by Lavinia Spalding

A daughter finds peace in a Mexican ghost town

The sun is relentless, stalking me along the narrow, cobbled lanes of Alamos, Mexico, as I return to my hotel. I unlock the heavy double doors and walk into the lush, untamed courtyard, where weather-pocked stone cherubs guard a center fountain and rocking chairs sit motionless beneath electric ceiling fans. It’s quiet inside. Quieter, in fact, than any hotel I’ve ever patronized, because I’m the only guest.

Which is not to say that I’m alone.

According to locals, my hotel is haunted by the woman it originally belonged to: Señorita Marcor, a beautiful spinster piano teacher who traversed Alamos only by underground tunnel because the streets back then weren’t cobbled, and she refused to muddy her boots and long skirts.

This doesn’t alarm me. For one thing, I like the sound of Señorita Marcor. For another, I’m traveling with my own ghost.

“I want to disappear,” I told my mother a few weeks ago, giving her a research project. My father had just died so I thought she could benefit from an assignment that would keep her busy, give her a purpose. As for me, I was desperate to escape San Francisco-the endless hustle, the cold summer weather, the impassive faces, and worse, the sympathetic ones. I wanted to retreat with my memories of my father to a place where no one knew us.

“Maybe Mexico,” I said. “Somewhere pretty but not touristy-a quiet village with a couple of small hotels and coffee shops. And bougainvillea. Lots of bougainvillea.”

It took her two days to return a verdict: Alamos, a seventeenth-century colonial town in the foothills of the Sierra Madres, one of Mexico’s oldest treasures and a national monument. A tourist destination in the winter, it would be disgustingly hot and accordingly devoid of visitors in June. I could take a first-class, air-conditioned bus from Tucson-where she lived-leaving at 6:00 p.m. and arriving at 6:00 a.m., for $80 round-trip.

“Alamos,” I said, rolling it on my tongue like a Mexican candy. “I’ve never heard of it. Sounds perfect.”

When I step off the bus at 6:00 a.m., however, I’m less convinced. It’s quiet here, all right. The sun is just beginning its rise, exposing thin, dusty streets surrounding the station. Lifeless and bleak, they don’t promise much-no bougainvillea, no inviting B&Bs, and not a single coffee shop brightens the pale, nondescript rows of single-story dwellings. Of the few local characters lurking about, none speaks English, and I’m struggling with Spanish. I have only a few key words in my arsenal, and I’m hoping that if I can put them in the right order, they’ll lead me to caffeine.

“Restaurante?” I inquire of the driver. He’s leaning against the bus, pinching a cigarette tightly between his thumb and forefinger. No, he assures me, shaking his head once, definitively. No restaurantes. All closed at this hour.

So I camp out at the station and wait for the town to open its doors to me, miserably watching the ticket agent sip coffee from a thermos. Wishing I knew enough Spanish to engineer a transaction that would result in my getting a cup. Wishing I had pesos to offer. Wishing I knew the whereabouts of my formerly travel-savvy, super badass self.

Finally around 7:30, I decide to strike out, following twisty cobbled roads into the center of town. For some reason, the sidewalks in Alamos are elevated a good three feet from the ground-almost shoulder height for me. Unsure of what to make of this, I decide instead to walk in the road, which means that each time a little pickup blows through I’m forced to press against the wall of the sidewalk to make room for both of us.

Within minutes my enthusiasm returns as I find myself surrounded by bright white Spanish colonial architecture, completely intact, and endless rows of tall, arched portals. I’m relieved by the absence of fast-food restaurants and scant suggestions of Western influence. No one is hawking blankets or tacky mother-of-pearl jewelry, or sipping Starbucks lattes while barking into cell phones. I see only a handful of locals beating dust from rugs, opening windows, calmly sweeping sidewalks. They cast shy looks my way, and something about them restores my confidence.

Soon I find myself at Casa de los Tesoros, a sixteenth-century convent turned tourist hotel. I spend the morning there, drinking Nescafe and nibbling on thick Mexican pastries delivered by clean-shaven servers in suits and ties. The manicured courtyard has café tables with umbrellas, a gift shop, a swimming pool, and an Internet station set up beneath massive, ancient-looking paintings of monks and saints.

Within an hour I’ve committed the very act I swore I wouldn’t-I’ve made a friend: Jean-Philippe, a Parisian toy designer who came here to purchase a million jumping beans to sell in the pages of French magazines. Alamos, he informs me, is the jumping-bean capital of the world.

“Only, for the first time since 1982,” he says, his face darkening, “they aren’t jumping. The rain came too early this year, ruining the chances for a crop.”

But he’s solved the problem, he announces, turning cheerful again as he reaches for one of my pastries. He’s invented a cardboard chicken that lays real, edible square eggs. This is exactly the sort of bizarre conversation I usually relish when traveling, but today it feels misplaced. I’m not in Mexico to make friends or conversation or be served poolside by well-coifed waiters. I’m not here to have a good time. I’m here for one reason: to lean into grief till I fall over and have no choice but to pull myself back up again.

My immediate problem is solved when I meet Suzanne, the owner of Casa de los Tesoros. After a brief conversation in which I explain that I’m a writer in search of simpler, quieter lodging (no need to tell anyone about my father), I find myself being led to her other hotel down the road where, if I stay, I’ll be the sole occupant.

From the outside, Hotel la Mansion appears stark and pedestrian, and I brace myself to meet the dumpy little sister of Casa de los Tesoros. But Suzanne casually unlocks the heavy double doors, and I step past her into a wild, tropical, secret garden-like courtyard. A central stone fountain bubbles, surrounded by palm and mango trees, white pillars and statues. Slanted beams of sunlight illuminate thick curls of pink bougainvillea hanging from white arches, and birds circle the tops of trees. Hummingbirds buzz and pale yellow butterflies flutter, and it feels like the doors have been sealed for a century. Suzanne offers me my choice of ten rooms, and then she closes the gate behind her.

My father would have been thrilled that I’ve come to Mexico to mourn him; he loved Latin American and Spanish culture. He collected Day of the Dead statues, Tarahumara pottery, and Mexican postcards of 1930s film stars; he devoured everything he could find to read about pre-Colombian history, the Mayans, the mummies of Guanajuato. But mostly he loved the music. A concert classical and flamenco guitarist, he studied in Mexico with Manuel Lopez Ramos and in Spain with Paco de Lucia, and he once performed at the palace of Alfonso the XIII for the Prince of Spain. And when he was diagnosed with terminal emphysema and advised that he could buy himself six more months by moving to a lower elevation, my father immediately chose Tucson- he wanted to go to the Mariachi Festival.

I spend my first Alamos afternoon in one of the old Mother Hubbard rocking chairs outside my room, reading and writing in my journal. Finally around dusk I venture out to find food. In the town square I buy a book called “See it and Say it in Spanish” from a woman named Marta at Terracotta Tiendas, a co-op in the plaza, and study it over a bowl of tortilla soup and a Corona at Las Palmeras, a quiet, low-key restaurant across from the plaza.

Directly across from me stands the centerpiece of town, a gloomy, shadowy church called Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción or La Parroquia de la Purisima Concepción or El Templo Parroquial de la Immaculada Concepción, depending on whom you ask. And right in front of the church, as if to cheer it up, is the Plaza de las Armas, with a delicate open-sided gazebo surrounded by flowers, a smattering of gangly skyscraper palm trees, and a wrought iron and white picket fence.

Like its church, Alamos has multiple names-the City of Arches, the Flower of the North, the Pearl of the Mountains, the Garden of the Gods, the City of Silver, and the Soul of the Sierra Madre-but Francisco de Vasquez Coronado first named it Alamos (or Real de Los Frailes de Alamos) in 1540. The northernmost of Mexican colonial cities, it became one of the wealthiest towns in the country after silver was discovered in the hills in 1683. By the late 1700s, the town had more than 30,000 residents, some of whom traveled north to found San Francisco and Los Angeles.

By 1790 Alamos was one of the world’s biggest silver producers and by the mid-nineteenth century, the capital of Occidente. But with riches came trouble; for two centuries, the people of Alamos suffered floods, droughts, plagues, and famine along with political unrest and continual Apache, Yaqui, Mayo and Tarahumara uprisings. Colonists, Federalists, Liberals, and bandits overran the town at one time or another. In the 1860s, under Napoleon’s reign, Emperor Maximilian’s troops occupied Alamos and drove away all the silver barons. Mexican rebels took it back the following year, and the Revolution drove away most colonial landowners. By the early 1900s the mines were closed, along with the railroad and the mint. The money was gone, and only a few hundred people remained.

But it still held some magic, because the story goes that when Pancho Villa’s troops arrived in Alamos in 1915, intending to pillage the town, he gave orders not to burn it, vowing to someday make it his home. Villa was killed shortly after, so he never returned. Instead, after World War II, Americans began immigrating and restoring the old adobe mansions. Now Alamos is a national monument, with 188 buildings on the national registry, and home to some 15,000 people, of whom about 400 are expats (Paul Newman, Carroll O’Connor, Rip Torn, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers all lived here). Still, it doesn’t feel like an expat town.

From the window of Las Palmeras, I watch people mill about the Plaza de las Armas, settling into benches around the church and gazebo. Two handsome old mustached men in matching cowboy hats lean cross-armed against the ornate white fence that frames the gazebo, and behind them, a teenage couple holds hands shyly in the shade of a jacaranda tree. A woman sets up a hamborgesa stand, and a man carries a guitar case across the plaza.

My father was teaching guitar right up until he died, still patiently explaining to his students how to do a tremolo or a rasgueado, jiggling their wrists to make them relax their hands, scolding them for hooking their thumbs over the necks of their guitars.

I studied seriously with him from when I was five until thirteen and again in my twenties and thirties, far less seriously. Now that he’s gone-and with him the opportunity to study-I’m already lost in regret for a lifetime of taking him for granted. It’s not a surprise. I knew I’d feel remorse; I just didn’t anticipate being so mad at myself.

My father left his guitar to me, but since he died, I’ve only removed it from its case a handful of times. I’ve held it in my arms, rested my cheek against the cool wood, played a few notes, and put it back. But suddenly I find myself wishing I’d brought it to Mexico. Perhaps here, in the haven of my hotel, I could make it through an entire piece of music.

The day he told me he was dying, I laughed at him.

“Dad, you’re not dying,” I said.

“Yes, I am. I have emphysema.”

“A doctor told you that?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?” I asked.

“I Googled it.”

I told him he was silly, but Google was right. His health declined over the next two years; he coughed and wheezed constantly, eventually barely able to breathe. Finally he was put on an oxygen machine, which he dragged around the house with him. He quit smoking, reluctantly, after forty-five years.

The last time I talked to him, I was in a rush to get off the phone. I had fifteen spare minutes before I needed to leave for work, but trying to carry on a conversation with him had turned painful; he was too often incoherent and rambled on.

“I’ve got to go, Daddy,” I said.

“Well,” he answered lightly, “when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

The words stay with me.

The Plaza de las Armas is quiet tonight, but not so on Sunday evenings, when the age-old ritual of paseo is still practiced, as it is in virtually every small town in Mexico: teenage boys and girls promenading, walking in circles around the gazebo in opposite directions, eyeing each other openly. It reminds me of high school weekends spent at the shopping mall, except the laps these teens make around each other are much shorter, and the prowling more overt.

But the true distinction is the parents, sitting on sideline benches taking in the entertainment of their daughters walking arm-in-arm with girlfriends, being ogled by pubescent boys. I think of what Suzanne said about my hotel’s ghost, Señorita Marcor-that she had dozens of suitors but never married because her parents didn’t approve of any of them.

Maybe little has changed since Señorita Marcor’s day, and parents still preside over their children’s love lives here. I consider the scene in front of me. It’s fairly self-explanatory, but for one thing: I see no pairing off, no conversation or flirtation between the sexes. What comes next for these teens loosely upholding the culture’s dating traditions? Will they date? Get married? And if their parents disapprove, will they run off and elope as my parents did?

My mother first met my father at her art school graduation party in Boston when she was 23 and he was 17.

“That’s the cutest boy I’ve ever seen,” she said to a friend when my father walked in with his guitar, crashing the party. “I’m going to marry him.”

“I’d better introduce you then,” the friend said, ushering her over to him.

“Wally, meet Dolly,” the introduction went. “You’re made for each other.”

Six weeks later they stole my aunt’s car and ran off together, making it all the way to California. When they finally ran out of money, they called my grandmother and told her they’d eloped (they hadn’t, but pretending to be married meant they could cohabitate). The following June they drove a borrowed TR3 sports car from Boston to North Carolina, where it was legal to marry at the age of 18 without parental consent. This time they actually did elope.

Before my father got sick, he was the star of the family, the vibrant, handsome, brilliant performer, and we orbited his life, for better or for worse, like the gazebo these kids circumnavigate in Plaza de las Armas.

If the gazebo weren’t here, would they still walk the paseo every night? What do we do with the traditions and patterns when our center is suddenly gone?

