The Wonder Trail

by Steve Hely

  This became kind of a pattern in Central America.

  When John L. Stephens was in Guatemala City, he said you had to be careful walking around at night or you’d get shot by “sentinels” working for somebody or another. He had dinner with a young widow whose husband “had been shot in a private revolution of his own getting up.”

  Private revolutions of somebody’s own getting up seemed to happen a lot in Guatemala. Take the United Fruit Company. This conglomerate emerged out of companies started by sailors bringing bananas home to Boston. By the early 1900s, United Fruit was enormous, well financed, powerful, and could do more or less whatever it wanted.

  Take their land deals, for instance, which were negotiated with whoever seemed like the friendliest strongman by the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. A partner from Sullivan & Cromwell, John Foster Dulles, became our secretary of state. His brother, Allen, who was on the board of directors of the United Fruit Company, was head of the CIA for a while. It’s not even a secret that the CIA was behind a 1954 coup that overthrew an elected president of Guatemala. Dwight Eisenhower discusses it calmly, even with a little pride, in his memoirs.

  But CIA-funded coups never seem to lead to happy endings in the long run. So it was in Guatemala. By 1960, the country was in a full-on, multisided civil war. It wouldn’t end until 1996. Maybe 200,000 people died. There were massacres and roundings up, bombings and assassinations. When the Catholic archbishop tried to put together a report about the civil war, he got killed. Smack in the middle of the wars, in 1976, was a tremendous earthquake, which didn’t make things easier for anybody.

  Things are getting better in Guatemala. If you’re looking for a turnaround guy, you might pick Alfonso Portillo, who became president in 2000. But, on the other hand, Portillo ain’t exactly Dudley Do-Right. As a young man, Portillo shot and killed two people. This is while he was a lecturer in political science. After he was out of office, Portillo ended up getting extradited to the US and charged with laundering money he’d been given as a bribe by the government of Taiwan. He spent some time in federal prison in Colorado before being shipped back to Guatemala.

  Not great behavior, sure, but it’s a little rich for the United States to come down too hard on somebody for crookedly enriching himself in Guatemala. And is he really the only foreign leader to launder his money here? The whole thing seems fishy to me.

  Guatemala’s had a tough time is the short story. An unfair deal.

  My cleaning lady comes from Guatemala. She’s from Chichicastenango. I’ve never thought it would be great for us to have a conversation about the absurd outcomes of luck and geoeconomics and history. When I told her I was going to be in Guatemala, she looked at me, as she so often does, with great worry, as I’m quite slow, mentally, and not really capable of living on my own.

  “Don’t go there,” she said. “Go to Costa Rica. It’s nice.”

  Wonders of Guatemala

  Guatemala is also beautiful. There are, for example, Pam’s remote mountainside cheese villages, which I cannot personally vouch for but which I believe in.

  A place I saw with my own eyes and can report is a world-level wonder is Lake Atitlán. Even Stephens was impressed by this one. He said it was “the most magnificent spectacle we ever saw. We stopped and watched the fleecy clouds of vapour rising from the bottom, moving up the mountains and the sides of the volcanoes.”

  I would’ve liked to watch the fleecy clouds of vapor for a while, too. But the bus I was on was careening down the mountains and the sides of the volcanoes to the shore of the lake. No problem: The rising lake vapor was still impressive from the window.

  Fifty square miles of silver lake set in a ring of volcanoes. Around it is a ring of villages: Panajachel, Tzununá, San Pedro La Laguna, Santiago Atitlán, Santa Catarina Palopó.

  The villages range in degree of what we might call “hippie-ness” and “hostel-ization” and “indigenous authenticity,” but in a given day, every one of them probably has both an ancient woman in traditional Kaqchikel Mayan dress carrying a basket of chickens on her head and an Israeli backpacker. Being raised on 8-bit RPG video games, I couldn’t help but take the lake and its villages, and the boats that’ll ferry you from one to the other, as a challenge. I tried to visit as many villages as I could, fueling myself with coffee or hot chocolates in each one. The boys who loaded and tied up and shoved off the boats from the dock were skilled and fast and competed with each other. Just watching them was good for a couple of minutes. On a ride across, a pretty girl with a guitar got in the back, asked permission in Spanish to play some songs, and did. The Mayan women riding looked indifferent, but when they arrived, more of them than not reached into the pockets of their dresses and gave her coins.

