Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  On the other hand, five dollars for a few found shells strung together with a length of discarded fishing line would feed the Garifuna woman’s family for a week.

  Eco-tourism. Of a type.

  One day, we paddled out to an small uninhabited island several miles away, a desert key where we picnicked on tortillas and jam, pineapple and coconut. The fish life was abundant here, miles from Lower Monitor. It was a tropical-island wet dream of a place, Grant said. Clients would love it. Presently, a motorboat powered up onto the beach beside our kayaks and a Hispanic man with long black hair jumped out and stomped over to where we were sitting.

  The man carried a machete at his side and did not return our greetings—good afternoon, “buenas tardes”—but launched into an angry barrage of Spanish, the gist of which was: “This is a private island. When are you going to leave?”

  We were all standing, and I didn’t like the man’s attitude or his machete. I moved to my right, thinking I could take him from the side if it came to that. I saw Rob drifting off to the other side, while Grant and Ted shifted about for some frontal advantage. The man was short and wiry. His eyes were cold.

  “When,” he demanded again, “are you leaving this island?”

  Rob, who spoke the best Spanish, has the habit of repeating what was just said. Fewer misunderstandings that way.

  “When,” he repeated carefully, “are you leaving this island?”

  Rob, I noticed, had unconsciously used the singular “you,” so what the man heard in response to his question was a challenge:

  When are you leaving?

  No, pal, the question is, when are you leaving.

  The machete man’s eyes passed over us: four men spread out in combat formation, not one of them much under six feet tall, not one weighing much less than two hundred pounds. Bad feeling, like electricity crackling across the beach.

  There is a law in Honduras, as there is in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S., that says the beach is open to the public for some distance above the high-tide line. We had been enjoying a perfectly legal picnic, but then the law didn’t seem to count for much on the Islands of Pigs. The Honduran, for his part, was likely just doing his job. Fishing was a dying vocation. This guy was the occupational wave of the future.

  Most people, I suspect, meekly left the beach when challenged, but the Machete Man had come on like an officious little prick, and we weren’t moving, not even a little bit. The man stared at Rob, who was smiling slightly, looking for some accommodation. The Machete Man clearly took the smile as a threat. There were no other boats on the water, only a few mountainous islands, dreaming in the distance.

  The man broke eye contact with Rob, walked fifty yards down the sand, drew his machete, and began furiously hacking away at some brush fronting the beach. Biologists, I believe, would call this “displacement activity.” He walked stiffly back to his boat, avoiding all eye contact, and sped off across the water without looking back.

  In retrospect, I suppose Ganunu’s wordless description of the islands had been our best advice. This was not the sort of confrontation Grant’s clients might enjoy. We stayed around for another couple of hours, exercising our rights under Honduran law, so it was late afternoon when we started back, which meant that we had a head wind of about twenty miles an hour, right at the limit of my own ability to paddle a kayak.

  Rob and I led, the wind yanking at our paddles, while Grant and Ted weaseled up behind us drafting our kayak and using us for a windbreak. Grant was enraged: The idea of private islands and guards armed with machetes infuriated him. Screw this place. There would be no kayak tours of the Cayos de Cochinos. He was shouting about it, shouting furiously into the howling wind.

  Oh, the idea of a marine reserve was a good one, sure. But look who gets the short end of the stick. Poor people. Local folks. Where’s the damn justice in that? Grant wanted to know.

  The place was gorgeous, the islands closely spaced and good for kayaking, but everything was private. Or resort-based. There were angry little dipsticks running around threatening people with machetes.

  On the Islands of Pigs.

  Pirates

  Mrs. Melba Hyde-Jones, eighty, resident of the Honduran island of Guanaja, strolled through her living room, showing me various archaeological artifacts, the work of ancient indigenous Indians, collected by her late husband, Frank. There were maize grinders and small figurines with round faces and round eyes and round mouths. Frank Jones was a history buff and he had written a poem not long before he died, a poem about the history of the island. He had said, “Melba, this one’s for you.”

