding his disgust.
These, I was determined, would be the best damn marshmallows I had ever roasted-evenly melted, no lumps, with the perfect singe of caramelized sugar. I took my time, with the focus of a surgeon. I could feel Fernando's look of disgust change to curiosity. The marshmallows were done, and yes, they were perfect. I sandwiched two between honey crackers with a square of chocolate, and handed it to Fernando.
"Come," I told him.
He hesitated, dubious.
"Come," I repeated.
He took a bite, chewed reluctantly once, then again. His eyes widened and he looked at me. "¡Mmmm!" He finished chewing and swallowed. "¡Buenísimo!" He inhaled the rest. Could I make him another one, he asked. Could I ever. He ate four of them.
We talked by firelight. He told me how he had started out as a chiclero. How, in the seventies and eighties, wealthy businessmen from the States and Guatemala City had financed teams of chicleros to dig out treasures from the temples in these most inaccessible regions of the jungle. How the money had been too great for him to refuse. How he had taken part in the treasure hunting, and of the amazing artifacts he'd unearthed. How he had been a rich man then, and how the spirits of the jungle had exacted their revenge, driving him into poverty and one of his children into an early grave. How he had spent years trying to recover, to salvage his life, when his only expertise was the jungle itself. How he had now chosen to seek forgiveness from the spirits of the jungle, by guiding people like me into the recesses of its beating heart so that the world might come to recognize it as the living, breathing spirit that it is, so that the world might abandon its assault, so that the spirits of the jungle might survive the reckless arrogance of man.
Fernando was taken with emotion and hung his head. I suspect this was his first and only confession on the matter. I passed no judgment, and think he knew that. We sat together in silence until the fire had burned down to a bed of pulsating, glowing embers.
Fernando stood, tossed a log on the coals, and walked over to the bag of fruit he had harvested from the jungle that afternoon. He returned with a handful of thick, waxy leaves of a deep, blackish green. He started extracting the essence of the leaves, an oily, pungent liquid, into the frying pan. Then he spoke.
"We are the Ancient Ones, a brotherhood of blood across time, keepers of this jungle. I know you have communed with her these past days. I know your pain. I know the voices. You have nightwalked beneath her shroud. Your silence throughout shows more respect than you can understand. I know you feel it, no television, no phones, no water, no electricity, no computers. It has been an honor to bring you here."
He continued. "The Ancient Ones are the human guardians of the spirits of the jungle, but there are others as well. We have existed since long before the Maya, though we count many Mayan initiates among us. They were here for many epochs, and still their influence falls heavy. They were not good keepers of the jungle, nor have I always been, but the Ancient Ones among them protected the line of our knowledge into modern times. I was initiated into the first of many rituals after many years as a chiclero. This is the first of those rituals."
He unwrapped three shanks of rust-colored hard dry wood from a plastic sack, placed the end of one on the edge of the ember bed. It began to smoke, an intoxicating, aromatic incense. He sat the frying pan of oily leaf extract on the coals, and it began to sizzle and fume, also a powerful aromatic. In a tongue that was not Spanish-nor did I recognize it as one of the Mayan dialects-he began to speak.
We did not retire to our hammocks until well past midnight.
We woke before dawn. As usual, the early-morning condensation had soaked everything. Everything, that is, except all the gear I wanted dry, which I had zipped into my pack the night before. I was learning.
Fernando built the fire, made two cups of steaming, sweet coffee. We ate a light breakfast of hot granola and jungle fruit, and then he left to retrieve the mule while I broke camp. He returned bewildered.
"La mula ya se fue," he said.
"What do you mean, the mule already left?" I asked.
"Ya salió," he said.
"What do you mean he's gone?"
We searched the jungle for more than an hour, kicking through the underbrush. Nada. No mule.
"I talked to the guards," Fernando informed me, "and they said we can borrow one of their horses. You can just buy the lost mule from its owner."
I made it clear that that was not an option, and we resumed our search. Back into the jungle, for another hour. Still nothing. No way was I going to buy the damn mule. We stepped out of the jungle, and there, in the clearing, was the mule, grazing as if he'd been there all morning. Maybe so. I'd experienced enough weirdness over the past months that it was not beyond the realm of possibility. We packed and set out for Nakbe, two hours late.
The day spent at El Mirador without my pack was noticeable in my muscles and joints, but an hour into the late-morning trek, the pain had returned in full, to its most excruciating levels. This was the hardest, the longest, the farthest I'd ever pushed my body. The waist buckle on my pack had taken to popping open repeatedly, demanding constant readjustment.
The garrapata itch in my legs raged like wildfire, mosquitoes were in full swarm, and the bees were active. The prior days had taught me to accept the itch of the mosquitoes and the venom of the bees, to diffuse them, to quicken their dispersal. The process was never total, but it helped. For the first time, I noticed the splendid coloration of the bees-electric, vibrant, reflective metallic sheens of red, orange, blue, green-on these resplendent robotic creatures from some faraway galaxy. Still, in the cynicism of my pain, I knew their true purpose, to inject my flesh with venom, to drive the pain to a maddening crescendo.
The jungle floor was scarred with massive toppled trees; root systems thrust vertically, two mules high, exposing at the base tangles of roots, dried soil, and cavernous recesses. Just as we passed one of these, the mule reared in front of me, neighing and snorting, backing violently toward me, almost pulling Fernando over by the lead rope. I snapped from the trance.
"¡Barba amarilla!" shouted Fernando. He threw down the lead rope and stepped away from the snarled cathedral of roots. The mule almost backed over me as we reversed our position. The snake disappeared in a matter of seconds, slithered back into the root system. I never did see it.
