by Wendy Dale
But the strangest sight of all were the signs that appeared along the road. Even after I painstakingly translated one of them with the help of a Spanish dictionary, its meaning still eluded me: “Don’t leave your rocks on the highway.” This kind of warning just didn’t appear along the California freeways. There were Slippery when Wet, Dangerous Curves Ahead, even the occasional Falling Rocks signs, but never before had I come across any request to kindly leave my stones elsewhere.
I turned to my father who was seated next to me in the backseat, figuring that after having lived in the country for nearly a year, he’d be able to help me make sense of the signs, but my mother was quick to interrupt.
“Honey, they put them up because so many people have been leaving their rocks on the highway,” she explained. I waited for my mother to complete her explanation, but clarity was not her strong point.
“Dad,” I said, turning to my Mensan parent, “Why is everyone going around carrying rocks and leaving them on the highway?”
“When their cars break down, which they do a lot, instead of using triangles or flares to divert other cars, they pile rocks in the road so that traffic swerves out of the path of their vehicle. But a lot of people get their cars fixed and leave the rocks. Hence the request—”
“Please don’t leave your rocks on the highway.”
“Exactly.”
Twenty minutes later, successfully having avoided all the rocks in our path, we arrived in my parents’ neighborhood, the ritziest area in town, where a two-story, three-bedroom Spanish colonial-style house ran my parents four hundred dollars a month, a price way out of reach of all but the wealthiest Hondurans. My younger sisters ran out to greet me, and after a round of gleeful screams and boisterous hugs my father insisted on having us all go inside so that he could show me around the place. Heather and Catherine, who had already taken this tour upon their separate arrivals, had found it so amusing they insisted on going one more time.
“Wait till he explains about the toilet,” Heather whispered to me as we huddled around the amenity, the first time I could remember that four Dales had entered the bathroom at the same time.
Other than being forest green, it looked like any normal toilet to me. “Toilet paper is the great enemy of Honduran plumbing,” my father explained, launching into a lengthy description of the septic system of the house. This was like poetry to my dad, and when it came to explaining any scientific process, he could ramble on for hours and hours. As children, he had inculcated us in the finer details of plate tectonics, ensured we could spot fake trilobite fossils at a glance, and trained us never to leave home without our emergency bottle of hydrochloric acid, in the event that an innocent bike ride would result in the immediate need to determine the chemical composition of a mineral sample picked up along the way.
His motto was that if you understood, you’d never have to memorize. You didn’t learn the periodic table by rote; you comprehended it. Ag stood for silver because argentum meant silver in Latin, which was where Argentina got its name. Ask him to pass the sugar at the breakfast table and he’d end up explaining the entire fermentation process for you.
As a consequence, our “why phase” as children lasted only a matter of days. Other kids got the pleasure of watching their parents roll their eyes, throw up their hands, and plead, “Just quit asking questions!” But by the time we were three, we actually knew why grass was green (a result of the chlorophyll), how come the sky was blue (the cones in our retina respond most strongly to the short blue wavelength of the color spectrum), and the reasons birds flew (a column of decreased air pressure created by the movement of their wings).
This tutelage continued even as adults, and today we weren’t going to get out of the bathroom until we learned the workings of the entire plumbing system in the house. By the time he’d finished and we all knew how to fix the sink in the event that a meteorite came crashing down on it, I couldn’t quite remember what the point was.
“Don’t throw any paper in the toilet,” Catherine summed up. Instead, we were supposed to dispose of our used bits of tissue in the wastebasket, a rule in force in the bathrooms throughout Central America.
Now that we were on the subject of strange Latin American habits, there was one other issue I needed clearing up immediately.
“Do they ever switch their soda from bottles to cans?” I asked anxiously, wondering if anything had changed in the two decades I’d been gone.
“No,” my father said, happy to continue today’s lesson. “They drink it out of plastic bags.”
This was something even my sisters had a hard time buying. “What—you go to the store and buy yourself a little baggie of Coke?” Heather asked.
“Or Pepsi,” my dad added, launching into a lengthy explanation of the raw materials of Honduras that might have been titled:
“The Scarcity of Raw Materials Combined with a Limited Economy and the Resulting Cultural Anomalies Among the Honduran Population”
Author’s note: For reasons of length, the full text has been omitted. See abstract below.
Abstract: In Honduras, it’s cheaper to drink soda out of a bag.
To get a sense of what Honduras was like, you have to know a little bit about its history, which has had a lot more to do with bananas than any sane country is likely to consider prudent. Beginning in the early 1900s, this yellow innocuous-looking fruit has been the source of civil unrest, military occupation, strategic alliances, and, of course, potassium.
In the early twentieth century, Honduras became the epitome of a banana republic—and not the kind selling high-quality cotton shirts at the mall. This was a poor nation that relinquished its national hold on its own interests in the pursuance of a higher good: money. Like a poor kid who invites his unpleasant rich neighbor to his birthday party in the hopes of scoring a Game Boy, Honduras welcomed U.S. investment in the region and in return offered to sing the tune “Happy Birthday” in English.2 In exchange for the construction of roads and railroads, Honduras handed over its fertile farmland to American banana companies, which in the end turned out to be like getting the cartridges for free while having to rent the Game Boy.