  Mrs. Hyde-Jones sat in a big wooden chair and recited the poem—a very long work—from memory. It was about “an earthly paradise,” about Guanaja, an island alive with fish and gulls and pelicans. The Indians who came from the mainland considered the island sacred, and warfare was forbidden.

  Enter the villains of the poem. Columbus landed in the summer of 1502, on his fourth and final voyage. Soon after, there were Spanish galleons in the bays and blood ran in the sand and under the trees. Peaceful Indians were taken as slaves to work in the gold and silver mines of Mexico. Spanish ships took the spoils back across the sea, to Seville.

  Ah, but then the English began to raid the Spanish treasure ships. By 1600 there were over five thousand pirates in the coves and bays of Guanaja and Roatan. Blood once again ran in the sand and under the trees. The poem strikes several triumphal chords here, the gist of which seemed to be that the Spanish pretty much deserved to get whacked by English pirates for what they did to the Indians and to what had once been an earthly paradise.

  The poem didn’t quite say that later on, wealthy Englishmen, who ran into trouble on Jamaica or the Caymans, might make their way to the bay islands of Guanaja and Roatan for a second chance in the plantation or commercial fishing business. The people of Guanaja—black and white—spoke English. They mostly made their living on the sea. They traded with other English-speaking Caribbean nations and protectorates: Belize, Jamaica, the Caymans.

  Then in 1859, the British ceded the bay islands to Honduras. Most people of English heritage on Guanaja still consider this an act of treachery. Today, the tensions on the islands are primarily cultural: English speakers—both black and white—versus Spanish speakers. Officially, the main town on the island of Guanaja is called Guanaja. White English speakers—who call themselves “islanders”—prefer the name Bonacco.

  In the 1980s, piracy again played a part in the history of the Guanaja. In September 1985, Edgar Hyde-Jones, Melba’s son, set out on a commercial fishing trip with a crew of nine English-speaking black men. They were approached by a boat carrying men who said they hadn’t eaten in days. The hungry crew was invited aboard Edgar’s boat, and were fed. After dinner the visitors produced weapons of some kind—probably Mac 10’s or Uzis—and killed everyone aboard except one crewman, who leapt overboard and was miraculously rescued at sea. The incident was, of course, drug-related, and investigative agencies from the United States tracked the pirates to Colombia. They rescued another survivor, a fourteen-year-old cabin boy who, Melba said, would have been sold into slavery.

  Edgar had been Melba’s only son. She told me the story in a firm voice, but her eyes glistened as she spoke. She said that she was raising Edgar’s daughter, who was now fourteen. Melba had never been able to tell her granddaughter precisely how her father died. “An accident at sea” is the closest she’d been able to come to the awful truth.

  We sat in silence for some time. The house had been built in the 1880s, constructed of cypress imported from the United States. The wooden floors were bare and they showed over a century of traffic patterns, but they were clean and newly oiled. There was a picture of Edgar on the wall. He was wearing some sort of uniform and staring off into the distance at a future that would never happen. A clock somewhere in the house ticked off the seconds, loudly.

  “Do you know why houses here are built on stilts?” Melba Hyde-Jones asked after a
time.

  She said malaria killed so many people on the mainland of Guanaja that over a hundred years ago, people began building on a shallow reef. “Islanders,” she said with some pride, “settled a piece of water.”

  The town—Bonacco or Guanaja, depending on your linguistic preference—has no roads but is intersected with canals and is sometimes called the Venice of the Caribbean. The walkways, threading between framed wooden houses and small shops, are narrow, and they cross over the canals in a series of humped-up wooden or concrete bridges. Deliveries are made by boat: ice and food and beer and clothing consignments all floating down the canals.

  Windows are left open for the sea breezes, and a stroll through the town gives a taste of its life. People singing in the Catholic church, in the Adventist church; a large family gathered for dinner, heaping platters of fillets on the table; a man scolding his wife, the wife turning to leave, then turning again to deliver the last angry word; American country-and-western music blaring out of bars catering to Spanish speakers.

