The Wonder Trail

by Steve Hely

  She told me all this while we walked through the modern-day town of Palenque, which sucks. About eight kilometers down the road from the ruins of the seventh-century city, it’s just a bust of a town, not even terrible enough to be interesting. The best neighborhood in it is the cemetery, where the aboveground tombs are colorful and wackily, cheerily decorated, and there’s no traffic. The cemeteries in southern Mexico are pretty great, generally, the one in San Cristóbal terrific, but there the town of the living can compete with the town of the dead. In Palenque it’s an easy win for the ghosts. We walked through a grassy park that was okay, except for the guy on the bench who stared at us with a fiendish smile and obvious intent to rape and dismember one or both of us. Pam seemed oblivious to this, and it was a wonder to me no harm had come to her yet, although maybe her pie-eyed quality somehow kept a bubble of safety around her. She could speak Spanish better than me, that was for sure, but even that she did with a giddy enthusiasm.

  She was headed, like I was, to Guatemala. For me, it was the next country to pass through on the wonder trail south—for her, it was where she planned to spend the next month.

  Together we found a tour operator to take us to some remote Mayan ruins along the Usumacinta River. Up until the mid-2000s, this was wild country. Bandits robbed rafters, the Guatemalan side was held by rebel guerrillas, and the Mexican side was occupied by army units that might’ve been into various criminal activities in their off-hours. Illegal immigration and logging is still a problem along the Usumacinta. The country’s pretty rugged, the river cuts through thick jungle, but I gotta say I had a pretty pleasant day riding a motorized wooden canoe up it with Pam and a few young Mexican tourists. There was a crocodile laid out on a sandbar along the banks. The ruins of Yaxchilán, a riverfront city that hit its peak around the year AD 800, are worth the visit, real Indiana Jones stuff, overgrown. In the dark stone temples, you can shine your flashlight up and see hundreds of bats. Palm-size spiders scurry away along the damp walls. In the 1880s, the English explorer Alfred Maudslay, who had family money from an ancestor who helped invent the screw-cutting lathe, hacked his way down here, cut out one of the best carvings of Yaxchilán, lintel 24, and shipped it back to the British Museum, where it remains. We now know from reading its inscription that lintel 24 depicts Lord Shield Jaguar, “captor of Ah-Ahaual,” and his wife, Lady Xoc, who is pulling a barbed rope through her tongue. Lord Shield Jaguar was into that, I guess. In the carving he’s standing over her. He has something attached to his headband, which might be a shrunken head, maybe Ah-Ahaual’s head.

  The next day, I planned to cross the river into Guatemala. So in the late afternoon the van dropped me off at a dirt crossroads where there was a place that rented cabins. Pam got off, too. We were in the Lacandon Jungle now, where the indigenous people wear a tunic called a xikul and leave their hair long under a simple bowl cut, like Gene Simmons. We walked down the road, where a strange Lacandon woman came up to us, chattered at us for a while in some indigenous language, and then walked on. She seemed crazy, but how could you tell?

  The sound of singing and frantic preaching came from a painted wooden church. It didn’t stop for a good three hours. Pam, ever frugal, was planning to just sling her hammock somewhere, but I told her to stay in my cabin, and we slept to the white noise of ten thousand or so insects.

  In the morning she was gone. Down at the riverbank, I crossed into Guatemala in a motorized canoe for fifty centivos. In the wooden shop that doubled as a bus station in the border village on the Guatemala side, she was cheerfully waiting. Together we rode for four hours in a converted school bus to Flores, a cramped city on an island in Lake Petén Itzá that was once Nojpetén, the last holdout of the Maya, bombarded into submission by the Spanish in 1697. In a picture taken from a distance, Flores looks lovely, filling its little island with red-roofed houses with white plaster. When you’re in it, though, it’s nasty, smelly, and malevolent and full of mosquitoes. Pam, determined as usual to do the worst thing possible, planned to stay there, but I convinced her to come with me, and I hired a taxi to take us to El Remate, a chilled-out village on the remoter side of the lake.

