by Tim Cahill
We camped on a sandspit that separated the calm black waters of the lagoon from the cresting waves of the Carribean. The sun sank to our left, so that we cast attenuated pink man-shaped shadows as we set up the tents. Grant trotted out his shortwave radio and tuned into the Canadian Broadcasting System, assuring Ted and me, the Americans in the party, that we would hear important news denied us on typical U.S. outlets. It was true. As the sun sank below the horizon and the pastel sky burst into flame, we listened, not quite breathlessly, to the results of the curling championships in Bulgaria.
I tried to imagine a curling war. Disputes over corked brooms. Lumpy ice. Fighter jets screaming out of a snow-shrouded sky. Shattered limbs and field hospitals.
The lagoon mirrored the fires burning in the sky above and was fringed with shadowed gloom under the mangroves. A school of baitfish rose out of the now bloody water, flying over the surface in a panic. It was dusk, the time caiman like to dine.
Grant was talking about eco-tourism, about how it brought money into places like Honduras, which is in fact the poorest country in Central America. I contemplated the monkeys we had met that day and their excretory attitudes. Grant and I chatted about the idea for some time.
Often—in places like Mexico and Bali—resorts excluded local people, except in the capacity of busboys and chambermaids. Visitors got no real idea of the country or of how people lived. And the resorts themselves generally occupied areas that would otherwise speak to the soul. Might as well drop a putting green in the cathedral, a go-cart track in the mosque, pinball machines in the synagogue.
No, Grant thought that operations like his were the preferable alternative. Bring people in, stay in a hotel for a few nights of orientation, buy supplies from local folks, go camping on the beaches, purchase fish from local markets, leave the campsites just the way you found them. You didn’t need a nation of busboys and chambermaids to travel in that fashion. You wanted to meet fishermen. Farmers. Fourth-generation ranchers.
We spent some moments digesting the idea.
Out in the lagoon, in the lurid sanguinary light, an egret, standing in the shallows, snagged a frog but seemed to have some trouble swallowing it. The bird’s neck jerked convulsively, its beak snapped open and shut, but the frog wouldn’t go down. Its back legs jerked and spasmed beyond the egret’s beak.
Wasa came to mind. It wasn’t exactly clear what the big fish would do if he caught you, but I imagined it was a frog-and-egret sort of scenario.
The sky began to fade until it felt as if we were covered over in a great blue-black bruise, and then it was dark. Wasa was out there, chortling away in the deep water. The monster was almost to be expected. He expressed something about wildness: sanctity symbolized, once again, as fear. Sister Norma would understand the Beast.
My flashlight beam caught two small red reflecting lights out in the lagoon: the predatory eyes of a caiman, moving silently.
And somewhere, unseen in the depths, was He Who Laughs.
This Man Cannot Speak
“You ever see Casablanca?” Grant asked.
We were paddling along the coastline of Honduras, moving west from Cocoa Lagoon, looking for a village called New Armenia. The people there were said to be Garifuna, a racial mix of Africans—former slaves—and indigenous Caribbean Indians.
“What about it?” I asked.
“The guy asks Humphrey Bogart why he came to Casablanca. He says, ‘For the waters.’ ”
“Yeah?”
“And the guy says, There are no waters in Casablanca.’ ”
“Bogart says, ‘I was misinformed.’ ”
“So,” Grant said, “you see my point.”
We had been misinformed about Cocoa Lagoon. People in La Ceiba, who were supposed to know, had said that it was big, that Grant could easily take clients there for a week. In fact, we had paddled around the lagoon in two hours. The rental van had cost the equivalent of a hundred dollars. We had been misinformed about the waters, and deeply hosed on the deal to boot. Which is why companies like Grant’s need to do a lot of advance scouting.
A few hours later we saw people on a large sandspit that opened into another lagoon, a calm riverlike affair lined by lechiguilla, green plants that looked like a cross between lily pads and aloe vera. The plants were alive with purple flowers. As we paddled down the flower-lined aquatic lane to New Armenia, howlers in the trees above laughed like fish. Women washed clothes and children splashed about, shrieking and laughing.