  Even the jail is open to the breeze. One day at about sunset, I was walking down a narrow street and saw a black woman in tattered clothes shouting insults at passersby. She was slumped against a bright white wall, just below a sign reading POLICIA, and calling people “pus belly stink shits.” It seemed a poor location for that activity, and I stopped to watch. Presently a hefty white policeman wearing camouflage pants and a shiny black T-shirt stepped out of the station, grabbed the woman by an arm, escorted her across the alley and into a room.

  “I never stole dat ring,” the woman shrieked. “I never!”

  “I don’ wan’ hear it,” the cop said mildly, “I don’ wan’ hear nutin’ from you.”

  He slammed the door, which was newly painted with two-foot-high white letters reading CALABOZO. I walked by, propelled by intense curiosity, and glanced inside the calaboose through a small square window. It was like looking inside an oven, that hot, and the woman sat on a metal bunk, sweating profusely and looking miserable.

  “Stink shit,” she hissed in my direction—understandably, I think.

  And then, only an hour later, there she was standing outside the jail, on the walkway, joking with the cop and wishing all who passed, including me, a good evening without a trace of sarcasm in her voice.

  Melba Hyde-Jones asked me if I was enjoying my stay.

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  Grant was planning on basing his kayaking business out of Guanaja. There were some good campsites on the island, and the owners of the land liked the idea of people coming in, spending money locally, and leaving without a trace.

  The diving and the snorkeling were spectacular. One of the sites out by Long Key reminded me of the canyonlands of Arizona and Utah. At about thirty feet there were strange breaks in the coral heads: tunnels and canyons in the ocean. Soft corals predominated. The golden sea whips, in particular, looked like fuzzy saguaro cactus. Purple and green giant sponges reminded me a bit of barrel cactus, and the occasional mounds of hard plating coral, I thought at first, could be Anasazi ruins. But no. Too many colors: yellows and greens topped off with reds. They looked more like pagodas, or something you’d see in Tibet, if you could conceive of Buddhist architects on psychedelics. Slanting shafts of late afternoon sunlight illuminated the whole affair. And everywhere, on the whole of the reef, all the soft corals—the purple fans and yellow whips—everything swayed in a gentle surge, so that, drifting through the sinuous canyons and tubes, I felt as if I were slow-dancing with the Caribbean.

  Melba told me about how the young people, sons and daughters of islanders, were leaving. Fishing didn’t pay much anymore. Young people went to school in the United States, then looked for jobs there later on. No one wanted to stay and work for virtually nothing in some little island shop. The stores in Guanaja were often run by “Spaniards,” that is, Spanish speakers from the mainland. Many of them were industrious. They did well, and after a time, they bought little chunks of property from islanders who might be down on their luck. Melba felt the whole place sort of falling away from her.

  Had I talked with her brother, Verne, about any of this?

  In fact, I’d talked a lot about it with Verne. He was strong and tireless, a rawboned tough-talking man who went to the United States at the age of fifteen and wound up working for the U.S. Army in marine transport during the Second World War, then again in Vietnam. He owned five hundred acres of agricultural land on the island and had tried to build a resort there, but got wiped out by Hurricane Fifi in 1974. He set to rebuilding, and was just about to open four years later when Hurricane Greta destroyed his newly built lodge. Verne went back to the States to make some money in construction and was flattened again, this time by a bad divorce. Fifi, Greta, and then … ah hell, Verne didn’t even want to say her name.

  At seventy-one, he was starting over.

  We didn’t have a lot of luck visiting Verne’s land. The day was blustery, too dangerous to go all the way by boat. Verne got us to within a two-hour walk, and we stashed his boat in a deserted bay. He marched Ted Wood and me, double time, over some mountainous country that might have been the headlands of Northern California, then examined the mango and banana crop at his plantation. The water in the stream was down. Way down.

