On the Road in 1980, Part 8
El Cerrito del Carmen, site of a hermitage on the northern edge of sprawling Guatemala City.
“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other [people] with common curiosity and pleasure…. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” –G. K. Chesterton
Martes, 8 de abril.[1] The package of literary magazine submissions finally arrived that afternoon. I was staying in Guatemala City at Pensión Luna, impatient to move on. I bided my time by wandering the crowded, rackety streets, hiking to Parque Minerva, on the northern edge of the city, where I shot baskets with a kid at a beat-up hoop and watched a local semi-pro baseball team practice. Atop a nearby hill, I came upon the quiet gardens of a beautiful old church, La Ermita del Carmen.[2] Following the cloister’s winding path, I thought about the next stage of my journey: down from the Highlands, northeast to Puerto Barrios and the Caribbean coast.
I started that 300-kilometer trip the next morning, walking far enough to get out of the city and quickly hitching a ride from two friendly foresters driving a flatbed truck, who took me almost halfway, to the town of Santiago. The day warmed up as we drove down into the lowlands and along the Río Motagua. I soon caught another ride from two guys transporting a truckload of sandias. I gently clambered atop the pile of melons and settled in for the ride, the last sixty kilometers growing tropical lush, the road lined with orchards of mouth-watering sapotes, papayas, guayabas, mangos, tamarindos.
Arriving in Puerto Barrios at four PM, I located a pensión and then went down to the docks to suss out information for the ferry to Belize. The ferry crossing Bahia Amatique to Punta Gorda would depart at dawn the next morning. I had enough quetzales for the ferry ride but not for the Oficina de Migración’s exit fee. Rather than waiting for the next Punta Gorda ferry, I decided to take the first ferry after the banks opened, which would take me across a smaller segment of the bay and the wide mouth of the Río Dulce to Lívingston, still in Guatemala.
While I was at the docks, I watched a departing ferry and two Aussies missing the boat by seconds. I got to talking with them, horticulturalists from Canberra collecting tropical plant seeds for their farm back home. We all had an evening to spend in Puerto Barrios, so we smoked some of their hash and drove around in their rented car, winding up at a whorehouse, where we drank too many beers and engaged in friendly banter with the Belizean sex workers. Port towns are always lively and captivating, but I was hoping Lívingston would be more laid-back.
On the ferry ride the next day, I met Liz, a charming Brit from Salisbury. We got off the ferry at the dock, both of us looking for a place to stay, and were led by a young kid to a pensión that offered a single room with two beds. We just looked at each other a minute and said, “Why not?” After unpacking, we headed out to explore the town, almost immediately running into two American girls I’d met in Antigua. I had to extricate myself from an awkward moment, since they knew me as David and I’d just introduced myself to Liz as Francisco. All good though.
The next day we rented a cayuco[3] and paddled across the wide mouth of the Rio Dulce to an isolated beach. Although the water was choppy and the cayuco tippy, we crossed without incident, enjoying each other’s company as we shared tales of our journeys and a picnic of sandia and aguardiente.[4] Liz was a social worker in Edinburgh, a gentle heart, with the wisdom and sensibility of an experienced traveler. When we returned late in the afternoon, the wind had picked up, as had the waves. The cayuco capsized twice, but after a few false starts and a lot of bailing, we learned how to balance the counteracting forces of river current and sea winds to keep the craft upright, laughing afterward about our little fiasco.
I was smitten by Liz – tall, lithe, athletic, adventurous. In my mind, she fit the mold of intrepid British explorer-travelers such as Gertrude Bell and Beryl Markham. Our last night together, I finally proposed joining her in bed. A bit shy about such things, never wanting to assume, I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing between the signals for friend and lover. Liz laughed, “I’ve been wondering when you’d ask.” We spent a sweet night together before she headed toward Antigua and I caught the ferry to Punta Gorda.
The quiet Punta Gorda waterfront. The craft in the foreground is a cayuco.
Formerly known as British Honduras, Belize had been a British Crown Colony for over a century. The name change had occurred in 1973, but the country wouldn’t gain its independence until 1981. Punta Gorda, the southernmost coastal town of Belize, was a small fishing port. I found a place to stay at Madman’s 5 Star. Trust me, the five stars of the name were aspirational at best, but Madman offered a cozy restaurant – a single long table with benches on his enclosed front porch – serving wholesome food in robust portions, and behind his house a palapa,[5] where I hung my sleeping hammock.
