The Forgotten Land

The Forgotten Land
Dawn as black as the inside of a body bag. Our bio clocks say we’ve slept enough. Roosters crow in the neighborhoods around us, busses screech their brakes and accelerate as they maneuver the highway topes, collecting workers for the days labor on some dirt and brush project. Different bird talk comes randomly from the trees. Each sound is clear, distinct, unencumbered with the white noise that deadens sounds in the Northern urban. Soon a dog barks. Then another to answer that. And another to answer the second. Then a panic of barking coming from all sides, from 30 yard chained creatures, some desperate, some piteous, most angry, all in loud discussion of their plight and might.

The graying of the day finally. Stumbling amid our unloaded things from the evening before. There is no laughter, though there should be. No joy in the dirt and mud pit we find ourselves in. No expositations of awe at the wonder of the muggy heat, the cloud of mosquitoes, the vegetation crowding all around, the glory of the jungle. The cats are now free. Adapt or die you little furry bastards. Fifteen days crammed next to you in the truck has weakened out pampering pussy love. Weakened love all around. You’re on your own now, assholes, is the general attitude. With eyes as large as quarters, the cats tiptoe around this weird vegetated place, smells of monsters all around. The dog on a rope after the third time of going over and working the rich widows chained dogs into a foaming lather with her plump city scent.

I find the little gas camp stove and get us some Mexican instant coffee hot in questionably clean cups. This feels better, but the bodily urges are stirred, an intestinal relaxing from days of truck cab compaction. It’s the woods and shovel program. My venture first through the spine covered brush. How fast can this happen before the mosquitoes puncture my delicate parts. Not fast enough. A six stab shit has me scratching in all the wrong places. I secretly relish the malevolent thought of Kim’s perforating sojourn. How long can she hold it? A second cup of coffee is mixed to contemplate the days labors ahead.

Presently, the dog erupts again in an apoplexy of barking. A tall skinny fella approaches us on the trail out of the jungle. We do not berail the dog it’s sonic exclamation. This is what we want the dog to do. Terrorize everybody. Let them know there are gnashing fangs associated with this pile of white people stuff. Good morning-morning ..sueahh. Good morning to you. We reply. Ahh comes heah every day to be right wit jah. Dis is my jungle place. Yes, well it looks like we’ve taken over this place. Dis all right, I just sits heah. He nestles into a dirt pile a dozen feet away. He is smoking a huge brown cigarette with the distinctive ganga smell. Ah sits here and watches the day goes by. Ah only wishes ah had some papers. Has to use dis banana leaf. He puffs a few, a blue cloud of smoke enveloping his head. Ah ams Orlando. I de only ones wid da weed arounds heah. Dem das wants de weed gots to sees me. I offer him a cup of the Mexican coffee, which he accepts, then launches into a long mostly unintelligible dialogue about how he went over to gets some weed, but the lady and the man was a-fighting. Den she called the cops on de man and he was deported back to Nicaragua and de woman stills a bitch buts she unloaded the rest O de weed on Olando, so he’s right wid Jah. He opens the ubiquitous small black plastic bag of south America, which contains an ounce or more of some dark raw looking plant. He generously gives me a few grams. I take a puff off the banana leaf, to be ceremonious and assure him I am not a prig of some kind. Maybe it’s the overall exhaustion or the underlying stress of our situation, but the puff immediately disorients me, forgetting where my coffee cup is, what I was to do next. So I sit down with the guest, content to bullshit randomly in half understood language. Presently I become aware of the quick and heavy steps of the woman. If it was a plywood floor, it would be booming like a drum. This is the standard body language of the pissed off woman. What can it be? Always the detective work to discern the mind of the female. Hmmm .. Ok, I get it. Sloth. My sloth!. But I’m just being cordial. Why couldn’t the tude be about theft or murder?. Why always these indecipherable picayune whims of improper moral turpitude? Ok, Ok .. with a groan I rise and set to work getting the chain saw in operation.