A man named Raphael Arzu motioned us to shore and invited us to camp at his mother’s house.
The house was constructed of thin-trunked trees crossed with smaller branches, filled in with mud, and roofed with thatch. Chickens, pigs, and ducks littered the neatly swept dirt of the yard, which was shaded by banana trees and coconut palms. A hand-lettered sign fronting the river indentified the place as Villa Hermosa, and it was, indeed, a pretty house. For a dollar a plate Raphael’s mother, the estimable Alberta (Berta) Arzu, served us up a lunch on an outdoor table: rice, plantain chips that tasted a bit like fried potato rounds, eggs, and small chunks of chicken in a mildly spicy yellow sauce, heavy on the inexpensive local saffron. The egg was small and oblong, with a suspiciously leathery skin. I chewed on it for some time without making any appreciable progress in regard to breaking the skin.
Grant said that he thought the accommodations here were “cool” but not fit for FOPs, by which he meant kayaking clients Fresh Off the Plane. “A guy might do some high-pressure business at home,” Grant explained, “information shooting at him all day long. But when you arrive in a foreign country, the strangeness of it, the foreignness, the kind of ‘oh God’ helplessness they sometimes feel, all this information at once … you have to settle them in a comfortable place for the first few days.”
We ate some rice and contemplated FOPs while one of the hens picked insects out of the snout of a contented sleeping pig. And to my mind, there was a certain foreignness about the food.
“Uh, what kind of egg is this?” I asked Berta in Spanish.
“Iguana.”
The trick, I learned, was to hold the egg in one hand and bite off a small piece of leather with the canine teeth. Pop the thing in your mouth and chew the yolk out of the leather sac. Spit out the sac. The egg was all yolk, yellow-orange in color, like that of a free-range chicken, but much richer in taste and vaguely creamy.
“This meat,” Grant said, holding up a knucklelike forkful. “I don’t think it’s chicken.”
It was, in fact, a tail section of what must have been a fairly large iguana.
“Chicken of the trees,” Grant said.
In English, Ted said, “May we see the endangered species menu, please?”
I asked Berta if there were lots of iguana about, and she said that there were many, many. Because, I continued, I know that there are almost none left on some of the Bay Islands.
“Well,” Berta said in Spanish, and shrugged. She looked out toward the islands. People there were very different. They were islanders, her expression said, and they went and killed off all their iguanas and acted stupid in so many other ways it was difficult to delineate them all. The imbeciles.
That afternoon we paddled down the narrow flower-lined river to New Armenia, a small town served by a gravel road. There was a rough-looking bar, a café, and a small hotel. I looked at one of the hotel rooms and heard a scraping sound above the loose boards in the ceiling. There were rat droppings on the bed, and no windows at all. It felt like the sort of place they might put you if you molested children. Not much good for FOPs, either. Personally, I liked the pig yard at Berta’s place.
Back at Villa Hermosa, Raphael came by and introduced us to a thin man with an exceptionally expressive physical presence. He was in fact an involuntary mime, a man who could not speak. Raphael said he was “family,” but the man was not an Arzu; he was simply troubled in some way, lived in New Armenia, was a Garifuna, and that made him “family.” The only name anyone knew him b
y was Ganunu.
In a series of generally transparent charades, Ganunu said that people slighted him, and they wouldn’t give him books, which he liked very much. The only book he’d ever had he carried with him for years, but one day it fell in the water and was destroyed.
… And, and … there was the time a man grabbed him by the arm. He showed us the man: a hulking gorillalike individual who walked in a stooped manner with bowed legs. He showed us the man’s face: stern and self-important. There was something I couldn’t make out on the man’s shoulder and his hip. I shrugged.
Ganunu’s face became a mask of frustration. He whirled, cried out in pain, looked as if he might cry. But no, wait. His face brightened. He knelt in the dirt and drew a rectangle. There was a small dot in the middle of the rectangle. Ganunu pointed to the dot, and then to the middle of his chest.