The mule refused to follow the trail past the roots. We hacked a detour around them and continued. The rest of the morning, the mule was skittish. So was I. The pain of the heat and the heat of the pain were racking. The trance set its delirium-laced hooks. The jungle was a monotonous collage of identical, rhythmic green in every direction. The waist buckle popped open.
Dammit, man, are the manufacturers of this pack going to hear from me! The single most important part of a trekking pack and it doesn't even work! How is that possible?
I stopped to readjust the pack, to fix the infuriating buckle, again. I finished and looked up. Fernando was gone. The mule was gone. Vanished into the endless deep tapestry of green.
This is not good.
I looked at the trail behind me, in front of me, identical in both directions.
Okay, stay calm. Think. Which way were we going? Which way were you facing when you stopped to fix the buckle? Have you changed position since stopping?
I . . . do . . . not . . . know.
I searched both directions of the trail, squinting and straining my eyes as though that would somehow enable my vision to penetrate deeper into the impenetrable cloak of vegetation. Exhausted and delirious, I accepted my fate and guessed. Fifteen minutes later I saw the mule. Damn, they were traveling fast.
The rest of the trail passed without incident. After a late start and six hours of travel, we arrived at Nakbe. As we emerged into the clearing, several guards crossed the encampment to meet us. "¡Bienvenidos!" they shouted, welcoming us with warm smiles. As we learned later, we were the first outsiders they had seen in three weeks.
The jefe of the greeting party gave us his formal welcome, addressed Fernando in a ritualistic dialogue similar to that of the chiclero days before. It's a peculiar exchange, one of protocol and etiquette, a jungle language of respect. The guard complimented our mule.
"Sí, él es chiquito, pero fuerte," came Fernando.
The conversation turned to the shortage of water in the jungle. The guards told us of the stagnant, algae-clogged water dwindling in their collection device, and immediately offered it to us, no mention of charge. Fernando recounted the guard at El Mirador, who sold water. All the guards demonstrated their contempt, in dramatic fashion. The jungle was changing, they agreed.
Fernando and I rushed to unpack the mule, watered him, and set off with two of the guards to climb Temple I, a twenty-story behemoth soaring high above the canopy. After the near-vertical climb to the summit, we emerged into clear blue sky at the top of the world. The older guide exclaimed "¡Aire fresco!" and inhaled. The rest of us followed suit, breathing deeply of the purest air imaginable.
"¡Fresco!"
"Verdad."
"Ahhh . . ."
I moved to the opposite edge of the temple's crown, three king-sized beds away, to sit in silence. I heard the low voices of the others behind me, hushed, reverent. The topic of their conversation never deviated from the sheer pleasure of the moment, the fresh air, the stiff wind, the warm sun, the clear day. These beings truly loved the jungle, and their interactions with it. They were hard men, living hard lives, in a hard environment. Moments that provided a sacred eagle's view of their world were precious and to be appreciated-moments that offered at once a sense of pride and accomplishment, humility, fragility, context, and a glimpse into the elusive forces behind perfection. After ten minutes or so of profuse praise, the conversation subsided to a barely audible murmur. A very tranquil time later, relaxed and recharged, we stood and walked reluctantly to the vertical passage leading off the temple. Before descending, each of us stole one final glance over our shoulder, one last taste of calidad.
We'd arrived at Nakbe later than planned because of the lost-mule fiasco, so Fernando parted with us to go set up camp, and sent me with the two guards to explore the rest of the city. They proudly guided me through the domain under their charge-speculating what structures lay buried beneath mounds; pointing in the direction of faraway cities connected to Nakbe from atop the snaking causeways that connected them; describing day-to-day life at the encampment. Their excitement mounted midafternoon as we neared a recent discovery of the archaeologists. We turned off the trail into the thick of the jungle, walked through undergrowth for a while, and then stepped among a mass of rectangular ruins, scarcely discernible beneath a carpet of foliage.
It was not a temple, they told me, but a great residence, one of the largest in Nakbe, probably that of a family line of successful merchants. The guards explained the floor plan as we passed through the ruins, and then we returned to the forest, walked a short distance, and arrived at a hole in the ground. It was an opening, they said, to an underground water system constructed by the Maya.
The younger of the two guards climbed in and gestured for me to follow. The opening swarmed with mosquitoes and the black air was musty and stale. A short passageway led to a circular tunnel running horizontally to the left and right, about four feet in diameter, with a thick layer of sediment forming an even floor. I turned on my headlamp, revealing a rectangular pile of stones the size of a water tambo. Lizards bolted for the dark void. The guard explained that wealthy families used these passages for hiding and escape in times of trouble . . . and as vaults for their most precious jewels and treasures; the pile of stones, he said, was an opened vault. He motioned for me to shine my light down the passage. There, fading into the darkness ahead of us, was a row of the rectangular vaults, unbreached, unopened.
We crawled to the first intact vault. The guard pointed. "Tiene tesoro. Todos tienen tesoro."
The vaults all contained treasure. Knowing that I might never get that close again, I put both hands on the vault in front of us and held them there for a long moment, closed my eyes, imagined the contents, imagined the former keepers, imagined myself as the keeper . . . and returned the treasure to its creator.
We shuffled backward and climbed from the hole, through the mosquitoes, into the light. As we walked away, I looked back toward the inconceivably discoverable, unfeasibly accessible, subterranean secret, and thanked it for its lesson.
We emerged onto the faintest of trails and followed its course. We had been stomping through dense underbrush for some time, so it didn't bother me to continue. The guards followed the trail, while I walked beside them, kicking through light ground cover. It was easier than staying on the path.
The older guard stopped and beckoned to me. We squatted in the path and he pointed at the leaf of a small plant, inches off the ground, half green and half brown. He picked the leaf cautiously and indicated the brown half.