For the next sixty years, the United States exerted its imperialist hold on the region, doing everything from applying stern diplomatic pressure to financing government overthrows, while Honduras went through the normal phases of development for a Latin American country: the oral stage, in which it paid lip service to U.S. demands; the anal stage, in which it became obsessive and detail-oriented in complying with these demands; the phallic stage, in which it realized that the United States was a lot bigger than it was; and the genital stage, which led the country to the conclusion that it was completely screwed.
Within a few years of the arrival of the American fruit companies, the true power of the banana had begun to surface. In the past, its capacity to transform three scoops of ice cream into a mighty dessert had been common knowledge; however, it soon became evident that its metamorphic powers stretched to the Honduran political climate as well. Banana companies began placing their employees in local government positions, offering kickbacks to sympathetic politicians, and funding insurgent military groups to topple noncooperative presidents.
In the 1980s, while the United States saw the advent of Cabbage Patch Kids, parachute pants, Strawberry Shortcake, and the Smurfs, Central America too went through tremendous changes. The majority of inhabitants in the region were sick of being poor, sick of being mistreated, sick of the United States, and sick to death of bananas. Honduras’ rebel neighbors, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, figured that Marxism had nothing to do with any of this unpleasantness and with the help of Cuba and the Soviet Union, launched a successful guerrilla campaign that eventually overthrew the right-wing Anastasio Somoza dictatorship.
This did not make Ronald Reagan very happy. With all the changes going on in this part of the world, his address book was too small to keep crossing out the name of the current leader of Nicaragua, and,
besides, this Soviet-Cuban alliance was beginning to reek of communism.
If there was one thing he had learned from U.S. history, it was that presidents were not above the law, but Hollywood celebrities generally were. Hoping that his past as an actor would sway a jury, he illegally sold arms to the Iranians and used these funds to covertly fund the Contras, the right-wing Nicaraguan guerrillas determined to defeat the left-wing Sandinista regime.3 And since Honduras was right next door and practically a U.S. colony, it provided an ideal Contra training base.
Eventually the war ended, the threat of communism dissipated, and the U.S. presence in the region waned. Honduras entered a stage of fledgling democracy but remained one of the poorest Latin American nations.
These days, Uncle Sam’s influence basically consisted of international aid and a strong diplomatic presence in the region, but my mother still held out hope that there was some secret agenda. In fact, now that Rosa, the underpaid Honduran maid, had taken charge of mopping the floor, scrubbing the bathroom, washing dishes, and ironing the clothes, my mother was devoting the majority of her time to trying to figure out who was CIA among all her new embassy pals.
Based on a string of dubious clues and rampant rumors, my mother had pieced together a list of those she was positive were agents. And whenever one of the embassy people invited her to dinner or a luncheon social, she was sure to attend, trying to gather as much information as possible on what she was convinced was the U.S. secret plan for Central America.
As it turned out, she hadn’t been all wrong. My sisters and I couldn’t help but giggle when Mom explained that in spite of all her digging and prying, a real CIA agent had been sitting right under her nose. In an attempt to sort out the rumors about James McPherson being a spook, one day she had set her best friend, Maggie, down for chocolate-chip cookies and a heart-to-heart interrogation.
“All this CIA stuff that everyone is talking about. Maggie, I just know it has to be true.”
“Cathie, you really can’t tell anyone. This is serious.”
“Oh, I won’t. I promise.”
“Besides, my job—it’s nothing that important. I just take down messages.”
“Oh my gosh!” my mother screamed. “You are an agent?”
“You said you knew,” poor Maggie said aghast, realizing she had just entrusted one of the nation’s secrets to a woman who would from then on refer to her as “my best friend, the CIA agent.”
Of course the magic word was “ambassador,” and any time the word got brought up my mother was quick to remind us that she had been invited to the American ambassador’s house on not one, but two, occasions. And although she had never met the man personally, she had had tea with his wife. My mother had turned into a Third World socialite.
While she was off eating finger sandwiches and teacakes, my brother had painstakingly downloaded The Anarchist’s Cookbook on a disturbingly slow Central American Internet connection and had set about to turning himself into an anarchist chef—which actually did have its bright side. Because my mother refused to buy the ingredients he needed for his experiments, he had been forced to learn Spanish on his own and when it came to chemicals and fireworks, he had become quite fluent. Now he was able to complain about his life in two languages: “Honduras is a pit. When are we going to move to a country where I can actually get a DSL line?” he would gripe, in between blowing up small portions of the country.
Meanwhile, my father had been busy with a project of his own. “Jalapeño chili peppers,” my mother explained. “Your father has become a jalapeño-chili-pepper farmer in Honduras.”
Most people, upon hearing such news, would have reacted with some surprise. I, however, did not come from a typical family. “Again?” I asked.
My mother rolled her eyes. “Again,” she said.
My father had tried farming once before. For years as a mining engineer, he had felt something was missing from his life: poverty, we assumed, because he rashly quit his well-paying job in Peru and moved his wife and three daughters to the backwoods of Tennessee. We were all to take part in his dream of self-subsistence—though when we first got there, there hadn’t been much to subsist on. I was only seven years old, but it didn’t take me long to notice that we didn’t have a house to live in. “Quit complaining,” my dad scolded me. “Look at the bright side. We have a car.”