  At lunchtime I was in San Marcos La Laguna, where trails and dirt roads lead to meditation lodges and Reiki retreats. There was a restaurant there called Blind Lemon’s, called that because the owner loves Mississippi Delta blues, and that’s where I ate. I was the only customer. While I ate, a Guatemalan boy who was either the brother or the son of the girl cooking tried on my hat and sunglasses, did a very good if somewhat mean impression of me, and played with my phone.

  Lake Atitlán wasn’t safe from the violence that tore up Guatemala. In Santiago Atitlán, for instance, you can see the church of Stanley Rother, a Catholic priest from Oklahoma, who translated the New Testament into Tzutujil Mayan. He founded a hospital in nearby Panabaj. In July 1981, he was shot twice in the head in his church by gunmen. Thirty people from his village had already been killed.

  Rother’s hospital was destroyed in a mudslide, in 2005. If you go looking for sites of massacres and disasters in Central America, you’ll find them. You’ll find no end of them. In going on this trip, and writing it, I don’t want you to think I’m looking away from that. This book could be filled with stories of tragedies. But there are plenty of books about Central America that are already anthologies of violence and misfortune. What good would one more do? It’s important work, to chronicle the terrible things that have happened, to remember them. Brave people take that job, tough people, but I’m not the guy for it. I prefer pretty girls singing songs in boats, like most people do. Believing that’s what most people prefer makes me an optimist, because those people so far outnumber gunmen who’d shoot priests in the head that they can’t help but win out. The gunmen can make things ugly, but I don’t think they can make them ugly forever. The morning I was on the lake was clear and terrific. There weren’t any guns, as far as I could see. It used to be believed that Lake Atitlán was bottomless. John L. Stephens didn’t believe it, and neither now does science, and neither do I. But you can see how they believed it. If I’d never heard of science, I’d believe it, too.

  If someday I am forced to become a fugitive, hide out someplace where no one knows my name, no one will ask too many questions, and no one will think to look for me, a little house up on the hilly shore of Lake Atitlán might be the spot. Although of course now I’ve given that away. And while I know I can trust you, Reader, I can’t trust everybody, so maybe I’ve just blown it. Or maybe this is part of my game. I’m just trying to throw you off my trail. Lake Atitlán is exactly where I’ll be. Except I won’t be. Don’t look for me there.

  On this trip I’d find plenty of good spots to disappear.

  Over El Salvador

  I flew from Guatemala City to San Salvador, which was a real knucklehead move. For the price of a plane ticket, I probably could’ve found somebody to drive me across the border and right to the door of where I was going. For a whole lot less, I could’ve taken buses and vans, and maybe I would’ve learned something, too. But that would’ve taken time, the thing we have least of. So I flew.

  Flying, I learned a few things anyway. For one thing, I learned that southern Guatemala and northern El Salvador are bumpy. All but the best topographical maps have the problem of revealing only two dimensions. You forget that th
e earth rises up, too, and falls down again, in unruly ways sometimes. Getting across a colored square of map might not be so easy on the ground. In San Francisco this lesson has been pounded into me, many times, when I assume I can walk from Union Square to Fisherman’s Wharf in twenty minutes, and I could maybe, if I could stay level and walk through hills. From the plane over El Salvador I could see lakes in the craters of volcanoes, incredible silver lakes it must take days to get to.

  These days, El Salvador is more violent than Guatemala. Not that it’s a contest. You can tire yourself out reading more history where an archbishop who calls on soldiers to be decent gets assassinated during Mass and a torturer called Blowtorch Bob runs for president and almost wins.