"Garrapatas," he said.
"Huh?" I thought, leaning in for a closer look. The realization was shocking. The dead brown half of the leaf was, in fact, green leaf covered in a teeming mass of thousands of larval garrapatas.
"Es un nido," he said.
In one of those lightning seconds, those singular flashes of brain synapses, when so many questions are suddenly and simultaneously answered, I realized that I must have kicked one of those nests on the first day, that this was why my legs were so infested, why the garrapatas seemed to launch their endless attack from nowhere, why Fernando had so relatively few, why Fernando often preferred that the mule lead the way . . . clear the way.
"It's easier to see them on the path," the older guard explained. "You'll always get them from the trees and the ground, but if you can avoid the nests, it makes life much better. Now you know. Stay on the path."
I had heard that before. "Sí."
For the rest of my time in that jungle I scanned the ground in front of me for those furry brown leaves. At first it was a game, maintaining that awareness. Then it became automatic and I no longer had to think about it. I managed to spot many, and evidently avoided them all.
We walked on and the guards gathered fruit from the jungle floor. We ate it as we walked, and I told them of the fruit Fernando had gathered at El Mirador.
"Could somebody live in the jungle, eating only its fruit?" I asked.
"No," the young guard answered. "Necesita tortillas también."
We climbed Temple III, almost entirely covered at its summit with full-grown trees, and bathed in the scenery and aire fresco. Proper reverence was given and silence observed.
As we climbed back down, the younger guard asked how much a beer cost in the States.
"Dos," I told him.
"¿Dólares?" he asked.
"Claro."
He did the math. "Eso es igual a dieciséis quetzales."
"Sí . . ."
"We get beers for nine quetzales in Santa Elena." Pause. "Quetzales are much better than dollars."
"Cierto," I responded. Couldn't argue with his logic.
We crossed the urban heart of Nakbe to Temple II, the last pyramid in the triad, and climbed to its highest plaza, from which we would make the final vertical climb through the canopy to the summit. The younger guard and I had begun the ascent when the older guard called out. We stopped and turned. The older guard told his colleague to come down. The younger guard looked at me, shrugged, said "Siga," then climbed to the plaza below. I continued the ascent. Once at the summit, I waited for the guards, but they never came. I took in everything, aware this was the last temple of the day, nagged by the knowledge that the guards were patiently waiting below. I did what I had learned. I breathed deeply of the aire fresco, observed a state of reverence, and savored the moment.
I thought about the Maya who had constructed these massive cities a thousand years across time, the chicleros who had used them as encampments for decades, and the archaeologists who had recently discovered them. I thought about how difficult it had been for me to get this far from civilization. Was there any place left on earth worthy of true exploration? Any place where one could realize the dreams of explorers, to be the first and only? Maybe I was too late. Maybe that era had long since passed, before my birth, before I had a say in the matter.
What was it that drove explorers? Treasure? Adventure? A need to prove something to themselves? A need to be unique? To overcome difficulty and hardship? To push the frontiers of possibility?
Those archaeologists hadn't discovered this place, not in the true sense of the word, but to themselves they had. What had they discovered? Could I discover it also? Maybe in those adventurous moments when one arrives at a sacred place, that place becomes a safe harbor, a place to explore the ultimate frontier, the inner realms. No electricity, no running water, no civilization, no people, only an isolated patch of physical reality. A place where one cannot remain, and thus where one must relish every detail, lest it ever slip away. A sacred place where it is possible to step into the abyss, enveloped by the perfect, unyielding laws of nature, from which flow the immutable laws of man, of the explorer himself.
I watched the eagles and parrots and monkeys traverse the canopy below, perfectly living out their lives. I identified trees below, as Fernando had taught me to do at El Mirador. A butterfly landed on my knee and stayed there for a while, slowly opening and closing its angelic wings. The late sun warmed my body and the jungle winds cooled my skin. I didn't want to leave, but it was time.
Atop the Pirámide del Sol at Teotihuacán in Mexico, a friend had taught me that in such sacred places, an offering is in order-an offering not of man, but of nature. I had no flowers or stones or animals with me, so I offered my heart. I offered it in whole, still beating, with all the reverence I could summon, and then I thanked the temple for the experience.
I met the guards on the plaza below. We descended the mighty pyramid to the jungle floor and made our way to the encampment. Dusk was coming on fast.
I met Fernando back at camp, unpacked, and rested. We talked for a while. Soon, all the guards came to our camp to socialize. Laughter and voices rose with the flames of the campfire, only to dissipate in the encroaching darkness. One of the guards found a scorpion and several of them played with it. I talked with Fernando and the elder guard, not paying much attention to the others. A few minutes later the other guards surrounded us. One of them extended his arm, palm open, holding the small scorpion. He motioned for me to take it.
No way, I motioned back.
He insisted.
I looked at Fernando. He nodded.
I let the scorpion crawl into my hand. The guards laughed with anticipation, and their excitement grew. The guard who had handed me the scorpion gestured at it with a stick.
"Moléstalo," he said.
"¿Moléstalo?" Is this guy kidding me, I wondered. The last thing I plan to do is piss this scorpion off while I'm holding it.
"¿Estás loco? No." I told him.
"Sí, sí, ¡hágalo!" he insisted.
I looked at Fernando; again a nod. So I took a stick, poked at the scorpion, and as expected, it whipped its tail forward, injecting its venom into the heel of my palm. I dropped a few f-bombs, and the scorpion. Remembered something my mother had told me about friends' jumping off cliffs. How stupid could I be? It stung, but not too bad. Close to a bee sting.
Everyone laughed, yours truly excluded.