And the bright side was, it was a big car—one of those 1970s station wagons whose seats fold back—which was very convenient when a family of five (Richard hadn’t been born yet) was going to sleep in one of them.
My mother had her doubts about the whole project, but my father remained upbeat.
“Dick, you’ve never been a farmer before. How will you know where to begin?”
“Don’t worry, pookie,” my father answered in the same tone of voice that had gotten my mother to agree to the whole scheme in the first place. “I have a lot of books on the subject.”
The sight of my father sprawled out on the grass in front of our station wagon reading about agriculture caused a great deal of laughter among our neighbors. After all, they were real farmers. Their farms had animals, unlike ours, which just consisted of two hundred acres of vacant land, half of which was a forest infested with wild boars. But within two months, my father had planted an orchard, bought us a trailer, built us a greenhouse, and had become a major source of information for the farmers who now timidly trekked over to our land to ask my dad’s opinion on pesticides, planting times, and harvesting seasons.
My dad’s farm only lasted as long as my mother could stand the project. Concerned that her daughters were developing a taste for wild squirrel and that we would think lice shampoo was what everyone used to wash their hair, she convinced my father that open-pit mining wasn’t such a bad way to spend his days, and within a year we were back in the real world, in a real house, with real beds to sleep in. But those eleven months of my childhood left their mark, and from time to time I remembered that it was my father who taught me that it didn’t matter what the neighbors thought, that it was okay to sleep in a station wagon as long as you had a dream.
In the four days I’d been in Honduras, we hadn’t really done much of anything. We’d basically just lounged around the living room laughing and joking while eating the food made by the maid: chow mein (her last job had been with a Chinese family) and refried beans, the only two items she seemed to know how to prepare. My brother would ditch us in favor of his best friends, a set of American twins living down the street, and the rest of us would sprawl out on the floor, cracking each other up with embarrassing stories about the members of our family.
There wasn’t a lot of material on most of us: Heather at age nineteen was blond, boisterous, and bubbly, an antiacademic with an academic’s résumé—she was at the top of her class and she kept piling up grants and awards. Catherine was quieter, darker, and introspective, qualities at odds with her stunning good looks—but these traits weren’t exactly incriminating. Dad was always cloning blueberries or cacti in a climate-controlled lab that he had set up for himself in the house, which would have made for a few good jokes, but we tended to see his eccentricities as endearing. That left my mother. Her grasp on reality was so far removed that we could spend hours on end making fun of it.
She was always doing airheaded things like picking us up at the airport and expecting us to remember where she had parked the car. And there were her inappropriate comments during otherwise coherent conversations, something that came to be known as a Mom sequitur. There was the time that she was so busy talking to my father that she accidentally followed him into the men’s rest room. Seeing a guy in there, she chided him, “Excuse me, is this a unisex bathroom?” And there was the whole moving story told to me by my sisters (I was already living in Los Angeles when this notorious relocation occurred), when my family caravaned from Montana to Phoenix in three separate cars, one driven by my father, one by my mother, the other by fifteen-year-old Heather who had learned how to operate a moto
r vehicle just weeks earlier. My father had insisted that everyone make two signs out of poster board: Bathroom Break and Food Break. And my sisters ended up making a third sign, just for Mom: Turn off Turn Signal.
People outside my family saw our joking as cruel, though it was my mother who always laughed the hardest, enjoying constantly being the center of attention. “Don’t say a word while I’m gone!” she’d insist, not wanting to miss anything during her bathroom break.
At the end of the night, our favorite activity was to read from Mom’s diaries, which I had insisted she give me when she had been tossing out everything else in preparation for their trip to Honduras. Reading the events of her adolescent life inevitably had us rolling on the floor, especially the June 14, 1964, entry:
Dear Diary, June 14, 1964
I’ve got just oodles to tell you!!
Well, today I was diving down at the pool & I met so many cute boys. They were giving me all these unneeded instructions on the art of diving. (phooey!) When I got at the end of the line, they put me all the way in the front. (such gentlemen!)
The other night, my mother & Mrs. Howe were discussing whether teenagers ever think deep. Of course we do! Why right now Im wondering what I’ll be, who I’ll marry, about religion, & life in general. But people just think that were delinquents, (so that we can’t express our deepest feelings.)
I just measured my face & here is the comparison between a perfect oval & my face!
Well, I’ve got a round face!
I’m going to try a new hair style tomorrow (not tonight because it’s too late.) It’s called “Offbeat Bubble.”
You know when I get married I want to have a daughter, & if I do, I hope that we’ll be close & she’ll be able to confide in me. & if she ever says that I just “don’t understand,” (like I say to my mom) I’ll just pull out this diary & let her take a peak! ooh la la!
It was that last paragraph that always made me sad because she had almost been right. In thirty-one years, she hadn’t really changed. She was a taller, plumper version of that fourteen-year-old girl, and true to her word she had never turned into a stern authority figure like her mother.