Ah. The rectangle was a jail cell. The man was a police officer with a gun on his hip and an epaulet on his shoulder. Thumbs up from Ganunu.
The police wouldn’t give him anything to write with (though it wasn’t clear that Ganunu could, in fact, write).
It occurred to me that Ganunu ought to have some sort of a card explaining his disability. The man agreed with me but said, in so many gestures, that no, he had no such card. I tore a page out of my notebook and, in authoritative block letters, wrote in precise grammatical Spanish: “This man is not drunk nor is he insane. This man cannot speak.” Ganunu looked at the paper, then at me. His face was glowing. He shook my hand, gave me a thumbs up, did a restrained little dance, and tucked the note away in his shirt pocket.
Later, I felt the need to atone for this good deed, but the local children were no fools and decided early on that the proper and formal way to greet English-speaking people was not, in fact “How’s your old wazoo?” On the other hand, wazoo is a fun word to say, in any language. The children and I said it quite a bit, a consequence of which is that I am now known to dozens of children in the Garifuna village of New Armenia as Señor Wazoo.
Grant liked New Armenia. The people were friendly, and the music, punta, a melange of African and salsa and reggae, was the sort of thing that made fat guys get up and dance. Berta and Raphael could arrange things for a fair price. His clients could soak up the culture. Grant and Rob paddled off down the canal looking for a grassy field to rent, a place where FOPs might feel comfortable.
Late that afternoon, while Ted and I were saying the word wazoo to a bunch of children, a large powerboat appeared on the horizon, and unknown men from someplace beyond the sea pulled up on a sandspit and offloaded a veritable houseful of furniture. There were several chairs, a couple of dressers, a table, and a sofa. The wind had picked up considerably, so the furniture, out there all alone on the sandspit, was partially obscured by a low-level sandstorm. It looked like a set for a Fellini film.
And then, wandering aimlessly, a small herd of cows made their way out onto the sand and wandered past the sun-blasted furniture, in the sandstorm, with the Caribbean Sea cresting five or six feet high in the background. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, Ted and I felt the need to herd these cows back onto the mainland, where they belonged. We raced a kayak toward the sandspit, paddling hard against the heavy late-afternoon wind.
Ted is from Wyoming. I’m from Montana. I suppose each of us knows a little about herding cows. We’d just never done it from kayaks before. It was hard work, and I considered our plans for the future, such as they were.
Early the next day, we planned to paddle out to the Cayos de Cochinos, called the Hog Islands or the Islands of Pigs, which were somewhere over the horizon, in the distance. According to our maps, the Cochinos were not more than ten miles away, and we figured we could get there in less than four hours easy. Still, the weather had been dicey, kicking up a heavy wind and big swells in the late morning hours. Afternoons featured gusts of twenty-five miles an hour. We’d learned that much from the cows. Blinding speed is not a generally recognized bovine trait, and yet chasing an ambling herd against the wind had been a daunting chore.
I thought about cows all night and was up at four, with everyone else, packing the kayaks and cursing dully as men do when they have to get up way too damn early.
And then Ganunu was there in the dark, watching us, a question on his shoulders.
“We’re going out to the Cayos de Cochinos,” I explained.
Ganunu shook his head in a violent and negative manner. He pointed out to the dark sea, then to himself. I understood that he was an islander and would show me how islanders act. Ganunu lifted his head and stared down his nose at me. His face looked like he’d just accidentally eaten something the dog left on the lawn. I was scum. Dirt. A distasteful person. He turned his back on me, in contempt. He spit on the ground.
I got the impression that Ganunu didn’t think the people who lived on the Cayos de Cochinos were very friendly.
The Islands of Pigs
By five it was light enough to see the breakers beyond the sand-spit. We punched through them easily enough and paddled into the open sea, which was rolling with five-foot-high swells kicked up by yesterday afternoon’s winds. Half an hour later, the sun rose into a perfectly blue sky, looking for all the world like a big orange happy face. We paddled for two more hours, but the mountainous islands in the distance never got any closer until the last half hour, when our every stroke seemed to send them looming higher over us.