  The single best photograph I ever took traveling, the one I’d submit to a travel photo contest, I took in El Remate. It’s of a motorbike, parked under a tree in shallow water, beyond the end of a worn gravel road that disappears into the lake. Light from the sunset reflects off the water, giving a pink tone. The kids who had the bike were barefoot in the water, catching minnows.

  The next morning while it was still dark, Pam and I got on a bus that took us to Tikal, maybe the greatest Mayan city of them all, where the tops of the pyramids stand above the treetops of the jungle. Scholars have worked out a dynastic order of thirty or so rulers of Tikal, including two women. The last of these was dead more than a thousand years ago. On the top of one of the pyramids, I sat and watched child monkeys jump around and chitter and grab fruit from the branches of the trees.

  Pam was spending three weeks in Guatemala. She had a long list of places to go. For instance, a remote mountainside village where they make a special kind of fermented cheese.

  Well, Pam was an excellent person, truly interesting. But if I stopped at every remote cheese-making village in Central America, I’d never get to the bottom of the Western Hemisphere, so I wished her well and we parted ways.

  If you’re out there, Pam, I hope you’re doing terrific.

  The Murals at Bonampak

  Before researchers could read their inscriptions, imaginative speculators could fill the silence left by the ancient Maya with anything they wanted. You could believe the ancient Maya were mystical, harmonious, and peaceful dwellers of the forest. Something like Smurfs.

  But slowly, the glyphs revealed themselves. Many of the inscriptions had to do with the complex Mayan calendar. Births, deaths, ascensions to the throne. Then, too, there were glyphs like “he was captured,” “he is the captor of,” “it was destroyed.”

  In 1946, Giles Healey,* who was exploring the jungles of far southern Mexico on an assignment for the United Fruit Company, discovered or was taken to the ancient Mayan site of Bonampak. He may have been tipped off by Charles Frey, sometimes described as an impoverished draft dodger, who drowned mysteriously a few years later. No matter. In spider- and bat-filled stone rooms atop the overgrown pyramids at Bonampak, Healey found and photographed murals that were painted in vivid color sometime around the year AD 770, before the great cathedrals of medieval Europe had even been begun.

  Professor Mary Miller of Yale, foremost expert on the Bonampak murals, and Professor Claudia Brittenham of the University of Chicago, describe them as “an artistic tour-de-force, outstanding in their sheer quality and artistic conception . . . a powerful and sophisticated reflection on the spectacle of courtly life and the nature of artistic practice, a work that reaches beyond the confines of its time, a window onto a world that could not know its doomed future.”

  That’s all true. Cleaned up a bit by the time I stepped into the still-spidery rooms and saw them, the murals at Bonampak have incredible, vivid colors. Depicted on them are parades and processions, dancers, trumpets, parasols, cloaks made of jaguar pelts, smokers of pipes, a king ascending the throne.

  Also depicted is a crazy intense battle, with bodies tumbling all over each other, people spearing each other and hacking away at each other. Plus: prisoners screaming as their fingernails are ripped out.

  The Maya achieved all kinds of astronomical, mathematical, and calendrical wonders. They were also violent bullies who were capturing, torturing, and killing each other.

  But, I guess, what civilization isn’t?

  Now, do me a favor: Take a look, you can find it online, at the mural from room 2 at Bonampak, the “battle mural.”

  Now take a look at any mural Diego Rivera painted. Any one will do, but try, say, the murals he did for the National Palace in Mexico City. He began these in 19
29, more than a decade before Bonampak was, supposedly, discovered.

  These murals were painted 1,200 years apart, but in the same country. Don’t you think the artists who did each of them would understand each other?

