The Land of E-turmoil Spring

* Go shopping downtown for Mayan weavings.

* Visit the Presidential Palace.

* Walk the avenida La Reforma from the Obelisco to La Torre.

* Kick some soccer balls on the Campo de Martes.

* Use bus terminals to catch chicken buses, Pullmanturs, and Galgos (Greyhound) to: Quetzaltenago, Panajachel, Puerto San Jose, Tikal, Retaluleu and the Frontera, etc.

Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

A good place to start any exploration of Guatemala is the Mapa En Relieve de Guatemala, (Avenida Simeon Canas, Final Hipodromo Del Norte, Zona 2 in Guatemala City). This is a map to scale of the topography of the entire country--accurately laid out as a beautifully painted outdoors public exhibition, accessible to anyone for a modest charge. Mountains and volcanos of this fascinating map jut out in stark contrast to the lower, flatter rain forest, deserts, and coastal shelves of Guatemala--abundance and variety aptly describing the physical features of both the map and the country it represents.

For your safety, take only yellow cabs. They are metered and fairly inexpensive. 20-25Q (about US) will get you most anywhere in the city. Allow only uniformed cab drivers to pick you up at the airport--there are pirates (pee-rah-tays) out there.

The buses are fairly safe during the day and charge between eighty centavos and a quetzal and a half.

I stayed in one of seven individual stone cottages. Each has a double bed, a private bath with hot water and a fireplace. They are equipped for comfortable triple occupancy. For the single occupant they are sheer luxury. Flowers and blooming shrubs flourish along the stone pathways to each cottage where one is afforded postcard glimpses of volcanos and the lake. If you are bringing a family, there are several larger cottages and also a two and a four bedroom house on the lake available to rent. Youngsters two and under are free and those three to ten are charged half price.

Prices vary from $30 per room for the smaller cottages to $75 for the larger ones. Double and triple occupancy only adds about $10 per extra person. To get to Santiago via passenger ferry, from Panajachel take the public ferry (cost is 10Q) to Santiago. There are other ferries that depart across the lake for San Pedro, so be sure to board the correct ferry. Once in Santiago, from the Municipal dock one can commandeer a water taxi (25-30Q), catch a ride on a pick-up (up to 15Q depending on how much of a hurry you are in), walk a little less than a mile yourself, or if you are adventurous, rent a dug-out cayuco for about 20Q (it can be negotiated down if you offer to help paddle).

The main dining area is splendid. Sit at a beautifully finished hardwood table and view a volcano as you dine through an aptly placed king-sized arched window within the stone walls of the Posada.

E-mail: posdesantiago@guate.net Once settled in at the Posada, you may wish to check out the local sights. Watch cattle being herded through town, visit the smoking and drinking deity "Maximon" or the four century old Catholic church.

The boat rocked gently with the motion of a slight tide pulling back and forth under the pier. Reflected sunlight glistened ahead of the craft like a pouch full of diamonds spilled above the water line. I boarded to the salute of a firecracker tossed atop the deck cover. The ticket taker swore. An adolescent scrambled. I sat on a bench in the shade of the overhang, mist from the warm lake water mercifully dabbing my forehead in the late afternoon heat.

The trip from Panajachel to Santiago Atitlan would take nearly an hour due to winds and choppy waters in the middle of the lake. My eyes, lacking purpose, soon set upon a Quiché woman. Her hair--jet black and arched around her forehead--was pinned on the back, without braids. Wisps of hair escaped the pug and filtered down exotically on either side of her ears. Not meaning to stare, I turned away, only to find myself glancing back from time to time. She was one Quiché woman among a dozen or so others occupying the wooden deck seats which began where the metal cabin seats ended.

They were women garbed in cotton white or colorfully dyed blouses, richly embroidered with red and purple flowers, green and yellow feathers, and graceful lines and patterns seemingly Victorian in design and striking in nature. They wore braids in their hair and necklaces of large cut stones and small amber ones. An occasional gold band flashed from among the group.

Though this woman sat alone against a support for the deck overhang, separate from the rest, that wasn’t what separated her from the rest in my mind. Nor was it her countenance. As did the others, her face and body took on a worn look suggesting a regular early rise to a demanding day’s work. It wasn’t anything in her dress either. In fact, she could readily be mistaken for a princess if judged merely by her attire. From her ears hung light brown garnet stones within circles of brilliant silver. She wore a bright bluish-purple Mayan dress with dozens of Mayan images couched fabulously into the fabric of her top--images conjuring a life and culture a thousand years past.

Many patterns and images sewn into Mayan apparel tell of ancient legends and stories. What was her story? Why did she sit alone, staring out into the water, her dark eyebrows set low with intent, her eyes seeing something far away from Lake Atitlan, or even Guatemala itself. Or perhaps seeing the images from another time, sewn into her camisa. That was the key. The other women talked among themselves or to children present. But this woman sat alone in her thoughts.

The men sat separate from the women: brown faces, wrinkled foreheads fitted into blackbanded straw hats. They did not contemplate thinking, only the end to the day’s working.