During the day not a soul visits my hotel, and I sit and listen to mangos drop from trees. I drink coffee, write, read, study Spanish, and nap. Sometimes I cry. Time spreads, expands.

But for a few hours each evening Ruben, a worker from Casa de los Tesoros, comes by in case I need anything. Twenty-two and bored, Ruben likes to bring things to my door. First, chips and salsa. Next, bottled water. Finally, a mango from the tree outside my door. I’m determined to be alone, but he doesn’t know that, and his earnestness makes it impossible to resent the interruptions. Gracias, I say, again and again. Gracias.

An elderly security guard also comes at night. He sits on a chair just inside the main door, though to protect me from what, I have no idea. I can only imagine it’s the town ghosts, for I’ve come to learn that Señorita Marcos is not alone; legend has it Alamos is teeming with them. There’s the gray-robed monk who guards the treasures in the seven secret underground tunnels leading to the church, the ghosts of the silver mine workers, the politically incorrect “headless Chinaman,” the unfaithful bride, the violet perfume ghost.

I find being in a ghost town soothes me. There’s something about the way the people of Alamos so effortlessly preserve their past and coexist with their ghosts. I start leaving my hotel more frequently during the day, retreating to my air-conditioned room only when I get overheated. I strike up conversations with locals if only to ask them about ghosts. Everyone has a story. In this town, ghosts aren’t a concept one does or does not believe in; they simply exist, almost as lively a populace as the living.

Out wandering one day, I poke my head into Casa de Maria Felix, a hotel and museum. One of Alamos’s claims to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Maria Felix, an iconic film star sometimes referred to as the Mexican Marilyn Monroe. This is the property where she was born. It’s run by an expat named Lynda, who tells me she was unaware, when she bought it in 1999, that the film star was born there.

She was not, however, oblivious to Maria Felix’s existence. Coincidentally, she’d been collecting the Mexican film star’s photographs for thirty years. The casa now overflows with artifacts excavated during the construction of the hotel, and a room dedicated to images of Maria Felix runs the gamut from famous original portraits to what resemble middle-school art class sketches. Altogether, Lynda has about 400 images of Maria Felix.

Lynda’s ghost story is that she came upon the ruin one night while taking a walk, during her first visit to Alamos. The moon was shining through a window, and behind the wall she could see mesquites and palo verde trees. Intrigued, she wandered to the back of the property, and turning to look at the ruins in the moonlight, saw the spirits of a woman and child. She bought the property the next day.

Later in the afternoon, I take a private walking tour with a man named Trini, who goes by Candy Joe (local kids gave him the moniker, he tells me, because he always has candy for them). We visit the cemetery, a study in shades of white and sepia. Elaborately carved statues of praying angels and weeping cherubs share sky space with towering, austere crosses, while beautiful old headstones are stacked on the ground like dishes in a cupboard. On one end of the graveyard, a tall block of aboveground family crypts all bear holes the size of grapefruits, evidence of a time when looting was standard practice.

Candy Joe also takes me by a mansion where a woman named Beatrice, a silver baron’s daughter, once lived. The house was a wedding gift from Beatrice’s father, he says. On the day she married, her father had the streets of Alamos lined with silver bars for a few hours. Leaving the church after the ceremony, though, the groom’s horse was spooked and reared up; the groom was thrown and his back broken, and several months later he died. Beatrice subsequently lost her mind, and for the next six months could be spotted in the cemetery late at night, digging up his grave with a shovel and pick. Because her father was the most important man in town, the cemetery caretaker left her alone. She died not long after and was buried beside her husband, but people continued to see her ghost, in front of his grave, praying.

I find that the stories all intersect, weaving around each other, cross-pollinating. Is it the virgin bride, the woman in white, or the unfaithful wife who haunts the beautiful mansion they call Las Delicias? Or are these spirits one and the same? The legends are fused, details blurred. They have been repeated so many times.

The night before I leave Alamos, I have dinner with Suzanne, Jean-Philippe, and a few other travelers. As we swap stories, I realize that for the first time, I’m not eyeing the door, waiting for a break in conversation so I can escape. I’m content in the company of others. I even talk about my father.

For a place I hadn’t heard of a month ago, Alamos has given me precisely what I wanted-gentle quietude and privacy, solitude without isolation, uninterrupted time and space to heal, no one asking anything of me. A summer season so slow and lazy that even the jumping beans won’t jump, so hot and muggy it holds no appeal to any other tourists.

It’s also provided what I didn’t want but somehow needed. When I walk through town now, I know people. Jose Louis, the bartender at Casa de los Tesoros, is teaching me to conjugate verbs, Lynda from Casa Maria Felix has given me a driving tour, Candy Joe hollers “Buenos dias” from his little tourist office, and Marta from the co-op waves exuberantly whenever she sees me.

I came here to be alone in my grief, but it’s the people of Alamos who have helped me move beyond it. Without even trying, they’ve taught me to remember the dead in a way that keeps them alive-by continuing to tell their stories.

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Lavinia Spalding is the editor of Travelers’ Tales’ The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 and the upcoming The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 8. She is author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler (chosen one of the best travel books of 2009 by the L.A. Times) and With a Measure of Grace, the Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant (now in its fourth printing). A regular contributor to Yoga Journal, her work has also appeared in a wide variety of print and online publications, including Sunset Magazine, Gadling, Post Road, World Hum, and Inkwell. She lives in San Francisco.

by Barbara Erwine

A traveler gets up close and personal with her cheese

Ankle deep in manure, I survey the surrounding hillside dotted with upwards of 60 cows.  I’ve never been good at crowd estimates, let alone the bovine variety, but we humans are outnumbered at least seven to one today.  I scan the scene trying to identify the one renegade cow that doesn’t belong here. She had bolted from the farm just after birthing a dead calf a day before we arrived.  Klaus says she’s grieving, but none of the broad flat faces that surround me show any telltale signs of motherly distress.  She has a name; but I’m not especially good at names either, so I’ll call her Else, because that’s as fair a name as any for a cow on these lush Alsace hillsides. Else took cover amongst the heaving flanks of this neighboring herd; and we’re a posse of eight come to reclaim her.

This, I should pause to acknowledge, is not the daily routine of city-slicker Seattleites like Paul and I and our 13-year old daughter, Annie. “We are having a family farming adventure,” I remind myself as brown gunk oozes up around our boots. I keep a motherly eye on Annie’s bandana as it bobs up and down like a small red beach ball bouncing off the backs of the disorderly herd.  The brooding cows eye us suspiciously, tossing their horns in the air.  My second-grade art teacher assured me that only steers had horns, but this trip has brutally undermined other childhood life-facts that heretofore provided a false sense of security in my life.  The horns add a bit of an edge to this adventure - maybe not on the scale of running the bulls at Pamplona, but definitely an adrenaline step up from herding goats into the milking pen.

The farm we’re calling home for this week is a 100 acre French dairy farm, the legacy of a dedicated group of young intellectuals who poured their sweat into its grey stone farm yard and gentle pastures as the 1970s slid toward the 80s down the gentle hillsides of this French-German border. Over the following decades, they built a milking herd of 20 cows, and 120 goats and sheep and set up a traditional small-scale yogurt and cheese dairy farm. I too can recall youthful dreams of moving back to the land on a farming collective. Yet not nearly so brave or committed to this alternative future,  I softened to the pull of a dependable job, a predictable paycheck.  But the passionate farmers we’re visiting here held true to their vision, living out the dream of locally produced milk, cheese, and yogurt, from cows and goats they know by name.

Idealists like these are becoming an endangered species in the increasingly corporate activity of serving up food to the world’s tables.  In the western world, the loss of small dairy farms is epidemic as large scale concentrated animal feeding operations, “CAFOs” as they’re known in the trade, have come to dominate the animal farming industry.  And though family farms and cooperatives remain relatively strong on the Western European farming scene, in France the number of dairy farms plummeted from 1678 in 1988 to only 752 in 2000, a reduction of over half.  This isn’t just a sentimental loss of the picture-book barnyard. It’s the demise of the heritage of unique local products made with care by people who are true stewards of the land.   Dozens of traditional varieties of French cheese have vanished over the past 30 years as small producers die out or are bought up. In addition, the small dairy farms clinging to the hill and mountain areas – regions known as “marginal” in the agricultural world - perform key roles in guarding the land, protecting biodiversity. The farmers who choose to stay in these difficult areas play a vital agroecological role by reducing the environmental impacts of food transportation and ensuring consumers fresh, seasonal local products. But scale, subsidies and the modern structure of the agricultural market all favor factory mega farms which, in pursuit of efficiency and profit, sacrifice the intimate connection between humans and the animals that feed us.

Even in our few days here on the farm, I’ve come to appreciate this fragile intimacy as I find myself face to udder with a cow on my first day of milking.  Following the brief milking demonstration we received on our first morning in the barn, I lean into the cow’s body to calm her, applying a steady pressure with my shoulder against her flank. The earthy smell of her warm soft flesh brings up memories of my grandmother’s basement - dirt-floored with last fall’s apples rotting in wicker baskets.  It’s sensual with a tinge of sadness, visceral and primal. As I start to massage each teat to let down the milk, the act feels almost obscene.  I involuntarily pull back like I would from an adult video storefront display - just slightly, but enough for the cow to sense and she shuffles a restless complaint. I lean firmly again, fumbling for her teats, the cold steel of the milking suction tubes in my left hand. These simple gestures initiate a familiar ritual that will start the milk flowing, a process ultimately leading to a quart of milk, a pint of yogurt, or a round of Le Gros Lorrain cheese offered for sale in a local market to a neighbor who got up at dawn to meet the cheese cart.

Much as this intimacy enriches the soul, it’s hard to ignore the exhausting work and low pay.  The ability to transform into a wide range of nutritious, gourmet products has earned milk the moniker of “white gold” but little of that gold flows to the farmer.  Consisting primarily of water, milk is a bulky, heavy commodity – made daily, spoiling quickly, and requiring constant hard work.  Farmhands here have come and gone as their hopes and disappointments wrestle with each other over the dawn-to-dusk hours, but a small core has remained.  Among them is Klaus, the lanky, grizzly-haired manager of this herd and our leader in Else’s rescue efforts.  Klaus is quiet at his work, outspoken in his pacifist politics.  Surrogate father to the cows of this herd, he weaned each of them from the teat to the bottle, knows which of them will stray, which will be slow to pasture.  His work is sometimes attended by visitors like us and other young wandering disciples who attach themselves to the farm for a few months that may linger into years until greener grass draws them onward.  A couple of these enthusiastic young cowhands have joined us now in our pursuit of Else.

Our job today carries a tinge of urgency. Else’s disappearance means that she hasn’t been milked for several days and if that goes on too long, it’s an effective death sentence.  If she’s not milked within the next 3-5 days, her milk glands will shut down, and the milk will absorb back into her body.  There’s a name on the farm for cows that that are no longer milkers – hamburger, flank steak, brisket. Else’s disappearance puts her one step forward on a conveyor belt to the slaughterhouse. Her life is in our hands.

So we’re all a bit on edge as Klaus lays out his plan.  He fans us out in a line across the hill – a muddy square the size of a baseball diamond tipped at a 30 degree angle.  At the bottom, lies a V-shaped fence of logs, a crude trap Klaus has constructed. Our goal is to funnel her in through the open end toward the closed point, where Klaus can lasso her and lead her home. I am anticipating the full cowboy performance with a slow undulating movement of the lasso that culminates with a graceful circle of rope suspended in mid air.  But instead I’m surprised to see Klaus pulling out some coat hanger wire and winding it around and through the rope.  The rope, as it turns out, is not stiff enough. So, like many things here at the farm, it’s improvised with a coat hanger, and I’m half-way expecting some duct tape to emerge.  This apparently is a low budget version of the cowboy scene.

To get Else moving, each of us is also equipped with a 12-foot section of rope to swing in the air, making us appear a bit more intimidating to these mammoths who both outnumber and outweigh us. Klaus whistles, signaling us all to start slogging down the hill toward the wayward Else. We’re yelling and twirling our ropes vigorously, letting the other cows pass between us, but keeping the heat on Else as she edges nervously away.  It’s working. Grumbling, she saunters toward the open funnel of the trap. I flash Paul a thumbs-up as we force her toward the closed tip, where Klaus hovers in lasso position.  Else pauses nonchalantly to nuzzle a tuft of grass at her feet.

Abruptly, Klaus takes a mighty swing and heaves an arc of rope into the heavens.  The surge of rope silhouettes a wobbly circle in the grey sky. My hopes rise and then fall with the rope as it collapses mid-air, missing Else’s head and dropping in tangles at her side.  Now she’s nervous. Klaus reels in the rope and tries again.  This time it briefly catches one of her horns, but shakes loose again as Else jerks her head and bolts out of the trap in angry protest.  Apparently cows can move quickly when they want to. I hadn’t imagined that, with all that bulk balanced over those skinny legs.  We’re all now on the run up the hill, away from her tossing horns.  All of us, that is, except one defiant young man directly in her path who decides to stand her down.  At first I’m impressed at his bravery, but he’s one of the volunteer twenty-somethings and has no idea what he’s doing.  Else hurtles straight on and he dives out of the way into a particularly muddy somersault right at the last minute.

