The Future of Petén

July 12, 2008

TINTAL, Guatemala — Tintal is quiet and empty without the anthropologists. In the distance the howling monkeys scrape their calls through the night. We sit under a xate rooftop and listen to it rain again and again while we drink hot sweetened milk - our eyes glazed over from fatigue. We’ve untied our shoes and unwrapped our bandages. From time to time the vigilantes talk to themselves in the kitchen behind us.

“La vida hay que aprovecharla de una vez, porque no se sabe si es la ultima vez,” said Mauricio Henríquez, our Salvadorean guide flipping potatoes over an open fire. Fries, hot milk and cucumber salad for dinner.

We are on our way back to Carmelita after four days of joining the archaeologists in Mirador and we’ve stopped here again. But things are not the same. No Carlos, no Paco, no Gustavo, no Josue or Beatriz; no stumbling from the darkness of the jungle, specs of dirt spit out from its bowels, stumbling towards fire and the promise of food and something warm. Now their faces haunt me as I turn the campground’s dark empty corners. But then we stared at the fire, our limp bodies dangling off green plastic lawn chairs. That night we had lost Michael, Paco, Paulino and Carlos had stayed behind and gone back into the muck of the bajo to look for them, listening for Paco’s whistle. We made every possible mistake, but I didn’t know it then.

We entered the jungle and swamp late into the afternoon and that was our first mistake. Our mules were already miles ahead of us and there were no rideable mules behind us. We pressed on quickly and soon the tightly knit group of archaeologists, periodistas and estudiantes that had journeyed eight riotous hours from Guatemala City dispersed into small groups. From time to time you could hear the shrill call of each small team sounding through the thick jungle like a hurt dog howling to its pack. In the bus we received numerous warnings, almost mythic in proportion of the dangers of the hike — poisonous snakes, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, flies that rotted out your ear cartilage never to be left the same, bugs that made your whole hand swell and tree trunks from which swarms of bees would emerge. But, above all, it was the mud we had to worry about. Mud so thick it would suck the soles from your shoes and would inhale you in to half your waist and then beechos would cling to your body.

“Te recordaras de esta experiencia, es algo muy intenso, Karolina, y llegara a tus raices” Josue Leonardo Guzman, one of the leaders of the archaeology team had told me on the bus ride up to Flores. His small face and frame as he sat on the arm of the seat next to me was outlined by the twilight as we slowly approached the end of the road. I listened to his astute Eagle Scout premonitions. The trip was imprinting on me now, like the stare of a young peasant boy looking back at me from the tall grass overlooking an open field that was once rainforest. It was with Josue’s words that I started to open myself to something beyond the concept of going on a jungle trek to be in the country of my birth, my country, the mother from which my mother and my mother’s mother had sprung. I was journeying into my Maya roots and I wasn’t prepared to understand quite what that meant. But I knew there were things that happened in life that were magical and while you were in them you knew it and didn’t quite know how to grasp it.

As we pushed ahead into Mirador, into the swamp, we entered our own heart of darkness and part of me wondered if Marlow would be waiting for us at the end — reminding us of the duplicitous and temporary nature of everything.

We left Tintal at 8 AM the next day and hiked another five hours until we hit the “Welcome to Mirador” sign. Don Oscar and his nephew were ahead of us his time and we followed like a small gaggle of loyal ducklings, liters of water dangling from plastic colored chords strapped across our shoulders. Nothing fancy, just used water bottles. Don Oscar, otherwise known as “Coca” had done the entire trip a few days earlier to visit his dying father. His trip started at 3 AM and eight hours later he and his nephew had arrived in Carmelita, a town with about 1,000 inhabitants and the center of it being a store with telephones and Gallo Famosa beer. Don Oscar’s eyes always looked red-shot, but his body sprang from the ground he touched. He carried two small waters bottles in the back pockets of his gray pants barely stained by mud, and short-sleeve white shirt half-way open to reveal his leatherish skin underneath. His body moved through the terrain like a graceful bobcat.

“Don Oscar, are we lost?” I had asked him at one point when our group had dwindled to five.

“Yes, we’re lost,” he said and had a very serious face as he slapped the mosquitoes swarming around him.

He then smiled and said, “We’re not lost, and we’re just getting there late.” How late “late” was I had no way to conceive of in a jungle with no “light pollution” and only thick, unbroken darkness that the eye could not cut through. We pushed on into the swamp and the night blanketed the deadly terrain, stubs of trees surfacing from it like jagged knives and the swarms of mosquitoes that latched on to your neck anytime you stopped. We became eight shadows lit by a crescent moon, limpid bodies moving slowly through the jungle.