by Teresa Bruce
We try taking a walk, but cupping hands over our ears blocks even less of the noise than the camper did.
“Isn’t this how the CIA tortures political prisoners?” Gary shouts.
Maybe it’s some sort of revival, or a religious holiday that Lonely Planet and all the other guidebooks missed. It would be absurd if it weren’t so disorienting. Everywhere we walk, the sermon follows. It’s as though the loudspeakers have eyes and we’re under shrieking surveillance. Shadows lurk in stinky ditches paralleling the gravel road, and the stars throb and pulse instead of twinkle. We take it for the Morse code of fallen angels warning us to return to the safety of the Avion.
Back in the camper, we sit on either side of the collapsible shelf that serves as our dining table, wadding toilet paper into our ears. It is impossible to have a conversation, but we try, just for the distraction.
“Could it still be the same two people?” Gary asks, and I know he’s thinking it’s impossible for vocal cords to survive this long. But there is no mistaking the timbre of the male preacher’s voice and the scratchy rasp of the female’s. We switch to passing notes, like this is an awful junior-high lecture on civic responsibility or personal hygiene.
“Worse than… the fingernails of fifty witches on a chalkboard,” I begin.
Gary snorts. Not that I can hear it. “Bagpipes. Wait. Make that deaf kids, learning to play bagpipes.”
I’d laugh, but any extra noise resonating in my eardrums might burst them. “Deranged woman screaming. In labor. Strapped to tracks. Freight train bearing down.”
Gary flips the paper over. “Willy Nelson concert. Inside a bomber. During an air raid over Vietnam.”
This I can trump. “Wouldn’t know. Before my time.” We switch to gin rummy, but even playing cards requires a degree of concentration impossible to maintain under continuous auditory assault. After the first hour we empty the aspirin bottle. After the second hour, I wrap every scarf I own around my ears like a mummy. The torturous din continues nonstop for three hours, reverberating within the camper walls like a scream in a tiny tin can.
I’m hallucinating. The camper windows appear to be vibrating. The door bulges and contracts, like the fabric covering a speaker. When the woman wails, the pilot light in the propane heater falters and droops, and when the man takes over, the flame shoots out in licks of fiery red. Then I realize it’s actually Wipeout’s tongue licking, and the fiery red is blood oozing from her groin and paws and dripping into her matted white fur. She is biting herself in anxiety, the canine equivalent of a panic attack. This is worse than any one thunderstorm or fireworks display has caused so far.
“Remember when we started out,” Gary shouts, “how we decided if any place along the way gives either one of us the creeps, we’re out of there, no arguing or second-guessing each other?”
“Is there enough light to leave right now?” I interrupt him. But I know the answer. The gravel road to Todos Santos is internal-organ bruising even in the daylight. I unwrap the scarves from my head and tie them around Wipeout’s paws, and together we lift her into the bed so that our weary bodies and aching hearts shield her from some of the suffering.
We escape at the crack of dawn, pelted by a fresh round of preach-shrieking from the roadside loudspeakers. For three days we drive through highlands of alpine forest and mud huts, grateful for silence. Wipeout doesn’t even lift her head to sniff the mountain air. Her appetite is gone, and we have to coax her to pee. We pass sparse, open-air markets in towns so small that maps ignore them. Women almost drop the bundles they carry on their heads as they pivot to watch our silver camper rumble past.
This is how my parents must have felt for our whole journey. They drove down the newly opened Pan-American Highway and into worlds without phones, electricity, or running water, let alone trucks with houses strapped on top.
Gary stops to photograph the stark landscape. It looks stone-aged, a muted palette punctuated by wildflowers in blood-red, cone-shaped flares. Through his lens my nomadic childhood comes rushing back. I am shadowing my parents but the context has evolved.
Miles from any village, we encounter twenty men walking down the middle of the road. When we slow down to drive around the group, not one man looks up at the camper. They stare ahead, transfixed, their march methodical and practiced. I see why and my heart falters. The men in this procession are accompanying a father with a wooden coffin on his back. It is so small that he carries it by strapping a band of woven fabric around his forehead and looping it around the bottom of the box. His arms hang limply by his sides, as if useless without the child to cradle.