  Central America—Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama

  Catherwood & Stephens

  Sometimes the president of the United States has a problem: He doesn’t know who’s in charge somewhere. Who’s he supposed to be dealing with?

  I’d guess this is a problem every president could relate to. In 1839, President Martin Van Buren had this problem with Central America. So he asked John Lloyd Stephens to go down there and take a look.

  John Stephens was a New York lawyer who also had a side career as a travel writer. In those days, sometimes if you got sick, what you did was take a trip, which seems counterproductive but maybe it worked. Stephens got a mysterious respiratory illness, maybe tuberculosis, so he went to the Middle East. When he got back, he published Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Paetra, and the Holy Land and then a sequel, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland. These books were “received with great favour,” I’m told, and Stephens got a reputation as “an excellent and agreeable writer of Travel and Narrative,” which is exactly the reputation I’m after.

  I even look kinda like Stephens, at least according to the sketch in my copy of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, the third in the series. (Be careful, don’t get this one confused with Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, book 4, recounting adventures from when Stephens went back for one more look). Not that I’m putting myself up there with Stephens, believe me. Despite his nerdy appearance and bemused writing style, the stuff Stephens went through was true adventure. Everywhere he went he was in danger of dying of disease, and his every moment, by my standards, was uncomfortable. I slept in beds most every night and was on edge if I went three days without WiFi. But then again, I doubt Stephens was that free of disease or mishap in 1839 Manhattan.

  Anyway: Van Buren’s first pick for this job died, and Stephens got the job. He sailed from New York City to Belize with his buddy, Frederick Catherwood, who was an English architect and draftsman.

  Catherwood was a tremendous illustrator—just look:

  I mean, the guy is fantastic. If you can look at Catherwood’s illustrations and not be interested in the people who built these ruined cities of the jungle, then, man, you’ve looked at too much Internet. Imagine how interesting these illustrations looked in 1839, when there was no Internet!

  Our two friends trekked around three thousand miles of southern Mexico, Guatemala, and what’s now Honduras and El Salvador and Nicaragua. They went by mule and boat, dodging cholera epidemics and insurgents and criminals. Stephens describes weddings and funerals and fiestas and cockfights and bullfights. They got arrested, they slept out storms in leaking barns, they saw snakes and parrots and monkeys and jaguars. They got arrested, they climbed volcanoes, they witnessed revolutions, investigated oddities, forged rapids, crawled into caves. They hacked their way into ruins. Stephens loved ruins. He couldn’t get enough of them. Nothing made him happier than sleeping under the stones of an abandoned Mayan palace. He tried to buy Palenque. The local authorities wouldn’t let him unless he was married to a Mexican woman, so his immediate reaction was to check out and consider the local teenagers and widows, before deciding it probably wouldn’t work out. His dream was to buy a whole Mayan city and somehow float it to New York.

  Catherwood and Stephens explored forty-four ruined cities. Catherwood would draw the toppled statues and overgrown walls and inscriptions, sometimes while wearing gloves to protect his hands from all the mosquitoes. These guys went through the wringer. One day, Stephens says, some kind of tick hatched inside his foot, and he had to cut them out with his knife, and then his foot was so inflamed he couldn’t get his shoe on, so he had to leave it hanging out for a day while black flies ate away at it, which he couldn’t feel at the time but which left “marks like the punctures of a hundred pins.” A few days later he finds Catherwood: “He was wan and gaunt; lame, like me, from the bites of insects; his face was swollen and his left arm hung with rheumatism as if paralyzed.” Stephens sorta just moves on from that, assuming no doubt that Catherwood would shake it off. No doubt he did.

  The one consolation for Stephens in his travels was his favorite thing: smoking. Waking up soaked one morning after sleeping in the ruins of Palenque, finding his tortillas all moldy, he says, “Blessed be the man who invented smoking, the soother and composer of a troubled spirit, allayer of angry passions, a comfort under the loss of breakfast, and to the roamer in desolate places, the solitary wayfarer through life, serving for ‘wife, children, and friends.’” A strong stance, but I gotta say the more I traveled, the more I started to agree with him.

