Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  There were cattle grazing in vertical pastures, moving under Strange knobby green peaks. Pineapples grew in adjacent fields, and clear-cuts wound their way up the slopes of the higher mountains, which marched off into the distance, purple against the rising smoke of the agricultural fires burning everywhere.

  The roads lacked signage of any sort and branched off to various tiny villages, where we saw horses, saddled Western-style, laden with bananas or pineapples and tied to hitching posts in front of the cantinas. Men in straw cowboy hats and Western-cut shirts pointed off in several different directions at once when we inquired about a route into the mountains above.

  The road dropped back down to the country’s major north-south highway, which fronted the west side of Lake Yajoa, a hundred square miles of clear waters, fringed with coffee plantations, a few resorts, and dozens of prosperous-looking farms. The lake, a seriously picturesque affair, was stocked with large and apparently exceedingly dumb bass. There were at least thirty restaurants lining the highway, each of them selling bass and only bass. We stopped at one of the upscale places, redundantly named Only Bass. They served bass with devil sauce, with tartar sauce, with garlic butter; we could have our bass fried, grilled, or baked. Everything was delicious except for the only beer on the menu, a sour imported American brand whose uniquely honest sales pitch is “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

  Later that night, we stopped in the town of Santa Barbara and tried to get a fix on the national park rising all around in the darkness. Since the directions given in the town square all smacked of misinformation and Casablanca, we counted ourselves fortunate to run into a man named Martine Rodriguez, of the Green Heart Ecological Association, who trotted us off to his nearby office, showed us some maps, and told us that we could get into the park via the village of San José de Los Andes. The village was set about a mile high and was one of the highest settlements in Honduras. Could we get up there in a two-wheel-drive car without much clearance? Not in the rainy season, Martine said, but since it had been pretty dry lately, hey, no problem.

  Which is how, the next day, we came to be irremediably stuck on a cruel boulder-strewn joke of a road at an elevation of about five thousand feet and two miles short of San José. Men from the village, returning from work in the fields, stopped and gave us a hand, as a matter of course. It was necessary to unload the van: twelve big bags, including four backpacks, three tents, and two disassembled kayaks weighing over one hundred pounds apiece. The men literally lifted the van out of some ruts and helped us push it the rest of the way to San José. While they seemed shy, it was clear that we were a source of some quiet amusement to these friendly men.

  The town was set out along a sloping dusty street lined mostly by one- and two-room wooden houses. The people were mestizo, which is to say, of mixed European and American Indian heritage: Almost 90 percent of all Hondurans are mestizo. They directed us to the home of Peggy Chui, a young American Peace Corps volunteer, who lived in a small wooden house with a bucket-flush toilet, a kerosene stove, and a battery-driven shortwave radio.

  We cooked dinner for Peggy and ended up talking on her porch, under a sky studded with van Gogh stars, while the lights of various fishing resorts twinkled on the shores of Lake Yajoa far below.

  Peggy was working with the village farmers, developing better methods of hillside agriculture. The people of San José, she said, got bad seeds, which they sowed in poor soil. The year before, when the bean crop had come in sparse, some people had gone hungry for a time. Sixty percent of the country lived like this, Peggy said, whole villages existing hand to mouth on subsistence agriculture.

  But—and this was hard for her to express exactly—the people in San José seemed … well, content. Happy. Pero como was the stoic motto: What can you do? It had taken Peggy a year to feel at home in the village, and now it was a part of her. There were evenings, she said, when a cool fog rolled up out of Yajoa and enveloped her, times when she felt as if she were living inside a glittering cloud, and the whole place felt mystical.