We made for an island with an expansive white sand beach where we had heard a Canadian couple was building bungalows to house travelers. A man in dreadlocks sat on the dock, holding his infant son. He said the owners were away and that his orders were not to let anyone land.
Well, where could we land?
Nowhere, it seemed. The whole of the Cayos de Cochinos were privately owned. Closed to folks like us. And Ganunu. The only place we could go was the island of Lower Monitor, a low half-moon-shaped spit of sand in the distance, choked with the thatched-roofed huts of Garifuna fishermen.
On that island we were met by several Garifuna men in tattered shorts, who seemed impressed that we had paddled all the way from the mainland. Further conversation revealed that, in fact, they thought we were morons for paddling from New Armenia when any child could have rigged a sail. No one ever paddled out to the island.
Tourists came, however. Most every day the motor launch, called a tuk-tuk, brought out some young backpacking type, along with various supplies such as firewood needed for cooking, beans, cooking oil, block ice, and beer.
The men said we could set up our tents in back of the village, in the shade of some palms. Did we require food, a cook? No, but it seemed to be the expected trade-off.
Our cook, Nancy, was from New Armenia. She was another Arzu, Berta’s niece, and she confirmed what we had been told: The islands were all privately owned. We were staying on the only “free place.” It was basically an adjunct of New Armenia, a fishing village, where men stayed for stints of six months or so. The other islands in the Cochinos group were “private,” owned by Americans and Italians and Canadians.
Lunch was one 3-ounce fish, a dollop of beans, and a spoonful of rice. So was dinner. And breakfast. It was what everyone on Lower Monitor ate. Every meal, every day. Fishing had been poor of late, due to the heavy winds. People were going hungry.
I swam out to the reef fronting the island. It was a shallow, craggy affair alive with elk horn and brain coral, with soft corals that swayed in a gentle surge: golden sea whips and purple fans. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of fish life on this reef located a few hundred feet off a fishing village filled with poor, sometimes hungry men and their families.
A lone parrot fish, in his court-jester’s garb of blue and green with patches of red, nibbled at a limestone cup of coral, trying to get at the living polyp inside. I could actually hear the crunch of coral in those powerful jaws. My shadow passed over the feeding fish and it veered off in a series of sharp angles, excreting powdery streams of chewed up limestone
at each turn. The fine white sand of many tropical beaches is partially composed of this material, an idea that does not appreciably contribute to the romance of a tropical vacation. “Honey, let’s wait until after midnight when everyone’s asleep, then sneak out onto the beach and make love in the fish shit.”
Sometime later I was sitting on the beach when a motor launch from a large scuba resort on another island landed on the beach at Lower Monitor. A tourist couple in their early forties, decked out in fluorescent resort wear, strolled into town. I talked with the boatman, who was the resort’s dive master. You could, he said, rent a room at the resort for $125 a night per person, which included three dives. People usually stayed for a week. The food was good and tonight was the steak barbecue.
And yes, he confirmed my suspicion that fish life was sparse off the village; but, he said, laws had recently been passed. Fishermen could no longer use nets. Only hand lines were allowed. “Actually,” the fellow said, “they’re talking about making a national park out of this island, a marine reserve. When they get rid of these people,”—he gestured toward the rows of ramshackle huts—“the fish life should recover fairly quickly.”
And here we had the problem and paradox of eco-tourism in a clamshell. Get rid of the local people, who, it was clear, were overfishing the reef, thereby raising property values of the surrounding islands, which were, by and large, owned by wealthy foreigners. In time soldiers would come to Lower Monitor, the people there would be forcibly evacuated, and the wooden huts burned to the ground. The argument is that traditional fishermen could be retrained to make good money busing tables at the luxury resorts.
“More tea, sir?”
The tourist lady returned to the dive boat carrying a shell necklace. She said to the dive master (and I quote precisely here): “I gave the woman five dollars. Didn’t even try to Jew her down. What am I going to do with their money? It was so funny. The woman said, ‘Sank joo.’ ” She was amused, this ignorant harpy in a fluorescent orange halter top, that an underfed woman in a Latin American country should speak English so poorly.