He could be my father. Our camper was my little brother’s coffin, pulled along the Pan-American Highway. Everyone who saw it knew that grief was passing.
Chapter Fourteen
WIPEOUT
My father got stoned for the first time on the shores of Lake Atitlán, and I approach Guatemala’s most famous tourist destination with skepticism bordering on premeditated disillusionment. My only reason for stopping is to find a vet for Wipeout and a jeweler to replace the wedding ring that dropped off my dehydrated finger into a Mazatlán toilet.
I imagine Lake Atitlán surrounded by expat colonies of aging American hippies and annoyingly crunchy, yogic Mother Earth–speakers. The guidebooks call Panajachel, the town that mushroomed at the base of this volcanic caldera, “Gringotenango.” It isn’t altogether fair—the town has just as many Europeans as Americans, and almost immediately I find a German jeweler who promises a new, handmade silver ring in a few days. Billboards advertising high-rise condos with free Wi-Fi and indoor gyms almost block the view of the lake. If tourism has ruined any point along the Pan-American Highway it is surely here; even the water has been contaminated by invasive bass brought in to stock the lake for American vacation dollars.
Still, the slide-show version of Lake Atitlán dances like a happy devil on my shoulder, whispering memories I’ve treasured since I was a little girl. Mountains ringing the lake like the points on a queen’s crown. Water so clear I was embarrassed to watch my parents skinny-dipping. An earthy mix of strange smells: incense and frying fish. And everywhere the sound of campers laughing and singing, even my mother.
JAN 18–22, 1974
Stayed on public beach… bought clothes for all… met lots of people—Jack and Carol there. Swam
My parents met up with the same group of travelers who had camped with us the night of the shoot-out in Mexico, and we stayed in one place for the longest time since the trip had begun: five whole nights under stars too many to count. Lake Atitlán was Shangri-la for wanderers and dropouts, too idyllic to have lasted, says the devil on my other shoulder.
The public beach where we camped still exists, but to reach it now requires dodging vendors selling Polaroid photo ops with dejected-looking ponies. Telephone poles are plastered with posters advertising an Astral Travel Camp and Vegan Meditation Center in the nearby village of San Marcos. Panajachel itself is a souvenir gauntlet of shell windmills and stuffed frogs, Mexican sombreros and American baseball hats. A paunchy American in a faded Hawaiian shirt asks Gary if he’s interested in some “really sweet weed,” and I wonder if he’s the same guy who convinced my father to light up, live a little.
It all seems like a tackier version of colonialism, culture shock after a week in the highlands. The only Guatemalans in sight are running souvenir stalls or giving tourists lifts to the lake in rickshaw taxis. A few tents dot the shoreline, where a drizzle of a river empties into Lake Atitlán, but there is no way to drive our heavy truck out that far. Luckily Gary and I have made other arrangements in Panajachel.
The twenty-three-year-old son of a friend from Arizona is volunteering for the year in a medicinal herb garden, a community health-care project. Shawn, and his girlfriend, Susie, arrange for us to park our camper and stay in a private bungalow among fragrant herb terraces. We warn them that we are traveling with an incontinent, cancer-stricken old dog suffering from panic attacks, but
they welcome us anyway. After a week without a real shower, we shamelessly abandon the Avion and embrace the comforts of what they call the “casita,” the little house. After all my gringo-bashing it feels like cheating, relaxing on teak deck chairs provided by the woman in San Francisco who owns the place.
This absentee landowner, undoubtedly vegan and chakra-mindful, formed a weaving cooperative for women widowed by the Guatemalan civil war. The widows still live in distant villages, without electricity, but at least now there is a market for their skills and they earn a living wage. Susie volunteers at the co-op, helping the women choose colors more likely to entice American interior decorators and high-end home magazines.
“Native women roll their eyes at all our earth tones and natural dyes,” she says. “To them, bright neon colors signify life and freedom. They’ll pick turquoise or Day-Glo magenta any day over taupe or black.”
