by Wendy Dale
“There’s one place left.”
As my mother said the word “Honduras,” the other half of my gene pool asked me to go to the fridge and get him a stiff drink.
Fleeing to a new place and leaving one’s problems behind was a proud family tradition. My mother had grown up this way, having been raised by army parents who roamed all over the world and finally retired in Mexico. And there was an alarming indication of it on my father’s side as well. My grandma Barb had managed to live in Arizona for thirty years, took a vacation to Hawaii one day, returned home long enough to pick up a few things, kissed her husband good-bye, and moved to Honolulu.
My uncle Bob was the only one in the family who hadn’t quite come to terms with the concept of travel as a means of escape. His work as an international photojournalist had taken him out of the country often enough, though he’d always wound up in nations with even more problems than the ones he was trying to avoid. In an attempt to elude his ex-wife, he’d fled to Central America in the eighties, though after a few years of running from guerrillas, the governments of crazed dictators, and paramilitary forces out to kill him, the idea of being chased by a diminutive blond woman started to seem pretty damn appealing. He returned to the States, vowed never to set foot in a Third World region again, and locked himself away in a private manicured neighborhood in suburban West Virginia, where the majority of his time was spent reading gourmet cookbooks and consuming expensive foods and wines with Italian names.
A typical conversation with him would go something like this: “It’s not pen pasta. It’s pen-eh. And whatever you do, if you ever decide to travel, make sure you go to Europe.”
He was the most vocal opponent of my parents’ impending move, but the pesto-stained letters that arrived in their mailbox with the message “Don’t do it” did little to deter my folks. They were used to picking up and heading off to exotic places. They had taught us kids early on that distancing yourself from your problems was as easy as calling up the moving company. The Dale family members dialed the toll-free number for Allied Movers as if it were a crisis hotline.
By the time I was sixteen, my dad’s mining engineering jobs had taken us to Arizona, California, Tennessee, South Carolina, Minnesota, Montana, and Peru—and this nomadic lifestyle was something I never considered a hardship. Whenever times got rough at school (which they inevitably did for the new girl who spent her free time in the library reading about the latest scientific discoveries in Discover magazine), I knew that all I had to do was endure the barbs of the kids for a little while, because soon we’d be leaving.
I approached all of our impending departures with unwavering optimism. Each time, I convinced myself that this move had to be the one that would take me to that scholastic utopia I was seeking, a place where the students got together during their free time for fun and informative didactic chats, where they met up after school happily exchanging useful tips on the periodic table, evolution, and relativity.
In South Carolina, the kids just called me booger-picker because they were ignorant—everybody said “over yonder” and “young ’uns”; I became convinced that all we had to do was move to a place where they didn’t speak this way. In the northern part of the United States, I was sure eighth-graders sat around debating the finer points of quantum mechanics.
When I was thirteen, and my mother came into my room yet again to explain that my father had a new job, there was only one thing I needed to know about our future destination of Minnesota: “Mom, do they say ‘you guys’ there instead of ‘y’all’?” (The answer to this question was yes; however, for anyone who has never been to Minnesota, I feel the need to tell you that the eighth-graders do not in fact sit around discussing particle physics over lunch. Apparently there is still some distance between the phrase “you guys” and the phrase “Newton’s corpuscular theory of light failed to adequately explain why the empirically measured entropy of pure substances at equilibrium tends toward zero as the absolute temperature decreases toward zero.”)
Growing up, moving had never been a big deal for any of us, and now that my folks planned to go to Honduras without even visiting the place beforehand, no one in my family was entirely shocked. My mother explained that this was the best thing for my father—he needed a change of pace, a more relaxed existence, and I couldn’t possibly object to something that was supposed to do my father good.
Everyone in my family was slightly in awe of my dad. All the good attributes came from his side of the family—he had wound up with brains and looks. When I was twenty-three and got diagnosed with gallbladder disease (the same thing had happened to him a decade earlier), he guiltily said, “I promise, it’s the only bad gene I gave you.” And it was true.
But high intelligence wasn’t necessarily the key to a contented existence. My dad had traded personal happiness for the material comfort of his family, giving most of his adult life away to mining engineering work he had hated. Every two to three years, he’d find a better paying job in a new state, but in the end he’d always wind up where he began—spending his days in an office feeling like his life was pointless.
But this time the move was going to be different. My dad wasn’t going to Honduras because he had a new job; he was headed there because he’d never have to work again. For once, he’d get the chance to stop and smell the roses—or at least the banana plants.
My sister Heather and I were going to be mostly unaffected by our parents’ departure—we were both living on our own—but there were still two kids at home. A month before leaving, my folks gave my seventeen-year-old sister Catherine two options: okay, you can come with us to the poorest country in Central America or you can spend your senior year of high school without any adult supervision. It was not a hard choice.
Before they had time to change their minds, Catherine quickly found herself a nearby apartment in Tempe with another senior who had also chosen to be guardianless for the year.1 And like jubilant Price Is Right grand-prize champions, the two of them set about filling up their new place with my parents’ television, couch, stereo, VCR, computer, and dining room set that Mom and Dad would be leaving behind in the States.