The guards turned over a second scorpion in the dirt, and demonstrated how they'd removed a series of fleshy comb-like organs from the belly of the first scorpion-I assumed these were the venom glands. This time I laughed with them. I was exhausted and delirious.
I had packed an agonizing liter of dead-weight whiskey for four days, thinking that it might prove useful for killing pain or marking some ceremonial moment. I grabbed it from my pack, along with two shot glasses Fernando had included in the kitchen mess, filled them both to the rim, handed one to the guard who had handed me the scorpion, extended the other for a toast, and exclaimed, "¡A la selva!" We knocked them back, the guards cheered, everyone echoed the sentiment. I poured pair after pair of shots and passed them among the guards. All imbibed. It was the first whiskey to wet their lips in months. We joked about the scorpion and polished off the bottle, Fernando and I deferring, to the benefit of the guards. They returned to their camp after a dramatic round of handshakes, in the best of spirits.
Fernando and I had some coffee, enjoyed a light dinner of grilled plátanos, and talked for a while. Then I rose and threw some gear into my sleeping-bag sack.
"¿Adónde vas?" he said.
"Arriba, a Templo Uno."
"Alone?" he asked.
"You want to come?"
"Sí, me gustaría, pero necesito quedarme aquí para cuidar el campamento."
"Well, then, I guess I'm going alone."
"Bueno, chico. Cuídate."
"Sí."
After stumbling through the dark jungle, I scrambled up the almost vertical mountain temple, felt my way through the night from plaza to higher plaza, burst onto the summit, into the heavens of the clear night sky, into the crescent moon, into the Milky Way, into the infinite sea of stellar luminescence. Laid out a tarp and sleeping bag, pulled on long underwear, weighted and secured all remaining gear against the wind. Lay there, alone, eyes wide for hours, embraced by the wind and moisture, staring into every conceivable possibility that ever has been and ever will be, the source of all mystery, a boundless dimension of dreams, patiently waiting to be realized.
The stiff jungle wind applied constant pressure; vapor condensed, soaking everything. Dreams cycled through the night with electric physical sensation. The stone temple was uncomfortable, hard on the back, and sleep was poor, but the night itself was fantastic.
It was hard to tear myself from those dreams, from flying, but I rose just before dawn. Stripping off the long underwear revealed that the infections had advanced during the night. They were on fire.
I watched the rising sun paint the green horizon orange. Packed the gear and enjoyed one final view of the sacred eagle, then scrambled down the temple and back to camp.
By the time I arrived, Fernando had already broken camp and started to pack. He told me to raise my pant legs, and then looked at the infections; he squatted for a closer inspection. He said that he had planned, later that morning, to harvest some type of resin with antiseptic properties that might halt the spread of the infections, but that they'd already reached too dangerous a level; the resin would be too little, too late. I drained and irrigated them as well as I could, and then made breakfast while Fernando continued packing. His mind was somewhere else, and for the first time that I'd noticed, he was visibly worried.
After we'd eaten, Fernando left to retrieve the mule, in a tall patch of vegetation just outside camp. The mule wouldn't get up. Despite Fernando's tugging and prodding and harsh commands, the animal would not rise.
"¿Qué pasa?" I yelled over to Fernando.
"Venga, mira," he replied, and pointed to the mule's shoulder. It shimmered with a cascade of congealed blood, matted with mosquitoes, flies, and bees, crawling with garrapatas. He suffered similar wounds on his hips.
"Murciélagos vampiros," said Fernando, holding apart his hands, shoulder width, to indicate their size. "Chuparon mucha sangre. La mula está débil."
During the night, vampire bats had descended on the mule to feed, draining a good amount of blood. The mule sat there, head hung low, refusing or unable to stand. Fernando walked to the dying fire, and with a thin plastic sack, grabbed a handful of glowing embers and ash. He returned to the mule and pressed the embers into one of the wounds. The mule neighed, jerked violently to his feet, and backed away. "Hold him!" Fernando commanded. He returned to the fire for more coals, and then headed for the mule again. The mule retreated, bucking and dragging me with him by the lead rope. Fernando managed to cauterize a second wound. This we repeated two more times. I thought my arms would be pulled from their sockets.
We walked back to camp, made another round of coffee, and sat.
"The mule is weak," Fernando explained, and then his gears started turning in that way I'd become all too familiar with. He would find the solution. I knew it. He always did.
I finished loading everything into the mule sacks but the kitchen mess-pots, pans, assorted gear and some foodstuffs.
"You're going to have to put that in your pack," Fernando said, "and I'm going to carry as much of the water as possible."
A bolt of panic shot through my body. I think I shuddered. But I felt recharged from the magic night on the temple. I gained some composure, set my mind, and convinced myself that it wouldn't be a problem. After all, I had a map now.
I crammed the kitchen mess into my pack. Fernando filled two plastic liter bottles with water from the tambo, tied on some nylon twine. We secured the mule pack, Fernando slung the bottles over his shoulder, and we were off.
With the mule so weak, it was slow going at first, but eventually, after a few hours, Fernando's pops and shouts began to take effect, the mule built steam, and we once again traveled at our normal, furious pace. Around the same time, the extra weight of the kitchen mess came to full bore, and the pain well exceeded anything from the previous days, physically and mentally. By now we'd developed a surging momentum-we were trucking. I was on the verge of collapse.
I knew that if I fell more than a few feet behind the mule, I would be left behind completely, alone in the jungle. But I had learned that if I stayed within a few feet of the mule, it would somehow conserve my energy. At that range I was inside the mule's wake-I was pulled along by his energy, like a magnetic train hitch. Mule drafting. In any event, it was a fast train, the fastest yet. "¡Siga, siga, siga!" We were flying. Faster and faster, it seemed. The trance dug its hooks in deep.