Else charges on up the hill as a Red Sea of cows and cowhands parts before her.  Crashing through a fence at the crest of the hill, she heads for the rural neighborhood of houses above, with Klaus in hot pursuit.  He sputters something in French, then switches to English just in time to direct me to bring the car, and we trail her a half-mile up the road until she disappears - yes, just disappears.  Where can a cow that tops a half-ton hide in this genteel French countryside? I flash on the Gary Larson cartoon where the standing cow hides behind the tree, gut bulging out in front, tail behind.  We are in the cartoon; but the joke is on us, there’s no Else to be seen.  We huddle up around Klaus, all shouting, scanning the horizon and offering up suggestions.

We divide up into teams and wander the neighborhood for almost an hour with no sign of Else. Regrouping, we admit defeat, and straggle back to the farm. Muddy and sweaty, I opt for the back seat of the car with Annie on my lap.  We all sense Klaus’s distress as he absentmindedly meanders the car down the road mourning his loss in a slow litany of French,“La vache, la vache, pauvre la vache.”  By the time we arrive back at the farm the rest of the posse has already sprawled out around the big kitchen table. Nobody has energy to cook, but a bottle of ruddy red wine is making its slow journey around the circle, softening the disappointment. We’ve only been here a few days, but I feel the loss on a personal level.

Although the work is hard and I fall asleep at night with sore arms, the sickly sweet smell of sour milk in my hair, I’ve come to treasure this experience of personally knowing the cows that provide our breakfast yogurt, our evening cheese. Sitting here across the table from Klaus, I realize just how far our Seattle life has taken us from these roots of our food. The farmers who have invited us into their home live this entire connection - field to cow, to milk, to curd, to aging shed, to truck, to market, to a smile of appreciation from a long-time customer.  This is food the way it used to be - slow food - up close and personal. In this simple, yet complex farm community, work and life, cows and people, buildings and landscapes commingle and feed each other so seamlessly.

These are the small comforts and dramas that accompany this time-honored lifestyle.  Perhaps in time the slow food movement will awaken enough of us to sustain this essential connection between the land, the farmer’s knowing hand and the health of us all.  Perhaps tomorrow someone will call to say they’ve spotted a wayward cow – is she ours?  Perhaps in both cases it will not be too late.

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Barbara is a writer, mother, architect, wife, sustainability consultant and wanderer on this planet (the order of identity varies from hour to hour). For 11 months from 2002-2003, Barbara traveled around the world with her husband and 13-year old daughter. When they set out to see the world, they did so not merely to see the things of the world, but to get to know her people, to see how they live, to try to understand their hopes, dreams and struggles. They stayed in neither Hiltons nor youth hostels, but lived, as much as possible, in people’s homes, eating together, cooking together, playing with their children, meeting their relatives, working in their fields, and praying at their altars. This story is a gift from these travels.

by Lola Akerstrom

A meat-addict finally confronts the loss of her love.

Ah, tofu….needless to say, our first encounter wasn’t pretty. Within seconds of biting into its white spongy mass eloquently disguised as chicken, I was expelling it back onto the side of my plate as my dining companion looked on, perplexed.

Certainly no disrespect was meant by the retching gesture. My stomach naturally revolted against this substance that seemed hell-bent on robbing me of dinner.

Growing up in Nigeria, a meal wasn’t really a meal without some form of fowl, red meat, exotic wildlife, or freshwater fish embedded in it.

Daily treks were made to the local open air market to pick through tied-up bunches of giant African snails, live chickens, dripping red cow flesh, dried fish called kpanla, wriggly giant catfish, and the occasional guinea fowl or bush meat.

If it once used to swim, crawl, jump, scurry, or fly, it was eligible for consumption.

Our meals centered around the soup of the day – usually thick, savory concoctions filled with leafy vegetables, blended tomatoes, a healthy dose of palm oil, and of course, a variety of assorted meals – shaki (beef tripe), kpomo (cow skin), cow legs, and chunks of beef.

As a child growing up in Lagos –the country’s pulsating capital at the time, I would stand on my tippy toes with my head barely reaching the kitchen counter top, watching in anticipation as my mom spooned red spicy tomato stew atop a mound of white rice. The climax was finally watching her add my piece of meat like a star on a Christmas tree on top the pile.

As I grew older, my taste for meat gravitated towards the exotic. Fried rice with chicken gizzards and hearts; tongue-scorching pepper soup filled with chopped and diced innards such as goat intestine, liver, and kidney; roasted goat as well as suya – a grilled delicacy with meat of questionable origin bought from a Hausa malam and eaten with toothpicks.  I also regularly picked up free range spicy chicken from our local fast food joint down the street. Chicken so spicy it dyed your fingers a fiery red, making anything you touched afterwards instantly combustible.

My palate for foreign meat wasn’t limited to West Africa. Once I moved to the United States during my teenager years, I tried fried alligator and grilled buffalo.  While traveling around Swedish Lapland, moose and reindeer regularly appeared on my plate, including the lone bite of bear meat I once was tried at the indigenous Sámi market in Jokkmokk. In Peru, I shared a plate of cuy al payo (roasted guinea pig) with one of our porters after a long arduous trek along the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu.

On a visit to Australia, I devoured kangaroo meat in Sydney. That action to this day draws gasps of unbelief from a few friends. Apparently, they’d likened my actions to running down the endangered species list like a restaurant menu.

Surely, I couldn’t have been the only one who felt such an intrinsic need for meat.  On an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”, I watched an Inuit family tear hungrily into raw seal meat and accompanying blubber on their kitchen floor.  Food vendors line crowded streets all across Asia, grilling up savory smelling mystery meat. Whole pigs are slowly cooked in their own juices beneath the earth on many South Pacific islands.

Even on international flights, people seem to avoid the meatless dish. On many occasions, I’d fume silently as I was handed option two by default because they were out of the preferred trays.

“Chicken and Rice or Pasta and Cheese for you, madam?” the spiky haired, clean cut British Airways flight attendant recently offered en route to London.

My choice was obvious, but the Swedish guy next to me hadn’t heard our dinner options so I had to relay the message.

“Pasta and Cheese?” he asked, befuddled.

“Yes.”

“That’s it? No meat?”

At the very least, he’d been expecting some fish….

A friend once dragged me to a Portuguese Churrasco-style restaurant in Maryland where assorted, grilled meats hung on skewers waiting to be devoured sacrilegiously.

With the flip of a multi-colored wooden peg, a muscled waiter with a cowboy hat was instantly at my side, tenderly slicing succulent meat onto my plate, while keeping eye contact.

I wondered why she’d had to drag me in the first place.

Even though with age came mild hypochondriac tendencies that had me equating paper cuts to stab wounds, my turning point didn’t come from reading studies upon studies linking red meat to heart disease, obesity, and cancer. It didn’t come from reading how difficult it is for the body to process and digest red meat, or from the threat of sludge-like trans-fat lining arteries.

It began when my mom’s organic African cooking was no longer readily available to me in a place called “College”.

In my formative college years, meals primarily consisted of prepackaged Ramen noodles, and due to limited time and limited personal funds, hard boiled eggs soon compensated for slow-boiled beef or shaki (beef tripe).

Valiant attempts to satisfy my meat cravings with overly processed patties were met with heaving at its artificial taste. Mc-anything simply didn’t stand a chance with me. I’d been preened on ultra fresh meat displayed on open-air wooden tables from the eleron (market butcher) who coincidentally kept swatting away flies as he sold us meat.

With time, college weaned me off my need for meat like a baby off its mother’s breast milk. I simply ate what I had in front of me and what my measly student budget could afford. I was no longer the little girl waiting for her piece of meat atop her rice.

The rice and meatless tomato stew was gift enough.

The more I travelled and was invited into the homes of locals, the more I realized I had to eat that meatless plate of rice, corn, and beans with gratitude because they’d slaved over it. Moving to Sweden meant slowly developing a palate for all forms of fish – smoked, cured, fried, baked, and fermented. No longer perplexed by meatless dishes, I’d grown to like gazpacho even though I hadn’t fully crossed over to the dark (or green) side just yet.

I do occasionally indulge in a juicy steak grilled medium-well every now and then, but meat doesn’t have to be the focus of my meals anymore.

And as for tofu….I still don’t get it.

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Award-winning writer and photographer Lola (Akinmade) Åkerström has written, photographed, and dispatched from six (6) continents for various major publications around the world. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden and her portfolio can be viewed at http://www.akinmade.com.

Mary Jo McConahay

Nothing is quite the same without it.

The small restaurant on the island in Lake Petén Itza was so dark I thought it was empty. As my eyes adjusted, I saw Drafter, the only diner, sketching on lined paper with a pencil bearing chew marks, beneath the unblinking stare of an antlered deer’s head. The waitress, a young, dark-haired woman wearing a light cotton dress, stood at his table holding a menu glued to a tablet of wood. Drafter did not look up.  He gently waved away the plank, all the time shading something on the paper with the side of the graphite point.

“Armadillo,” he said.

“Si, señor,” said the young woman.

She turned to me and indicated a place a couple of tables away. I sat beneath another antlered head. She approached with the oversized menu.

Behind her in the dimness, high on the opposite wall, I saw a jaguar’s face taking shape. His body sliced away, the head and broad neck came out of the wood panelling like a creature emerging from dark foliage. He roared silently, tongue rich pink, amber eyes open forever. Waiting next to the table, the waitress seemed small and waif-like among the jungle animals.

“Uh, give me a moment,” I said, taking the plank off her hands. “Por favor.”

“Take all the time you need,” she said.

The great Mesoamerican rainforest once called Gran Petén has never been known as a gourmet’s paradise. On the other hand, the continuous tropical land that spreads across parts of three countries was a gastronomical democracy. Whatever might be plucked from trees or picked from the jungle floor, or brought down with gun or bow, is what landed on all plates from southern Mexico’s Chiapas across Guatemala’s northern Petén region to Belize. Beans and rice might accompany the deer, rodent, nuts or bird, but roughly the same meals appeared on the laps of indigenous Maya, and after the sixteenth century, the plates of conquering Europeans. By the 1990s, things had not changed much.

“Tepesquintle,” I said when the waitress returned.

From the corner of my eye I saw the blonde Drafter lift his head and regard me. He seemed to be in his mid-thirties, younger than I, but not too young. I figured he knew I had been staring at him, so I did not return his full-on look. He flipped a page of his notebook and began to draw anew.

The waitress served our meals. Mine looked like pot roast in thick, red-brown sauce, but the light was so poor anything might have looked like stew. Tepesquintle is a 40-lb. rat that roams the jungle at night. I knew it was edible. Old books about Petén wrote of the animal as the occasional food of chicleros, men who tapped jungle trees for chewable sap, boiled it into blocks and sent it by plane to the Wrigley gum factory in Chicago.

I pushed the food around on the plate, cut a small piece. Itdidn’t taste like chicken. It wasn’t gamey or beefy. It tasted like nothing I had ever experienced, rich without being heavy, meaty but light. The aroma was delicious, herbaceous. Finishing, I told the waitress to give my compliments to the cook, and asked for the sauce recipe. She hesitated as if she didn’t understand, but my Spanish is pretty good. She walked toward the kitchen.

“You’re absolutely right,” said the Drafter from his table.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s the sauce,” he said.

(Of course, I did not know his name then. Later, when he told me it was Edwin, I told him I’d rather call him Drafter, which to me fit him better. “Yes, it calls up ‘Drifter,’” he said. “It calls up ‘Daft,’” I said.)

The lithe waitress returned, followed by a portly woman in a grease-spotted apron. Wisps of salt and pepper hair bristled out from her blue headscarf. The cook, for that’s clearly who she was, placed her hands on wide hips and recited the ingredients for the sauce.  Like the most competitive international chefs, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give their precise measures.

“Write it down,” said the Drafter.

“What?”

“Write it down.”

I took out my notebook and asked the cook to repeat. I thought she might be annoyed, but instead she seemed proud that what she said was being registered, taken down in words. I wondered whether, like most women in these parts, she had never learned to read and write.  This time she gave the recipe a title.

Tepesquintle Rodent Sauce

Thyme, laurel, cumin, black pepper, garlic, green or red pepper, tomato, onion, V-8 juice, white wine, cinnamon, honey, consommé, Saborin (like Accent).

She looked over at the Drafter, who was listening intently. Turning to me again, she winked and whispered, “For armadillo, replace the wine with vinegar.”

When I left the restaurant, heading for my hotel, the Drafter followed, catching up and speaking as if he were continuing the thread of a conversation we had begun somewhere, but I had forgotten.  “They can be farmed, you know,” he said.  “Those raised domestically are indistinguishable to the palate from those in the wild, when prepared in the same sauce.”

