by Steve Hely
Down by the lake, I leaned over the water and watched the waves change color as the sun set, until tiny insects got the word to start feasting on me and went to town. That’s when I retreated to the bar of the Hotel Gran Francia, and stared at the painted rug.
* * *
About the history of Nicaragua: The rug’s a pretty eloquent summary.
The latest round in a long recitation of shootings and massacres was a revolution that turned into a civil war. Here is my quick summary: From the 1930s until 1979, Nicaragua was ruled by a US-supported father-and-sons bandit team called the Somozas. In the late 1970s, a liberal newspaper editor got killed by agents of these guys, there were riots, then a kidnapping campaign, and then open revolution. The last Somoza fled to Paraguay, where he eventually got killed. The Sandinistas took over the country and started redistributing land. They weren’t always gentlemen princes, but at their best they were trying to spread literacy and reduce poverty in a country that was a total mess. All that land redistributing seemed awful Communist, though, and a right-wing group called the Contras tried to overthrow them.
Ronald Reagan once said that the Contras were “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” which they weren’t, even when you remember that many of our Founding Fathers owned human slaves. The Contras were a bad-news bunch, assassinating people and shooting up the countryside, just generally doing anything to overthrow a government that had, after all, won a more or less fair election.
The United States had not been successful or a positive force in its messings-around in Nicaragua up until the Contras. So, in a case of perhaps rare wisdom, in the early 1980s the US Congress declared that the CIA and the Department of Defense had to stop helping the Contras. Fervent anti-Communists in the Reagan White House, namely a Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North, concocted a way to work around all that by selling weapons to Iran (another thing we weren’t supposed to do) and then sending the money to the Contras.
That was the Iran-Contra Affair, which I remember Tom Brokaw telling me and my mom about during the nightly news when I was a kid. Oliver North testified before Congress in his Marine uniform and was pretty unabashed about the whole thing. After all, shouldn’t the president conduct foreign policy, not Congress?
If you try to learn about all this, as I did from old books and archived articles and stuff, you come across all kinds of twists and convoluted motives and lies and excuses and weaselings and ever-deepening confusions folding on top of each other. Also interesting trivia, like the fact that the never-married Edward Boland of Springfield, Massachusetts, after whom the congressional “no money for Contras” resolutions were named, fell in love at age sixty-two with a woman thirty years younger than him, fathered four kids, and quit Congress to raise them.
Your darker conspiracy theorists can find in the thicket of Iran-Contra evidence that the CIA was also funding the Contras by selling crack cocaine in America’s inner cities, fulfilling a double-secret agenda of destroying black communities. This seems implausible to me, because a scheme that sinister would require a lot of competence. Even the much simpler double-secret scheme of funding the Contras with Iran weapons got found out. One thing that is true is that the lines between “good guys” and “bad guys” became pretty much indecipherable.
One thing the Iran-Contra scheme didn’t do is work. The Contras lost. The current president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, was on the Sandinista side. He ran things for most of the 1980s, and he’s been officially back in charge since 2007. What a life you go through as a Central American politician: If you’re on the road to the presidential palace, you’ll definitely detour into prison somewhere along the way. I’m no expert on Nicaraguan politics, and don’t want to offer a strong opinion on Ortega. I can say with confidence that while much of his rhetoric is about uplifting impoverished people, he is not 100 percent purehearted in the way he has run the country.
As crazy as Iran-Contra was, it is dwarfed in hubris by another American intervention in Nicaragua.
Walker, Nicaraguan Ranger
In 1856, William Walker, of Tennessee, Louisiana, and California, went down to Nicaragua with about sixty guys and declared himself president. Walker was amazing. He’d graduated the University of Nashville at age fourteen; graduated medical school at nineteen; been a doctor, a lawyer, and a newspaper editor; fought in a duel; and been engaged to a beautiful deaf girl who died. He’d already tried to create a republic in Baja, California, and Sonora, Mexico, but that didn’t work. He got driven out and was lucky to be alive. Back in California, age thirty, he was put on trial for violating the Neutrality Acts, but his fellow Americans liked his gumption and he was acquitted. His plan wasn’t that crazy, after all. This is sort of how Texas was created. Two years later, Walker went down to Nicaragua and tried again.