  There was a truce declared in the civil war, and amnesty declared for everything that happened in it, but El Salvador is still not exactly a paradise. In January 2015, there were fifteen murders a day,* in a country that has about as many people as Massachusetts, where there are .37 murders a day. That makes El Salvador a pretty good contender for the most murdery country in the world, with neighbor Honduras also putting in a strong show.

  On the plane behind me were two Salvadoran Americans, strangers to each other, who made friends and spoke to each other in English. One of them was from Los Angeles. He said that when he was back home and met a Salvadoran who could speak English pretty well, it always made him nervous, because he figured that was a guy who’d gotten kicked back out of the United States for doing something real bad.

  You can, on YouTube, watch an infinite number of documentaries about MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, a violent gang whose members do an excellent job of being terrifying, with their face tattoos and reputation for doing things like killing twenty-eight passengers on a bus* as revenge for something or another.

  But like I said, I didn’t come to Central America to come back with horror stories. I came for wonders and curiosities, for the spectacular and the terrific. So when I got to San Salvador, I set off for a place I guessed might be the best spot in the entire country.

  Surf Pioneers

  Surfers come first. So said a friend of mine who does aid work down in El Salvador. I’m not sure what he does, exactly: builds schools or hands out soccer balls or something. Partly, I suspect, he’s down there to go surfing. I think he meant surfers are first to arrive in some beautiful, remote, as yet unexploited coastal spot. But like a lot of surfer sayings, the more you contemplate it, the more possible meanings are revealed to you.

  Down on the west coast of El Salvador, the Pacific side, near a fishing village called Playa El Esteron, there is a hotel called La Tortuga Verde. It’s near the surf spot called Las Flores.

  Here is how La Tortuga Verde describes itself on its website: a hostel/hotel, restaurant, health spa, turtle sanctuary, yoga center, pelican retreat, coconut plantation, sustainable practicing, student educational facility, and marina . . . dedicated to the idea of recycling, composting, lessening one’s carbon footprint, and living a cleaner greener lifestyle in harmony with sea turtles and all marine life.

  Well, that sounded great. A lot better than strolling around the world’s murder capital, nodding somberly at the sites of notable bombings and assassinations. Next to that description is a picture of a hand (a young female hand) with a baby sea turtle flopped on it.

  Off I went, in a car from San Salvador. A guy drove me, we crossed half the country.

  El Salvador doesn’t even bother to have its own currency, they use US dollars, so at a gas station by the road, I could buy a bag of M&M’S and a Coke and end up with nine Sacajawea dollars in change jangling in my pocket. Ten minutes away from the airport and you’re in true country. The countryside of El Salvador looks like it was first settled by humans maybe six months ago. The stands and houses by the side of the road look makeshift, just a few notches above camping. Natural enough, I guess. Why knock yourself out when all history suggests storms and murder gangs and earthquakes will most likely destroy it all again soon enough? The vegetation’s thick and wet and unstoppable. You could hack at it all day and be nowhere by tomorrow, maybe even end up moving backward, given how fast it grows. But on the other hand, enormous fruits are everywhere, mangoes and pineapples and annona, which look outside like green alien spores and have inside pink fibrous sugar spheres like balls of cotton candy. Beyond the road were folds of hills and green valleys, and on the road we passed pickup trucks with eight or twelve people standing, bouncing along on the bed, whole families sometimes. It was Saturday.

  When I got to La Tortuga Verde, it was late in the afternoon. The outdoor tables in the courtyard were filled up with families, big Salvadoran families having picnics, and beyond them, framed like a picture by big palm trees, was the beach and the ocean.

  This was great. I flopped my bag down in my room, walked outside, and sat down on the sand. A teenage girl sitting nearby was smiling at me. She said hello.

  “What should I do here?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Do nothing.”

  The owner of the property has been surfing since the age of 12 and so the La Tortuga Verde connection with the ocean and having a positive impact on it is more than a focus . . . it’s a lifestyle. So, too, read the website. In the night after the sun went down and the local families left and I was eating fish and drinking cold bottles of Pilsener beer, I met this owner.

