Most travelers – even loners-with-social-tendencies, like myself -- are audience to a fair bit of storytelling. Some of it is cautionary, some of it fantastical, some of it predictable. I’ve heard a hundred stories about people getting their stuff stolen, getting sick here or there, missing this or that connection and the wild adventures that ensued. Then there are stories of love lost or found, new life paths discovered, histories transformed. We can become the closest friends – if even for a couple of days. We can tell each other secrets, make promises to stay in touch. . . and indeed, these promises are sometimes fulfilled.I took a long journey from Guatemala to Mexico about a week ago – by boat and van and foot, I arrived in the afternoon rain to San Cristobal de las Casas, in the Chiapas state of Mexico. Most people know Chiapas for its revolution in the early ‘90s -- in which the Zapatistas, led by Subcomandante Marcos (formerly a university professor. . . see how dangerous are the educated!) emerged from the forests and took control of San Cristobal. Supposedly the goal was to overturn the centuries-old control of the oligarchy and to give power and land back to the indigenous populations – which have been exploited and abused in Chiapas as they have been everywhere else in the world. I made it my business to become a regular in a couple local establishments – namely, the rebel café, Tierra Dentro (great coffee, lots of people with laptops, others having important-seeming conversations. . . probably about revolution, and lots of young bohemians with asymmetrical haircuts). I also ate twice at the local Argentine restaurant, saw a documentary about Fidel Castro, and took shelter inside a tin-roofed supermarket on the edge of town to escape the afternoon deluge while enroute to the Mayan Medicine Museum.
What left a deeper impression than anything in San Cristobal was the nearby Canon de Sumidero, where I went by boat along a river that had carved its way through the earth – and where now the plastic Coke bottles compete in population with the herons.
I left a Semana-Santa-weary San Cristobal on a night bus to Pochutla, where I would get a taxi or a collectivo to my recommended spot above the ocean. I had been assured it was a safe night trip, so I figured I’d go for it. About three hours into the ride, we were delayed by a collision between two tour buses. We sat in the road for hours, engine off -- the only lights the flashing of ambulances passing back and forth. Reports from fellow travelers were that 16 had been killed and several more injured. I felt lucky for just losing a few hours rather than my life, and settled on a plane ticket for my next move.
I woke up the other morning, looked out the picture window to the Pacific, and left my cabana built on the rocky cliffs above the Playa Aragon to go to the lovely private composting latrine. I couldn’t help but feel some alarm upon noticing that there was a world of large black ants marching across the patio in formation, and also in both the toilet and shower sections of the bathroom. ‘Take heart -- you’re in nature!’ I reassured myself. And onward I went, sustaining minor bites on the feet while brushing my teeth. I dressed and went up the hill to the main house -- where Mario, the charismatic, worldly and energetic owner and host of Rancho Cerro Largo had asked me to lead the morning yoga class. Normally it’s his gig, but he insisted that it would be fun for everyone to have someone different teach, so of course I obliged him.
Before class, I mentioned the ant issue to Chofo, the Karate-chopping multi-lingual Zapotec manager of Rancho Cerro Largo. He assured me that the ants would pass, that they make their way up the hillside every so often, ‘cleaning the earth,’ finding worms and other small delicacies of the soil to take back to their holes and feed on in the rainy season -- which is fast approaching. He said that by the time I had taught yoga and eaten breakfast, they would be gone. This was a fascinating phenomenon – that the ants would simply clean up and leave? Jesus, maybe they could work on my desk in Brooklyn, pay a few bills, dust. . . Sure enough, by the time I returned to my little pied a terre on the Oaxacan coastline, the ants had indeed passed.
What makes us move? What makes us stay in one place? What sustains some connections while others are fleeting? These are the things I’ve been thinking about the last few days. I got really sick after a glorious day on the beach in San Agustinillo, followed by an evening of food and some kind of delicious Mexican grappa and music and storytelling by Mario and the other guests – one, a chef from Mexico City who is married to one of the most famous singers in Mexico, and another restaurateur from Oaxaca City. They were telling me about the hootenanny that preceded my arrival, which was led by New York’s very own Mark Ribot – unfortunately he and his wife and their teenage daughter left the day that I arrived. Those remaining sang some boleros – which aren’t necessarily sad, but are always romantic. The thing that always gets me about Mexican love songs is that so many of these dudes cheat on their wives. . . please! I mean – do what you have to do. . . it’s just hard to take the pleas to love and longing very seriously in light of things. . . but the music is nice.
Though it was a shame to spend an entire day sick in bed, it wasn’t the worst place in the world to convalesce. . . sea breezes sweeping through the open windows, a hammock when the bed became tiresome, and privacy for my misery. . . save for the insects. I can’t seem to develop love for insects of any kind, and they don’t make good company. They just poison you and gorge themselves on your blood -- then they disappear, they move on.
There are a couple of things that have been making me think about transience and connections. One is a book I read while I was sick called The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. After wading (pun intended) through Moby Dick for the last month and a half (brilliant though it is), I needed more of a page-turner during my suffering. It’s about two lonely people in New York – one, a teenage girl who’s trying to help her depressed mother find happiness again, and the other, a Holocaust survivor whose survival had depended on a) being invisible and b) his love for two people in the world to whom he could not make himself known. I guess it’s also the passing from one place to another that’s been making me think about the formations and rhythms in which we march across the earth. I have seen more of Guatemala than the average Guatemalan, and also more of Mexico than the average Mexican. Mario told me about one of his Zapotec friends who lived in a village in the mountains just a few hundred meters above the beach where he has his eco-villa (delightfully reminiscent of the as yet undrawn but oft imagined blueprints for the locale of Bacchanal 2010. . . which may have to become Bacchanal 2012 in light of the Mayan calendar), and this man had never seen the ocean.
Sometimes it seems like keeping your world a little smaller might have some benefits. The only problem is that once you leave – as the saying goes -- you can never really go home. Things change. Rivers carve their way through stone and paved highways replace dirt roads and populations of ants clear the surface of the earth. Everything transforms. People aren’t any less dynamic than the places they inhabit. I guess all we have is the moment -- some addresses and memories and bug bites and a few beaded bracelets.
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