He went on about seasoning and spits, chattering in a vaguely public school accent embedded in origins I could not exactly pinpoint. India? The Caribbean? His light skin argued against them, but he didn’t seem British either. I negotiated puddles on the road. I felt confused. My face must have been saying, “What in bloody hell are you talking about? Why are you even talking? Who are you?”

Rounding a corner, he saw my expression, and stopped.  At first, his look said the problem was mine, then slowly, his deep brown eyes lost their sparkle. “The tepesquintle,” he said.“I thought you’d be interested.”

That’s when I made my mistake.  Or set the course for one of the most memorable weeks of my life. We faced each other on the walkway that runs a ring around the island, which is only a mile across. Modest old houses with pastel color walls were turning luminous in late sun. Waves lapped softly against the malecon.

“Look, let’s have a coffee, shall we?” I said, feeling apologetic about my snooty attitude.

Travelers tend to skip the thousand small steps that begin the journey of social communication, because they already share the road. In Petén, they know they also share interest in, or a need for, a place off the tourist path; the rainforest ruins of fallen civilization; an atmosphere on the edge of isolation. When travelers meet in Petén they already know a lot about each other, before either says a word.

“I haven’t seen Ceibal or Altar de Sacrificios,” I said, “But I want to go because it means travelling the river that runs past them, the one with the wonderful name, Passion, Rio Pasión.”

We sat on a pier drinking tea laced with the local rum called Zacapa, not the cheap stuff but the aged honey-colored kind, in the bottle encased with woven sisal. The toddy was his idea. I told the Drafter I had been coming to Petén annually for five years, enamored of Maya ruins since I first saw the grand site of Tikal. Stepped temple pyramids rising into hot, blue sky. Carvings of sacred animals, and of lords dressed in fine feathers and jaguar hides. Glyphs, dots and short lines that once spoke to men and women in a language only now being decoded. And jungle, threatening at any moment to hide again the fallen rainforest cities.

“After two weeks I go back to the office feeling like I’ve really been somewhere, you know?”

“Right,” he said, staring straight across the water into the setting sun. It burned orange-red in color, like the circular bands on ancient Maya pots. Only when a boat approached did the Drafter drop his eyes to the lake.

The skipper tied the bow to a piling and jumped from deck to dock. He walked past us toward shore with a friendly Buenas tardes.  Empty, the wooden craft left behind rocked slowly in the water, red hull with chipped paint, a faded look to its striped canopy that sheltered passengers during the day.

“I’ve walked to El Mirador, three days from the nearest settlement,” said the Drafter. He was the first I’d met who had been there, the largest ancient Maya city yet discovered, far to the north against the border with Mexico’s Yucatan.

“Wow, and three days back,” I said.

“Not if you are continuing on to Mexico,” he said.

Before I could respond another boat pulled close, but its skipper merely called out, “San Jose?  Lake tour?”

“No,” said the Drafter, which suited me fine.

By the next day we were traveling companions. We discovered we both liked going to Tikal, about fifty miles north of the lake, even though we each had seen it before. He knew things, and I knew things. For instance, I knew how we could travel at one tenth the cost of the Tikal tourist shuttle. Just cross the causeway on foot from the island to the mainland, and grab the twice-daily local bus that runs to the village of Uaxactun, where the gum tree tappers and xate gatherers live.  Before the bus heads into deeper rainforest on a dirt road, get off at Tikal, and, voilà.

Once at Tikal, the Drafter knew how to avoid the ticket kiosk, where a hefty entrance fee was levied on foreigners. The bus stopped on the old runway, unused for thirty years since archaeologists decided the rumble of propellers was destabilizing the thousand-year old temples. We left behind the bustle of visitors arriving by vans and private cars. Drafter led me around a pond with a sign warning Beware of the Crocodile, up a narrow path through giant matapalo trees, past a corrugated metal house where the resident shaman lived, and beyond, through a palmy grove once home to a family of indigenous Maya Lacandon. Emerging from the steamy forest, we saw the Temple of the Great Jaguar before us, rising into the sky. We were in.

By the end of the day I felt rather bad about not having paid an entrance fee, reckoning the money went to a good cause—keeping up the lawns, fixing stairs on lofty temples so ascending visitors depended less on grabbing tree roots for balance. When the Drafter wasn’t looking, I slipped the amount of the ticket into a donation box near the park’s exit. No use telling him, I thought; we were, after all, almost perfectly compatible for strangers who met on the road.

On the return bus, we watched another foreigner—French, I think—plunging one tortilla after another into his mouth, smearing each first with a dark substance from a small jar.

“I hate it when travelers make an exhibition,” I whispered. “I take it personally.”

“It’s the sauce,” said the Drafter.

The young man wore a shirt made from a huipil, embroidered in a dozen colors and typically Guatemalan-looking, but, please! Huipiles are women’s clothing. His jeans were fashionably ragged with holes at the knees. Even the poorest peasant farmer dons his single decent pair of pants to travel.

“He can’t help it,” said the Drafter. “Nutella.”

That’s the way the Drafter was, as perspicacious and forgiving as I could be critical. In the next days, waiting for meals, for buses, for sleep to come, he drew, and I read. We didn’t talk about where we came from, or how we earned our livings, not from lack of curiosity, at least not on my part, but because such details would have pushed the conversation to a different plane. We were quite satisfied, I suppose, with the air we breathed.

Anyway, it was clear enough we had grown up in different places. He never put his knife down when he ate. Discussing the classic Maya Ball Game, where players re-fought the transcendent battle of the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh against the Lords of the Underworld, his metaphors came from soccer, mine from football. At night he placed his shoes—they were leather, not canvas boots like mine—outside the room wherever we stayed, as if he expected to awake to them clean and buffed. It never happened. He blew dust from the shoes in the morning, although the pale powder of Petén paths covered them again once we were outside.

We departed by a local bus from the area of Lake Petén Itza, heading for southern Petén, a remoter region with less rainforest, where fewer tourists ventured. We would see the Passion River, but we were unlikely to find surprisingly good restaurants like the one on the island that had served the delicious tepesquintle.

“From here on any meat is road-kill,” said the Drafter. “‘Road-kill,’ right?”

“Very good, very colloquial U.S.A.,” I said, and watched him smile.

That night, the evening of the fourth day, I caught myself looking at the Drafter in a certain way, as he bent over pencil and paper in a crummy cantina in Sayaxche, a town on the Passion River. We were waiting for our food.

I looked at at his blonde hair falling over his forehead, in the low-watt light of a bare bulb hanging from the thatched ceiling, and I wished him to raise his face. I wished him to give me that smile again, the one I had seen on the bus in the morning.

I stared at his hands. I couldn’t help it. Their daytime paleness was gone, replaced by an olive cast that seemed to take over in dim light, a tone so warm to the eye and attracting I lifted my fingers from the table, but stopped. If I touched him, the pencil would slip, and I could ruin the picture.

The waiter delivered two plates of the daily special. I was glad to hear it contained no meat. Just squash flowers on melted cheese.

“It’s the sauce that makes this one rich,” said the Drafter. The special gravy was neither thick nor thin, slightly lumpy, black as tar. Liquified corn fungus. Tasty.

When the table was cleared, the Drafter took a few drawings from his bag and spread them before me. They were impressively detailed, but carried something other-worldly, too, as if my friend saw not just shape and line, but the possibilities of his subjects, their other selves. An antlered head looked alive even missing its body, not hung on a wall but suspended in mist, not trophy but forest lord. A canopied boat, unmanned, self-contained, floating as if at will. A candle and mosquito coil like those we placed on the cement floors of rooms where we stayed, the smoke of each joining the other in the air to create a vision serpent with open jaws.

Before dinner, I supposed, he had made the drawing of the vintage juke box standing near the bar, all chrome strips and rounded shoulders, with colored lights (you knew they were colored, even rendered in black and white).  You could almost see those lights flashing on the bass tones, almost hear the ranchero songs. And the old corridos, given we were so close to Mexico.

On the last day I would see him—had I known it was the last I would not have enjoyed myself so much—we drove toward Laguna del Tigre, another lake, near the border with Mexico. We rented the car in my name because the Drafter didn’t drive.

By this time I knew his German father had died in a flying accident in the Guatemala mountains, and his mother was half-Kekchi, one of two dozen Maya indigenous groups whose roots reach back more than a thousand years. “That’s why I don’t like to pay to enter the sacred sites,” he said, meaning, I supposed, Tikal. “They should not belong to the government, but to the Maya.”

It was the closest to a political statement I ever heard him make. I knew “German” in the mountains could mean someone who was not German at all, but light-skinned Guatemalans whose families had lived in the country for more than a century, since the government invited Europeans to plant coffee on Kekchi land. The invitation had been an official effort to enter world markets, which worked, and to “purify” the race at home, which didn’t. In his case, the Drafter said, English came from British tutors in Belize next door, and two years studying art in America.

“I’m Guatemalan enough so they won’t give me another visa,” he said. “I don’t own a house or a business, and we don’t have bank accounts.” No collateral to ensure he would return. I guess the Drafter could not say to the consul at the U.S. Embassy, Of course I won’t stay there forever.  My mother lives here.

I liked the idea of knowing he would be in the country when I visited, year after year. I didn’t think to ask how he received permission to live in the United States when he had. Didn’t cross my mind.

What was important was seeing a world foreign to me, alongside him. We watched porters offloading boats on the beach in Sayaxche, stripped to the waist, carrying covered baskets, square tin boxes, squealing pigs. A girl dressed in white, seated on the back of a motorcycle, miraculously unsullied by splattering mud, like old Maya royalty whose feet never touched the ground.

About midday, on the way to Laguna del Tigre, Lake of the Jaguar, some time before we crossed the San Pedro River, I stopped the car in front of a house with a painted sign, Comida, the rural promise of cooked food. In the doorway stood a Kekchi woman, recognizable by her full cotton blouse, loose and lacy where most indigenous women wore heavily woven huipiles tucked tightly into wide cumberbunds. Many Kekchi Maya migrated to Petén when they lost land in the Verapaz highlands, the Drafter’s home. The woman served us a dish I never thought I would eat: beans, rice, and spaghetti heaped together in a bowl.

“I know,” I said to the Drafter. We sat at a plain table outside the house. “It’s the sauce that will make the meal.”

“It’s true,” he said, as the woman spooned it over the food. “It makes the ordinary memorable.”

Homemade tomato sauce, fresh of course, thickened with flour, tarted up with half-inch slices of hot dogs. ”Not bad,” I said.

We crossed the San Pedro River on a hand-cranked ferry, driving from the boat onto a badly pocked road, still on the Guatemala side of the border, but not far from Mexico. Wetlands, inundated in the rainy season, now appeared as low forest, and open savannah. Slim, elegant egrets walked on their stilts of legs among tall grass. The road’s poor condition meant we drove slowly.  In my romantic period, when I had read everything D.H. Lawrence had ever written, I vowed to myself I too would become familiar with the names of flowers and trees, as the master had. I did not, but I wished I had gone at least as far as the primitive palms, to know what to call the myriad kinds swaying now on all sides, so different one from another in heights, fronds, trunks, capacities to bend.

In an hour, when we could go no farther by road, we walked the rest of the short distance toward the lake under double canopy forest, dark and cool. Somewhere the border ran nearby, but in this wild land there were no markers or fences, no sign of other visitors.  As we followed a curve, a dashing movement rustled low foliage just off the trail. We stopped. Probably it was not a jaguar—although that would have been thrilling—because the big cats are nocturnal. Perhaps a peccary, or a brocket deer.

At the lake we lay on our backs, unspeaking, but communicating, it seemed to me, our ease with the moment and place. We didn’t point or cry out to each other when we saw the pair of scarlet macaws fly overhead, electric red and blue with fine yellow collars, their long tails like fiery rays in the pale sky. But I heard the Drafter take the same deep breath as I.

More birds cried softly and flapped their wings in passing, but I don’t know what they were because I had shut my eyes, keeping them closed despite some curiosity. I liked more the dreamy feeling of experiencing the forest through its sounds.

I thought I heard a deep human voice calling from a few feet away. I jumped to my feet in a single move, startled. The Drafter stood too, saying, “Don’t be afraid.”

He waved to the caller, who waited at the forest’s edge with two young indigenous men, and a woman with two children, a boy and a girl. The woman and girl wore pants. This struck me as unusual, because here females wear dresses or long skirts.

“You know that man?” I asked.

“The leader, coyote, guide,” he said.

Figure it out, I thought. Figure out what is happening.

“I could not change all these moments, these good moments, by telling you,” he said. “The road is safe.  You’ll be alright.”

From his bag he drew out a piece of paper rolled like a tube, tied with a thick blade of grass, handing it to me as he turned to join the others. Understanding flooded my mind as fast and overwhelming as a tidal wave, and I felt helpless against it. For the next weeks this small group would traipse through Mexico and sneak across borders, aiming for destinations in America. The Drafter would walk through my country’s back door, since he had been turned away from the front.

I watched him walk across twenty feet of marshy shore to join the band. I heard him speak to one of the young men in a language I did not understand. He turned and called, “Kekchi!”, smiling, waving, but missing not a step, melting into the forest with the others.