  Catherwood and Stephens never did really figure out who was in charge in this part of the world. The problem, it seemed, was that nobody was. What had once been a kind of Federation of Central America had collapsed. Various gangs and warlords were fighting it out, things shifted, it was hard to say.

  So they sailed back to New York and published their book, which was a big hit. Catherwood’s fantastical illustrations sparked and kept alive curiosity about the Maya. They went back for another trip, and then they went their separate ways. Stephens became president of a company, a start-up, you might say, that aimed to put a railway across the Isthmus of Panama. But he caught some combination of tropical illnesses—“by long and incautious exposure in that deadly climate . . . brought on a disease which terminated fatally in the autumn of 1852,” says Catherwood, in a fond reminiscence of his friend, reprinted in my copy of Incidents of Travel in Central America. Three years later, Catherwood himself was lost at sea and presumed drowned when the steamship Arctic crashed into the Vesta, off the coast of Newfoundland.

  Disasters of Guatemala

  Guatemala is literally unstable. Like: The ground, the very earth underneath it is unsteady. Volcanoes pock the earth like acne on an unfortunate teen. The active volcano Pacaya gurgles to this day. I toasted a marshmallow in a hot and sulfury crack in its rock. You can see Pacaya from the capital, it’s less than twenty miles away. There are plenty more. You could walk the length of the country from her northwestern border with Mexico to the southeastern border with El Salvador on volcanic ridges (but why would you?).

  The old city of Antigua used to be the capital, back when Guatemala was a Spanish kingdom. But it got destroyed too many times in earthquakes. For forty quetzals you can climb all over the collapsed stones of the Iglesia y Convento de la Recolección. On the other side of town, you can stare up at the wide blue sky from between the open arches of the old Catedral de Santiago. The place couldn’t stop getting ruined. So they moved the capital to Guatemala City, which isn’t very far away, where the earthquake and volcano problems continued.

  I can’t read Spanish well enough to go truly deep into the history of Guatemala. What I’ve read in English tells me a story of misfortune and misadventure and catastrophe.

  Beyond the earth shaking and sporadically spitting rock and fire on everyone, it’s a tough country to get around. The mountains are big, the jungle vegetation grows thick, the rivers plummet and roar and aren’t easy to paddle along. The devastation that followed the Spanish left Guatemala even more isolated. When the Spanish were done destroying Tenochtitlán, they’d also destroyed a social, economic, cultural, and political network of trade and exchange that rippled out around it. Destruction continued as Spanish adventurers hacked their way outward on expeditions that ended in disappointment for the adventurers and disaster for everyone they encountered. Compounding all this, maybe many times over, were new diseases hitting vulnerable populations that’d never been exposed to them before.

  Our old friend, Cortés’s guy, Bernal Díaz ended up in Guatemala, where he’d been awarded a plantation. But he didn’t get rich there.
There wasn’t enough of anything anybody wanted to put much effort into connecting Guatemala to the wider world of trade and money. Missionaries from the various Catholic orders came, souls are souls and they wanted those. But Guatemala’s rugged country, it’s hard to get around on foot and mule. By the time some dusty and ragged missionary showed up in a mountain village, he might not find it all that easy to convince people to worship his sacrificed god whose pronouncements were written in an incomprehensible book and who had commanded this missionary to lead a bizarre and sexless lifestyle. Mayan languages and village traditions hung on in the valleys and hilltops of Guatemala. No new order replaced all that, for hundreds of years in some places, to this day in some places.

  People tried imposing new orders. Dictators, revolutionaries, executives for fruit conglomerates, CIA operatives, communists, criminals, all kinds of missionaries, lunatics, bullies. Local uprisings, violent oppressions, ragtag armies hacking and shooting each other, people getting their heads put on spikes.