San Pedro is the kind of place that feels like an island, but isn’t. It is self contained, wedged between a volcano and a lake, writhing up and down the hillside. A single road, snaking around the cornfield covered volcano that shares the name of the town, and the saint, connects it to the next district.
Tourism moved in a long time ago, but stayed within a few hundred yards of the lake. The Guatemalan locals refer to the area as “Gringolandia.” But the permanent gringos, many of whom have moved their shops and bars slightly further from the main docks, refer to the area as “The Vortex.” By the standards of a major city the thoroughfare is quiet, by the standards of a tranquil little town, vortex is the more apt term.
Upon entering Gringolandia from the heights the first thing one can see on most of the walls are flyers for beer pong tournaments, bikini parties by the pool bar, bar trivia nights, and the mélange of activities one would find at any large fraternity house in the states. Most days the walks down to the café are an unwelcome reminder that I am no longer 23. Once within the ethereal confines of the vortex the panoply of tourist trappings assault from all sides. There are hordes of art galleries, a generous term, where handfuls of no doubt talented artists manufacture uncounted copies of the same dozen photos. There are a few western stereotypes of natives, in fictional native dress, staring bemusedly at a volcano, with the lake and silhouetted canoes floating in the background. Various shops all sell the same products, which in New York we call chotchsky. A dozen tour operators hawk trips to the peaks of Vulcan San Pedro or “The Indian’s Nose,” coffee tours through some local villages also appear as advertisements in windows with mute regularity.
The vortex is easy to forget if you don’t take advantage of it. It would take a tremendous amount of noise to completely block out something as amazing as Lake Atitlan. It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful lakes on planet Earth, though I can’t pretend to be an expert on lakes. Many of the towns around the lake still look ramshackle during the day, but at night, when the clouds disperse, from a good vantage point, all human habitation around the lake is reduced to puddles of terrestrial stars climbing feebly up the sides of the great volcanoes. On the lake too, the volcanoes growing out of the shores manage to make one forget the groaning diesel engines of the lanchas that glide over the surface like fat water bugs.
There is always something disconcerting about these kinds of “tourist traps,” especially when they grow not from major cities, but places of natural beauty. We derelicts daily face the paradox of dealing with other travelers. Though for the most part outgoing, we all want to feel special, we all want the pleasure of a soul searching walkabout without losing cell phone reception, we all want the peak of the mountains without the blisters on our feet. We want to meet new people, but every new person who looks likes us, walking the same foreign streets, reminds us of how common our quests really are. When we meet each other in hostels, in campgrounds, we let down our guard, throw back a few drinks and talk shop, like fishing vessels meeting randomly in open water. When we are on the streets however, there is an unspoken resentment, a half-smiling admission that as our paths cross, we have invaded each other’s fantasies, every other white face that barges into our snapshots of some foreign landscape are like spots of turpentine tossed onto a priceless painting.
Travel Writers (the professional kind, that get paid for things nobody reads) face a similar, if not more stark, paradox. The goal of many a travel writer is to find the next undiscovered paradise, whether that’s a place that’s always existed that nobody’s bothered to visit (extremely rare these days) or the rediscovery of a place people had abandoned long ago (Come to scenic Mogadishu!) but within them, this drive to turn over stones and find moments of beauty and tranquility, is the seed of their undoing. By writing about something which struck them in the world, they are drawing in the very tourists which will convert it soon to something entirely as bland and uninteresting as the vortex. There is nothing so inspiring in this world that it cannot be destroyed by a healthy dose of other people.
The last person to be awed by the Mona Lisa probably saw it before the first World War.
In my experience, upon finding myself in a new country, a new tourist trap, when the foreground starts to turn Western, I take it as a sign-post – deeper it says, farther afield. Tourism is a travel challenge, because for every “Unesco World Heritage Site” there are usually a few more sites within a day’s reach that are just a mesmerizing with ten percent of the visitors. Or as I would find a few weeks after arriving in San Pedro, additional opportunities for suffering while on the hunt for the unique.
Before that fiasco there was school.
The Cooperativa school sits halfway between the local population at the top of the hill, and gringolandia, by the docks. Like most of the “schools” in San Pedro, teachers, mainly local women who underwent some kind of limited local training, line up in the mornings and take their students to a little outdoor hut where private lessons will go on for about four hours.
I tell my teacher, Rosa, on the first day that language teachers often make for the most frustrating language students. We know the drills, we’ve played all the little language games a thousand times before, and especially true, we know when you’re phoning it in. For a teacher it is a rare blessing to have students who actually want to learn. It makes the job easy, it makes the job fun, and it makes the job possible. Most of the people studying in Guatemala genuinely want to learn, and for many it’s easy to overlook the obvious shortcomings of the mock language schools. In three weeks, I filled up two small notebooks almost entirely with grammar. Sometimes functional, sometimes obscure.
It quickly becomes a chore to get through four hours of grammar lessons a day, and my limited enthusiasm for the task dissipated by the end of the first week. I also discovered through conversations that the teachers are treated awful, paid a pittance, and rarely get to work full time hours, even after years of dutiful grammatical drudgery. It’s not much of a surprise that the language schools dispense their earnings in roughly the same ratio as a pyramid scheme, greatly enriching a few owners, and shackling the rest of the staff to a life somewhere above farm work, but not very far.
After classes are over I often find myself wandering aimlessly through the town of San Pedro. The town is a labyrinth, with roads and alleys leading to dead ends or opening into the lake with the same frequency. Roads turn into alleys and alleys into trails and trails into dead ends at some family’s door step. You can start by walking steeply downhill only to be walking steeply uphill minutes later, and vice versa. It took three or four days to memorize the simple path from the house I was living in to the school and back. Landmarks come in the forms of painted signs, either of political parties, or praising Jesus, or large churches. The most unique landmark on the way to school was a painting of an eggman giving us the finger.