I gazed for a while at where he had been, but saw only trees, huge and brooding. I felt no sense of betrayal, because there had been no promise. I did feel that something of value was disappearing, but whatever it was had never been mine, so I could not say to myself he stole it away.

Inside the car I took the grass tie from the paper tube and unrolled it. I saw myself at a table in a dark room, the head of a great deer on the wall, the figure of a woman looking more sensuous than I had ever believed myself to be. I tossed the paper in the back seat, too brusquely. I drove so fast the tires raised a cloud of dust. I ignored thin figures waving me down, hoping for a ride.

Like a survivor tossed upon shore, I felt whole, but shaken. I was not the same person who—was it only a week before?—had stepped into a dark restaurant on an island floating in a deep blue lake.

That night I returned the car and went back to the cantina in dusty Sayaxche, even though I was not hungry. I did not want to be alone, even though I talked to no one. Black flies studded a sticky yellow strip hanging above the table.

I ordered meat—why not?—picking it slowly from the bone.  It tasted dry.  There was no sauce.

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Journalist and documentary filmmaker Mary Jo McConahay is the author of Maya Roads: One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest (Chicago Review Press, 2011). Her narrative reporting has appeared in more than thirty periodicals including Sierra, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Vogue, The Texas Observer and others.

by Justine Hanson

“Please can you help?” One woman tries to make sense of her response to people begging on the streets of Nicaragua and Cambodia.

“Soy Churequero. Trabajo en La Chureca,”he said. La Chureca is Managua’s giant city dump, where hundreds of people live and work as freelance garbage pickers, amidst acres of smoldering, untreated waste. He was one of them, and he had stepped into my path.

His skin was dark, almost black, a strike against him in color conscious Nicaragua. When I walked down the street, men would hiss and call out “chelita,”slang for “milk,” or “little whitey.” Dark and light, we stood next to each other in front of the gas pumps at the Esso station.

He opened a worn manila folder. Carefully, he took out clean white typewritten papers that showed he was a university student. He couldn’t pay the fees. In a soft voice he explained that if he did not pay them by 8 pm, he would have to leave.

¿Ud. me puede ayudar? He said it gently. Can you help me, please, with all due respect?

It was lunchtime, and I was on my way to buy a sandwich. I wanted to eat lunch in the cool air-conditioning and then return to my intellectual labors in the library around the corner. I was a graduate student; how could I possibly be his savior?

I wanted to walk away, but I couldn’t. I wanted to give him all the money in my wallet, but I couldn’t. It was easy to let myself think my way out of any obligation. How do I know this is not an elaborate scam? What good is it to give money to one man, a stranger whom you meet in the streets and will never see again? My income hovers near the U.S. poverty line. But not the Nicaraguan poverty line.

Feeling heavy, I reached into my wallet, knowing I had a $20 bill, but handing over only 20 córdobas– barely $1.50 – and walked away.

When you travel to developing countries, the conventional wisdom is: Don’t give money to people begging in the streets. Don’t buy from children selling in the streets. It only encourages the parents to send them out on the streets, not to school. It’s better to give money to an organization that does Good Things. But these sensible guidelines don’t tell you how to deal with the flesh-and-blood person in need who is standing in front of you.

I lived in Nicaragua for over a year. I developed relationships, I donated money when I could, I tipped generously, and tried to buy locally. But every day, I was confronted with my own inadequacy, with the basic, irrevocable inequality that my American body represented on the streets of Nicaragua, and the enormous gap between the two worlds I straddled. Every day I was confronted with my own powerlessness to make any kind of dent in the giant chasm of inequality. Every day I re-lived the accident of birth that put me on the path to one kind of life, my Nicaraguan friends on another.

Three years later, I went to Cambodia. One evening, I walked down the middle of a rutted road heading to a corner store. From half a block away, I saw a young boy approach a couple at the store’s entrance. My first instinct was to give him a wide berth and cross the street, to avoid the encounter.

I could have kept walking. But I didn’t. As I approached the door, the small boy came closer. I saw he was holding a chubby baby in his arms, dressed in a small off-white T-shirt.

“Please, milk, for him. For him.” He gestured at the baby. “Milk. For him.” The words grabbed me. “For him.” He gestured again. “For him.” He was insistent, like it was an emergency, like he didn’t do this every night, like he wouldn’t be beaten if he went home empty handed.

Wordlessly, I nodded and followed him inside the store. He led me down the aisle, to the powdered milk, and stepped aside, looking up at me, encouragingly. I looked at the different brands and then at him. He pointed to one, and I pulled it off the shelf, picking the largest size. We didn’t talk, and now I wonder why it didn’t occur to me to ask his name. Inside the store, under the lights, I felt mortifyingly self-conscious, like everyone in the store was witness to my vulnerability, my inability to say no, and perhaps, the act of being taken advantage of.

We made our way to the register and I paid: $12. The boy stood aside as I completed the transaction. I handed him the large cylinder and we walked out the door together. He must have said thank you, but I don’t remember. He went one direction and I went the other. I’d like to think I somehow repaid a karmic debt, but I know this kind of calculus exists only to make me feel better, to absolve me of our collective burden to take responsibility for the world we live in. Both he and I know it’s not that simple.

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Justine Hanson is an anthropologist and writer who has lived in Nicaragua, Spain and Ireland and visited over 25 countries. She loves the feeling of the first day in a new place, setting out to explore in the morning air. Her favorite way to travel is slowly and by water, and her ambition is to travel as much of the world’s coastline as possible.

by James Dorsey

My pen pal,the African King

While in Africa, I met a king.

Africa has many kings, some self proclaimed, while others are hereditary, and they run the gamut from despot to enlightened ruler.

I have met more than a few in my travels, but had never before sought one out.

The oral histories of Africa allow for personal interpretation, and stories of great men usually carry much embellishment creating a chasm between the myth and the man.  The stories I heard of this king could only be called legendary; that he was a shape shifter, assuming the guise of a panther at night.  Some said he could fly, talk to animals, and was wise beyond belief.  They also said he was still a boy.  Such a story begs to be followed.

Centuries ago the Kaan or Gan people (pronounced Goon), depending on who is doing the spelling, migrated from Ghana into what is today the southwestern corner of Burkina Faso in West Africa, settling near Loropini. They number less than six thousand.

They are primarily animists and practitioners of voodoo that permeates most West African cultures.  Their king is elected from and by members of the royal family, rules for life, and is the keeper of traditional fetishes that are the soul of Gan beliefs.  Some say this king took the throne at age eleven, with worldly insight that far exceeded his isolated existence. Theirs is an ancient culture.

Monsoon clogged roads forced me to abandon my vehicle miles from my destination, forcing an eight mile trek through dried millet fields where I accidentally stumbled into the voodoo soul of the Gan, a re-created burial ground as it were, with stone houses, each containing a clay effigy of a seated former king, inlaid with cowry shell eyes and mouth.  At first, in the darkness, I thought I was viewing mummies lifelike enough to stand and accost me. This was the Gan place of ritual and source of the king’s power.  It is here that he comes for the advice of his ancestors when the mantle of rule proves too heavy to bear. I did not linger, for in many tribal areas, violating a burial ground is a serious offense.  I left an offering of salt, more for the benefit of prying eyes than my own beliefs.

Not far away I saw his majesty sitting placidly in a wooden deck chair under a shade tree.  He was not a boy, but not yet fully a man either.  His ebony skin was flawless and he had long thin fingers that would be at home on a piano keyboard, locked in clenched fists under his chin as though deep in thought.  His long caftan and skull cap did not betray his status, and none of the ostentatious trappings that usually accompany African royalty were in evidence.  He turned to offer a slight smile at my approach, saying in French, “I knew you were coming, father.”

That simple phrase alluded to psychic abilities, but I knew countless people had seen me fighting through the brush, and no doubt the “jungle telegraph” had warned him of my arrival; still, this announcement added to his mystique of special knowledge while throwing me off balance.

In Africa my white hair has often given me entre to villages normally closed to outsiders because there, more than anyplace on earth, age demands respect. The longer you live the more knowledge you accumulate, and education is at a premium. In remote villages, I am usually older than any of the chiefs. The saying goes, “When an African dies, it is like a library burning.” I take full advantage of my age in such situations to see places and seek answers not available to a younger man.

He motioned me to a bench in front of him while a lady approached from a nearby hut.  She sat at his side with her hand on his shoulder and introduced herself in English as his fourth wife and thus a queen. The king spoke directly to me in his native tongue, his black eyes never wavering in their stare, while his wife explained that he was in mourning for the death of one of his three other wives and not in the best of spirits, but his quick smile did not betray any such emotion.

I spoke with him, through her, of all manner of topics, from African politics to the health of our families. When I asked his name I was told I would not be able to pronounce it, and that his true name was known only to his people, for such knowledge in the hands of his enemies could harm him.  Such is voodoo.

I asked what he thought of America having a black president and he laughed, saying Africa had been ruled by black men for centuries and America was just now catching up.  He wisely added that it was our fate to be ruled by black men as we had originally brought them to America as slaves and were now receiving our due. I held my tongue by not reminding him that it was the black kings of Africa who rounded up their own people to sell to white slavers, but I was not there for confrontation.  I wanted to know his thoughts.

We talked of philosophy, religion, and at one point he asked me what snow was like, having never known cold.

His questions came from a separate reality than my own and I found him fascinating, but in no way did I think of him as great.  In Africa where rulers are most often despots, such a benign and friendly ruler could certainly be perceived as great to his own people and that is how legends begin.  I even thought that perhaps in another time and place we might become friends.

We talked throughout the afternoon and not wishing to overstay my welcome, and with no offer to stay in his village overnight, I said I must go.

His majesty beckoned me to follow and there behind some bushes sat a decrepit 66 Nissan sedan that did not  appear to be in running condition but the king got in, started the engine, belching black smoke everywhere, and beckoned for me to join him.  He was personally going to drive me back to my vehicle.

With the roads clogged by mud we veered across millet fields, bounding over uneven ground as fast as the king could coax his aging wheels to go.  I hung on for dear life, with no seat belt, as my head met the ceiling more than once. Seeing the broad smile on his face I realized he was having a wonderful time and let my own apprehension go, enjoying the wildest ride I ever had.

In the village, surrounded by his people, he was the noble leader, but here in the bush, behind the wheel of his car, he could be the young boy that still resided in the man’s body.  This was his relief from the prison of rule and I was his excuse.  Two different cultures had merged into the kind of day a traveler prays for.

We passed startled villagers, wide eyed and open mouthed, as they watched this strange white intruder bouncing along in the king’s car, many of them bowing as we passed, but most too startled to move.  I have no doubt that at that moment I became a story to be told around their evening meal for generations.

We broke through into a clearing and saw my vehicle ahead, finally coming to a halt with a sliding, brake wrenching stop.

His majesty just turned and smiled, gesturing towards my vehicle as calmly as if asking me to lunch.

He posed for a final picture and then reached under his robe to hand me a small slip of paper.  It was a Xerox with his photo on it and read, ‘His Majesty, the 29th King of the Gan.”  It also had a cell phone number.

So there under the broiling African sun, I exchanged business cards with a king and got into my own vehicle, watching as he put the Nissan into reverse and backed away with all the élan that had brought us here.

I have often thought about that encounter and of the two sides of the person I had found; a young man who inspired a legend.  It is then that I think of calling his cell phone but know the call would not go through, nor would he remember me even if I could speak his tongue.

Almost two years later I received an e-mail from him, as he apparently just got internet service, from who knows where.  He asked if we could correspond and so now I have an African king for a pen pal.  He writes to me often and we talk of people, love, life, death, and God, and I am grateful for such a rare gift.

I had become a story for his village, and now he is mine.

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James Michael Dorsey is an explorer, author, and photographer who has traveled extensively in 43 countries. His journeys are usually far off the beaten path to record the cultures of indigenous peoples, particularly in Africa and Asia.

His first book was entitled “Tears, Fear and Adventure”. He is a frequent contributor to the Christian Science Monitor and The Los Angeles Times. He is a regular contributor as both writer and photographer to WEND, Sea Kayaker, Ocean, WorldAndI, and Wavelength magazines. His articles and photos have appeared in Natural History, BBC Wildlife, California Wild, Northwest, and the Travelers’ Tales book series, plus Wild Moments, The Seattle Times, Orlando Sentinel, and L.A. Weekly newspapers. He is a 2008 and 2010 Solas category award winner for Best Travel Writing.

