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.