  Verne blamed a neighbor above him, a damn newcomer, a Spaniard from the mainland who was burning the gullies, working a slash-and-burn agricultural system that was destroying the watershed. The sons of bitches already trashed the mainland, Verne said, and now they want to come out here and do it. It was happening all over the island. Slash and burn.

  And so, on the two-hour walk out of the plantation, Verne cursed Spaniards altogether, using a term that would get you hurt bad in any barrio I knew. I liked Verne, liked him a lot, but thought I ought to say something. Nothing particularly diplomatic came to mind. When we got back to the boat, the engine wouldn’t start, and Verne cracked a couple of ribs trying to work the hand crank. Then it got dark on us and started pissing down rain. There was a severe lightning storm in the distance, moving our way. We were stranded and pretty much screwed.

  “Please don’t go around calling people spics” is what I should have said.

  Verne was in some pain, so Ted and I set off for the nearest town, jogging, in the dark. An hour later, we saw a light on a ridgetop, climbed toward the house, and met a retired couple from the United States, who radioed for help. That night, rescued, Verne, Ted, and I stayed in a small town on the mainland, in a boardinghouse owned by an ample black woman named Enola Gay.

  Enola said that she was born before they named the plane that dropped an atom bomb on Japan, but she sure hoped nobody thought she had anything to do with that. While Enola fixed dinner, Verne said that he’d known the woman all his life, that he had, in fact, grown up with her. When Verne was a kid, he delivered milk, on horseback, and every morning there was this beautiful little girl, working out in her yard. “She was always a worker, like me,” Verne said. He admired that in her.

  When Verne was trying to put his resort together, Enola worked for him. Then Fifi and Greta came along, and Enola started her own boardinghouse and restaurant. She was making a living primarily, I imagine, because her fish chowder is a thing of singular elegance. My room in her boardinghouse was spare and very clean.

  I woke sometime in the middle of that night. Lightning was striking nearby. The wind was booming and howling out of the east. Enola and Verne were up. I could hear them chatting in the parlor, two old friends seeking shelter from the storm.

  Enola was listing the things Verne had to do tomorrow.

  “Enola,” he said. “I swear, I’m getting so forgetful …”

  “Well, Verne,” she said. “I think you should slow down. For your health.”

  “When are you going to slow down?”

  And they laughed together while lightning struck all around. I drifted back to sleep as Verne and Enola gossiped about the people they’d grown up with.

  “Was sh
e the one who always went barefoot?” Verne asked.

  A soft murmur from Enola.

  “And that’s her boy?”

  The next morning, Enola had breakfast on the table when I got up and Verne was still talking about how the river on his land was going dry. What he ought to do, he said, was visit the governor. Talk about some laws. He apologized for getting so worked up yesterday, for some of the things he’d said.

  So I told Melba Hyde-Jones, that yes, I’d heard Verne’s opinions about the land and about various agricultural practices. I agreed with him to this extent: Slash and burn would result in a Guanaja that was literally dead in the water. The practice didn’t draw paying tourists, either. You got a visit, once, from a BBC documentary film crew, and that was about it.

  “But what can you do?” Melba asked. “The new people: It’s their country too.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes it is.”

  I talked a bit about Grant’s project and the idea that people might pay to visit an essentially unspoiled Guanaja.

  “You think so?” Melba asked. There were a couple of very good scuba resorts on Guanaja already. She couldn’t see that many more people would want to come to her island.

  “Hey, it’s an earthly paradise,” I said.

  Melba caught the echo of her late husband’s poem and smiled in a way that broke my heart. She was eighty years old, smarter than most, and wanted to think on the notion for a time.

  We sat in silence.

  Melba’s clock ticked away the seconds in her century-old home.

  The Lone Ranger

  The highest, the most remote mountains on the mainland of Honduras form the nucleus of several national parks. We were driving along a network of bad dirt roads, looking for a way to enter the newly established Santa Barbara Park. It was steep country, very green, and the mountains were closely spaced. The land, to my eye, possessed the logic of a sheet of paper crumpled in the hand and dropped on a table.