He succeeded for a while, before an army from Costa Rica came in and drove him and his guys out. In the chaos, old Granada was burned to the ground. In the smoking ash that remained, one of Walker’s guys put up a sign he’d written in charcoal: AQUI SE GRANADA—here was Granada.
Incredibly, after he’d been hauled back to New Orleans by the US Navy, put on trial again, and acquitted, again, Walker went back to Central America. They’d had it with this guy, though. A firing squad of Hondurans shot him to death on the beach, and they buried his body in the sand.
This story is told in a few places, perhaps best of all by Walker himself in his memoir The War in Nicaragua, written and published sometime before his death, which is not included.
The story is also told in the 1987 Acid Western Walker, starring Ed Harris, a movie whose “poverty of imagination has to be seen to be believed,” according to Roger Ebert. It’s true, it’s not a good movie. Peter Boyle, who played the dad on Everybody Loves Raymond, plays Cornelius Vanderbilt. He’s great in it. At one point he declares that Nicaragua is a “fucked-up little country somewhere south of here.”
The Perfect Cup of Coffee
On the island of Ometepe, at Ojo de Agua, I sat half in the sun and half in the shade, my feet splashing in volcanic water. Eye of water? Something like that. This place is a natural pool. A spring, cool and clear. There’s something special or healing about its waters. They bubble up from the volcano, the ancient peoples worshipped here—something like that, who cares. You can’t learn the story of everything.
A crazily pleasant, wonderful place. I mean it. Just in terms of pure good, relaxed feeling washing over me, Ojo de Agua might’ve been the best place in Central America. You swam if you wanted, sat there if you wanted, dangled your feet. There was a girl who would chop a straw into a coconut for you, if you felt like drinking a coconut, which I did. There were birds and you felt like you were in the jungle but only in the best ways. Everybody I talked to seemed nice, but maybe their best quality was how little they cared about talking to me. Just: Lemme know if you need a coconut, until then let’s both relax.
Near me were four Americans, three girls and a guy. Average age maybe thirty, from North Carolina. The guy was shirtless, obviously. It was unclear his relationship to these women. My guess, later confirmed, was that these were women who were up for an awful lot. They took pride in being wild.
“I just don’t give off that vibe, you know? To girls? That I’m threatening,” said the guy. “Even though I am very sexual, you know?”
This is terrific, I thought as I leaned back in comfort. Now on top of everything, I have entertainment.
What I had been doing was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. You can’t really show your face in Colombia if you haven’t read this book, and Colombia was coming up, and it’s not a short book. Marquez tells the story of a village over the course of a hundred years. You follow a family, there are revolutions, the railroad. Magical realism is a term to describe the genre of which it is the most famed example. Surreal and beautifully strange things happen to the people in the book, time bends a
nd repeats. Their world perplexes and folds in on our world, and thus reminds us of the true weirdness and cruelty and wonder of our world that so often gets left out of descriptions of reality. Only by getting a bit magical, you might say, can you truly evoke the strangeness of reality.
Look, man, it’s a great book, but just at this minute? At Ojo de Agua as I drank my coconut, dried off from a swim, and cooled my feet? Listening to my countrymen chat was more compelling.
Of course, it’s not right to eavesdrop on your fellow Americans. That’s an obvious truth, and it’s rude of our federal government to keep forgetting it. Though I guess I had, too. The truth was I liked these people. Maybe I’d meet up with them down the road. I dried off my feet and went back to my motorbike.
Ometepe is in the middle of the lake. It’s made out of two volcanoes, it’s about twenty miles across, and there’s really only one road to speak of that goes around the whole place. Perfect place for a motorbike.