My eleven-year-old brother, Richard, was not so lucky. He was going to have to whittle his possessions down to the contents of one piece of luggage. This was not too difficult; what was a problem was that most of the items he had chosen to take with him were forbidden by all international airline carriers. Years ago as a precocious eight year old, Richard had decided that his future lay ahead of him in the ever-growing field of weapons design so what he considered essential items were contraband in most developed nations.
“But Mom, why?” he cried as my mother pulled another offending item out of his suitcase.
“You will not be bringing nitroglycerine to Honduras.”
“Okay, but let me keep the gunpowder. Pleeeeease.”
Rich didn’t understand why his parents were dragging him off to the Third World. After all, none of his other friends had to spend their Saturdays getting yellow-fever vaccinations. They were eating soft-serve dairy-based frozen food products, playing video games, and surfing the Internet. But I told him to look at the bright side: He wanted to be blowing things up, and it sure was going to be a hell of a lot easier in Central America.
“So, what do your parents do?”
In the past, this question had never caused me to hesitate. I had always been able to provide a simple one-word answer, a title like “engineer” or “geologist” in my father’s case and the label “housewife” to describe my mother’s role. But after my folks headed down to Central America, coming up with a response suddenly wasn’t so easy. I sought in vain through my dictionary, my thesaurus, and any other reference materials I was able to get my hands on and finally resigned myself to the fact that there wasn’t a term that expressed the concept: “They sold their house, their car, and their furniture and took my brother and two suitcases to Honduras.”
“Wow, what are they doing there?” people wo
uld respond, intrigued.
I was led to the dictionary again, searching for a way to describe what it was my parents actually did in Honduras and remarkably enough, this term did exist. The word was “nothing.”
However, saying that you do nothing is a difficult concept for most Americans to grasp, I knew; I had had the do-nothing conversation many times before.
“What did you do today?”
“Nothing.”
“You couldn’t have just done nothing. Come on, what did you do all afternoon?”
“You’re right. Actually, I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling.”
A brief moment of silence would follow, after which the other person would condescendingly respond: “Oh, you mean you really did nothing.”
Of course, it was much more complicated if you were a writer because there were days that you lay on your bed and stared at the ceiling and it was called working. But this was a difficult concept for most nonartist types to grasp.
My sister Heather was getting asked these types of questions as well, but she was the only one clever enough to derive advantage from my parents’ move to Honduras. She was at Vassar on a full scholarship, one of a handful of middle-class kids at an otherwise elite school. There, like at any other Seven Sisters or Ivy League college, “doing nothing” was synonymous with trust fund or was code for sitting on a yacht, playing golf, and attending charity luncheons. So Heather actually looked forward to being asked about her parents. She would lean back in her chair, cross her legs, and answer, “They’re abroad.” And everyone would be quite impressed when she added, “Doing nothing.”
Even though we often lived in geographically distant places, the six members of my immediate family had always gotten together at Christmas. According to my parents, there was simply no plausible excuse for not showing up, not “Mom, I’m sick” or “Dad, I have to work” or even “Sorry, but you guys live twenty-four hundred miles away in a Central American country.”
This year, we were going to be spending our first holiday season in Honduras. To avoid any potential reticence on the part of her daughters, my mother sent a letter explaining that she and my dad were springing for the airplane tickets—not that her children really needed any convincing when it came to hopping aboard an airplane. I was in desperate need of a trip abroad—it would bring some much needed excitement to my dull existence of employee newsletter writing, and for several weeks prior to departing, the high point of my workday was witnessing the puzzled look on the aeronautical engineers’ faces after they innocently inquired into my plans for the holidays.
Did I plan to go home?
“Sort of.”
Where was home?
“This year it’s Tegucigalpa.”
Tegucigalpa?
“Yes, you know, the capital of Honduras.”
They weren’t sure if I was kidding, but since the exchange had already used up several minutes of valuable rocket-making time, they would smile uncertainly and quickly excuse themselves to go back to the safety of their secret labs and soundproof rooms. Alone in my office, I would chuckle happily at the private joke they had not understood, reassured in the fact that I was not one of them after all.
A week before Christmas, landing at the airport in the capital of Honduras, I was struck by a twinge of nostalgia. The plane came careening down, barely avoiding the mountains beneath us, and made a bumpy landing on a runway much too short, which was compensated for by the pilot who frantically slammed down on the brakes and swerved to the left, skillfully avoiding the airport in front of us. Ah, Latin America. It hadn’t changed a bit in the past twenty years.
One of my father’s mining engineering jobs had taken us to Peru when I was four years old, and as a kid for a while I really had believed I was a Latina. I switched between English and Spanish without effort, wandered about in an alpaca poncho, and hung out with our maid, Ana, who taught me words in Quechua and took me up into the Andes where we ate beef-heart shish kabob (called anticuchos) surrounded by a herd of llamas.