And then it happened, the unthinkable. Fernando bit it. He tripped on a root and hit the dirt. The mule almost trampled him, delivered a few solid kicks. I did a double take, thought I was dreaming.
Fernando got to his feet, shaken, and brushed himself off. "We'll rest." He laughed. "Happens to everyone sooner or later."
No argument from me.
He was quick to roll the jungle herb. We smoked, watered ourselves, rested, and then continued, backing off the furious pace a bit. A while passed without further incident. Then we stopped.
"Tsss," Fernando cautioned. "Escuche."
I listened. From the distance, high in the canopy, came a low drone, a buzz. It grew closer and louder, and the pitch higher, until it enveloped us. It was overhead, just to our right. The deep vibration charged the follicles on the back of my neck. Then it was visible, a trailing column of bees that blackened the sky in its path. With one look, Fernando made it clear that silence was in order. For a strangely prolonged minute, the cloud rushed past, then faded into the distance.
We pressed on, and Fernando informed me that we would be taking a back route to draw from the only spring between ourselves and Carmelita that stood any chance of having water. We wouldn't reach it until the following day, so it was critical to be conservative with the little water that remained.
The trail gradually disappeared. I'd seen this before. Once again, we found ourselves hacking through dense raw jungle. This lasted a few hours, and we expended tremendous energy through our arms and shoulders. Fortunately the machetes had newly ground edges. It seemed that Fernando had foreseen this possibility, and that was why he had had me work the edges at El Mirador. Was there anything he didn't know about the jungle?
We eventually emerged from the thick, tangled undergrowth back onto the trail. How Fernando was able to hack through that much raw jungle and bring us out exactly on trail is beyond me. We stopped for a quick lunch, sipped at our remaining water, and continued, traveling again, at furious speed.
The trail passed through several small cities, their temples completely buried, long transformed into large hills, and lacking the usual scars of tomb raiders. Fernando said they all contained treasure.
Fernando stopped, sooner than he normally would have. It seemed he'd grown tired of the weight of water slung over his shoulder, or perhaps the twine digging into his flesh. He massaged his shoulder a bit and loaded the water bottles into the mule pack, along with the kitchen mess from my pack. I had developed a deep appreciation for the work of our loyal mule and thanked him for his hard work.
We smoked the jungle herb, sipped at the water that remained in my bottle, enough to hydrate our mouths, and continued. That would be the last rest until nightfall.
Hacking through the raw jungle had cost us precious daylight, and Fernando was determined to make up for it with speed. We pushed with all our might to build steam and hold the momentum. Fernando was demanding with the mule, shouting "¡Siga! ¡Siga!" all afternoon and popping him at the slightest reduction in speed.
I was gripped firmly in the clutches of the trance and felt like I was dying. The fibers of my muscles and the cells of my bones had suffered so much pressure over the past days that the crescendo of pain neared its apex. It felt as though my body was no longer fighting the pain, resisting the pressure, but eating itself for sustenance, dissolving at its cellular limits. My mind felt as though it too was beginning to crack, crushed by the vice grip of the trance and unable to further assimilate the barrage of synaptic impulses of fire and pain being transmitted, bombarded, from all reaches of the nervous system. The mosquitoes were horrible that afternoon. I'd lost the ability to absorb and diffuse the itch. I walked in a black shroud of biting hell and there was no escape.
I just needed to slow down, but I knew if I fell behind, the consequences would be even worse than the present situation. The inner map that had been charted days before was no use in this place; it was off the map. How much further could I possibly push? My feet had stress fractures, I was certain. I could barely bend my hips and knees. The discs in my spine were so compressed that I thought for sure they would rupture. The fire of the garrapata infections had transcended pain, and was now a web of tingling sensation along my lower legs, shooting white electric currents into my hips and, occasionally, when stepping wrong, into my spinal column. My skin was dry, unable to sweat; all reserve fluid was gone.
The jungle was silent, as if awaiting something. My mind, in contrast, was a raging storm, a deafening roar of voices, horrific shrieks and screams. Voices I never knew existed, thousands of them. All distinct, separate, screaming and clawing for survival, not mine, but theirs. Where the hell did they come from, and why were they in my mind? None of them gave a damn about me or one another, each concerned only with its own survival. They had somehow gained access to my mind, through which they viciously and relentlessly questioned everything about my existence, distant memories, secret fantasies, unlived dreams, relationships, family, friends, life decisions, the pain in my physical body, the functioning of my brain, the efficacy of my mind itself.
I was trapped in this hell for an eternity-there was no way out. No nightmare of my life, even combined and multiplied, compared with this mental agony. I was so trapped that it never occurred to me to ask Fernando to stop. I silently wailed, cried, screamed hysterically.
All memories, all dreams, faded into nothingness. Emotions went dry; the well was empty. All that remained was the mechanical firing of brain synapses, which began to dwindle and focus on the one question that remained . . . had the umbilical cord with reality been severed?
Yes, it had.
One final rush of panic, then . . . TOTAL CRACK of psyche. Something had come undone. Had I transcended? Surrendered? Was I lost? Could I ever go back? Would I ever be able to relate to my family and friends again? Lucid awareness of being alone . . . just me and a fictional old man who doesn't even speak English . . . a figment of my imagination, which I conjured to draw me into this dark place in the heart of this dark jungle. For that matter, my entire reality, everything I'd perceived during life as real, was not. It was an illusion, an elaborate synthesis of infinite perceptions, infinite thoughts injected into my mind by infinite voices, none of which was mine. What had I done? What had I, through passion and laziness, allowed my reality to become? Where had all my reckless questioning of the universe delivered me? Why had I taken it so far, so deep, so beyond the faculties of my limited deceptions of control?
I cursed everything, especially the spiritual path.