His was a principal photographer for England’s? Seventh Wave magazine, and his work has been used by the National Wildlife Federation, Ocean Conservancy, International Cetacean Society, California Gray Whale Coalition, and the International Whaling Commission. His work has twice been chosen as Kodak Internationals ?Photo of the Day.? He has appeared on National Public Radio?s ?Weekend America” program and is a Fellow of the Explorers Club and former director of the Adventurers Club. WEBSITE: www.jamesdorsey.com

by Lisa Alpine

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances — to choose one’s own way.”¹ — Viktor E. Frankl

Cold drizzle in summer. I arrived in the heart of Vienna hoping to find a bed at the youth hostel. Full. Then, I wandered over to the Stadtpark (public park). Grizzled bums occupied the benches, lolling in a cloud of fruity schnapps fumes. I didn’t feel comfortable sleeping there, so I strolled along Europe’s longest shopping boulevard, Mariahilfer Strasse, to the Wien Westbahnhof (the main train station). As I walked along the same wide promenade that Hitler triumphantly marched down in 1938, I asked strangers if they could recommend a cheap place to spend the night.

It was the summer of 1972. I was 18 years old, blond, wearing nondescript jeans, a raggedy t-shirt, and ported a small backpack. Hitchhiking from Denmark, I was lured south by the sun-ripe peaches and beaches of Greece. Passing through Germany, Austria, and soon, Yugoslavia, Albania, into Greece and its tantalizingly chalk-white cliff islands and aquamarine sea. Motivated to the edge of the Mediterranean by Joni Mitchell’s “Carey,” a song from her 1971 album Blue. It was inspired by her time with a cave-dwelling hippie community in the village of Matala, on the Greek island of Crete. It was my siren’s call to the caves of Crete, the stark white-blue of Santorini, to bonfire nights fueled by retsina and ouzo, to dancing under a cat-eye moon.  Far away from drizzly weather, grey skies, and Teutonic attitudes.

Not one of the business-suit-clad people clicking by in their well-heeled shoes offered any helpful suggestions. I began to feel invisible. I was considering hitchhiking out of the city, even though it was dusk, and finding a place to camp out on the side of the Autobahn in a grassy ditch (it would not be the first time), when a short woman in a grey cardigan walked up to me and asked,  “Do you need help?” She was as tall as my shoulder. I looked down into her wrinkly, smiling face and realized she was speaking English. Good English that I could understand, which was uncommon.

“I’m looking for an inexpensive place to spend the night.”

She continued to peer up at me and said, “Let’s go get coffee at the train station café.”

Getting out of the rain seemed like a good idea, even though she had not mentioned anything about where I might sleep.

We walked two blocks to the café and chatted over rich, cream-topped Viennese coffee, a glass of water, and a newspaper. She told me she had lived in Chicago and that is where she learned English.

Her name was Rada Milovich.

When our coffee cups were drained, she said, “Would you like to come home with me?” She was staring at me through cloudy bifocals.

“Okay. I only need a place to sleep for one night, as I’m hitching to Yugoslavia tomorrow. Where do you live?”

“In another district, but we can walk there.”

And walk and walk we did. The wide boulevards shrunk to pot-holed streets, the sidewalks cracked and carpeted with gangly weeds. Storefronts disappeared and warehouses took their place as I followed her sturdy march. Broken streetlights failed to provide light in the waning dusk. The evening strollers and café-goers had disappeared and we were the only pedestrians, our footsteps echoing through the shabby, deserted street.

She suddenly turned and went down an alley, motioning me to follow her, and then opened the metal door to a building with no windows. I would never have followed her here if she was not a tiny, grey-haired old lady with an impish grin.

Up three flights of clanking metal stairs, and then through a door that opened into a grey-washed hallway with a yellow light bulb hanging from the ceiling, providing an eerie glow. It recurred to me that maybe I should have hitchhiked out of town.

Rada opened the door to her apartment with a thin, bent key. She did not offer any excuses as to the dingy living quarters. Or to the motley-brown rat that scurried down the hallway before we entered.

“Come in. You are my first visitor.”

Somehow that did not surprise me.

It was a one-room studio with a bathroom. There were no adornments on the walls or trinkets on the bureau. Plain. Clean but rundown. I hesitantly set my backpack down as she made us tea. We chatted for a while but she was tired and wanted to go to bed. I helped her unfold the convertible sofa bed we had been sitting on, and began to lay out my thin sleeping bag on the bare floor.

Rada appeared in a simple white nightgown and climbed into bed. She looked up at me and said sternly, “No, no. You must sleep in the bed with me, not on the floor!”

It was odd and uncomfortable sharing a bed with a person I had just met a few hours before. But it was only for one night and she was harmless. A faint whistle-snore escaped her. In the dim light of the room, she looked so peaceful as she fell into slumber. The sheets were neatly folded over the thin blanket edge and her arms were resting on top of the sheet. Her face calm, haloed in wispy grey hair. I decided it was good to be here and looked back over at Rada before I, too, prepared to succumb to sleep. Then, startled, my eyes focused. I saw the numbers in faded bluish ink tattooed on the inside of her left forearm. The numbers her cardigan sleeve had concealed.

I’d never met a Holocaust survivor.

Deeply disturbed, I didn’t fall asleep until she scurried out of bed in the bleak light of dawn. She pulled her cardigan back on immediately and left. Awhile later, she burst through the door, seemingly propelled by a wave of damp, frigid air trailed by the yeasty aroma of fresh baked bread that filled her tiny apartment. She had gone to the bakery to get our breakfast.

This would be the first of many mornings of racing to the bakery to see who could buy breakfast. This sprint was ridiculous. Rada rose at 6 AM, and then, after I beat her to it one day, at 5 AM she’d pop up, raring to be the first to the bakery. I didn’t want her spending her meager pension feeding me, but I also didn’t want to walk in the pitch dark down those haunted streets. I kept promising her I would stay yet another day if she would let me purchase the warm, crusty rolls and butter we noshed on around her pill-box-size Formica table.

The days stretched on as she showed me Vienna. We walked the city and sat on park benches, feeding the pigeons. We talked over coffee and then we talked some more when we would lie beside each other in the dark on the sagging sofa bed.

Her stories were what kept me there. As we got to know each other, she told me about the origin of the etched numbers on the thin skin of her arm. About her time in Auschwitz and the family she had lost.

She told the stories in vivid, gripping detail but without bitterness or anger. She brought to life the sounds of the harsh, screeching grate of the rusty cattle car doors as they slid open; the  scuffling noises of boots and worn shoe leather meeting the ground as her family was shoved out of the trains and into the camp. The unfolding of the chapters from this horrific period in her life took days. Intertwined with the nightmare were also happy memories of her earlier life in Czechoslovakia, her homeland.

Had she ever told anyone else about the tragedy of slowly losing her entire family? Her daughter, her son, her husband, her sisters, her mother and father. And then surviving Auschwitz all by herself? Was I the first?

“Why didn’t you go back to your country after the war?” I asked.

“I can’t go back. My village was destroyed and I have no family or friends left there. The borders are closed to my kind. Czechoslovakia is lost to me.”

One day I asked, “Rada, the day I met you, you told me you learned English in Chicago. How did you end up there?”

She became reflective and then said, “I was evacuated from the camp and the Red Cross arranged for me to go to America and live with a sponsor. I took a job as a nanny and learned English, but I never fit in. I knew no one. I’m a Jew from Eastern Europe. Always. Austria is closer to my country, so I moved back here.”

In the two weeks I stayed with her I never saw or heard another resident in the hallway. I wondered if she was squatting. She told me it was government housing that was offered to her as a Holocaust survivor.

We went to the train station and drank coffee daily. She liked watching the people. She was keen on staring at the immigrants with their shabby, bulging suitcases as they got off the trains coming from Eastern Bloc countries. She could tell which country they were from by their appearance.

“That fellow wearing a cap is from Hungary. That one in the blue work shirt is from Romania.”

It surprised me that she liked hanging out at the train station café, considering it was a train that took her through the gates of hell to the concentration camp. I asked her why she kept coming here and she said, “I hope to see someone I know from my village.”

One day, a lovely lattice-topped Linzer Torte was placed before Rada and me between our coffee cups and saucers. The waitress indicated that a customer had paid for it and sent it over as a surprise. We looked around the café for him, but he had left. After a steady diet of crusty, warm rolls and butter, this was Technicolor flavor. Symphonic, sweet-yet-tart red currant jam crowned the lush cake layer of aromatic ground hazelnuts and butter.

Rada leaned forward to hear my groans of pleasure and beamed as I fingered the streaks of red currant jam off the plate and licked my fingertips.

She said, “The Linzer Torte recipe is the oldest-known in the world and is one of the most famous Viennese culinary specialties.”

She continued, “I worked briefly in a bakery and learned how to make it. It is a very crumbly pastry made of flour, unsalted butter, egg yolks, lemon zest, cinnamon, and ground hazelnuts, covered with a filling of red currant jam. It is covered by a lattice of pastry crust on top of the preserves.

Rada chuckled and said, “I was not a very good baker, as I would improvise and not follow the recipes, but I did enjoy eating the tortes we baked. It was too tempting and I was still so scrawny from my time in Auschwitz. It was the only time I was fat in my entire life. I think that is what got me fired.”

Rada’s sunny temperament turned morose and subdued when she sensed I was getting ready to depart. Those white sand beaches and late-night mazurkas were calling me south. The greys of Rada’s apartment and the city streets were starting to weigh on me. I needed peaches, grapes, blue seas, and other young people. She could feel my restlessness as I sat beside her on the park bench. It made her sad, and she even had a temper tantrum, accusing me of abandoning her.

But leave I did. She was anxious about my hitchhiking, so I had compromised and bought a train ticket to Zagreb. After one last coffee, she walked with me to the departure platform and waved goodbye. For years I wrote her letters and sent postcards from exotic locales, but then she stopped responding.

Twenty-three years after meeting Rada, I visited Auschwitz. Four other journalists and I, all of us well-known in the American river rafting community, had been invited to Poland to attend the 54th Annual International Kayak Rally on the Dunajec River that borders Slovakia. On our one free day, the Krakow Tourist Board planned to take us on a tour of the salt mines. I had another plan. I wanted to visit Auschwitz. Rada’s stories were imprinted on my heart.

It was a mutiny, as the entire kayak team wanted to go with me instead of to the salt mines. The tourist board representatives rebuked my desire, but ended up arranging for a bus to take us there. They weren’t keen on American journalists viewing this particular epoch of Poland’s history.

The countryside was verdant with leafing trees and spring-green grass. As we approached the gates of Auschwitz, the terrain turned brown and sterile. Not a bush or blade of grass. Just barren soil. A tour guide led us through the dank warehouses, many storing the items guards confiscated from the newly arrived prisoners. One warehouse was just shoes and shoes. Another housed thousands of suitcases stacked to the ceiling, taken from people being pushed out of the cattle cars onto the hard-packed soil and into the camp surrounded by barbed wire. Our tour guide pointed out her own suitcase. A beam of dull light shone on this battered leather bag. Dust motes dancing on the light beam were the only movement in the cavernous building as we stood there, paralyzed with grief and shock. She survived Auschwitz just as Rada had—alone. I wondered if one of the suitcases belonged to Rada or her family.

We walked in silence, heads down and hearts aching, to our bus. Through my tears I saw wheat fields top-heavy with seed heads stretching for miles beside the road. Punctuating the green sea were bright, lipstick-red wild poppies. Their delicate petals fluttered in the breeze like miniature prayer flags on their tall stems. I saw these as evidence that the river of sorrow that had streamed from the camps decades ago had saturated the countryside, the crimson blood metamorphosed into flowers of beauty and cheer.

I asked the bus driver to stop and I went out into the chest-high wheat field and picked the poppy heads. Up close, the flowers were the same color as the red currant jam spread over the Linzer Torte that Rada and I had shared over two decades before.

Folded into a sock in my luggage, the seeds came home with me to California. I planted them in pots beside my pool. Soon, the summer heat coaxed the seedlings to sprout and grow. Each pot was filled with tall-stemmed scarlet poppies. It was odd, though, because the next year, they morphed and the blooms were cornflower-blue on shorter stems. The year after that, they were white and shaped like stars.

The seeds have spread and naturalized, and they now carpet my garden, blooming pure white.

I researched the true name of this special poppy that has kept Rada’s memory alive in my garden. Its name is Papaver rhoeas, the red-flowered corn poppy. It is a native of Europe, and is notable as an agricultural weed and as a symbol of fallen soldiers. It is the flower of wartime remembrance.

1: Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning.Beacon’s Press, 1959.

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Lisa Alpine is the author of Exotic Life: Laughing Rivers, Dancing Drums and Tangled Hearts (Best Women’s Adventure Memoir in the BAIPA 2011 Book Awards) and co-author of Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel . Her travel essays appear in numerous anthologies, including BATW’s Travel Stories From Around the Globe 2012, Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing 2011, I Should Have Stayed Home, Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why, Lonely Planet’s Tales From Nowhere.
She teaches travel writing at the Writing Salon in San Francisco. To find out more, go to www.lisaalpine.com

She is a member of the California Writers Club, Bay Area Travel Writers, Bay Area Independent Publishers Association, Northern California Book Publicity and Marketing Association, and the Wild Writing Women.

by Bill Zarchy

A remembrance

I like to google people from my past. I never know what I’ll find.