Now early morning. The plan is to make stairs and get all the crap up on the 10 foot concrete platform by the end of the day. Now that the truck is empty, it’s off to the lumber store, Nancy’s it’s called. Orlando has newish plastic sandals, a walkman which he is intently adsorbed in regga music, a clean newer shirt, is saturated in ganga smoke, and for all intents and purposes, seems reasonably harmless. Then there is the dog, who I hope would spring to the aid of Kim if attacked with some malignant intent by our guest. Off to Nancy’s lumber. The lumber here is not far removed from trees. Still green and cut generously but irregularly, a 2x4 looks more like a porch post. The truck is loaded with some boards as heavy and hard as concrete, and two huge beams for the stair sides. Back to the platform. Orlando as been giving Kim a botanical tour of the surrounding jungle while the dog runs amok. There are cashew trees, lime trees, and dozens of medicinal plants that cure everything from malaria to cancer. Some are poison woods, who’s sap burns the skin like acid, or worse yet, blinds you if you rub your eyes. The story is told of one white man who sat on a recently sawed poison wood stump for lunch. The acid burned a meaty abscess through his posterior and killed him. Oddly, the antidote tree always grow close nearby. A thin red barked tree, crooked and rarely bigger than your wrist, it is called Peely Bwana because the red peeling bark, similar to paper. It reminds the locals of the burned red white man who’s skin peels relentlessly. Orlando points out that the bark can also be used to roll ganga.

Setting to work with the square, felt pen, and chain saw, I lay out the stairs. My god, the wood is as hard as plastic and cuts about the same. It is tremendously hot.. Sweat sheets off me, dripping as though I just stepped out of a lake, but without the cooling refreshing quality. My pants are soaked with the effusion and I feel like I’m about to keel over, but still I must toil on. Must get the camp set up on the platform and all the crap up there before the night thieves pack everything away. Orlando sits in the shade, puffing endlessly. He helps only if I ask him with some ridiculously heavy part. Late in the afternoon, the step supports are up and the steps nailed down. Finally on top. It is breezy and airy up there. Sweep the leaves and accumulated debris off the sides, set up the tent, and start hauling all the thousand things up. Orlando sets up one of the camp chairs on top and lights up a fresh reefer as we toil everything up the new access. Numerous people are passing by. Larry’s place is on the main trail cutting thorough the jungle. Workers from the rich widow come by and get emphatic about the poor connection of the top of the stairs to the platform. Bali wood no strong. Ita cracka. Must have support. Will crong bong down, asmacha. Mucho mas. I am polite, but not energetic to do any thing about it. I feel rather a-smasha already. In fact, I am roasting and semi delirious. The largest worker fellow had been going on about the “T” brace that needs to be under the stairs. Finally he rallies a few others and they build one, fitting it tightly under the middle of the span. I am most grateful. These people are alright, me thinks. I try to take time to converse and be cordial. Kim is getting frantic to get all the stuff up on the platform. It is getting dark as it always does .. to early. Kim, I explain, we don’t have to get every little thing up here. Just the most liftable. The most obvious. We do have the dog, which is barking viciously at everybody. Finally, dusk descended, she acquiesces and sets about puttering on top.

Now dark, and the situation of how to dislodge our comfortable guest. He is apparently content to sleep in the chair in what could be construed as our new living room. Of course, the job falls to me, with the scowling woman in the shadows. Some how I convey that we want to wash up and go to bed and that he should trundle on off back into the jungle leaves from whence he came. Finally, we are alone, our empire of American commodities secure, just us to contemplate where the hell we are. We wash in a bucket from “well” water, which is a rain water hole in the ground below us. I am fairly dubious of it’s microbial concentration, advising Kim not to get any in her mouth. Certainly, not toothbrush quality. As a final act of glory, I get one of the LED lights hooked up to a battery and life is illuminated. The bedding has dried a bit during the day. The nest is an oasis of rest after a roasting day of labor. A mild feeling of contentment come over us with this hard won peace. Kim is smiling. The cats are on jungle prowl.

Morning comes with a troop of parrots squawking and fighting in the trees around us. Wonderful it is. And of course the morning dogs, answering miscellaneous roosters in the distance, to which our dog must answer, and soon the sweet talk of the jungle animals is drowned out in colophony of frantic barking dogs within a mile radius. The plan today is for me to go all the way back to the border to get the hovercraft. A necessary plan, though filled with worry about leaving Kim alone on the jungle trial. But after coffee, I’m off with the satchel of paperwork.

