by Noe Alvarez
36
Zapatistas: Rebel Country
We plunge farther into new lands—the state of Chiapas, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the autonomous Zapatista villages of Oventic, then Acteal, and the Agua Azul waterfall deep in the Lacandon Jungle, a green muscle flexing across Honduras and Guatemala.
It is an ink wash of a world here in rainy Chiapas where we traverse steep highlands with heavy feet, moving about the clouds as if in some dream world that smells of firewood. Roads coil around remote Mayan villages that appear and disappear in the fog like ghost towns. The silhouettes of women hunching over the land can be seen in the clouds, working the land, and carrying bundles of firewood on their backs. I run, parting the mist with my body, observing these lands—a state with the highest poverty rate in Mexico.
From these harsh lands erupted a movement that caught the world’s attention in 1994. The Mayan people of these lands took up arms and seized towns across Chiapas, fed up with generations of evictions, encroachments on their land, and mass displacement. Leading them was a figure who emerged on horseback as if from the mist of the Lacandon Jungle. A man in a ski mask, smoking a pipe, who went by the nom de guerre of Subcomandante Marcos. “El Sub” for short. Thousands of Indigenous people in ski masks declared war on the Mexican government as part of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). The Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
El Sub was said to wear two watches—one to track society’s time and another to track Indigenous time. “The movement will stop only when the two watches become in sync,” he will say in an interview with reporter Carlos Loret de Mola of Primero Noticias de Televisa Chapultepec, on May 9, 2006. “When society finally understands our place as Indigenous villages. Only then will there be a single time. United.”
We enter the autonomous town of Oventic, which El Sub helped protect under the orders of the Mayan tribal council of Chiapas. These autonomous villages are collectively referred to as los Caracoles. “Snails,” in English, because they are defensive by nature and are content to take their time. Their spiraling shell pattern symbolizes an ideology that will radiate across the globe. Pacquiao approaches the gates, communicates our intentions to one of the ski-masked commanders, and undergoes a thorough inspection. They review his papers, make the necessary inquiries, then wave the vans inside, onto their lands. We pass a sign reading, YOU ARE NOW IN REBEL ZAPATISTA TERRITORY. HERE, THE PEOPLE COMMAND AND THE GOVERNMENT OBEYS.
We enter into a wooden lodge—its facade is painted with a large mural of Emiliano Zapata. Above it, the words: SNAIL MU’KTA TZOB’ONBAIL. We enter the lodge. There’s a stage, a large Mexican flag, and a music band. Surrounding us in a circle are more men and women in masks. Tacked to the walls are papers with lists of international organizations in support of the Zapatista cause. Lines of spotted lights—like Christmas ornaments, set the mood for a fiesta. Despite our exhaustion, I watch the runners dance in celebration.
The melancholic vocals of Indigenous artists in ski masks resound against this pine lodge and earth floor, while I sit and watch my colleagues. What I feel is love. I watch my friends with warmth, every one of them, proud to call them my family. I watch them, us, in our imperfections, in our passion to be better, commitment to be present for others over ourselves. Refugio’s acceptance that every person is good. Cheeto’s unrestrained humor. Chenoa with a heart for singing twice the size of anybody else’s. Andrec’s unwavering balance and centeredness. Pacquiao, who in many ways has to carry the great load of us—leading us into uncharted territory, counting on us to persevere. Even Tlaloc’s and Trigger’s strict regimens of self-discovery. Every one of them pushed me to build the muscle to confront my problems. Here, I make my decision to call it quits on the run. But only once we are in Guatemala. I let Cheeto know.
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
“I don’t really know,” I tell him. “But whatever I do, I’ll have to do it soon.” I grip my knees. “I’m not fully in it anymore.”
“PDJ can do that. It can pull you in another direction. Into another river. If home’s where you need to be, it’s where you need to be, amigo.” He puts his hand on my shoulder.
I struggle to stand up and I join the line of dancers. For a moment I try to ride the beauty of the Chiapas people engaged in the beautiful act of community. I absorb this like a sponge, to last me the rest of my life.
