La Selva

Day 1. There’s garlic under my pillow and smoke in the air, a baby crying, and crickets. I’m in Nuevo Jerusalén de la Selva Lacandona, close to the Guatemalan border. Dogs echo off the mountains, and I have a headache. I left San Cris early this morning with a couple professors and other students, one of whom lives here, in this house where I’m sleeping. We bussed six hours through the mountains through pine trees and cold wind and lakes and into jungle and phallic banana flowers and sharp curves. Chiapas is so, so beautiful. Luis, the professor I’m volunteering with, and I walked around the town of about 500 people, and the water in the river looks so clear, and everything is so densely green on the jungly mountains, and the field in the center was filled with fireflies like a forest fire, or like dew. Luis told me when you do fieldwork in a town, the first thing you have to do is walk around and say buenas tardes to everyone on the street, introduce yourself a bit and let the rumors begin to flow. Soon everyone will know who you are.

Day 2. Yesterday was incredible. I woke up to roosters and a corn-grinding machine with the familiar flavor of country sickness. After a couple visits to la letrina (down a steep hill, past a garden plot, a goat, and a pig, pull back the Little Mermaid towel-door and into the little shack built for two) I was ready for breakfast: chayote in caldo de res, with homemade tortillas from the early-morning grinding of their very own corn. Watery coffee that tasted like sesame.

Following breakfast, we went for a two-hour hike in the jungle along one side of the Rio Santo Domingo. We climbed up and down a steep, muddy mountain, and then further down to the river’s edge. The water was a bright, chalky blue, and fast and wide. The ground was some kind of porous soft stone with tiny ferns and plants that looked like honeysuckle growing out of it. Pools in holes in the rock smoothed out by water until they looked like skin. Water bubbling up through mojo stones in puddles from the pressure of the subterranean currents. While we waited for the old professors to catch their breath, smoke their cigarettes, and take pictures, my mind went blank at the sight of so much. So much power and speed and big and beauty and green and all around me, all crushed beneath my tennis shoes. I watched our guide, a middle-aged Tzeltal man (and father of one of the students) as he watched the water move. I wondered how he thought about everything we were both seeing, sitting silently on either side of the river in the same moment.

We hiked back, down to an embarcadero on the other side of the brige, to swim. The water there was wide and warm and shallow and so rico I didn’t get out for hours, not until they called to me from the shore while I was diving off the waterfalls into deep pools and scrambling up sharp rock to do it again. My hands are still rough.

Back at the house in Nuevo Jerusalén, we ate elotes and drank pozol, said goodbye, drove back up to Tierra Fria. Six hours on the road, giant mountains, cheshire moon, sunset, half-asleep. Passing semis trucking gas on curves in the dark. Pissing in the dark on pine needles. Gallo beer from Guatemala and quesadillas de flor de calabaza.

(2009)