Before leaving California, I got my motorcycle license. It wasn’t easy. I failed the test the first time, which should’ve told me something. It should’ve told me that if you’re nervous on a motorcycle, which of course you should be, you will die. To ride a motorcycle well, you need to be both focused and brave. While I’ve been both, I’m neither consistently.
In this way riding a motorcycle is not unlike surfing, I guess. Except instead of waves, you’ll land on skull-smashing pavement. To be effective, you must be fearless when you should be fearful. This is the lesson I was trying to teach myself by riding around Ometepe.
Great place to learn. Get five hundred meters out of the town and you’re on a country road, with big wide vistas up to the volcano, and you’re the only thing in sight. Maybe a cow or something. You can cut loose and it feels amazing and thrilling.
Tiring maybe, whipping around those curves with the waves of the lake crashing below you. But a good kind of tiring. Maybe that’s why at Ojo de Agua I felt so great. I’d ridden a while, but I still had a while to go, to a coffee plantation, the Finca Magdalena.
My mission was to have the world’s best cup of coffee.
* * *
Before I left Los Angeles I did some investigating into coffee. Research. Believe me, if you start trying to learn about coffee—its geography, its nature—you will never run out of passionate opinions. Many people have gone far deep into the world of coffee.
Look, I barely peered in. It was too dangerous. You can get lost in learning about coffee.
The best idea I learned is the theory that caffeine developed because it killed insects. That it was like an evolutionary pesticide that grew within coffee plants. Beyond that, I learned some basics and some place names.
In El Salvador at the bar of Tortuga Verde, I shared what I’d read with Miah, who’d worked on a coffee plantation for three months and was able to correct me on some practicalities and offer things he’d learned. Like that anywhere there’s shade on a volcano, there grows good coffee.
With this knowledge I studied my maps, read what scraps I could on precious minutes of WiFi, and determined:
The best coffee in the world will be at Finca Magdalena, Ometepe.
About four in the afternoon I got to the trail. It was at the far end of the island, the south end, on the slope of Volcán Maderas. Road, trail: It wasn’t good anyway. There were huge rocks sticking out of it as it ran steep uphill. There were logs and stuff along the way, holes dug by what must’ve been frequent floods.
Well, there was nothing to do but rev my motorbike and attack it.
An hour later, maybe a third of the way up, half a kilometer at most, I had to give up.
When I was a boy, I’d read somewhere that a well-executed retreat is the most difficult of military maneuvers to perform. I’ve taken a lot of comfort in that quote, though I forget who said it. Whenever I’ve had to retreat, which is often, I’ve taken comfort in the idea that what I was doing was deciding to accept a serious challenge rather than quitting. It helps.
My retreat was imperfect but honorable. I just shut the bike off, put it in neutral, and rode down, bumping my ass off along the way. Bruised but unharmed, I shook it off. Finca Magdalena is best visited in the morning, after all, I declared to myself. Bravely I resolved to come back in the morning, when the coffee would be all the more delicious.
As I mounted my bike to find a place to sleep, a whizzing sound came upon me. It was a middle-aged man, I’m guessing French, with a slender woman of about the same age gripping him tight from behind as he blasted, with sureness and confidence, up over the rocks and around the logs, steady up the road I’d just quit on.
Sir, I salute you, I said, again to myself, and off I went.
With night ready to come in, the wind picking up on the lake, I went back along the coast road. Those Americans I’d seen earlier—well, maybe we’d end up at the same place and drink beers together, and then they wouldn’t mind me writing up the funny things they said, because we’d all be friends. There was a place I’d passed, a rickety painted hotel right on the water, where I guessed they’d be. That’s where I went.
The other Americans didn’t turn up before the sun went down, and they didn’t come after. Alone in the restaurant, I drank bottles of beer and ate spaghetti. I ate spaghetti a lot in Central America because it’s hard to screw up. Anytime I was in a place that looked like it screwed everything up, that’s what I ordered.