The country is beautiful though not particularly interesting. Reaching Belmopan before noon, I am surprised to find my boat license ready to pick up. I feel dreadful, hot and cold and weak in the legs. I pull the truck under a tree and sleep for almost 2 hours. Still feel awful when I wake, but must go on. A few miles past the cutoff that bypasses Belize City, there are some uniforms that are waving me down. Not knowing what legality this is, I stop. A black uniformed thug opens the passenger door and jumps in. Another 6 clamber into the pickup bed. Ok, this is it. I’m screwed now. This must be the Belizean equivalent of the Mexican police mugging. I’ll be directed to some side road and whacked for everything, the swamp and vines overgrowing what is left in the mud. But it turns out these are hitchhikers. I was passing the prison and these are guards getting off work. The frantic road waving is the central American method of asking for a ride. No thumb. My surprising guest if friendly enough, as most are here. The half dozen settle around in the truck bed as though they were getting ready for the superbowl game on TV. I am roasting with fever now. My legs seem paralyzed. I have to lift my leg by the pant leg to step on the brake. On we go through the mundane flat land with my cargo of turnkeys. We come to a police check point and are waved through, the uniforms recognizing their professional brethren. A few stops at side roads to let out passengers, and now dusk again. I roll into the town of Orange Walk, about 60 miles south of the northern border crossing. Burning up now, stopping at the first hotel I see, Hu Wangs. I can barely get out of the truck, and shuffle along the sidewalk, holding the wall like a drunk. The Wang,s are barely able to communicate with me, but finally the paperwork is filled out and a bar of soap and a “wowel” is given to me. The room is upstairs, which is a lengthy process to ascend to, each step having to manually lift my leg. I am in psychic agony about the paralysis, something bizarre and unknown to me. Mrs Wang is concerned, which is nice, but irreverent. The room about the size of a large closet, a ceiling fan paddling the torpid air, just a sheet for the bed, bars on the window and the evening bedlam outside. I collapse in feverish exhaustion. The next 12 hours are a writhing of sweat and bizarre dreams, the secret bodily process trying to burn out the invading microbe or what ever Dengue drudge that has assailed me. The morning finally comes, the body wrung out like a bucket mop. A shower in a space the size of a vertical coffin, no room the retrieve dropped soap. A search for food in town proves hopeless until I at last locate a Mayan fruit seller. The wild oranges are reviving as the chemistry greedily adsorbs the vitamin C. On again now, to the northern border.

The road is a plague of bicycles going in all directions, but eventually they thin out as the cane fields dominate the landscape. I arrive at the border around 9, thinking I’m an hour late. But not much to my surprise, the gate has not been opened yet. Eventually inside, looking for Leroy, or whatever the hell his name was. Nowhere around, although he claimed he was there every day. I eventually hook up with another customs agent and the customary hours of wait commence. The papers are here, the papers are there, this official needs to sign them, that one needs to stamp them .. how anything gets done here is unknown to me. I use the time to hook up the hovercraft trailer. Using my bumper jack, I draw a small crowd. The jack is the most coveted item in central America. Some offer to buy it off me on the spot. No more tossing it in the back of the truck, it is number one on the klepto list around here. Inside the hover is all manner of rotting putrid food. The cooler is like opening an overdue casket from Calcutta. Important papers are mixed with all this, mold mountains of illegible text. Amazingly, there is a trash can where I can donate all this biology. When done, the flies move on to sweeter pastures.

Around 11:30 the customs agent informs me that all is in order. I had thought that all was in order when I left 3 days ago, but evidently mistaken. The bureaucrats would hate to miss a chance to obfuscate the process. Now to the pay-out-the-ass window. I’m sweating if I have enough money, all is in Yankee dollars. I get out of there with about 50 bucks. The thieves have charged me about 900 US to bring the boat in. Then to the insurance guy, a minor fleecing for a days insurance on the trailer. Now the road in earnest. 6 hours of daylight and 6.5 hours of driving. It’s pedal mashing time. I pick up no hitchhikers, I’m on a mission to get back to Kim. If everything is … as has been going, she will be raped and murdered, laying in the few things that were unable to be carried off. I’m stressing. I’m stomping the gas, passing like any good Mexican, irresponsibly, trying to get to Punta Gorda before night. I don’t make it. Blackness envelops the myriad standing on the roadside, the bicyclists, and the dogs alike. I can’t see spit. Some times I see a silhouette of some masses riding or walking beside and in the road, but often I only catch a glimpse as my headlight illuminates them instantaneously … 4 feet from my 50 MPH bumper. What the hell are they doing out here anyway? Shouldn’t they be in their smoky hovel slapping around a tortilla for the 30 family members? Maybe this nocturnal migration is coming over for dinner? I am terrified of hitting one of these people, though so burned out and ripped off I would enjoy bouncing a few off the grill. I think my tires can take running over a bicycle, they have pretty thick rubber. What the hell would I do then? Flee? Not a really great way to establish residency in a foreign country. I slow the truck to around 30 giving me a small margin of panic with each dark phantom.