When was the last time you walked into a K-mart and tried to buy a Tootsie Roll with a five hundred dollar bill? Try the same in any Guatemalan market place: a bunch of bananas, a half-dozen avacados, a papaya, a mango, and a carton of eggs and all you have to spend is the largest denomination of Guatemala's currency, the 100 quetzal note. Worth less than a US $20 bill, for the low, wide end of the capitol's work force it represented a week's wages or better. 'Lo siento, no cambio Señor,' comes the storekeeper's changeless apology.

100, 50, 20, and sometimes even 10 quetzal notes were just too big for small, casual purchases. 50 centavo notes, along with the ones, were fine, but they didn't buy much and a wad of them stuffed anywhere is too conspicuous in a land where opportunity equals permission. That leaves the five quetzal note as the denomination of choice for adept small time shoppers.

I came to this epiphany while waiting in line at a Bancometropolitano branch office at Supermercado Paiz to cash my employing Guatemalan school's latest idea of a month's salary. I handed the clerk my deposit slip as my paycheck disappeared. But my morning's business required a withdrawal too. I had negotiated a $1,000 swap with a local missionary, a check issued in dollars for 5,000 quetzales. And there were personal needs. Brown hundreds, orange fifties, blue twenties, red tens, purple fives, green ones--I could use a small hoard of quetzales just for spending the next thirty days in living color.

It dawned on me at the teller's window that I didn't know how to say 'change' in Spanish, or 'convert' or 'break up' or even 'Don't just give me only fifties and hundreds.'

So I said what I could, 'I want some fives, please.'

The clerk hesitated, then blurbed something I didn't understand before going to a back counter and discussing my request with a higher authority. Returning to his station, he peered into the depths of his currency drawer, shook his head, said 'Un momentito,' as much with his forefinger as his mouth, and shuffled to the drawer of a second teller. He seemed busy for a long time. I watched as rubberbanded stacks of cash piled up on the counter above his drawer.

What was this lunatic doing?

'Señor!' he drew my attention to a form set up in triplicate which he shoved through the half oval slot of his service window, 'Su firma, por favor,' he gobbled, pointing out where I should deliver my X. As to why my signature was necessary, I didn't know. I didn't care. I would have signed to board the Titanic just to get out of there. I scratched my X.

'Un momento,' the teller put his hand up as if to stop traffic and if only could be believed, walked over to the vault, where he handed a superior the carboned papers.

I walked away with my pockets bulging with thick wads of cash screaming 'Rob me! Rob me!' I'd only asked the guy for some fives. How do you say 'some' in Spanish anyway?

"How would you like to spend your summer vacation teaching up in the mountains on beautiful lake Atitlan?" was the pitch. Within two weeks I was on my way to Panajachel, a popular tourist town in western Guatemala known for volcanos, a deep blue lake, and '60's rebels.

In my haste for departure from the capitol the afternoon before my teaching assignment was to begin, I failed to wait for the green and red "Rebuly" bus as instructed.

"Su destinacion?" the driver asked at the terminal.

"Panajachel," I voiced above the sound of the still running bus.

"Pase adelante, por favor," he invited me aboard.

"Panajachel?" I querried once, then twice to double check.

"Si, si," the answer came back the same.

The bus had "Xela" printed across its side. I decided to trust the driver and not my mere powers of observation, which were failing to see the word "Rebuly" anywhere on the bus. It was late Sunday afternoon; the bus left the city half empty, and I fell asleep. When I awoke the bus was stopped. The driver pointed out to a fog enshrouded row of kiosks and said, "Los Encuentros, Panajachel."

In the dark and mist it didn’t look like Panajachel. I stayed on the bus, but where was I? I was on a bus whose normal route by-passed Panajachel and instead climbed further into the mountains. Panajachel lay two thousand feet below, buried in shrouds of fog.

Within an hour, I recognized my surroundings as being the imposing terrain of the Alaska--a ten thousand foot mountain range in western Guatemala and one of the highest paved points in Central America.

Quetzaltenango, Guatemala's second largest city, was waiting on the other side of the Alaska down in a sprawling hollow, though still nearly 8,000 feet above sea level. It was 8:00 and I found myself dumped off on a street corner with only a finger point to the nearest hotel.

The hotel had a heavy feel to it inside with dark, polished wooden stairs and railings and an ornately carved cedar service desk. There I found as Spanish looking a man as any that existed, with short, balding hair, a well-trimmed moustache, and spectacles. He wore a bow tie with his short-collared shirt and suspenders with his pants. He reflected class.

I petitioned him for the cost of a night’s lodging.

"Noventa quetzales," came the reply.

I only had eighty-six quetzales on me. The provincial school had arranged for my stay in Panajachel and I didn’t care to risk more than the seventeen dollars in local currency I had taken along. I walked away from the counter and heard the clerk laugh in derision at how a North-American couldn’t accomodate the ninety quetzales charged for a night or somehow expected to pay less.