What use is any of it if my mind is forever shattered? Nothing matters. Why not return to the unconscious, unquestioning, robot state, and indulge forevermore in mindless earthly pleasures? What difference would it make? No, this newfound insanity is perfectly acceptable. It's just an insignificant part of a much vaster universe, and who am I to question that?
My family flashed through my mind. Would I ever see them again? And even if I saw them with my eyes, would I see them in my heart, as they were, as I had known them? Would they see me? Would there even be a me?
All I wanted in that moment was love-to love and to be loved. Not in an emotional sense, but in some larger sense that had never before occurred to me. I begged for it. I cared no longer about the survival of my mind or my physical body, only about this newfound love. A mixture of white light and this new feeling began pervading my mind. The process was beyond words-dynamic and static-throbbing in waves, pouring into me. The infinite voices lashing out in their anguish subsided, relaxed, calmed, until they went silent, until, eventually, there were no thoughts, no questions, no emotions. The energy released during this experience flowed from my mind into the whole of my body, and then into the whole of my being, until there was no body, no me, only an essential presence vibrating in a tingling bath of something long forgotten, something at the core.
I was still fully aware of the corporal pain, relentlessly present in all its splendid glory, and the psychic and emotional pain of twenty-six earth years and beyond. The thoughts generating that pain were very much present, and I was very much aware of them, but they were not my thoughts, they were not me. They existed, yes, around me and through me and in the distant reaches of consciousness, but they were not me. Detached, I watched them through new eyes, wondering where they came from and what they wanted from me.
This state of suspended observation existed outside time. It carried me through most of that afternoon. Once it faded, I slipped back into my mind-into the voices-and began to interact with them again. But it was different now. Infused with a sense of calm and serenity, I perceived the voices and the thoughts and the pain differently, as I have since. They are not me and they never will be.
I floated through the rest of the afternoon.
We reached camp after dusk. The first thing we did was build a fire and make coffee, plenty of sugar. As we sat there on generous logs, low to the ground, soft fire dancing between us, Fernando seemed different, he appeared different. And from his eyes and the broken rhythms of his speech, I sensed that I appeared different as well.
Fernando was noticeably fatigued-I hadn't seen him that way before. We unpacked the mule, hacked a clearing in the jungle, set camp, and strung our hammocks.
Fernando rolled the jungle herb and we partook of its grace. Later, he was wowed by dinner, a special recipe my father had taught me as a child, the only dish I cook well. Our bodies were numb with exhaustion. We sat there for hours, tapped, too spent for conversation. The flames licking the space between us dwindled into a pulsating mass of deep red wonder. I was sure that the rhythmic undulation of those embers held the secrets of the universe, but I was too exhausted to probe for them.
We sank into our hammocks earlier than usual. Fernando was snoring before I was even settled. I slipped in and out of sleep, adjusting cramps, trying to integrate the day's events. I felt the canopy winds, connected to my bones, rocking, gently rocking. Great white flashes illuminated the canopy, as my waking states dipped in and out of dreams.
Cool, I thought, aliens in the Mayan jungle! How lucky can I get?
Slowly my dreams dissipated, leaving me in a hot, muggy reality, in the middle of an immense dark jungle . . . with flashes of light igniting the skies. I watched from my hammock until I was fully awake.
"What is that?"
I leaned forward for a better look, but it was impossible to see anything through the canopy besides the flashing night sky.
"Oh, man, that's a thunderstorm."
I crawled out from under the mosquito net.
"¡Fernando, Fernando! ¡Mira! ¡La luz! ¡Va a llover!"
He moaned.
I fumbled around the dark campsite, looking for the tarp and some rope, all the while trying to wake Fernando, to warn him of our impending fate. He finally did wake up and helped me string the tarp over my hammock. He laughed at the absurdity of what we were doing.
"It's not going to rain," he said.
We set the tarp and slipped back into our hammocks. The flashing skies diminished, moved off into the distance. I felt like an idiot and felt horrible for waking Fernando when he was so tired.
Oh well, that's why he's the guía and I'm the gringo.
I drifted back to sleep.
CRASH!
The explosion jarred me awake.
"What the . . . ?"
Lightning and thunder exploded around us. Raindrops tickled the tarp and continued their charming game for some time.
Whew. It's just an electrical storm. Not much rain. Besides, the canopy is so thick that not much rain could get through, anyways.
Wrong. The heavens opened, dumped their seas upon us. In a matter of minutes a small river surged through camp, washing away our gear and provisions.
My pack!
I jumped out from beneath the tarp in my underwear. Fernando, also in his underwear, was already up, darting frantically around camp, rescuing gear that was being washed away and securing everything else. What a sight it must have been. When we had finally secured all the gear, I climbed back into my hammock beneath the tarp; Fernando lay down on the ground beneath me. We were soaked to the bone, and the chill crept in.
The downpour continued long into the night. The tarp, as it turned out, was more like Swiss cheese. Water poured through its many holes, onto my neck, my stomach, my legs. I contorted like a magician's assistant in the swords-through-the-box trick. It was pointless. There was not a dry place anywhere in that patch of jungle. Poor Fernando lay in a river of mud and leaves.
I was so exhausted, so delusional from all that had happened in the previous days, all that I'd not had time to integrate, that I just started laughing. Uncontrollably. Then Fernando started laughing. Uncontrollably. We finally laughed ourselves to sleep, despite the water and explosive thunder.
I woke up, after maybe an hour of sleep, miserable, wet, cramping. The soft patter of water falling from the canopy sounded on the tarp. Checked the Indiglo-"three forty-five."
Good enough for me, let's get moving.