The following morning, ski-masked men, women, and children meet us in a field of corn. They have a saying here, Andrec tells me. “We cover our faces so that you can finally see us.” They lead us into their community. At one point, women in straw hats and ponytails smudge us—each of us still holding our staffs. But not Tlaloc, who has torn a green cornstalk from one of his runs and carries it proudly to “help heal the harvest,” he tells the villagers who thank him. “Corn represents life. We owe her our souls.” This is Tlaloc as a runner, improvising to the beats of his surroundings. Tlaloc as a nonrunner, well, part of me still admires him, but things have grown worse between him and me. It is as if running can no longer suppress the people we really are inside. Hungry, exhausted, and impatient, we resort to old habits, take our frustrations out on one another. Blame failures on everyone but ourselves, myself included. Still, we continue forward, nourishing ourselves with the spirit of these lands as best we can.
37
Acteal
Cheeto, Andrec, and I enter an abarrotes convenience store. My mission is only one: to pack as much sugar into my body as possible. On the curbside of this small village, I sit and dump cupcakes and beverage packages around me. One by one I peel them open, intent on replenishing with junk food the nourishment I have lost. Cheeto and Andrec do as I do. We’re like kids. It’s a treat to myself, dammit. I’ve earned this.
“When exactly will you be leaving us, Noé?” Andrec asks me.
“Soon. Very soon.” I feel guilt for leaving them behind. I begin to feel the real fear of Tlaloc’s promise to make me pay. “Sorry I no longer have it in me.”
“Have you told Pacquiao?” they ask.
I have told Pacquiao how ashamed I am of leaving the team. For failing to care for my legs properly. I just want to make it across all of Mexico. As soon as we reach the Guatemalan border, I will find a bus to take me to the nearest airport.
The three of us pack the final sugary snacks into our systems and sit back, a kind of joy blazing in us.
Near the region of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, in a region scarred by deep valleys, steep mountains, and dark muddy ravines, a constant drizzle makes the streets glisten and moistens my face. A ways away into my run, I come upon three smiling kids. Two are on a bike, a brother and a sister—she in a muddied dress, her brother in a Spider-Man shirt. Their friend is in a patterned wool sweater and walks beside them.
We play off of each other’s energies, each picking up the pace until we’re in a full-fledged race. Their laughter melts my heart. I cheat and set off into the grass. They bring out the kid in me again, and I dash over the soft soil and suck in the pine-flavored air around me. The burst of energy rejuvenates me, and I think of the Yakima Valley—the river and hills. Of my family. The children know these lands—every wrinkle of earth and hair of grass—better than I do. They know happiness better than I do. I run even harder, all to make them laugh when suddenly my knees are gripped by an excruciating torture, like knives twisting into them. There I sit, feeling like a failure, bracing the flesh of my legs. I go no farther.
This, I think, is where it all ends for me.
The van comes for me later in the day and takes me to camp. With no hospitals anywhere nearby, I am instead visited that evening by a local medicine man. He shoves peyote into my mouth and gestures to me to swallow. He smudges me with eagle feathers, incense, and chants.
We conclude our trip through Chiapas by running to the turquoise waters of the Agua Azul waterfalls before leaving for the Palenque ruins. There, we trace the blue water and dip ourselves in it—yet again letting the la
nd become acquainted with the taste of us. Before leaving for the Palenque ruins, I dip my feet into the river bubbling with the flavors of the jungle, like tea, and I let all my problems slip away into the water like sediment. My final run approaches.
38
Guatemala
Roughly 6,300 miles. On the floor of an abandoned church near a remote village south of the Zaculeu ruins, I wake from a bad dream to the sound of howling street dogs. Enveloping us is the smell of must and sage. My bandaged legs pulse and oppress me. The moment has arrived for me to leave the run. While everyone is still asleep, I gather my belongings, open my 1,600-page dictionary to confirm the little money I hid for a return flight home is still there, and walk into the foggy night.