I wandered back out into the traffic. I remember suddenly stopping in the middle of a street near the city square. I went over in my mind a checklist of normal reactions the average traveller might exhibit given similar circumstances as mine: profuse swearing, cussing and cursing; crude remonstrances hurled at the drivers and their bus; crying, whining and wallowing in self-criticism; asking "Why me?" then blaming higher powers for creating base stupidity.

For some reason I just couldn’t start with any of it. A rather unorthodox thought was forming and flipping through my mind as I stood on an island of cobblestone in a pockmarked side street. What if there was a point to me being here at this very moment? What if it were ordained that my mistake with the bus was somehow crucial, somehow pivotal, in some unexpected unforseeable way to the ebb and flow of this sleepy mountain retreat?

Not only was I not in Wisconsin, I was not in Guatemala City or even in Panajachel, the place I was setting out for in the first place. The idea that a purpose existed for this unexpected return to Quetzaltenango steadied me. "Well God, your call," I mumbled, "Let your angels guide me."

As I was contemplating the situation and beginning to feel the weight of my travel bag, I was arrested by a voice from behind, "Señor! Señor!"

I paused and turned to see a man lying on his side along the top of a coffee table of sorts set up on small wheels. He was a small man, drabbly dressed, his legs withering from non-use half covered with a blanket. A sheet of plastic was bundled up near his feet to unroll in case of rain.

(Continued in Part II)

A hundred adolescents in mass juvenile revolt overran the park and square, engulfing the bus and parada with riotous insurrection. Wrapped in sheets, blankets and hooded shirts, their heads covered with masks, straw hats, or bags and sacks with eyeholes, the tricksters turned from subdued to frenzied as if by signal.

Shop doors were battered with makeshift cudgels of sugar cane and kindling. Firecrackers and spinning sizzlers rained down on roofs of tin and stucco. Rusting old pots and pans were beaten together or dragged on the cobblestone by the end of ropes and chains. Three dozen pairs of fists pelted the bus, then shook it back and forth while screaming insults. Green and brown camouflaged snakes, some several feet long, were whipped live up onto buildings and into the cargo on top of the bus, the driver invoking a fair amount of venom in response, but declining to venture outside.

The English woman turned back to me, 'Why can't he drive away?'

'No ticket taker for one thing.' I replied, 'No passengers for another. If he moved now they might start throwing rocks. We're stuck here until this thing blows over.'

The melee continued. A young Latin couple made a dash from the church across the park and entered the bus with shrieks of laughter. I shook my head. Since when was mayhem a joke?

From the sanctuary of a church across a patch of beaten cobblestones kitty-corner from the park a rush of passengers emerged and boarded the bus as if part of a drill. A moustached man in a faded yellow T-shirt and a paunch made of beer stepped onto the bus, and it pulled away.

For several miles the bus pulled over again and again to board more passengers until there were four or even five to many seats and the aisle of the bus itself was jammed with those standing.

Presently the faded T-shirt took to his task of collecting the fares, moving from front to back. With no conceivable way to do this, he ignored logic and crawled up onto the top of the seats, climbing from seat to seat while accumulating a fist full of cash. I slipped my camera out at the odd angle necessary to capture the absurdity and flashed. Laughter filled the bus.

Within twenty minutes I had reached my destination of Panajachel. I walked to my cheap hotel and obtained a key for a flat with a four inch mattress. Made of aluminum, the key slowly twisted in the lock, but in its bending, didn't turn. I carefully bent it back straight and pulled it out of the lock, relieved it was still in one piece.

I found the hotel keeper and explained the key was no good.

'Llave no trabajo!' I said.

He looked to his wife who wore the 'another gringo' look on her face, then followed me to my room as his wife followed him. He placed the key carefully in the lock, ignoring my warnings it might get stuck, and turned. The padlock sprang open. He eased the key back in the lock and twisted agian and once again the lock obeyed. He smiled and presented me the key, while glancing towards his wife to telegraph to her a strong confirmation of her initial 'crazy gringos' sentiment.

Dia de Diablo had come to an end, though an incident I would catch details of afterwards bespoke of a devil never resting. Two weeks later a bus enroute from Los Encuentros to that same Solola was halted by highway men and the passengers lined up along the side of the bus to be searched and robbed of their valuables.

An older man protested the demand to turn over a cherished family ring and a scuffle broke out. The robbers panicked at the display of defiance and opened fire. One had a machinegun. Some people survived by hurling themselves under the bus. Many others were killed.

My first housing arrangement in Guatemala City was with an aging doña, Señora Castillo. She looked Latin enough to me, but actually was a New Yorker who'd fallen in love with a Guatemalan officer when she was only eighteen and never returned from her vacation.

She'd risen with his fortunes to wealth and influence. But 'The Colonel' sunk a million dollars into some worthless investment, she would tell her captive audience of borders, and then used up much of the rest to pay for his cancer treatment in the U.S. She was left with just a few properties, losing even some of these to squatters. Every thread of her emotion was tugged and tangled as this little woman with wavy grey hair relived her life's unravelling yet again. Her Spanish much better than her English, after thirty-five years, Guatemala had claimed her as one of its own.