  She introduced us to her neighbor, a man named Octivilo Ramos, who had been the chief (and only) ranger for Santa Barbara National Park since it was established in 1987. It was an unpaid position. He was also the only guide in the area, and offered to take us into the forest for a fair price. We bargained in the Honduran fashion, which is to say, when Octivilo named a figure, forty lempira a day apiece, we were struck speechless with an agony of grief and stared hopelessly at the ground. Octivilo let us live in the silence of our unbearable pain for all of thirty seconds, then suggested thirty-five a day. Thirty-five? We stared at one another in shocked delight. Our joy was uncontainable. He couldn’t possibly mean it. Thirty-five? Why, it was a miracle. We shook hands on the deal and agreed to start off into the forest at dawn the next day.

  Later, after Octivilo went home, Peggy said thirty-five lemps was, in fact, his usual price, which was damn good money in San José. When people worked for others—picking coffee, for instance—the average wage in the area came to about ten lempira (a little over a dollar) a day. On our two-day trek, Octivilo would earn the equivalent of twenty-eight days of average wages.

  Not many people came to San José to visit the forest, Peggy said. There had been five parties her first year, ten the next.

  I suggested that while the numbers were small, visitation had doubled. Since people sometimes went hungry in the village, was it possible that some sort of trekking tourism could make up the slack?

  Peggy was torn on the issue. In the best of all worlds the people of San José would improve their farming methods, feed themselves, and live as they always had. You only had to go to Copán, the country’s major tourist destination, to see what San José could become. The people there, in Peggy’s view, were aggressive, fixated on profit. Most of all, they didn’t seem happy.

  And yet … the poverty in San José could make your heart ache in dozens of small ways every day. Look at the children, Peggy said. There was no dentist anywhere nearby, no money to get one up to the village, and no real understanding of the techniques of oral hygiene. When the children, these beautiful children, smiled up at you, their mouths were full of rotting black stumps. So, yes, Peggy supposed, you could put in a visitors’ center, charge a small fee of each trekker, and pay for monthly visits from a dentist. Thing was: Where did something like that end?

  The next morning, Octivilo marched us through town, out over the coffee plantations, and up through an area of clear-cut that ran smack into the boundaries of the national park. An hour or so into the park we came upon a small canyon that had been slashed and burned.

  Octivilo was a “Spaniard” Verne Hyde would have loved. He stopped there to give us a quick lecture on ecology. Whoever burned the area was planning on planting a crop, using water that would naturally flow into the area. The problem, Octivilo said, was that heavy rains later in the year would erode the gully and cause mudslides to destroy cropland below. Worse, the forest floor, littered with over a foot of fallen vegetation, acted as a giant sponge, storing rainwater that fell during the wet season and releasing it slowly during the dry. Cut the forest, he said, and the rivers—like the one on Verne Hyde’s place—would begin to dry up. All the crops below, all the way to Yajoa, would die of thirst.

  Octivilo said he’d known about the burn and was investigating. He was an honest, knowledgeable man but essentially a volunteer. Could he really turn in one of his neighbors. In a town of five hundred people?

  The cloud forest above the burn was thick—you couldn’t really see more than ten feet in any direction—and the trail was narrow, sometimes nonexistent. We passed giant hardwood trees, a type of mahogany, a hundred feet high, and the branches were hung with woody vines, with great masses of moss. Everywhere, in all the trees, there were red parasitic flowers the size of basketballs. Looking up induced a kind of vertigo: All the smaller trees bent and twisted their way toward the sun, toward a patch of open sky, so nothing grew straight up and down.
There was a sense, in this dizzying forest, that every living thing longed for the death of its nearest neighbor. The mosquitoes were fierce.

  Our campsite was a limestone overhang, fringed with woody vines dropped from the trees growing on the ledge above. Octivilo shared my tent that night, and he told me that there were some nonpoisonous snakes in the forest, a number of small deer, a few ocelot, and a lot of foul-smelling bad-tempered peccaries. The monkeys were gone, hunted out, but there were plans to reintroduce them.

  Not everyone, Octivilo said, agreed about how the new national parks of Honduras should be administered. There was some dissension in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. One group, noting the economic benefits Costa Rica was enjoying from eco-tourism, wanted to open up everything, everywhere, to unrestricted travel. Another group was more cautious and felt some areas should be preserved to protect the wildlife and the watershed. Octivilo wasn’t sure which was really the right approach, but he seemed proud that Santa Barbara wasn’t all that accessible to the outside world.