It is the kind of casual revelation that only happens far from home, a contradiction that proves assumptions foolish. What I judge gaudy is joyful to women who have survived much worse than I can imagine.
Wipeout licks my ankles like a good-night kiss before she falls asleep, and she is once again the snoring puppy who adopted me in Mexico. For sixteen years she has planted herself at my feet when it is time to rest, grounding me. Susie puts a pillow under her head, hands me another Gallo beer, and asks if my parents were hippies.
“No more than we are. They just kind of stumbled into the stereotype.”
When my parents met other Americans, the child not with them was never introduced. It would have been natural for fellow travelers to assume my charismatic father and timid mother were tuning in or dropping out. All the young Canadians, Europeans, and Australians that Gary and I meet assume that we are free-spirited wanderers too. The real motivation for this drive would be a chat bomb dropped into discussions about camp spots and roadblocks. It isn’t practical, my quest to find my rolling childhood home and say a thirty-years-too-late good-bye to a three-year-old-boy. How could I explain that it’s not that I still grieve my brother but that his unspoken history is so powerfully present.
I had a chance, the first time I camped at Lake Atitlán, to look into the future and find out whether I would ever be able to forget John John. But I was seven years old, and it had been thirty-seven days since I said good-bye to all my friends in second grade at Banks Elementary School. I was more concerned they would forget me. Even a walk along the shores of the lake wasn’t enough to stop homesick, sorry-for-myself tears from gushing out when I met the woman I’ve called “the gypsy lady” ever since.
She was camping at the far end of the beach, and I thought she looked like the star of I Dream of Jeannie with her long hair and layers of colorful skirts. Her wrists tinkled with the sound of copper bracelets, and she told me she had a crystal ball inside her tent that could predict my future. That this crystal ball turned out to be invisible seemed perfectly logical at the time, and I didn’t say a word as she moved her hands through the air in the shape of an orb. I finally blurted out a question.
“Does it show if I will ever have another friend?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling. “Many friends. In fact, each time you move to a new country or start a new school, you will find more friends, even closer friends than the ones you used to have. You’re a very lucky girl to get so many chances.”
Where once I had been an unwilling passenger in my parents’ escape, the gypsy lady made me feel like a daring stowaway, discovering new worlds. I left her tent jackpot happy, and now, drinking Gallo beer with new friends not far from that very spot, I am filled with the same hopefulness.
In the spirit of the gypsy lady, the next day we take Shawn up on an offer to visit the pinnacle of Lake Atitlán’s New Age subculture: Las Pirámides of San Marcos La Laguna. The ferry chugs away from the clamor of Panajachel, and within minutes it’s as if we are traveling back in time. Other than a few tourists the boat is filled with locals taking goods to markets along the lakeshore route. Men wearing traditional woven traje sit on one side, napping, while women sort through sacks of beans, limes, and chili peppers. The lake is glassy and smooth, and little kids who’ve never held computer games in their hands jostle for position to lie on their stomachs and drag their fingers through the water.
We disembark at a rickety wooden dock with a hand-painted sign declaring the destination. Underneath the San Marcos sign is the same poster we saw in Panajachel; it promises better health through the one-month moon course at Las Pirámides Spiritual Retreat and Yoga Center.
“At least we’ll have a good lunch,” Shawn says. “Can’t go wrong with a vegan buffet.”
The pyramid part of Las Pirámides is more suggestion than literal—a scattering of tent-size rustic wooden structures with pointed tops peek out from clearings in the scrubby brush. They’re too low to the ground to be anything other than sleeping quarters, but the whole complex seems abandoned. No one greets us or asks what we’re doing on private property; we must look like foreigners authentically seeking authenticity. I’m feeling a bit like a spy, here to judge rather than join in, so I buy some dried purple basil and wormwood powder from an old Mayan man shuffling a few steps behind us.
He points to two larger structures—pyramid-shaped meditation centers—and taps his watch. Apparently in five minutes something important happens. I’m trying to be open-minded but this place feels anything but sacred, and I picture the meditation center filled with the drooping breasts and faded tattoos of potheads past their prime.