Emilio, her son, managed a Christmas tree farm outside of the capitol, about halfway to the coast. His tall, robust stature was in dissonance with his mother's frail, thin frame. He sported that well-developed moustache which lends younger Latins that proud look and older ones a dignified image. I found him to be both pragmatic and agreeable and we discussed many things when he came to visit. Guatemala was new to me and I wanted to know about all of the stories I'd seen in the news in the weeks before flying down from the States.

'Killer bees?'

'We have them. I know of one man attacked by them who died.'

'Malaria?'

'We are a mile high in the capitol, so it is not a problem, but down on the coast, in the pantano, it is best to carry medicine just to be safe.'

'Cholera?'

'It is not healthy to walk around with the bare foot.'

'Firearms?'

'About one in every three cars you see is with a gun inside.'

'Americans, what do Guatemalans think of Americans?'

'We are all from the Americas. Why do you think you are the only American here?'

'What would you call me, then?'

'A North American perhaps. You are hated, envied, and loved in this country. It always depends.'

'Oliver North, are you familiar with the name?'

'Ah, he is a fine patriota, how you say?'

'Patriot...'

'Yes, patriot. Reagan and Bush, they are good men too, but they choose against we Latins when Britain come to the Falklands. Why your country no support Argentina? It has a right to its teritorio.'

Emilio had a tendency to start losing his usually good Enlish when the wrong subject came up for conversation. I chose to humor him, 'Actually, we've had plenty of our own trouble with the British over the years. Every time they draw a line on a map, a war seems to result somewhere down the road.'

'Belize belongs to Guatemala. Britain take it away. It is the same thing...'

'British Honduras belonged to Guatemala?' I knew so little of Latin American History.

'Belize IS Guatemala, Alanso. Es no past tense.'

'Oh, well just remember that most Americans, er...U.S. citizens probably couldn't point to Guatemala, Belize, or Argentina on a map of the hemisphere, and they find Britain's soccer fans more of a threat to world peace than its soldiers.'

The touchy item I was most curious about I'd left slide until this point, but now that we were both finding ourselves allied against the British, I thought it safe to give it a try. 'It was reported several weeks ago that police in Rio de Janeiro clubbed to death 200 street kids. The same report had at least twenty-five beaten to death in Guatemala City.'

Emilio launched into a tirade of Spanish, punctuated by occasional English, then fell silent.

'I take it this news isn't true,' I backtracked.

His mother, who had just refilled our tea, entered the conversation, 'It may be as you say, but they were all illegals, children from Panama and Nicaragua that come here they say to work, but steal is all they do. They take even from poor Guatemalans.'

'I suppose the poor have enough troubles,' I replied for the sake of replying.

'Don't always feel for the poor,' she admonished. 'The ladies of my church, we helped a prostitute out of her way of life. We fed her, clothed her, gave her a room, and paid for her schooling as a secretary. She was doing famously.' (Every so often the doña would drop a word or phrase that would scream 'gringo' and when she did it screamed with a New York accent.) 'A year later,' the Señora continued, 'we went to see how well things were for her. She was a prostitute again. 'Why?' we asked her and she said to us, 'This is easier.'' Doña Castillo waved her hand in front of her face as if dispelling an unwanted odor.

'It's the same with the illegals,' she concluded. 'For them, stealing will always be easier.'

The event I write about was foreshadowed by a similar, though earlier event in Zone 4 of Guatemala City, a part of the city adjacent to the old downtown. A small recycling business had received a government contract to recycle nearly a million rounds of WW II ammo, I suppose in order to salvage the brass casings. Somewhere near the beginning of the enterprize, somebody at the recycling shop began cutting odds and ends with an arc welder. A fireball rising above the city eventually signaled it hadn’t been a very good idea. The entire magazine was set off by a weld spot.

***

I was apartment/dog sitting for a couple of teaching friends I knew at the American School of Guatemala one weekend. Their apartment was located in a quiet neighborhood in the affluent Zone 10 of Guatemala City. It was Sunday after church and I was just entering the living room with the dog right along side me when I heard Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! The loud popping sounds went on and on. Such a sound wasn’t anything unusual, since in Guatemala firecrackers were used religiously to celebrate birthdays and anytime of the day was free game. But these surely were the loudest firecrackers I’d ever heard because they were obviosly coming from a good distance away. I walked out onto the second floor veranda and noted a little smoke coming from direction of the airport and more popping, but made no connection between the two.

Once I was back in the living room, the whole apartment shook violently -- Not like an earthquake which slowly builds up in force, but much more suddenly and with complete surprise, as if the Jolly Green Giant had grabbed the entire upper appartment and shook it like crazy for three or four seconds.

I ran out onto the veranda, half expecting a truck had impaled itself into the wall below. More smoke streamed above an area in the general direction of the airport.

I never heard a word about what had occurred until I next met the renters of the apartment.

"What happened yesterday afternoon--the apartment just shook?" I asked.