At long last I arrive “home”. Parking on the road now and hiking in the ¼ mile to the platform and Kim’s presumed remains. But I can’t walk, though better, my best is an interminable shuffle. I’d lose the 20 meter hobble at the geriatric Olympics. In 15 minutes I get to the bottom of the stairs and call out. Kim answers, She is fine. The dog barks. I crawl up the stairs pulling my self by my hands. Sweet home! Rest. Food. I ask, are you alright? What has happened? Has there been a hoard of visitors? People passing by? Has Orlando been here from dawn to dark? No, no .. she answers .. Nobody coming and going. I’ve been here all by myself. Moved the rest of our stuff up here. Just one visitor. What’s wrong with you? Why did it take so long to walk from the truck? Paralyzed .. I answer. Oh, that’s to bad. Followed by silence. Not exactly the sympathy and massage I had in mind. Who was the visitor? I ask. Chet Schmidt, the hostel owner. He says that we have to clear off of here by Monday morning. He has a crew coming to finish building on this place before Larry [the owner] shows up in a month. He says there will be 6 guys hauling cement and gravel up here, Spanish music blasting on the radio, a flurry of activity. Everything must be cleared off and out of here. The bastard, I think. This place has sat here in the jungle, descending into an archeological ruin for two years with nothing happening. Now suddenly when we need rest and release from kayos the most, he decides to start building. It is Friday evening. Monday is not far off. And just where the hell will we go?

Saturday morning a beautiful mosaic of sunlight through the jungle trees. A half dozen parrots fly into the trees nearby, like a moving monkey fight, defoliating the tree in a raucous argument. Other unknown birds are also aggressively announcing their position in the canopy. The dog wanders off to get the neighbors chained canines in an apoplexy of verbal expulsion. We brew the coffee and sip with extreme relish. One teaspoon, add hot water. In this land of coffee, there is only instant from Mexico. Around 7, a thin malarial white man comes walking through the jungle trail, approaching the rain of dog barking without fear. He talks rapidly in a monotone, giving a usual greeting, some compliments on our camping ability, then launching into a social economic monologue about how the workers must be kept busy or they’ll return to Guatemala, how Larry has left him money to work on the place and he’s done naught to date, how he made a bad investment that has cleaned him out (unrelated), and a few newbi stories of how the ground is swarming with deadly snakes and venomous bugs. He is never still, flitting about the platform, snapping his head from side to side as though a rock had just whizzed by his ear. He says he has a place where we could move a block away and begins to talk of monthly rent and power bills. He said the workers left the city water on for two days and it cost him 1200 dollars. It’s no use exaggerating to an exaggerator, I can smell the crap in that story. But city water sounds good. The cesspool dug in the jungle floor below us is not fit for the animals to drink. I tell him that we are robbed and penniless, but that I have skills and tools which I can use in trade with him. He seems satisfied with that as he jerks his head suddenly to the left. I’m wondering if ghosts are sneaking up on him. We go over to the place a bock away. It is a construction site with the proverbial unfinished concrete building. Two stories, the lower level a dark obiliat of stacked construction supplies, but the second floor is of wood, with an expansive metal roof and some walls without windows. The back of this place is on level with a wall of flowering jungle trees, very airy and beautiful. This will do quite nicely, I think. But don’t tell him that. He is rambling on non-stop about how this is not finished, that is done wrong, this is rotting from neglect, if then … then that could happen. We settle on my task of installing the sewage drain piping to start, then the toilets and water supply. Later still, the electrical wiring of the place. I’ll keep a check on the Guatemalan water use and we’ll worry about the electricity later. Down stairs and in a hovel on the side is where the workers stay. An outhouse of disgusting factor 12.6 is in the yard. The filthy seat is loose on the rotted tilted throne. It is dark and decayed, the walls seething with black biting malignant insects. Who can imagine what’s lurking in the hole, licking it’s incisors, waiting to clamp into a looming soft white ass. Apparently this is motivation to get a working toilet installed. Yes .. I am motivated. Another 5 minutes on breathless jungle Streptococillis, mahogany wood, squalid workers existence, and loud Mexican music, then he’s off in a panic to some other imagined appointment. So this is it. Evicted and re-housed all in one sentence.