  His name was Tom. I have to tell you I didn’t like him. That’s because when he asked me what I did and I told him I was a TV writer, he interrupted me and said, “Well, it’s pablum for the masses, but you know, everybody has to make a living.” He wasn’t wearing a shirt, obviously—people who are having a positive impact on the ocean as a lifestyle don’t wear shirts. He had wild hair and was maybe forty-five, well sunned, the obvious lazy king of his backpacker kingdom. I also didn’t like him because the teenage girl who’d smiled and told me to do nothing turned out to be his girlfriend—I dunno, maybe she wasn’t a teenager but she looked like it, and he tossed off some instructions to her in a tone like he was so far beyond her in worldly experience, it was adorably tiresome to speak to her.

  Just because I didn’t like him doesn’t mean he was uninteresting, or even a bad guy. He had, after all, built this place, on the wild shore of Central America, a lot of it with his own hands, and the local families and the tripped-out Germans and Americans and Canadians washed up and lounging in bliss there all seemed to find it a happy place. I did, too. It was terrific. It’s just that, okay, first of all, we are in a golden age of television and I don’t think The Office and 30 Rock and American Dad (fifteenth-longest-running TV comedy of all time) are quote pablum unquote, and second of all, decent pablum is very hard to make. Pablum should be much more appreciated. If you don’t believe me, you try making pablum the masses enjoy. It’s a lot harder than running a friggin’ turtle sanctuary slash pelican retreat, believe me.

  Anyway. Tom told me that he’d been surfing breaks in Costa Rica for years, but he knew from the geography of the coastline there must be good breaks in El Salvador. So he got out a nautical chart and a map and he deduced the best break of all might be at Las Flores. He came up here, saw he was right, and bought the place.

  Surfers had followed. At the bar that night, I drank with three American kids. One had been down there for it was not clear how long. When asked how long he planned to stay, he could only smile at the question. He was in some kind of apprentice- or disciple-like relationship with Tom, though he would no doubt not use such words, suggestive as they are of hierarchy. His eyes were glazed over with pure surfer bliss. I would maybe believe that he had transcended human concerns to some higher level if he wasn’t trying to suggest all the time exactly that. He ate food as if he wanted you to see the deep and tactile way he enjoyed it. I liked him anyway, though. I liked the way he described how in the battles in the fantasy novel he was reading, while the warriors hacked away at each other and the archers shot their arrows, the magic
ians stood apart and did battle with their minds.

  The other two Americans were a kid named Miah and his girlfriend. They were so genuine and kind, it came off of them. They’d been volunteering at an orphanage in Nicaragua, but it had turned sour somehow, not in any terrible way but in a way that they were disappointed, and had to leave. They’d gone and worked on coffee farms, and then at a hostel in Costa Rica, where they swam in hot springs and floated on rivers, but now those days seemed over to them, their money was up, there was a wedding to go to, back in the United States. She didn’t surf, but she liked sitting on the beach while he did, so for now they were saving the last of their money to surf a big swell that was due to come in from a storm out on the Pacific.

  The surf the next day was already gonna be pretty good. I asked Miah if he’d take me out and teach me if I paid the fifteen bucks to rent him a surfboard—deal.

  The Excellence of Surfing

  Everyone can agree that surfing is cool. It takes grace and skill and courage and timing and you do it outside with your shirt off. Balancing yourself while riding the manifested force of the impartial universe—I mean, what else is there? What else is life but a ceaseless ride forward where the best you can hope for is to keep some composure, some control of yourself, express your will in shifting tensions and harmonies with the overpowering, indifferent momentum until you’re knocked off or deposited and the whole experience vanishes, erasing itself behind you as the wave collapses, absorbed back into the formless spirit that gave it rise?

  I mean, right?

  How can you not admire surfers, testing the ageless heroic qualities of man, not against each other or even against anything as crude as a mountain, but against dissolving judgeless pulses of energy as they pass in and out of infinity in beauty that can only exist beyond consciousness? Waves appear and pass over you like breath blowing forth the veil that hides the true face of the universe and then are gone forever, unpreservable.