"You didn’t hear? There was a fire at a military warehouse at the airport," was the reply. "The fire had quickly spread to some crates of mortar rounds."

"So that’s what caused the apartment to shake," I said.

"Not really. After the mortar rounds went off, the fire spread to an army truck."

"So?" I said.

"It was a truckload of nitroglycerin. Windows were blown out for blocks..."

Later, my landlady insisted the CIA was involved and that it was a plot to destroy paperwork evidence of rightwing death squads and executions ordered by the military as such files were rumored to have been stored at that same warehouse.

My most bizarre experience in Central America began with a night in Guatemala City like no other. Though Christmas decorations were already well-entrenched on city streets, it being only two and a half weeks before the city’s Navidad holiday, something else was plainly afoot. Piles of trash and debris were stacked up along neighborhood streets in every zone of the capitol. At dusk they were lit and their smokey flames suggested a great insurrection had begun. Over some of the makeshift bonfires hung red and black piñata effigies of the Biblical Satan which were eagerly consumed by the flames.

The following afternoon, I took the green, red, and yellow two o’clock Rebuly bus westward bound for the provincial destination of Panajachel, some three and one half hours away. A few miles out of the city, the bus broke down. Fares had hardly all been returned when another bus bound in the same direction boarded those stranded. After more than two hours of dreary travel, the bus stopped at a pivotal intersection of many roads called Los Encuentros. Passengers stepping off were immediately greeted with cries of 'Pana! Pana!' Panajachel bound transportation was already available for loading up.

The villa-taxi stormed down the mountainside and twenty minutes later zig-zagged through Solola just minutes before sunset and jerked to a stop a few blocks from the central park, unloading listlessly. I walked up an open stretch of rough pavement and was delighted just then to see a familiar pattern of green and red stripes rattle by ahead of me, the 3 o'clock Rebuly, now three hours out of Guatemala City, slipping in along the village square to disgorge itself.

The bus emptied quickly and the square was nearly deserted by the time I arrived to board what would be for me a last leg on down the curling mountainside to Lake Atitlan and Panajachel. Church bells tolled the sun's setting. The driver paced and stared, then motioned towards the bus in agitated sweeps of the hand as if offering refuge from vampires.

I was among a few from the villa-taxi to step up onto the Rebuly and as soon as I did I watched intently as the the driver took to snapping shut every half-opened window on the bus, though the air felt plenty warm. The streets of the village were dead. A quarter hour passed.

There was another frame of quiet. I was rather curious. What happened to all the people who’d just gotten off the bus? Surely some of them were going on to Panajachel and not just myself and the others from the shuttle, an English woman and teenage daughter, and a drunken passed out bum who'd thown-up out the door of the villa-taxi at 60 kilometers per hour. The woman broke the silence, 'Driver, is something wrong?'

'No hablo de Ingles,' he replied, adding a shrug.

She was right. Something was not going according to Hoyle here. One might expect the town to be rather quiet at dusk on a Sunday, but pin-drop dead? Where were all the people who got off the Rebuly? This deck was a card short. Oh sure, the kiosks maybe all did board up at the stroke of sunset. The kids may have run off because the ticket taker as he left told them that the gringos on board were cannibals. The driver possibly shoved people into his stuffy bus out of habit, since no other bus was there competing for cargo.

A horrid, twisted thought fluttered through My mind. It was the last scene from Salem's Lot, where even in an isolated Guatemalan village, David Soule is discovered by the plague of vampires he'd almost destroyed. I noted that among my belongings, I didn't have a cross.

I turned and looked back through the emergency door window at the rear of the bus. Through the shadows, smoke, and fog, down a motionless expanse of cobblestone...something moved! At the far end of the park where storefront ends to become trees, statues, and benches, a lumbering form emerged. The light was too soft to make it out. It appeared to be a partially wrapped figure, no, several figures, robed and hooded--many figures ambling, inching their way from out of the thickening fog. Their slow and somber march suggested a funeral or religious procession. But at sunset?

The driver ushered a couple more passengers onto the bus, physically pushing them up the steps, then secured the door behind him as all hell broke loose and tumbled down on the village square in an avalanche of anarchy.

From Guatemala City, I had crossed the highlands into Quetzaltenango twice by night, slipping past drowsy little villas like Santa Catarina while scrambling on up the Alaska--one of the highest paved points in Central America. Alaska--not pipelines, caribou, permafrost, and tundra; but tropical mountains, high altitude coffee, wool panchos, and volcanic peaks.

A dull and lifeless terrain by day, what could compare to the Alaska by night? The air is cool and fresh and more rousing than the blackest coffee of the Boca Coast. A picket line of fog floats in glowing waves down into the foothills as if legions of angels were hovering to hold the mountain in place. The stars are gleaming embers caught in a carpet of sky, many times more radiant than the glimmer of any village lights far below. The half dollar moon hangs so near and so bright it seems one could roll down the window, grab it, and throw it in the ash tray.