I look around at the empty cobblestone streets. Cheeto grabs my arm. “You take care, homie.”
He goes back inside.
Packs of stray dogs canvass the streets, hurrying as if to some secret meal. They disappear like ghosts. I walk to a bus stop across town, feeling sad that I will not be able to finish the run. Despite my knees’ protests, I post myself against an adobe wall and stand against the mist as it butters past me, not knowing if there really is a bus. The bus departs once a day, a villager told me the day before. Finally, with the rising sun, a brightly colored bus arrives. After I board, it drives noisily through pine forest and foggy open country, toward Guatemala City.
While I jump into an airplane for home, to rest and heal, the other runners, I imagine, finally gather in jubilation at the opposite ends of the Bridge of the Americas in Panama. There, Crow unwraps the Warrior Flag held in her hand. Holding on when others couldn’t, gripping that flag as hard as if it were an extension of everything meaningful in her life. When the time comes, she and others launch themselves forward toward the finish line, Crow waving the flag against the wind.
The main feathered staff has gained the weight of so many feathers that a flare of wind threatens to lift the runner holding the staff aloft into the heavens. It has absorbed a world of stories since its inception in Chickaloon Village, Alaska, where it only had three: the eagle, macaw, and condor feathers.
The end of the run, I hear later, does not feel like an uncomplicated victory. Even in the comfort of a hotel, Cheeto and other runners worry about their families. Mazat sits and smokes outside on the steps of a hotel in Panama without a dollar to his name, dwelling over how he’ll return home. Meanwhile, Pacquiao sits hunched inside his car, beaten down by disappointment. Word reached Gustavo—his mentor back home—about his failure to organize better. The infighting, the chaos. Pacquiao feels unappreciated and unacknowledged. A sickness would consume his body for months and he would vow never to lead PDJ again.
For everyone, the world that we had put on pause was beginning to move again.
FREE
39
Old Orchard
For months after the run, I rest, at home among my people in Yakima. I rest on the couch by day, and sleep on the floor of my bedroom at night, unable to adjust to the comforts of a bed and pillow. Although my knees are finally free of bandages, my spirit continues to heal still enwrapped in the dream that is PDJ. I kick and throb in my sleep. Still running.
Months later, when my legs feel strong again, I revisit the old apple orchard of my childhood. I take my mother’s car and drive toward the familiar west. I grow excited at the thought of becoming reacquainted with my relatives that are the land and the trees. I come to the crest of a hill, turn into the property and—
The apple trees have been leveled. Not a single root around. None of the branches left that had supported my weight when I had scaled them. Timidly, I knock on the front door of the adjoining house to ask for permission to wander the premises. A young boy answers the door with one eye showing through the slit. It’s okay, he tells me.
I walk over the old land as a mature person now, on a land no longer rippled like ribs of a human by the wheels of tractors, thinking back to when I was a child, when I pummeled the dry, compact earth with the force of a young boy believing himself a man, wielding a shovel against the gusts of wind, dressed in the baggy clothes of my father, which I sometimes liked to borrow. When I leaned with one foot on the shovel, arms on the handle, to observe my father in the distance manning a diesel tractor. I know now that every bit of earth contains the sacredness of another person’s existence.
Aided by a foundation of peace, dignity, and self-love, I return to the adventures of college several months later. This time, I achieve degrees in philosophy and creative writing from Whitman and Emerson Colleges. In between those two schools, I complete a fellowship at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and study conflict analysis, peacemaking, and conflict resolution at American University in D.C. I commit to these intellectual pursuits like someone making up for lost time and still restless and pushing myself forward, trying to figure things out. I delve into grassroots work and study U.S. drug policy, military aid, and human-rights issues in Colombia inside the jungles of Putumayo. I meet with parliamentary figures of Northern Ireland and lead an art delegation to Mexico, soaking in as much of the world as I can and searching for that “better” version of myself. I teach youth and work inside food banks, helping homeless and substance-abuse populations. I seek elsewhere the spiritual and philosophical truths that running provided me. But within myself I believe that these truths can be achieved without a college education. The world tells me that achievement has to look one way, but I struggle with that.