Once I googled Mr. Tavis, my elementary school principal, a huge man with a booming voice, and discovered that he had sung on Broadway in the late 40s. A month ago I googled Nancy, a producer with whom I had worked extensively at Channel 2 in Oakland in the late 70s. I located her working as a teacher and journalist in Denmark and soon initiated a flurry of emails.

That same week, I googled Kevin, a former marketing manager for Sony and Ampex whom I hadn’t seen for 15 years. I found him living in Beijing, selling broadcast equipment, and about to hop a plane to an industry convention in Las Vegas I was planning to attend. We conspired to meet for lunch.

Last week, I googled David Sigelman, my college roommate. I found his name on websites for his pediatric practice, teaching awards, a community music center, a book group he started, an article he wrote on prescription drugs and the FDA, and an ominous three-day-old link from a newspaper that included the words, “he was working in a clinic in Peru and became ill. I adored David Sigelman…” I followed the link and was horrified to learn that David had died suddenly, less than a week before, during an altruistic health care trip to the remote Andes.

Until just recently, I hadn’t seen David in decades.

He grew up in one of a handful of Jewish families in Watertown, South Dakota (“15,000 Friendly Folks!”), viewed our surroundings at Dartmouth with a sense of awe, and projected a charming, self-effacing sweetness. He approached his studies with determination and worked his butt off, eventually graduating with honors.

I was a suburban New York Bar Mitzvah boy who viewed the Ivy League, a bit arrogantly, with a sense of entitlement. Indeed, I had been groomed for years for Princeton by my cousin Ted, an avid alum. Ultimately Princeton didn’t admit me, but Dartmouth beckoned. I’d coasted through high school with A’s, and I drifted through college with C’s, as the Vietnam War roared by outside.

David and I pledged to different fraternities but lived together for two years. Our sophomore year, we shared a large room with a visiting Swedish student named Tomas Bertelman, an accomplished linguist. We made plans to move into a spacious room in an elegant dorm for junior year, but I was offered a rare, coveted single room elsewhere, so I changed plans. David and I remained friends, but unfortunately we saw each other much less.

Towards the end of our senior year in 1968, my parents offered to send me on a summer trip to Europe. David and Tomas had been planning a road trip across the Continent and graciously let me tag along. David had previously done community work in Mexico, but I had never left the country before, except for a two-day family trip to Quebec when I was ten. My two roommates met in Sweden and drove through Eastern Europe in Tomas’s mother’s red Austin Mini Mark II. They particularly enjoyed visiting Prague during the Czech Summer, a short-lived flourishing of art, freedom of expression, and culture during a thaw in Soviet domination that ended tragically later that summer. I flew to London for a few days, then on to Vienna, where we rendezvoused.

The three of us crammed into the red Mini and burned up the road across southern Europe, staying mostly in small, fleabag hotels. We dallied three weeks in Spain, as Tomas was studying for a Spanish exam at the end of the summer. We gaped at Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and mellowed at the Alhambra in Granada.

On a beautiful Andalusian road in southern Spain one day, we passed an imposing figure, an officer of the feared Guardia Civil in dark glasses, triangular hat, and black hip boots, standing next to his motorcycle and glaring at traffic.

A few miles later, after pulling over for a picnic lunch, we were startled to hear the motorcycle of the Guardia officer. He stopped across the road to watch the cars, then noticed us, hopped back on his bike, and squirted across traffic. As David and I watched openmouthed, he strode over to Tomas, pulled out a knife, extended his hand, and said a few words. The Swede, who had been peeling an orange with difficulty, handed it over, and the officer demonstrated how to remove the peel in one continuous, spiraling cut.

He soon roared away to intimidate more drivers.

“What did he say to you?” I asked Tomas later.

“He said it’s much easier to cut in one piece if you use a sharp knife.”

Toward the end of July, we zoomed north, and Tomas dropped us in France, then dashed home to Göteborg. David and I spent a week in Paris and took a day trip on the train to Chartres Cathedral, where the English language tour guide captured our attention. A young Brit named Miller, he knew every sculpture and stained glass window and changed the focus of each tour, twice a day. David and I speculated privately about Miller, wondering why someone so brilliant would get “stuck” there in that small town. In those days before the Euro and the Chunnel train, Chartres seemed like a backwater to us, such suave, Ivy League men of the world.

We trained to Amsterdam, rented a room from an older German woman who approached us at the station, and stayed up late chatting with her and her Italian tenant about World War II and Vietnam, aided by my high school German and David’s fluent Spanish. We flew to Edinburgh, traipsed around Scotland for a couple of days, and decided to hitchhike to London.

No one would pick us up. Young people with Czech flags would get rides in moments, but we waited at one truck stop in the Midlands for hours. “We look like gringos,” said David, even without a USA sign or flag. Passing drivers, presumably angry about Vietnam, responded to our thumbs by waving other digits. Canadian hitchhikers vigorously maple-leafed passing vehicles to distinguish themselves from us. Then our luck changed: a kindly lorry driver named Graeme picked us up and eventually took us home to his girlfriend and a large apartment in Birmingham, where they made us welcome for a few days.

Back in London, David and I flew home separately, both permanently bitten by the travel bug. I endured severe culture shock, returning to the States the day Chicago police tear-gassed student demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That same month, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, crushing the brief explosion of freedom.

David and I saw each other once or twice the next year, while he studied at Dartmouth Medical School and I taught high school social studies in a small Vermont town. But after that, I lost track of him for a while.

I attended our tenth reunion and was disappointed not to find him there. I remembered his Dad’s name and wrote to David at his parents’ address in Watertown. I told him about going to film school at Stanford, my years starting out in film and television in California, a recent trip to Japan with Fleetwood Mac, my engagement. He wrote back, told me he was specializing in pediatrics and settling in Massachusetts, that he didn’t attend the reunion because he was embarrassed at having been such a “greasy grind” in college—something between a devoted student and a party pooper—though I assured him my image of him was different.

He didn’t go to our 25^th reunion, either, but a mutual friend who had seen him recently filled me in. David was living in Western Massachusetts, partner in a well-established pediatric practice, married, teaching, doing community work, raising a family. And, said the friend, David had learned to play the viola da gamba, like Gerard Depardieu in the recent French film “All The Mornings of the World.” Oddly, I still felt close to David, even after so many years. Inspired by his example of picking up an instrument later in life, I soon began studying the guitar. For inspiration, I sometimes visualized a montage of David and Depardieu playing the viola.

The night before my departure for our 30^th reunion in June 1998, at my son’s Little League dinner near my home in California, I sat next to a local pediatrician, father of another player. Serendipitously, he turned out to have been great friends with David in medical school. He gave me David’s office number in Holyoke, and I called the next day and left a long message, trying to convince him, at the last minute, to meet me at the reunion. Later that day, he called me on my cell phone, and we talked for half an hour while I changed planes in New York. He might have been tempted to come, he said, but that weekend he had plans to meet his family in Florida, where his Mom had retired.

We promised to stay in touch and exchanged email addresses. Later that summer I was in France with my wife and kids, where I noticed in a guidebook that Mr. Miller still led the English tours at Chartres Cathedral. I dragged my family there. Chartres was a medium-sized city, I realized as we arrived on the train, and I wondered if it had ever been a small town in my lifetime. The cathedral, deservedly, was a Major Pilgrimage Destination, Miller a world-renowned author and expert.

“Has any of you ever taken my tours before?” asked Miller as we basked in his brilliance with the other tourists. Hands went up. “How long ago, sir?”

“This morning,” answered a man. “Five years ago,” said someone else. “Thirty years ago this month!” I cried out, recalling our erroneous assessment of Miller and his “backwater.” I bought two Chartres guidebooks, one to keep and one to send to David with an account of my return. When we got home, I put them both in a bookcase in my office.

Just a few months ago, I got an email from David, telling me he would soon visit San Francisco for a public health convention. We met for dinner and spent hours catching up at a French bistro on South Park. Except for some graying at the temples, he looked the same as he had in college. He was delightful to be with, slim and fit, alert and energetic, with a maturity, poise and confidence that I had just seen hints of during our college days.

He described his trek in the Himalayas with his wife Pat and flabbergasted me with the news that Tomas had served as Swedish envoy to several countries (I recalled the incident when the Guardia officer showed the future ambassador to Spain how to peel an orange). We talked about our families—both of David’s parents had passed away by then, and I’d lost my dad a little over a year before. We’d both loved being daddies, and he told me how difficult it had been for him when his “younger offspring” had moved out, the nest finally emptied, an event I was anticipating—and dreading. He shared his pride in being part of a pediatric practice that served a culturally and economically diverse population.

He described his volunteer trips to Peru as a reaction to the emptiness after his kids were gone. He was planning a third journey to the remote Altiplano region of the Andes, to small, impoverished villages at 11,000 feet and higher, where he worked with other doctors from Bay State Medical Center to provide pediatric care and train health care workers. In addition, he had established a program, Project INCA, to help the villagers build simple greenhouses to combat severe malnutrition in the area.

I told him about my travels and my writing, described seeing Miller at Chartres again, and promised to send the picture book I’d bought for him five years before. Remarkably, we spent the evening catching up on our histories and passions, not reminiscing about college. Later we went to a club in the Mission District to meet his son Ben, recently hired on at Google, the search engine company in Silicon Valley. We hung there for an hour or so, then hugged goodbye. We hoped to see each other more, since he’d be coming out regularly to visit his son.

I wrote to him the next day, noting that we still seemed to know each other well, no doubt from bonding during an ordeal “driving the porcelain bus,” after a near-fatal overdose of vodka and grapefruit juice in the fall of our freshman year. “I was touched by your pointing out that our parents were the ones to whom we could puff out our chests with pride re: our own accomplishments or the accomplishments of our offspring…

“And yet, there we were last night, puffing out our chests and extolling our various kids to each other,” I wrote. “So maybe it’s okay to do that with old friends as well…”

*    *    *

Ironically, the day David died, I was celebrating life with my wife and children at my mother’s 90^th birthday party near Phoenix. It had already stacked up as a momentous and heartbreaking day: my kids had to choose between coming to Arizona for my mom’s party and attending the funeral of their friend—a young man who had just died of leukemia—in the Bay Area. To discover that David had died on the same day was terribly sad.

Preliminary indications suggested his death was caused by a pulmonary edema brought on when David and a companion climbed to 15,000 feet in the Andes. I was shocked and upset at the news and refused to believe it, until I found a memorial page for David and an article from a newspaper in Springfield, Mass.: “Beloved Doctor Dies…”

“He was the rare type of doctor, one that you just do not find today,” wrote one reader to the newspaper. “He had a passion for what he did and he did it well. He was a class act and will be missed by so many children and parents.” A memorial fund to continue David’s community work locally and globally has been established in his name with the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. In a hall packed to overflowing on the Smith College campus, nearly 1000 friends, neighbors, colleagues, patients, students, and musicians paid tribute to David at a moving memorial service. He was 58, and leaves his wife Pat McDonagh, daughter Katie, and son Ben.

I never know what I’ll find when I google someone from my past. I’m grateful I had the opportunity to reconnect with David, however briefly, that I was able to see him in his prime, to see how the modest South Dakotan had turned out, to tell him a bit about my world. After three decades apart, we had three or four splendid, rewarding hours together. It felt like a bonus at the time.

I thought that we might have more dinners and get to know each other’s families, that our friendship had more of a future. But the Chartres book is still in my bookcase. I thought we had plenty of time.

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Bill Zarchy is a freelance director of photography, writer, and teacher in San Francisco. He has shot film and HDTV projects in 30 countries and 40 states, including three former presidents for the Emmy-winning West Wing Documentary Special, the Grammy-winning Please Hammer Don?t Hurt ?Em, feature films Conceiving Ada and Read You Like A Book, PBS science series Closer to Truth, and countless high-end projects for technology and medical companies. Roving Camera: Bill Zarchy?s Blog appears at http://billzarchy.com/blog. His tales from the road, personal essays, and technical articles have been published in Travelers? Tales and Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies, the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers, and American Cinematographer, Emmy, and other trade magazines. He has a BA in Government from Dartmouth and an MA in Film from Stanford and teaches Advanced Cinematography to grad students at San Francisco State University.

by Chris Epting

Venturing into a valley with a badass name for a father-son camping trip, Dad wonders if it’s time to change the misleading moniker of America’s largest national park.

I almost think that it’s time to rename Death Valley. Yes, know the moniker has all that great foreboding mystique. Yes, the name itself is probably what draws many of the visitors in the first place. After all, when you tell people you’re going to “Death Valley” it’s a statement; a marker that says you’re interested in exploring the edge.

But despite the fact that the name was inspired by the many who sought to cross the barren bowl on their way to the gold fields of California, only one death was recorded during the famed ‘49 rush.

And besides, though not obvious at first, Death Valley teems with life of all sorts. Much of it is stealthy and subtle, but it is there, impressive and often surreal and unforgettable.