Needless to say, I returned to the States a pretty weird kid. I was the only third-grader in my class who had never tasted a Big Mac, had no idea who this Grover guy was (was it true that he was blue?), and was completely baffled by the machine that you put a quarter into (which coin was the quarter?) and got a soda can out of. In Peru, soda did not come from machines, and it definitely didn’t come in a can.
Eventually, my images of Peru faded to that dreamlike state reserved for childhood memories. I learned how to play Atari and I realized that American girls got a lot more mileage begging for ponies instead of pet llamas. But there was always a part of me that longed to return, to see that mysterious country that had given me the ability to pronounce strange-sounding words in an accent that always made my friends in Tennessee laugh, the place where my daily happiness had been as certain as the fact that summer arrived each December.
I walked down the stairs that they had rolled out to the plane, feeling strangely like a kid again. The scent of dust in the air triggered images of my childhood and all around me were the familiar sounds of a language I could nearly make out but not quite understand. It was eerie—I could imitate the words I heard with the flawless accent of a native speaker, but I had no idea how to string them together to make a coherent sentence.
In a slight daze, I crossed the dry pavement and entered the dilapidated airport filled with cigarette smoke, wondering where I would meet up with my parents. Looking around the tiny building, I realized there weren’t too many possibilities: first, the entire building consisted of one gate, which left very little room for confusion, and second, while standing in line at immigration, I heard the familiar, high-pitched voice of my mother, indistinguishable even in Spanish, saying, “Permiso. Perdón. Permiso.” Before I had time to count to tres, the entire room turned to view a lively, loud, platinum-blond woman completely ignoring the Do Not Enter sign, climbing over a rope, waving past a security guard, and joining me at my side, welcoming me to the country with an emotional scream and a bear hug.
This was a typical Cathie Dale maneuver. Years ago, after discovering that the Rosarito Beach Hotel in Baja California was all booked up, she’d tried to sneak us into the pool anyway, which she had assured us would be as simple as lying about the room number on the sign-in sheet at the entrance. Unfortunately, the number she wrote down belonged to a single, and since it was unlikely that a family of six was going to be sharing a double bed, the manager had come over to politely ask us to take our lying asses to another establishment. “But I don’t want to leave!” my eight-year-old brother shouted as my parents dragged him out of the pool.
At the Tegucigalpa airport, this behavior was repeating itself. Smothered in her embrace, I couldn’t help but comment, “You know, no one else’s mother met them at immigration.”
“Yeah, but only because it’s not allowed.”
“But you—”
“I have connections,” she proudly announced. “My Embassy Friend is outside.”
Apparently those connections were not enough to ensure that everything would run smoothly at the airport. At baggage claim, the roped-off area into which suitcases were tossed by a man into the center of the room, we failed to find my maroon Samsonite. While I had arrived safe and sound in Tegucigalpa, it seemed that my suitcase was enjoying a three-day stay in Houston, courtesy of Continental Airlines.
“I’m sorry, but there has been a problem with the luggage,” the airline representative at the counter informed us.
“What kind of problem?” I asked.
“It will remain in Houston until we have space available on the plane to retrieve it.”
“You mean, my clean underwear, my deodorant, my toothbrush, my socks, and all my other personal belongings are going to be delayed indefinitely?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Unintentionally, I let out a small yelp of joy. For the first time in my life, I had had the foresight to purchase a traveler’s insurance pol
icy. It had been a simple financial decision really: A month’s health coverage had turned out to be cheaper than getting the recommended hepatitis, cholera, and yellow-fever shots. And unlike spending a day in a vaccination clinic after which I would have nothing to show for myself other than a few track marks, my traveler’s insurance policy came with a delayed luggage clause. They would reimburse me up to two hundred dollars for necessary expenses. And here I was, in need of a couple hundred dollars worth of personal-care items.
“So what’s the first thing you want to see in Honduras?” my mother asked me, excitedly rushing toward the more restrained half of my parental unit who was patiently waiting outside the airport.
“The Estée Lauder counter!” I shouted.
For me, travel was the real-world version of falling down a rabbit hole. In a foreign country, everything was slightly off: the smell, the sounds, the view. Now I knew why everyone made such a big deal when it came to the phrase “treading on foreign soil”—on the other side of an international border even walking across the ground felt new. It was like a drug-induced high, only better—with travel, the next morning when you woke up, you were still there.
On the ride to my parents’ house, chauffeured by the woman I still knew only as “Mother’s Embassy Friend,” I stared out the window of the car, struck by the strangeness of the place. The vehicles racing alongside us were familiar to me in that they had four wheels, a steering column, and were covered in metal, but here they seemed to operate on a different set of principles. Vehicles that long ago would have been relegated to the junkyard in the United States tentatively puttered along here, held together with bungee cords and electrician’s tape, as if no one had bothered to inform them of Newton’s laws of motion. And the cows and pigs we passed by were different too. Personally not an expert when it comes to farm animals (to this day my father’s greatest disappointment has been raising four children, none of whom shares his enthusiasm for livestock), I am not competent to describe the exact nature of their dissimilarity, but they felt foreign to me. They were unmistakably Honduran.