In Seattle, for a time, I venture into dishwashing. My face drips in the hot mist of towering dishes as I hose and feed them through a commercial dishwasher. In ninety-second intervals, steam emerges from the machine in suffocating plumes that redden my face. In the back, cutting boards chatter under the cutlery as potatoes and tomatoes are diced, and oysters are peeled and parted. Balls of dough slap onto flour beds. Hands shape them into braids. Paper ticket orders queue from a machine like sausage links over chef José’s blazing pans: shepherd’s pie, soup, oysters. José’s forehead gleams as he prepares and garnishes plates. With rag in hand, he slams shut a red-hot oven door and curses through his teeth, “I need oysters, potatoes, limes, rapido.” I collect and wash oysters. With a knife, I jab at the stubborn crustacean mouths inches over my palm. There’s never time to put on gloves. When the chef calls for potatoes, I hobble back with a fifty-pound orange net of large potatoes, wash four dozen, and shave long brown skins from them. Peeled potatoes slip from my hand into a splashing bucket of water, and I place the load at José’s feet. “Here are the potatoes and oysters, boss.”
As the dinner wave calms, and the fall evening sun sets over the drizzle outside, I step from the noise into a nook in the narrow hallway used for breaks, where a single chair and table glow under yellow lighting. Others are already resting there. I sit on the floor, my back against the wall, and pull out a paperback to read.
The kitchen’s double doors open. “What are you all doing sitting around? Hell. Look at this,” Old Lady Kelly—the tireless restaurant owner—tosses empty boxes from random shelves. “Break these boxes!”
Her eyes fix on me sitting in the corner. “Come here,” she says, and I get up and follow. “Take this bucket and fill it with Clorox. Here—wipe this table down—no, not like that—why the hell did you do that? Bring that trash bin here—quickly—use this.”
I clean over and under the baking table with old rags drenched in Clorox as Mrs. Kelly storms around the kitchen. I keep myself moving, wringing Clorox rags, grabbing brooms, breaking boxes, removing dirty towels, nesting buckets, and often responding with downcast eyes: “Yes, ma’am,” and, “Right away.”
In the restroom, the cleaning chemicals burn my nostrils as I scrub the walls of the bathrooms, the urinals, and get in behind the toilets. My shoulders brush the narrow stalls as I collect trash and soiled toilet paper and sweep away pubic hair. The cleaning agents suck the moisture from my hands and the skin breaks over my knuc
kles. I carry clinking bags of waste over my shoulders to the red-brick alleyway, dump them in the bin, and pause to breathe in the cool damp air of Seattle. As instructed, I clean the surrounding area with Clorox water, and it floods the rats out of their dens. They appear from their usual dark corners and step over broken beer glass and bottle caps. I chase at them with a sharp-bristled broom, but they crawl back. I sweep at them repeatedly, each time harder than the next, but they only scurry between my feet. Something touches my ankle and I jump back, kicking off one rat from my foot. I need to step away for a moment. When I gather my courage again, I splash more Clorox water onto the sticky surface and black rodents. My shoes slosh in the pools of dark water. Hunched over, I scoop up the muck one dustpan at a time and dump it into the trash bins. I scrub away at the filth and at the wading rats who seem to taunt me, knowing it will never be clean enough.
I tear off my apron and walk back inside the restaurant. I imagine charging through the kitchen’s swinging doors, into Mrs. Kelly’s office, and telling her who I really and rightly am. But at the bar I see the soft-spoken, white-haired Mr. Kelly hunched over a beer. “Hello, Mr. Kelly,” I say.
I hurry to the bathroom to scrub my hands with soapy, hot water. I wet my face and neck at the sink and for a moment let my head hang over the running faucet. Minutes later, I put on my apron again, and return to my duties in the now-vacant kitchen.