The churches are particularly noticeable in San Pedro. They are everywhere, and a great many of them are evangelical. I had my own ideas of what evangelical churches were like in the states, but in San Pedro “evangelical” must be Spanish for noisy. The house I was staying in was sandwiched between two of them, and every night I went to bed caught between the stereo sound of choirs and brass bands, singing and playing the same songs night after night. I’m still unsure if the churches are the harbingers or the after effect of the other unexpected surprise of Latin American travel: church people.
It is not often that I have encountered church people abroad, though to be fair Japan is religiously apathetic, China is militantly atheist, and the Middle East…well, is the Middle East. The fact that the Catholic Church maintains its greatest grip on the souls of those in Latin America and Africa is somewhat mystifying to me, considering the device of delivery was Conquistadors and Smallpox in one and the slave trade and colonization in the other. There are Christian churches sprinkled around San Pedro like delis and pizza joints in Manhattan. Many of the students at the language school, and others scattered around the town are there to primarily do mission work, or learn Spanish in order to do mission work somewhere else.
It’s difficult for me to come to terms with this phenomenon. I have trouble putting myself in the shoes of devoutly religious locals, living in lands with such a unique cultural and spiritual heritage, and forsaking whatever invisible trajectories their own brands of immortality would have spawned in the absence of the omnipresent Bible. Believing that Jesus died for the sins of the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs seems akin to believing that Mohammed wrote passages of the Koran dedicated to the Australian aborigines. But here we are, in one of the most devoutly Christian populations of the world, thanks to whatever daily tortures and humiliations the Spanish and Portuguese empires inflicted on the local populations until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when homegrown dictators and U.S. foreign policy could pick up where the Spanish left off.
I’m hard on them though. My housemate was a kid from Texas, getting ready to do mission work for a non-denominational church. He went with his father to Zimbabwe for Doctors without Borders. Who is, all in all, a far better man than I, and who will likely improve the lives of others his entire life. What harm could they really do I guess, in a place where Christianity has already achieved such stunning, incontrovertible penetration? If the people have already got God, and what they need are education and healthcare, what good is dispelling their comforting superstitions going to do? I suppose that’s why Agnostic Missionaries really haven’t taken off quite yet.
Oddly enough, the only person who seemed to be pulling neck and neck with Jesus in a popularity contest was Batman, whose symbol adorned every Tuk-Tuk from Mexico City to Cusco, Peru. I’ll spare everyone the joke here about competition between fictional characters.
At the center of San Pedro is and will always be the lake. The story of Lake Atitlan begins 84,000 years ago. A day so far beyond the human past it’s hard to register, and a day so recent in geological history that the Earth could blink and miss it. We don’t know what the weather was like the day before the event, but we know to almost a certainty what it was like the day after.
Lake Atitlan, which doesn’t flow out to any rivers or streams, which collects and grows but doesn’t diminish, is a caldera. A crater lake created in a single moment, known as the Chocohoya event, and when the volcano erupted it blew a hole in the Earth 338 meters deep, scattering ash and debris as far north as Florida and as far south as Ecuador.
The lake only collects, it collects gasoline and motor oil, collects its decades of human waste, but most importantly, it collects more water. There are trees growing out of the lake at its edges, homes, abandoned as the first floors were submerged. It is as simple as a subtle shift in the rains.
A lack of subtlety was the scientific community’s greatest mistake, or at least the mistake of those speaking for the scientists. They focused on the extremes, bigger hurricanes, blizzards and tsunamis. Hollywood imagined firestorms and tidal waves, but what most of the world will feel is what San Pedro feels right now. This sense of helplessness as the world around them, the world they thought they understood, creeps into the foreground from its passive place at the back of their minds.
At first it’s a single family, then a neighbor, a cousin, a friend whose home is destroyed by some bizarre twitch of an increasingly precocious natural world. In the end, every one of us, in every quiet, noisy, busy, or tranquil patch of the world will be left scratching our heads. We’ll tell anyone who’ll listen, “I remember when.” Every one of us will remember our favorite piece of planet Earth, and how it changed into this unknown thing; shrunken, grown, or disappeared completely.
This is the last gift we’ll offer our grandchildren, our memory of a time when we all knew the creep was coming. A time when we all elected simply to shuffle half steps backward and admire the sunset, beyond the waters lapping at our toes.
Guatemala still places value in the wisdom of grandparents. After Bolivia it has the largest percentage of native peoples in all of Latin America. The evidence in San Pedro comes in the form of a festival. The locals descend from the tiny mountain towns around the lake like the migration of flocks of brightly colored birds. At the beginning of the week-long festival there is a beauty contest. The girls do not come brandishing bronzed bodies in swimsuits, but clothed in the regalia of their ancestry. Though many live within a few scant miles of each other the contest requires a series of translators to change the dozens of local Mayan languages into Spanish.
In this way do they set their lines against the inevitable, the dissolution of the unique into the accepted. The Mayan apocalypse brought to you by Coca Cola. Every passing day across the developing world modernity inches forward, making a gelatinous soup of the genuine for the high fructose corn syrupy goodness of progress. Many places and peoples have succumbed, and none of we privileged can blame them. Still though, in the hill countries of the world, in the remote corners, off the grid, they struggle and suffer. They keep their thousands of generations safeguarded in the soil they till, planting one more row of crops against the empty horizon. The last defense against the desertification of the human soul.
No comments:
Post a Comment