I climbed out of the hammock, woke Fernando, and built a fire. This task would normally be impossible after such a drenching, but Fernando had taught me the secret jungle ritual used to summon the fire gods. A certain plastic, used in the manufacture of motor oil bottles, will, when lit, light anything. The chicleros know this, so they include those empty bottles in their provisions. I dug deep into the leaf litter covering a high patch of ground until I found dry mulch and branches. Put a heaping pile of that into the drowned mess of the stone fire circle, lit a plastic bottle, and dropped it on top. The gods must have smiled on me. In under a minute the fire was going strong. I gathered enough large sticks to fuel our breakfast and threw them on.
"¡Levántese, Fernando!" I barked. He finally got up.
As the fire grew I began breaking camp. We boiled water for coffee and ramen noodles. While we sucked down our liquid breakfast, I asked him how long it would take to get to Carmelita.
"Seis horas y media," he said.
We'll see about that, I said to myself.
The gear sat in the middle of camp, packed and readied it to be hoisted on the mule. The mule pack was a soggy, muddy wreck and we were caked in slop after setting it. I threw on my pack, grabbed the lead rope, popped the mule, and yelled, "¡Siga!" The mule and I were off. Fernando was still gathering himself. A mischievous smile crept over my face.
We were nightwalking again. I loved it. It didn't last long, though. The light of dawn came soon enough. The early-morning jungle was wet. The air was cool, the ground soft, the smell fresh. The ground muffled the sound of our footsteps. From high in the canopy, water continued a steady drip, as though it were still raining.
The morning was serene and we seemed to glide along without effort. The stillness created a blissful silence, contemplative, without disturbance. Then, just off the trail, a loud explosion shook the air as a gaggle of pavos took flight. The mule bucked, my heart lodged into my throat, Fernando let out a yelp.
I saw many more pavos later at Tikal, at close range. They are bizarre creatures, ocellated turkeys, with the shape and form of North American turkeys, but bigger, with the coloration of a peacock. Of course, I observed none of those details that morning in the jungle.
Adrenaline finally drained from the bloodstream, the heart settled back into its customary pace, and the morning resumed without further noteworthy event. The drip from the canopy died with each passing step, and soon the sun was vaporizing the water, liberating it back into the atmosphere, transforming the jungle into a sauna.
We hauled ass that morning. No jungle herb. No water. No stops. Not a word, except "¡Siga!"
The pain was fully present, but the voices were not. My mind, and the voices in it, were focused, united, on one objective . . . getting the hell out of that jungle. So we pushed, without thought.
The trail finally opened into a small clearing of reeds, and in the middle lay the spring we'd taken the back route to reach. It probably formed a small pond in the rainy season. We were, despite the past night's storm, still in the dry season. The spring flowed not. All that remained was a pool of stagnant water unfit to drink. A few mouthfuls of water remained in the plastic bottles. We were both thirsty, but agreed to save the last of the water for later.
As morning turned noon, we came upon a lagoon and stopped to rest. We hadn't prepared lunch for the day, so we scavenged through the provisions for ready-to-eat rations, which consisted mostly of jungle fruit and leftover tortillas, mushy from the rain. We sat on the enormous trunk of a fallen tree, rested, and exchanged smiles. We knew we were close to Carmelita.
After finishing off what little was left of our water, I asked Fernando if we should let the mule drink from the lagoon.
"No. Venga, mira."
We stood and walked to the bank.
"Se llama Laguna Crocodrilo. Espera."
Dragonflies swarmed above a clearing of reeds, hovering in slow motion. Turtles basked on logs protruding from the lazy water, one upon another, like fallen dominos. Blinding sunlight reflected off the shiny black surface, shimmering with the sluggish movements of water insects. Fernando strained to see something.
"¡Por allá!" he said, pointing to the far bank.
A huge crocodile slipped into the water and swam to the opposite side, where we lost sight of it behind a patch of reeds.
"No es segura para la mula."
The mules of more than one chiclero, he told me, had been taken down by the crocs here. There used to be many of them, but chicleros had hunted and killed them for that very reason. There were still two large crocs in the lagoon, and maybe a few smaller ones. It was only a matter of time before the chicleros got them all.
We spent over an hour tromping around the area, through weeds and mud and mosquitoes, hunting for the other big croc, without success. I didn't care. I hadn't expected to see a crocodile in the middle of the jungle; just seeing the one was gravy.
We readjusted the mule pack, I threw on my pack, and adjusted the straps. When I looked up, Fernando and the mule were, uncharacteristically, still there. He chuckled and handed me the lead rope.
"¿Vámonos?" he suggested with a nod.
"Vámonos," I agreed, and we were off.
I had driven the train all morning. Silly as it might be, I was deeply honored by the gesture, and I was determined to drive the train as well as Fernando would have driven it. Handling the mule took little effort. He knew exactly where we were, that we were on the home stretch, and he was every bit as eager to get out of that jungle as I was. I didn't have to pop him once, and yelled "¡Siga!" a few times, only so that Fernando would think I was doing my job-which I wasn't, the mule was.
We marched, and my mind wandered. The idea that I would soon be out of the jungle felt strange. I remembered how enthusiastically I had jumped into it, into that life over the past days-the thrill of the unknown, the expectation of wild adventure, the fantastic projections of my mind as to how it would be. How many of those fantasies had manifested themselves, how many of them had not, and how much I had encountered that I was simply not prepared for; how unimaginably difficult it had been to extract myself from that existence, from that reality; the rich and rewarding teachings of the experience; the lessons, pain and all. The growth. How, in the end, it would soon come to pass.
Then I thought of the other realities I had thrown myself into over the course of my life. How enthusiastic the entries had been; how rich and rewarding had been the experiences themselves. How thankful I was for the opportunities for growth that those experiences had offered, pain and all. How excruciating the extractions had been. And how, in the end, they had all come to pass.