  There were times, he said, when it felt as if he were the only person in the forest. He especially liked the winter months, when it sometimes snowed in the higher elevations. There was a very distinct line at about eighteen hundred meters. Everything below was green; everything above, white. The snow bowed down the branches of the trees, covered the red flowers, and was knee-deep on the ground.

  In the morning we puttered around camp, then walked back through a forest that was shrouded in clouds. Peggy said that while we were gone, there had been a gathering of townsfolk and we had been one topic of conversation. Her friend Pedro related the story of how badly we’d been stuck, how we had to unload the van and push it up the hill. He told the story in such a way that people were doubled over in laughter. Peggy—she said she was sorry about this; she couldn’t help it—then told people that the big red bags we unloaded, the heavy ones, the ones we carried, sweating and cursing two miles up the mountain: those bags contained … boats. Oceangoing boats. People had laughed until there were tears in their eyes.

  The Ozymandias Express

  The drive from San José to the ruins of Copán, located near the border with Guatemala, had been exciting in unanticipated ways. At first we thought it was a bad accident ahead: A schoolbus blocked the roadway, and there were several plumes of black smoke rising behind. In fact, it was a protest of some kind. Lines of burning tires spanned the pavement, and men carrying sticks of varying sizes motioned us to pull over in such a way that our van, like the schoolbus ahead, blocked traffic. A man carrying a bullhorn followed the men with the sticks up and down the line of stopped cars and trucks. “Avoid violence,” he shouted. “Violence has bad consequences.”

  The bus ahead was full of ten-year-old schoolgirls wearing white blouses and blue skirts. It was nine in the morning and already 90 degrees. The driver wouldn’t let the girls out of the bus to mingle with the men on foot carrying sticks, who were being exhorted to avoid violence.

  Grant, Ted, Rob, and I split up and walked down the line of cars, trying to find out what was happening. Truck drivers, who seemed unperturbed and used to this sort of thing, had strung hammocks in the shade under their trucks and were lying there scratching their stomachs and smoking cigarettes.

  Rob and I sat in the shade of a maple-size tree covered over in pink flowers and chatted with an older man carrying one of the smaller sticks. Everyone, he said, was protesting recent price rises. Clothing cost too much, as did food and transportation. It was all tied in to the price of gasoline, which had doubled in the last five years.

  A younger man, carrying a bigger stick, explained, quite pointedly, I thought, that the United States was behind the price jump. We were? I tried to sort out the mechanics of that, came up with several possible scenarios, and kept my mouth shut. Rob said that he was Canadian and that the U.S. was always doing that sort of stuff to him.

  “The bastards,” I added, temporarily Canadian.

  It was a little tense for a while. Some people from a bus that was stopped behind our van walked by, carrying their bags toward the other side of the roadblock. Men with sticks menaced them, women screamed insults, and the man with the bullhorn followed behind, shouting about the bad consequences of violence.

  A gentle breeze blew a cloud of black tire smoke my way. An hour passed. Two. It was edging toward noon, and was probably already over a hundred degrees in the sun. The protest, it seemed, was beginning to wind down in the heat. TV cameras had come and gone. Most of the protesters had discarded their sticks, and people were chatting amiably enough. When a man carrying a rusted automobile fender walked by, someone yelled, “Hey, are you taking your car through one piece at a time?” and everyone laughed.

  I figured the protesters wouldn’t let those little girls swelter in the bus much longer, and I was right. They let us go at about one that afternoon. A few hours later we drove into the town of Copán Ruinas, less than a mile from the ruins themselves.

  It was a graceful place of cobblestone streets and colonial buildings, with a variety of hotels, restaurants, and cafés catering to international travelers. Tourists thronged the streets. Near a shop selling T-shirts, I saw a man wearing plaid Bermuda shorts, black socks, and black wing-tip shoes. Gee, I thought, this place is utterly unlike San José de Los Andes.