***

My first passing over of the mountains to Quetzaltenango was by car as a passenger guest of a Guatemalan army medic who for some reason missed the calling of a race car driver but, as was my experience, not by much. The sun had just set as we neared the Alaska. Rising like a vampire after dark, for brief periods of time the pain-in-the-neck fog would disappear. Off to the right and far below, clusters of lights would betray the dwellings of men.

There were obstacles to driving mountain roads in Central America by twilight, but Ricardo, my chofer de militar, was seemingly up to challenging them all. Drunks stumbled, staggered, and passed out on the side of the road and into one's lane of traffic? Manoveur around each body and hopefully the breeze of your passing will revive them from their prone peril. Horses, carts, donkeys, and exhausted human forms in weary procession stepping off the last mile of a day's work? Hug them just as they hug the curb and never slow down a kilometer. Buses, trucks and the like slowed to sensible speeds respecting sharp curves, fog, and anything else already mentioned? Pass them up on curves in the fog. Fog as thick as frijole soup? Drive the curves by memory. My only problem with Ricardo was the possibility that he was trying to remember his memory.

My time in Quetzaltenango was for the most part uneventful, though I did actually see a blooming monja blanca-- a rare occurrance as Guatemala's national flower is a fickle bloomer. I found the ride back from Quetzaltenango to be far less taxing. It was daylight and there was no sign of fog. Ricardo cruised southeast past the volcano Siete Orejas ('seven ears') and through a pair of small villages. The town dump of one was a shallow ravine along the road just outside of the town limits. An aging woman and several children trudged barefoot through the bags and piles of garbage while picking their way through their day's salvage which, in my possession, would have been thrown away in a minute.

Our vehicle manoveured around the volcano Santa Maria. As I reached down and checked my road map, Ricardo interrupted me.

'Look ahead!' he exclaimed.

'A rockslide?' I wondered aloud. The road ahead curved left into a huge smoking mass of white soil and rock, part of which seemed to have slid down from the middle of the mountainside just above, but most of which didn't appear to have a source for such a massive amount of smouldering material.

'Es lava Alanso.'

'So that's lava,' I gawked. Chalk white and yellow ash left in its wake, the lava had pushed down across the highway on the near end of the curve, then proceeded to flow out almost to the center lane on the far end of the curve. The road had been plowed clear, but pockets of hot lava sent cotton puffs of smoke casually drifting up the thinly wooded mountainside. One lone spruce, oblivious to the withering furnace around it, stood tall in defiance of hell. Steam from the volcano itself billowed across the sky, wiping out its lofty ascents.

I noticed steam vented from shallow ditches along the highway, mainly where the road itself presented the lowest point of topography. Rows of coffee trees, more like big bushes, flecked the rolling mountains until they rolled too close to sea level. Curving around a hill of rock, I caught site of another great gash in a mountainside at some distance to the right. A pile of rubble was strewn beneath it, lending it the appearance of a Guatemalan Mount Rushmore without a sculpture.

'Ricardo, is that more lava out there?'

'No Alan. What you now see is a rockslide. The government, they decide to build a factory for power from heat in the earth. How you say?'

'Geothermal?'

'Si, termo. One day they blast the mountain above the village. Nothing happen. But in the night, the mountain it move and come down on the village and bury a hundred of people.'

I stared back on the yellow slice of death carved out of the mountain until it disappeared, saying nothing. Ricardo also was silent. After some while he pulled over near a small highway coconut stand. We were nearing the coastal shelf. Ricardo told the owner of the stand I was a gringo on my first visit to Guatemala and a machete was soon presented which carved up some sugar cane in four inch pieces for us to snack on.

Soon after we came upon a gently flowing river. Along its banks, trabajadores worked diligently to sledge hammer large rock formations into wheelbarrow-sized piles of building material, some cut as small as marbles, others as large as softballs. We passed a dozen such piles --roadside displays for potential buyers. At this point our vehicle stopped.

The bridge was out. We were forced to cross the river itself over a temporary pontoon of dirt pushed up over a series of culverts and lined by five-gallon pail sized smooth white boulders--a set-up allowing free flow of both traffic and water. The original bridge was comprised of a series of steel squares, each halved diagonally into double pyramids by an undulating pattern of heavy steel braces. But the entire frame was tilted and sagging badly, the far side angling down until it rested cock-eyed along the bank and across twenty feet of river.

I turned to my military ambulance driver chauffeur, "What happened? An earthquake? A flood?"

Ricardo stopped his car in the middle of the pontoon. "Can you read the banderas?" Two banners hung from the near side of the contorted steel structure.

Terrorismo Irracional," I read the first with a poor accent, but full understanding. "You mean this bridge was blown up?"

"Si, guerrillas, Alan."

"Una Clara Violacion de Derechos de Los Gente," I mumbled, guessing the at the pronunciation, then the meaning. "A clear violation of the...Ricardo what does ‘derechos’ mean?"

"Rights."

Then ‘gente’ must be people I surmised. "What about the other one, ‘Delincuencia Terrorista’...what does the ‘No Dana Al Ejercito’ underneath it mean?"