I return to the platform, convicted to do nothing for the rest of the day. Sunday we’ll move. I tell Kim of our luxurious new living apartments. There is minimal excitement. Back to the Mexican coffee and bird calls, sinking in awe into an American camp chair. Contemplating this land, so far down here at the last of the road. From here, one must take a boat to another country, this humanity hemmed in on all sides by the Jungle. Here the Mayans have lived un-molested by the Spaniards and the rest of the world, and also unaided by any government, the British or the current Peoples Parties. Pirates used the coasts and islands to hide their treasure, slave ships unloaded Africans, Chinese, and East Indians here, Europeans mixed with the Arimi Indians .. then this place was left alone. Forgotten by the world. Left here to stew in it’s poverty, interbreeding, becoming a semi rebel land populated by the unwanted. Have we gravitated here because we are such people also?

Sunday I get the hovercraft off the trailer and it runs well in spite of it’s holes and torn skirt. I’ll use it to shuffle the mound of possessions across the rich widows lawn to the truck on the street, then ferry it to the new digs, packing it all upstairs. This process takes a week, where we had unloaded in 2 hours, now it seems endless. No workers show up on Monday, but the downstairs of the new place is a bustle of activity, making rebar frames for Larry’s place. Mexican music blares form below. By Friday we are re-entrenched, our tent set up inside for bugless nights, some semblance of order to our discordant belongings, the LED lights emplaced, and the cats exploring every nook and cranny. Chet comes bustling in, blithering non-stop about the Hurricane. A force 5 tempest is heading straight for us. His place on the waterfront will surely be leveled he exclaims. He must move all his 20 years work of precious papers in the next 8 hours. Also boats, furniture, household everything, his empire must be secured. He is frantic. We must figure where to go also, he says. Fill the truck with gas. Lock everything down and flee.

Flee? What do you think we’ve been doing for the last month? Flee where? This is the last place. If this is our burial mound under a pile of ripped apart lumber and concrete, then so be it. We ain’t budging. A piddly hurricane vs what we’ve just been through? It’s maelstrom is but a walk in a spring shower … with flowers. No way we’re fleeing, we’re digging in and gritting our teeth. Come what hell or fury you have to throw at us … Belizean hurricane, there’s no way we’re moving back into that truck.

The hurricane passes with no wind, raining torrentially over the next few days without cessation. I am grateful for the roof, drubbing like a jungle drum, but this storm is a punk. It will take a lot more than this to kick our ass.


Epilogue
Now this exodus two months past, we agitate into this new life of raining flowers, idyllic temperatures, sea breezes and millions of biting bugs. Adjustment sickness takes it’s turn with all of us, next Kim, who we haul to a primitive clinic for pills (all free), then the dog languishing for days with tick fever. Another punk hurricane comes and goes. We hack, chop and burn our acre of jungle, clearing enough space for gardens, getting to know the trees and insects before we destroy them. The colonial paradigm of a mansion centered in a groomed estate is strong in our blood, despite our new age sentimentalities. The scorpion infested thatched hut in a tangle of vines is not to our tastes. A three story tower of my mad design will soon rise from the jungle floor. The hovercraft is repaired and repaired again, tropical attrition decaying every part enthusiastically. Skipping over the blue sea in the hovercraft is magic. The secret rivers traversed wind inland for 50 miles, cloaked in thick tangled growth. The local police are searching for me due to neighborhood dust infractions, a consequence of driving it down the street to the launch site.

The people are still nice, some getting nicer, others showing their deep contempt of first worlders. Kim is pragmatic about her existence, so much about the kitchen and laundry and site work, it seems that temple looting never enters her mind. But I am plagued with such questions, how to make a few dollars to offset our endless expenditures. When will the time be found to search for Karnackna Ku’s golden statue? I build a shrimp trap, a charcoal making machine and have plans to make a plastic melting machine. But to what end I question? The connection with wind power moguls of the North fades, the hover business plans seem to crawl along in an insurmountable bureaucratic morass. Where will be our place here in this society? What can we do to insure our sustainability, as well as give back and uplift the struggling around us? It is a race to create a life of meaning, of security, of importance before the money runs out. In the meantime, I join with twitching Chet, the local political provocateur, as his ghost writer, for he writes like the insane prisoner, scratching the wall with a spoon. With myself in the shadows, we instigate a Mayan uprising, refining rhetoric to readability. Maybe the god Ichmal will have pity on me and give me his ruby eye, or at least a gold earring the size of a truck tire.