And then I realized how much I loved them, the experiences, and how I wanted more . . . pain and all.
The path in the distance ahead was no longer darkened by shadow, but fully bathed in sunlight. The mule quickened his pace. I knew what was next. We broke into an expansive clearing at the end of the world, the Carmelita airstrip. I let go of the lead rope and dropped to my knees. The mule kept going. I was, quite simply, overcome with emotion. All the emotion that had dried up inside me the day before came flooding back with such force that I couldn't control it. It would come and I would welcome it. It felt like the first gasp of air after holding my breath for days-it felt like liberation.
Fernando put his hand on my shoulder, and told me to let it out. He noted that we'd made it in just over five hours.
"You must have found it while we were out there, eh?" he said.
We took our time to get to the other end of the airstrip, to Guillermo's home, past the grazing horses, savoring the wide blue sky. When we arrived, the mule was already there, sucking down a bucket of much-needed water that Guillermo had put out. As we unloaded the gear, Fernando gave Guillermo a rundown of our journey. Their conversation turned to the business of the jungle. Fernando recounted the story of the guard selling water. Guillermo was disgusted. The jungle was changing. I went inside to rest, heard "chico" and "fuerte" as I walked away; smiled.
Guillermo and his family put everything at our disposal-coffee, food, a bucket of water for bathing. They averted their eyes and kept their distance. Their behavior was unsettling, but I was glad for it. It was only later that I understood their reasons. That much time in the jungle does something to a man. Maybe it reignites some smoldering primal fire, long starved for oxygen by the trappings of civilization. Maybe a call of the wild is heard, and its vibrations awaken the sleeping animal within. Or maybe the sleeping human within. Guillermo's family had hosted enough chicleros returning from the jungle to know the pattern, whatever it was.
Guillermo's daughter had her hands full with a litter of brand-new puppies, barely able to walk. I didn't remember a dog at the house before we entered the jungle, much less a pregnant one. Maybe she had gone into isolation to give birth. I don't know. But they were beautiful-brand-new beings, beginning life in the world. It seemed a good and fitting omen.
After dinner, Guillermo's daughter took me out back, to a small wood-screened stall with a stone floor. She pointed to a bucket of water on the ground.
"Báñate," she said, "báñate," and left.
I peeled the clothes from my body. They almost stood on their own. Naked there, in that rickety contraption, surrounded by pecking chickens and towering jungle, I removed a week's worth of film and jungle from my skin. I had never been so glad to see a bucket of water. The garrapata infections were now the size of pus-swollen quarters, surrounded by small webs of red streaks. I knew that they needed sterilization and treatment.
Guillermo's wife cooked a late lunch of sardines and tortillas. While we ate, Fernando and I discussed the state of my infections and agreed that reentering the jungle would not be wise. We decided to skip the final three days of trekking through the jungles to the south, and return to Santa Elena the next day.
I was depressed and relieved at the same time. It was tough to let go.
Fernando and I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the front porch in our underwear, removing garrapatas and soaking in the rays of the sun. Late-afternoon thunderclouds built up and blackened the eastern sky. One cloud after another billowed and blew past. We both dozed off, draped over wooden benches. The benches weren't as comfortable as the hammocks inside, but the cool breeze and smell of distant rain were refreshing. It was a good trade.
Guillermo's wife woke us for dinner: gallina, rice, and vegetable stew. Fernando and I made coffee after dinner. I grabbed the sugar bag. It was empty. We had consumed that pound of sugar after all, in seven days, not ten.
After unpacking the moldy gear, we repacked it for an early departure in the morning. The bus to Santa Elena left at daybreak. We slung our hammocks in the front room and took a walk across the airstrip to visit a friend of Fernando's. Fernando told his friend the highlights of our journey, and they talked the business of the jungle. I mostly sat there in an exhausted daze. When we headed back to Guillermo's, the sky to the east was ominously dark with the storm clouds that had been building all day. The sky above was a white-speckled ocean. I remembered the night on the temple at Nakbe.
After the family retired to bed, Fernando and I stepped outside to conduct one last ritual of the jungle herb. Our talk of the journey flowed into a ceremony of our amistad. Then it flowed into talk of our return to the modern world. That talk made us both a little uncomfortable, as though we were bracing ourselves to return to a world much less than the one we'd just come from. I was sad that it was ending.
That night it poured on the tin roof above our hammocks, a deafening roar of Nature clashing with man's attempt to tame her. It was intense. I was thankful for the roof. The sonic fury drowned out all voices. Sleep was deep.
We rose in the dark hours of morning and cooked a breakfast of eggs, tortillas, and coffee. Packed our gear and stepped outside to wait for the bus. The black sky faded to purple, the bus pulled up, we tied our gear on the roof and boarded. There were two other passengers on board.
We passed through the wasteland of decimated forest; both hung our heads.
Neither of us said much on the bus. I dozed in and out of sleep, and the bumpy four hours went by fairly quickly.
When we arrived at Fernando's stop, we untied the gear and three days' worth of leftover provisions from the roof, and loaded it into a taxi. I wish I could say that some magical exchange took place when we parted, but it didn't. We shook hands, said good-bye. He got into the taxi and disappeared into the distance. Ganador.
I disembarked into the bowels of Santa Elena's mercado, made my way across the causeway of Lago Petén Itzá to the small island municipality of Flores, and checked into my three-dollar hotel room. The English voices of other gringos in the lobby hit hard. It was over.
I threw my pack into the room and headed for my favorite Flores restaurant for lunch, which I devoured. The waiter asked if I wanted dessert. I'd never been big on sugar, but I ordered a piece of chocolate cake. It was delicious.
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