"It say, ‘This no hurt the army.’" Ricardo explained further. Military garrisons were no more dependent on this bridge than supporters of the guerrillas. But with the onset of the wet season, the dirt pontoon would soon wash out. The river would become a rapids, daily rains soaking the mountains, gathering in torrents, and raging hell bent down to the coast. And to get from one side of the river to the other by walking and bus would impose as much as an eighteen hour detour for some travelers, and the necessity of circumventing well over 100 kilometers of tortuous mountain road for the privilege.

"Poor devils," I muttered as we sped along out of a cloud of dust while watching a busload of campesinos strike out for the pontoon. Guatemala was full of poor devils I thought.

Before leaving work that day, I tucked into my jacket pockets a salvavidas bottle and a small yogurt container, both of which I’d filled with water from the school‘s amply chlorinated supply. I mostly used it for cooking or brushing my teeth. Sure, I was getting plenty of water at my Zone 5 apartment in Guatemala City: yellow water, brown water, tan water, grey water. Indeed, in my six months there I’d seen more white water than an Arkansas lawyer.

Since it was cooking I had in mind, I needed something to cook, so I stepped off my bus at Supermercado Paiz and trotted briskly up the second story ramp. I stood in line to pay for yucca chips, cream cheese, and broccoli. After about twenty minutes, the woman in front of me unloaded her cart, the contents of which would take the combined efforts of herself and her twin pony-tailed little girls to haul away.

"Ciento catorce y cuarenta centavos," the register clerk whinnied with nonchalance, 114.40 quetzales.

"Ciento catorce...ala," echoed the black-haired, dark tanned, sweet-as-brown-sugar, Guatemalan woman in anguished surprise. She counted out all of her money, almost all of it in dirty, worn, taped, torn one quetzal bills. The clerk took his turn...87, 88, 89--a ten note--99...a hand full of fifty centavo notes brought it to 103 quetzales.

"Necesita once mas," declared the clerk. She was short eleven quetzales. She was obviously torn between picking through her groceries to decide which items to leave behind or scouring her purse and person for the eleven quetzales she didn’t have.

I examined my pitiable few groceries and determined that I would still have about sixty-seven centavos to my name once checked out should I decide to take the situation by the reins and help the woman out.

I offered to the clerk to cover the eleven quezales. He in turn offered my offer to the woman.

"Muy amable," she spoke softly in gratitude. Then she packed up her grocery cart and disappeared.

Soon, my own groceries were being rung up. Within a few minutes I was hoofing it to the ramp winding down to the sidewalk below. But before I could begin to gallop the remaining four blocks home, my groceries swinging wildly in my yellow plastic Paiz bag, a shout rang out behind me.

"Señor!"

I was still up on the walkway just past the ice cream shop when I turned to see a brown uniformed security guard motioning for me to stop. He wore a holstered snub-nosed 38 revolver and a gun belt gleaming with live ammunition.

I hadn’t left anything at the counter. What would this guy want with me? My free hand brushed against my damp jacket pocket--water had seeped from out of the yogurt container stuffed in there.

"Tiene nosotros salvavidas," were the bandelero’s first words as he pointed to my bulging pocket.

"This?" I replied in Spanish, slipping the salvavidas bottle from out of its hiding place.

"Si, salvavidas," he reiterated.

"It's my water," I assured him, then realizing from a glance down at my money belt's unzipped coin slot that 67 centavos would not be near enough to buy the bottle in question, even if I could get off that easily.

What he said next I do not know, though "salvavidas came up twice in its saying.

"It’s my water...from my school," I insisted, totally missing his obvious perspective that everyone well-to-do buys their water to take to school and so who would be so dense as to believe that there would ever come a gringo so cheap or so stupid as to take water from a school to use at home.

The guard barked another sentence in Spanish which I didn’t catch except the last word--"salvavidas." I wanted to explain why I had the water in my pocket, that my last month’s dentist bill took my entire paycheck, that my kitchen faucet was spewing more colors than the Rainbow Coalition, that it was my water from school for cooking, but I really lacked the necessary Spanish verbs to get much of it intelligibly across.

So I merely repeated, "It’s my water from my school."

"Salvavidas," was all I heard.

My troubles compounded like interest in a local soccer match as I presently found myself saddled with two security guards from Paiz rearing up at me. The second guard was wearing lighter tan accoutrements and once filled in by his partner he kept braying about "salvavidas" this and "salvavidas" that over and over again. I felt like I was the in a universe where I was the only one existing with the power to think. Did I look that stupid? I did. My further explanations only seemed to draw the same one-track-mind response, "salvavidas."

I pulled the leaky yogurt container from out of my pocket and tore the cover off. "It’s water from my school," I assured them in Spanish . I continued to hold the half-filled container with two fingers, tucking the cover in the palm of my left hand. My remaining three fingers dug into my money belt for my school ID, the appearance of which did little to back up my story.

What now? My worst case scenario was a Guatemalan jail and my best case scenario was eating my broccoli raw all because of that blue-labeled agua bottle hanging out of my jacket pocket.