This place looked like it screwed things up. There were both too many people working there and not enough. Two employees, men, smoked and whispered in a dark corner of the place. A fat, gloomy teenager was at the desk, unhelpful, distant. A storm was brewing on the lake. Not a serious storm, but gray and windy. A lot windier than I like it on a tropical isle. Spooky wind, eerie wind. It rattled the shutters. I left half the spaghetti and asked if I could take some beers back to my room.
My room was across the road, now pitch-dark. You couldn’t see the lake. Why had they put me back here? Was this worse? I tried to read One Hundred Years of Solitude but couldn’t concentrate. A fan rattled away, co-echoing with the clattering from the wind. Guatemala Pam had told me that you have to watch out on Ometepe, that thieves swim over from the shore in the night and rob tourists. That seemed crazy to me. The swim must be five miles at the narrowest. But who knew out here? I was alone in the cabin, behind me was forest, across the road the black lake. When I fell asleep, I don’t know.
In the morning it was the most perfect day ever.
So: I hopped on my motorbike and went back down the road around the south volcano to the trail to Finca Magdalena.
This time I walked up it, and I gotta say it wasn’t even easy to walk with all the rocks and stuff. I don’t know how the other motorbike got up it. Maybe halfway up the one-and-a-half-kilometer trail, the trees sprouted pink and red and orange cherries, in narrow bunches. Coffee cherries. Like you could pop them in your mouth and they’d have delicious coffee juice inside.
The trail bent, chickens squawked and hopped across the path, and there was the big house of the Finca Magdalena. An old wooden house, wide porch all around it, aged and falling apart in just the charming ways.
On the porch at a table a black-haired girl who looked intensely hippie’d out read a hippie’d-out tract of some kind. Two Danish (maybe?) women ate French toast in silence. Below me the slope of the volcano rolled down, a clearing first and then thick with green trees, down to the road and the shore of the lake beyond.
At an open window to the kitchen, a girl asked me what I wanted.
Café, por favor. I ambled to an old wooden chair at an old wooden table to await the best coffee in the world.
Ten minutes later it came.
It was okay.
Wait a Second
Wait a second,” said my coworker Bobby months later, when I told him this story of the Finca Magdalena and the perfect cup of coffee. “You told me
the exact same story about tea.”
He was right. I had.
Three years before, I’d been in Darjeeling, India, where they grow tea on the mountainsides. Man, I thought to myself, in Darjeeling I’m gonna have the perfect cup of tea. So I went a few kilometers out of town to a tea plantation. Women with wide hats and huge baskets on their backs worked their way down the side of a mountain, in the steep green foothills of the Himalayas.
At the plantation house, the old woman had lectured me about the highest excellence in tea, demonstrating each step in a slow and meticulous preparation as she asserted that what she was making for me was the freshest, finest kind of tea in the world, made only from the tip of Silver Darling Darjeeling tea leaves, the water prepared exactly properly. She presented it to me with reverence, like a sacred gift, as though I should be very honored just to try it.
She locked eyes with me as I took a gentle sip.
It tasted . . . fine? Like . . . tea?
Don’t get me wrong. This was a beautiful place. I was lucky to get to go there. Same with the Finca Magdalena: spectacular place, a dream of travel. Going to these places were two of the best experiences of my life.
The point, I guess, is it might not matter how good the tea is, how great the coffee. The experience you get isn’t always the experience you went looking for. What you were after sometimes turns out not to be the point. But who cares? What matters is the trip you took to get there.
* * *
On the boat back to the mainland, I saw the North Carolinians again. The ferry was crowded, tourists and Nicaraguans both, and most people were keeping to themselves. There was a radio playing and a few of the crew guys stood around it, watching a spectacle: The brassiest of the North Carolina women was, lustily and imperfectly, performing along to “Black Velvet” as recorded by Alannah Myles. Our brassy North Carolinian didn’t know the words exactly, but she didn’t care. She positioned herself in a doorway, arched her spine backward like a cat, and belted it out, projecting her voice and using her space like she was the second-to-last song before closing time at a karaoke bar. It was maybe ten in the morning.