Instead, the pyramid disgorges dozens of the most beautiful young foreigners I have ever seen in one place. They all seem to be under thirty and they’re laughing and chatting in half a dozen different European languages. The energy is radiant and palpable, enough to disarm even the most determined skeptic. Whatever it is they’re studying here, these are eager, appreciative students. The women in particular are luminous, like they’ve just swallowed the sun.
“Forget astral travel, they should put these women on the poster,” I whisper to Gary. “The place would be booked solid.”
We follow the followers into a dining structure and, at only slightly inflated prices, dive into a crunchy meal of quinoa, root vegetables, and dehydrated fruit snacks. I’ve dabbled in vegetarianism for close to twenty years and haven’t created or consumed anything as tasty. I can practically feel the toxins draining from my body.
“Don’t go overboard,” Gary warns me. “It’s a long ferry ride back. Without bathrooms.”
Only two people join our table and I’m surprised when they don’t return my attempt at conversation. Instead, their faces drape into benign smiles, and they lean toward each other and touch foreheads before picking up their silverware.
“What’s that all about?” I whisper to Shawn. The two diners appear to be pantomiming with gentle hand gestures and facial expressions.
“I’m not sure but I’ve heard that the last week of the moon course is supposed to be silent,” Shawn says. “Part of getting to another level.”
An entire week without talking seems more like torture to me, and I leave San Marcos mystified by its spiritual pilgrims. I’m bursting with questions, and on the ferry ride back I find someone to ask—a thirty-nine-year-old Guatemalan man traveling with his four-year-old son. He offers only his first name, Saluo, and explains in halting Spanish that it means blessed with fortune.
I do the mental math and realize that Saluo probably fought in the civil war that was raging across Guatemala when my family unknowingly traipsed through the country. He’s surprisingly eager to talk about it. He loved guns, he says, and reenlisted many times after his mandatory service was over. Even though he saw many atrocities, he tells me he was still drawn to guns and violence after the war and ended up as a security guard in Guatemala City. The man gently stroking the top of his son’s head seems like he is describing another person in another lifetime, and when he builds up to a long pause I realize he is setting the stage for a p
lot twist.
“And then I found God,” it comes. “I left violence behind me. Alcohol behind me. The only thing that matters to me now is God, my wife, and that my son never know the life I led.”
He speeds up with the energy of the evangelical. He leans so close I can feel the hot breath of conviction. In Saluo’s earnest fervor I hear the passion of the loudspeaker preacher in Todos Santos. I try to smile, channeling the calm acceptance of my silent lunch companions. He is putting his past into perspective, offering thanks for an option other than violence. It doesn’t matter how I define the continuum of logic to lunacy; the truth is that I am just as much a seeker as this man. Or as the beautiful vegans meditating under stunted pyramids. Or as my father, smoking really sweet weed so that he could float, for a while, away from the memory of my little brother.
Lake Atitlán is a gift that I am beginning to appreciate, a respite from the world of knowns and certainties. It is gently preparing me to accept that there are things I can’t even understand, let alone control.
Meanwhile, Wipeout is weakening by the day. Summer thunderstorms are increasing both in strength and frequency. Children are afraid to touch her: she twitches, howls, and bleeds from everywhere her teeth can reach. Even guard dogs give her wide berth. We’ve stayed longer than we planned, unwilling to uproot her again. I can’t bear the thought of putting her to sleep, but it is even worse to think that she might die along some nameless stretch of the Pan-American Highway, her last days unsettled and transient and with no place to bury her.
After dinner on our fourth night in the casita, Gary and I walk her down to the shore for a dip in Lake Atitlán. Just a mile away from the hustle of Panajachel, there is serenity and privacy. A thousand soothing shades of blue sky float above the clear water on invisible terraces of wind. The volcanoes rise so steeply from Lake Atitlán’s shores that the sun can’t set at the same time here. The evenings are a staggered affair; each cove and jutting point burns to its “good night” alone.