Of course! The water bottle itself. That was the answer. Even these fellows would have to concede to the logic of it. The bottle was filled with water to the cap. Surely they didn’t believe I looked whacko enough to walk into their store, grab one of their agua bottles machine filled to the neck and add water to the cap from my yogurt container before leaving the store with the salvavidas I’d just rendered contaminated, then stolen. Besides, the numbers stamped on the cap didn’t match the numbers on the bottles sold in this outlet. And anyway, the label was considerably faded from hours of setting out in the sun.

I had my argument fully spiked with common sense, in order to commence my latest lecture on water bottle 101 I still needed to free my hands.

"Un momento," I pleaded while stooping down to deposit the grocery bag, yogurt container, cover, and school ID temporarily on the walkway. As I bent over, a steady stream of coins spilled out of the unzipped slot of my money belt, plinking and clinking on the pavement below. Around and around they spinned and rolled--mindless circles of insurrectionist specie. For a moment, I saw my life in those circles.

With their hands on their gun belts, the security guards peered sheepishly down till the coins ceased motion. As they looked up and glanced at each other, their silence shouted their sentiments with no less volume than a conductor hailing passengers. Surely there could not be a more pathetic gringo in all of Guatemala.

My train of thought derailed, I wondered if the store would allow me a phone call, or if my school would bail me out of this one--boil me out of this one was more like it, along with my broccoli.

A middle aged woman in a blue work dress emerged chugging toward us from the store entrance. Her thin rimmed glasses along with slightly greying long black hair and a face gaining less wrinkles than character with age set her apart as someone in charge. So did her confident gait and security ID. With one brief sentence and a sweep of her hand, she dismissed the two guards and myself as well.

"I should have checked my water at the package counter," I said.

"No hablo de Ingles," were her only other words.

As I picked up my things, I watched the woman briskly step back into her store. I walked home and boiled broccoli.

What meager possessions he had were stuffed under the austere platform on which he laid. He washed himself from a gallon container fastened to a corner of his dolly. He used a long stick with a pike-shaped metal tip for hooking cobblestone edges and cracks in the pavement in order to propel himself along. It was a tedious task, the simple rollers of his gurney hardly a match for the disheveled streets they navigated.

"Ayudame," he said. "Help me."

"What can I do for you?" I asked. His English was as limited as my Spanish, but a flurry of hand motions soon had me pushing his cart to a darker, quieter street to where he could retire with less interruption.

It was only a five block journey, but time consuming with his cart moving awkwardly across the lumpy pavement and myself breathing hard and stopping for air repeatedly in this 8,000 foot atmosphere.

For half an hour we threw together a conversation as patchwork and rough as the the stone laid street beneath us, while dining on a bag of cookies I’d packed for the the bus ride. It was getting late. A nearby hotel would close soon. But I had first gotten to the point of exchanging names and was determined to be of some service to the man if possible.

"Jose," I said. He showed surprise at my use of his name so soon after he’d given it out, as if I’d repeated the key to a secret code for all the world to hear.

"Jose, what can I do for you?" I asked, almost as if voicing a request on my part for him to fill.

"I want to learn English," he said.

Sorry I didn’t have a dictionary to present to him, I brought out my Spanish practice sheets and gave him all the words I had Spanish to English and with pronunciations, all written out on sheets of spiral notebook paper. We wrote and practiced these for an hour and a half. Then he went one way and I another. It was very late.

My hotel had closed its broad and heavy double doors. The wooden drawbridges, fastened and reinforced with wide metal strips, were pulled together securely--shut tight to keep out the night, or a furious fusilade or brisk cannonade for that matter.

I wandered the central city in a semi-circle, failing to find another open hotel. From somewhere a clock chime sounded midnight. I turned a corner to find Jose still attempting to move his cart to a darker destination. With hardly another word between us, I pushed him along two blocks more to a dim curb where a street lamp had burnt out.

He signaled to stop, then pointed ahead. I walked off in that direction suddenly desperate for even a set of steps to huddle under for the night. Behind me I could hear Jose, laying on his side, relieving himself on the pavement below. I did not know desperation.

I reached the end of the street. "Now what?" I thought. I turned left. "Hotel 24 Hora" in neon blazed out at me.

"Decinueve quetzales por noche," the clerk chanted in his sleep. After dishing over nineteen Q’s, I was given a room to myself with six beds. I opened a Bible laying on a nightstand and read the writings of John: "This is my commandment, that you love one another..."

The rainy season had started late that year and then dragged on late into October. On my journey the next morning from Quetzaltenango to Panajachel, the sun was bright and every mountainside, valley, and ravine glowed with shades and hues of green I'd never imagined to exist anymore. For the first time since a child, I knew the color green. The crowded, bumpy, hour-and-a-half bus ride seemed but minutes. Maybe it was just that life never looked better just then.

I happened to return to Quetzaltenango a year later. I scanned the rough hewn streets of the city for my cart-bound friend, but to no avail. He was gone. The cobblestones remained that had deterred him from his daily pilgrimages to unremarkable side streets.

My own cobblestones in life felt much smoother than these.