The Largest Continental Park
First, some facts: Death Valley is the largest national park unit outside of Alaska. It encompasses more than 3 million acres of wilderness area, is surrounded by high mountains, and contains the lowest point in North America. Death Valley also includes Scotty’s Castle, the elaborate oasis home of millionaire Albert Johnson (named for the huckster & cowboy prospector who talked his way onto the property). Scattered across the salt-baked miles are remnants of gold and borax mining, mysterious sand dunes, otherworldly mountain scapes, and other natural oddities. It was proclaimed a national park on February 11, 1933 and designated a Biosphere Reserve in 1984.

All that said, facts don’t really matter much in Death Valley. As I was reminded recently on a several-day camping trip with my son, the ancient charm of the place is irrational and logic-defying. The extremes are exhilarating and exhausting.

And the life there is to die for.

Escape from L.A.
Escaping the city, in this case Los Angeles, for Death Valley sets up a wonderful balance. After all, I’m not sure there’s any place on earth that juxtaposes one of the world’s most populated places with the vast loneliness of a Deathly Valley in under a four-hour drive

But soon after leaving that tangled, complex metropolis, you arrive. And even though “Death Valley” as a name may be somewhat misleading, there is something visceral one feels when passing that first welcome sign. This is an environment that can sneak up on you, can stun you and have its way with you, even in late spring, when we were there.

Arriving to set up camp at Furnace Creek, as we did, you realize at once that even if you’ve visited many deserts, Death Valley is different. Maybe it’s the reputation, the faded vintage postcards of 1930s road trips, or just the sheer celebrity that the name conjures up. Whatever it is, Death Valley is an instant badge of honor, a bragging right for the rest of your life.

And it first it will seem dead. The pickleweed, saltgrass and the creosote bushes that populate the alluvial fan around most of the valley are drab and common. But as soon as night falls, while the smoke twirls skyward from your campfire, and you hear the high-pitched coyote calls out on the salt pan, Death Valley hints that it is full of life.

Desert Creatures and Pupfish
There are many places to explore in Death Valley; many places that do not reveal much of the stubborn, evolved life forms that tend to live more in the shadows. You’ll certainly see plenty of ravens soaring around the fan-shaped mountains of Golden Canyon. Zebra-tailed lizards will be darting about near the breathtaking lookout know as Zabriskie Point. And jackrabbits will be scooting in and out of the brush around Scotty’s Castle.

Raptors will soar throughout Ubehebe Crater and Chuckwallas will squeeze in between the seemingly endless crusty salt formations that stud the “Devil’s Golf Course.”

You expect those things in the desert. But fish?

Thousands of years ago in the Pleistocene era, there were large lakes (including Lake Manly) in Death Valley. As the bodies of water dried up, small streams and pools managed to survive. The pupfish (named for the way they frolic in the water) were trapped in these shrinking pools, selected by evolution to survive and eventually becoming the species we know today.

There are a number of types of pupfish in Death Valley, each stranger and more rare than the next. These species include:

- The Saratoga pupfish, located at the south end of Death Valley.
- The highly endangered Devil’s Hole pupfish, found 37 miles east of Furnace Creek, in western Nevada.
- The Cottonball Marsh pupfish, found in Cottonball Marsh on the west side of central Death Valley.
- The famed Salt Creek pupfish, located in Salt Creek in the central part of Death Valley.

Easily visible for just a few months each year, the inch-long fish can survive in water temperatures that exceed 112 degrees F. In fact, the tiny fish are so adapted to warm water that they must burrow into the mud and become dormant when the shallow stream becomes cold in the winter. Another hurdle these fish face is high salinity. Pupfish can actually live in water that’s up to three times saltier than ocean water.

Watching the pupfish in the crystal-clear pools along a boardwalk is a thrilling bit of business; a real-time evolutionary study. They represent life at its finest—in a place where we typically do not associate life at it finest.

Badwater Basin
Similar charms also exist at Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, 282 feet below sea level. The spring-fed pool of supp-briny “bad water” located near the road before the vast white expanse of salt-covered ground is home to the Badwater snail, a minute marsh snail that also has adapted to the harsh environs.

And adaptation is everything in Death Valley. The plants adapt, the animals adapt, and we adapt for our visits, hauling our water and food and measuring our paces as we search for solitude in the lonely, shimmering heat.

Flowers in the desert
Death Valley, after even a short rain season, presents colorful life if you know where to look. Desert Dandelion, Brittlebush, Princesplume, Desert Paintbrush, Fremont Phacelia, Mojave Aster, Indigo Bush and Desert Globemallow are treats for the eye, and the spirit. Explosions of color carpet various parts of the valley; artfully reminding us that life is where you look for it.

And then you sometimes get the unexpected moment that forever erases any sense of fear or intimidation in Death Valley. For us, it was a tired-looking coyote that approached us as we meandered back from looking at wildflowers. Studying us from just several feet away, she (I think it was a she) seemed bashful, curious, suspicious, and bashful again, all in the span of about 15 seconds. For several minutes she kept us company. Eyeing us. Licking her chops. Then she wandered off into the salt pan, in search perhaps of food, water, or a cool place to rest.

Death Valley, for me, is a life-affirming place. We escape there to remove ourselves from the life we know, and in turn we encounter life we want to know. The wild, the threatened, the rare and obscure, all thrown together in a pocket of parched, lonely planet bliss that bares a scary name.

But it’s not a scary place at all. It’s holy and naturally sacred, a testament to those that can survive the scorching brutality.

“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well,” said de Saint-Exupery. This is true. But when it comes to Death Valley, the well may not even be hidden. It is the life before you; it is the pulse in the warm wind, in the sand and in the billions of stars overhead as you lay down to sleep.

I wish they’d rename Death Valley.

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A pop culture history aficionado, Chris has a lifelong penchant for documenting the exact sites where things both great and small occurred. As an author, Epting has found that unearthing and chronicling “hidden” locations offers him a challenge. What began as an inquisitive hobby soon developed into the writing and photographing of 18 books based on his discoveries, including James Dean Died Here: The Locations of America’s Pop Culture Landmarks, Elvis Presley Passed Here: Even More Locations of America’s Pop Culture Landmarks, Roadside Baseball, The Ruby Slippers, Madonna’s Bra, and Einstein’s Brain: The Locations of America?s Pop Culture Artifacts and Led Zeppelin Crashed Here.

Chris is a frequent featured guest on numerous radio and television programs such as National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” “The Savvy Traveler,” “Access Hollywood” and FOX TV’s the “Best Damn Sports Show Period,” plus international programs in Australia, Japan and the U.K.

He has contributed articles for such publications as the Los Angeles Times, Westways, Travel + Leisure and Preservation magazine.

Chris lives in Huntington Beach, CA with his wife and their two children.

by Luke Armstrong

When it’s time to step up and attend a function for respectable people, an expatriate in Guatemala gets the bespoke suit treatment from an Antigua tailor.

Starvation, lack of infrastructure, political corruption, bathrooms last cleaned when the Berlin Wall crumbled, and smooth salsa dancers named Rico Suave who steal your girlfriend with their superior salsa skills. These are the typical third world annoyances travelers face here.

Some people with battitudes seem to want to do nothing but complain, complain, complain about these things. I’m sorry your third world doctor prescribed you benzos for your bug bites, and I empathize with the cockroaches, beg bugs, mice, rats and magpies infesting your $3 a night hostel. I really can relate to the blocked highway causing you to miss the flight that was to take you back to your comfortable first world home. But after you’re done reciting a laundry list litany, take a deep breath and let’s go get ourselves a tailor-made suit in the failing state of Guatemala.

I read somewhere once that at some stage in every man’s life, he must purchase a tailor-made suit. Like smoking big Cubans, drinking black label from a tumbler, hiring a private eye, and going on safari (don’t be a Hemingway-jerk, use rubber bullets), going to a tailor is a dying practice of the endangered Nineteenth Century gentleman.

For most would-be gentlemen, a tailor-made suit is way too freaking expensive. And here is where the third world’s tailors step in to lift the dark, elitist gate on the financially impossible road.

New Suit = Year’s Supply of Grilled Mystery Meat
I was not always a promoter of tailor-made suits. I actually used to be on the opposite side of the fashion wheel. About a year ago, I was headed to a reception in my expatriate home of Guatemala. The first lady was likely to attend and formal dress was insisted upon. My Guatemalan co-workers tactfully informed me that the blazer I found in a friend’s dingy basement during a beer pong tournament during my sophomore year of college (the same blazer I’d been using to “pull off” formal events for years) was not going to work this time. Despite the fact that you could barely see the pink thread from where I had stitched up Ol’ Yeller—the name of my blazer—it would need to stay on its hanger.

As I thought about owning a suit, a tinge of dread surged from the dying vagabondish-free spirit I had envisioned for myself as a young humanities major, and I threw up a little bit in my mouth. Just a bit. It was actually probably from the street-meat I had just had for lunch. As I chewed the last bites, I began to suspect I was eating dog meat. Not from the distinct doggy flavor, but because around the grill where the street meat sizzled, I noticed that sad street dogs had made a half circle of mourning.

The dogs’ solemn expressions seemed to say, “Rest in peace Barky. If you were here today, you’d be proud at how good you smell right now.”

How was I—a guy who had obviously just eaten dog meat for $2—a person who had any right to parade around in a three-piece suit, choking on caviar, and toasting my champagne glass while heartily laughing at politically themed, observational humor?

I think most of my resistance toward suit-owning-hood came from not wanting to dish out the dough. I was clearly the kind of person who preferred to spend his money on dog meat. And the cost of a nice suit represented nearly a year’s supply of street food.

But despite my timidity towards the thought, I needed a suit. All my Guatemalan friends topped out at a towering 5′5″, so borrowing a midget suit from one of them clearly was not an option.

Armani, with a Side of Pain-killers
I asked around and found that the best place to buy a suit in Antigua, Guatemala was the Solex pharmacy. It seemed to make sense that at the same place I’d be dropping hundreds of dollars on an outfit I’d wear a few times a year, I could also buy cheap, generic anti-depressants.

So off I went. There was a woman with crazy eyes selling baby rabbits and mangos outside the pharmacy. I bought a bag of mangos and opted to wait on the rabbits until they ended up on the grill, next to the dog meat.

The suit shop occupied a small cinderblock room off from the pharmacy. A short man, who I will call Don Cultivo, greeted me with a warm handshake as he eyed me from head to toe. “I’ve come for a suit,” I announced with a solemn air.

“Yes, or course you have,” he responded taking a deep breath of aged wisdom communicating accumulated secrets to whimsical youth. “A suit,” he said, “Is what gives a man his manliness. It defines him. We will need to find a suit that shows what sort of man you are.”

What gives a man his manliness? All these years I’d been thinking my beer chugging ability and vast variety of man-bags was what made me macho. As I looked around the room at double- and triple-breasted suits, the dazzling cufflinks, starched collars, and variety of ties, a sinking realization dawned. I was still just a boy lost in a world of manly, suit-wearing men. But here, underneath the care of Don Cultivo, surrounded by cinderblocks, was my ticket to the real world. Here was where boys became men.

We spent the afternoon taking suits off the hangers and posing for the tripled paned mirror. Many of the suits seemed okay to me, but Don Cultivo knew better. With every one I tried, he sadly shook his head, “No, not this one either.”

When it seemed that I had tried on every suit in the shop, and began to worry that I was doomed to be trapped in perpetual boyhood, Don Cultivo touched his chin, “What you need,” he said slowly, “is a suit made especially for you. And you are in luck. I am a tailor and with mucho gusto, I can make a suit for just for you.”

My elation at being able to finally become a man was temporarily eclipsed by the fear of how much this service must cost. “Cuanto? ” I ventured in a timid tone, that I hoped would indicate to Don Cultivo that not every white person had remembered to water the money tree they were issued at birth.

“No mucho,” he reassured me. “$150 and I’ll include a tie and dress shirt gratis.”

“$150!? Not even Wal-Mart’s slave-made suits could compete with that. I stood on a stool while Don Cultivo measured me meticulously and imagined my soon-to-be suited self.

When he finished his measurements, I paid the deposit and he caught me just as I was leaving, “The last thing we need to do is decide what brand of suit you want me to make.”

It seemed somewhat oxymoron-ish, but Don Cultivo produced from behind the counter a basket of designer labels for me to choose from.

A week later, when I picked up my handmade Armani (don’t tell Giorgio) suit and shook my tailor’s hand, the boy who entered the tailor shop walked out a wistful man. On the way home, the dog meat sandwich tasted different. I looked out at the world with my new manly eyes and decided I should start drinking scotch and smoking more cigars. But first I would need to locate a third-world cobbler. I needed shoes to go with my suit, and I’d be damned if I was going to spend more than $50 getting them.

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After setting off hitch-hiking post college from Chile to Alaska, Luke Maguire Armstrong made it as far as Guatemala. There he spent four years directing the social service programs of the educational development organization Nuestros Ahijados in a mission to “break the chains of poverty through education and formation.” He is the author of iPoems for the Dolphins to Click Home About. co-editor ofThe Expeditioner’s Guide to the World, and editor of RabbleRouseTheWorld.com. His first novel, How One Guitar Will Save the World, is at large. Follow him on Twitter: @lukespartacus.