  My first morning in the ruins proper, a mist was rising off the Copán River. I stood silently in the great plaza, an open grassy area dotted with several stelae, monumental statues commemorating the accomplishments of various extinct rulers. I couldn’t read the glyphs on the stelae, but even in the drifting mist, the subtext was clear enough. It had been written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

  Small deer wandered toward the central court and the acropolis, an aggregation of steps and temples rising 120 feet off the grassy plain. The ruins had just opened for the day, and there were only a few other people walking in the mist. Most of them were taking notes or pictures. The place was like a great cathedral. It enforced that sort of solemnity.

  There had been people living in the Copán River valley two thousand years before Christ. A city of monuments and temples and ballcourts grew up the banks of the river. The structures are smaller than those found at other major Mayan sites—Tikal or Palenque or Chichén Itzá—but it was at Copán that the culture found its fullest expression in art. If Copán was the Athens of the Mayan world, the thirteenth ruler, known as 18 Rabbit, was its Pericles.

  The classic era lasted from about A.D. 465 to 800. Then, very rapidly it seems, the city fell into ruin. No one knows why. There might have been war or disease or famine or drought or civil insurrection. Some archaeologists, examining the various sedimentary layers in the riverbed, have postulated that the Copánecs simply overused their agricultural resources and that the catastrophe that devastated the classic city was an ecological one. Slash and burn.

  The next day, as if to illustrate Peggy Chui’s comments about the pernicious effects of tourist dollars, a local sharpy took me to the cleaners on a fast horse deal. The agreed upon four-hour ride lasted only three because “another tourist is waiting for your horse, señor.” Rather than argue, I paid full price. The guide stared at the money I gave him and glared at me.

  “Where’s my tip?” he demanded.

  Since violence has bad consequences, we stood in the town square and discussed the sexual morality of our respective mothers for a time. I don’t know whether or not the man was content by Peggy Chui’s definition. I did notice that he was wearing a pair of sixty-dollar Reeboks.

  Later that day, I found myself back at the ruins, sitting on the ancient stones of the Mayan acropolis and contemplating the Ozymadias Express. Grant said he would take his clients to Guanaja, maybe visit New Armenia with them, but skip San José in favor of Copán, which, we both thought, tended to put things in perspective. Hey, pero como? You live; you do what you can—throw up your own version of a few stelae—and in the end only He Who Laughs pr
evails.

  Misty Crossings

  Earl, the weather god one of my companions favored, was in a festive mood, which is to say, it was about 65 degrees on a fine sunny October morning off the western coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. My heavily loaded fabric kayak was cutting smartly through the Pacific Ocean at about three miles an hour, and I was testing its performance capabilities, leaning off to one side or another in an attempt to ascertain the precise point at which the craft might capsize. This is like sitting in a chair and balancing yourself on the back two legs. People who test the performance capabilities of chairs sometimes have reason to chastise themselves.

  So it is with kayaks.

  Even so, I had to lean pretty far back in the figurative chair of my boat before gravity even began to exert its ponderous influence. Sea kayaks are stable in the water—not at all like river kayaks, which are maddening, tippy little sons of bitches, built to capsize for the fun of it. Sea kayaks, by way of additional contrast, also carry a lot of gear—your boat is your luggage. Such a craft is paddled in the interest of exploration and comfortable camping, not acrobatic athleticism.

  My kayak was gliding over calm seas near the mouth of Esperanza Inlet, where mountains soared directly out of the sea. The land looked like Seattle, without all the Seattle. Misty green forests rose, precipitously, to angular rocky peaks. The higher summits carried a fine dusting of recent snow that sparkled and glittered in the sun. The sea was a glassy expanse: It took on the cobalt-blue color of the sky; it caught the surrounding mountains in such a way that I was paddling over the shimmering reflection of forest and snow.