I had finally found the seclusion I needed to read and comment on the eighty submissions to the literary magazine I was co-editing with Michael Cummings, which we had decided to call Police Beat.[6] When Mrs. Madman heard about my project, she loaned me a spare table that I repaired and set up as my desk. After three days of editorial work, I sent off the letter that included my notes on which pieces should be included in the issue.
The first and only issue of Police Beat. The postcard on the cover had arrived mysteriously at my address two years prior.
My first afternoon in Punta Gorda, I befriended a gregarious dreadlocked Rastafarian named Charlie, who had spent time in Canada, the U.S., and the military, but who now tended a field of ganja somewhere in the backcountry and lived on his sailboat. We met two Canadian girls whom Charlie invited to go sailing with us, but I wasn’t much of a first mate, and we never got out of the inlet he’d been anchored in. Instead, we hung out on the boat and got high while Charlie played his guitar. On shore later, as we walked through town, Charlie accosted a young British soldier, all the enmity toward the colonial oppressors seeming, at least to me, to explode out of nowhere.
On Saturday night, I gave in to Charlie’s nagging and let him introduce me to a food vendor on a dark side street who dished up “ground food” – yams, potatoes, plantains, all cooked with pigtail and lots of grease, served on wax paper and eaten with our fingers. The bars in Punta Gorda sold good stout in plain brown bottles. Everyone cooked with coconut oil and milk. Sweet coconut bread buns were sold by little girls who walked the grassy lanes of Punta Gorda, carrying baskets covered with tea towels, almost too shy to show me what they were selling.
Punta Gorda was a trip. The beaches weren’t great, but I still went swimming among the jellyfish. Walking back, I chatted with some young guys gathered under a large spreading ceiba that they called “the learning tree,” and later went with a Rasta named Soul to a shanty on the outskirts of town to buy a spliff and get high right there on a Gospel Sunday afternoon. Folks spoke English to me, but when they conversed with each other, I heard an incomprehensible blend of English, Belizean Creole, and Spanish. Besides fishing, not much work was available. When people needed something, they were so laid back they’d just ask for it. Thanks to this custom, I was able to present a pair of pants I wasn’t wearing to an old man. The town was inhabited by a mix of Creoles, Garifuna, Maya, and peachfuzz-cheeked British soldiers.[7] The music was good – lots of reggae, and the funkiest U.S. music.
Madman had his finger on the little pulse of Punta Gorda. When he heard a truck transporting empty bottles would be stopping in town on its way to Belize City, he let me know I could catch a ride with it. Just one road meanders the 270 kilometers north to Belize City, and I’d heard that the hitching could be painfully slow, so I decided to take him up on the offer. It turned out I wasn’t alone.
That night, two other Americans – Bruce and David – joined me on the “empties express,” which stopped for the night in Big Falls. After sharing canned mackerel and crackers for dinner, we crawled into our hammocks, rising at four AM to be on our way. From the back of the truck, we got a good look at the dense tropical forest we were passing through. Most houses were mounted on stilts; churches adhered to the English Colonial style. We helped load the crates of empties as we stopped in shantytowns – Hellgate, Bella Vista, Georgetown, Santa Cruz, Silk Grass, Bocotora, Hattieville. By noon, we were being dropped off at the Belize City docks, where the three of us found a skiff going to Caye Caulker, 30 kilometers northeast into the Caribbean.
Footnotes:
[1] Tuesday, April 8th.
[2] The Hermitage of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the patroness of the Carmelites, one of the first religious orders of Christian hermits.
[3] A shallow dugout canoe carved from the trunk of a palm tree.
[4] Literal translation, fiery or burning water, made from fermented sugar cane mash.
[5] An open-sided dwelling with a palm thatch roof.
[6] After an unintentionally funny column in the University of Iowa’s student newspaper, The Daily Iowan.
[7] The Creoles are descendants of enslaved Africans; the Garifuna are descendants of Maroons (Africans escaped from slavery) who mixed with Native Arawak and Carib people.