My last meal before leaving the country was an Eggs Benedict.
I chose to not have the coffee because I was already so nervous.
We had a four hour layover in LAX after flying out of PDX.
The overall hum of my travel experience was a caffeine headache fuzzybuzzyssswirl.
Sitting on the plane, arms wrapped around all my games, books, journals, ways to pass the time and anchor in the change, but I just fell asleep in our anxious octopus-arm-embrace.
I can hear my friend’s voice playing in the back of my mind, “This lake we’re going to be living on is a really spiritually intense place. Everyone who I know that comes here has had this really intense adjustment period, just be fair warned, it would be good to budget for a breakdown.”
There’s Guatemala.
Landed.
“There’s the bathroom. Remember to put your toilet paper in the trash, not the toilet. Also, I wouldn’t drink from that water fountain.”
Noticing my empty water bottle, wondering where the next drink would come from, I took a deep breath and felt a flush of thirst wash through me.
“We should stay in the airport until our driver arrives because if we go outside we’ll get swarmed by drivers.”
We sat in the airport lobby, comfortable chairs near the “Explore Guatemala” sign.
“Our driver is here, let’s go.”
Walking to the car and loading all these bags and boxes into the car. Every pound of it is the kindling to keep my homesick heart warm in this faraway place. We’re driving and I’m in shock. I’m a child, a little brother, suckling on the perception of my guide and her driver who is holding both of us.
It’s important to have a good driver.
The air is musky with the sweat of drivers and gasoline, we round the corner to a road full of cars threading lanes like a broken loom.
“Welcome to the mess”
We’re driving on a pretty typical four-lane highway at first, but the cars are weaving in and out chaotically. There’s motorcycles humming down the lane divider. There’s two lanes going each direction. That is, until we see some cones and jolt into the next lane. Sometimes we’re on the left side of the road, sometimes the right, most of the time both lanes are going both directions. The only rules of the road seem to be get where you’re going as quickly as possible, and don’t clip anybody else with your car and send the whole river of commuters into a death spiral.
I feel my wobbling belly held in a glass jar of shock in the smog, dismayed, awkward, tensed up. My heart yearning for beauty, arrival, a sigh of relief, my home-to-be, what I came to see:
[We’re going to the lake, el lago, Atitlan]
Finally out of the rush-hour in town (I'm told that isn’t even the worst of traffic) and at speed, the mudslides along the roads make the road treacherous to traverse on its own. Where there isn’t fallen debris, there are potholes in the concrete, primed for consuming the souls of tires which are unskilled enough to be kissed by their undercarriage-rending maw.
As we dodge, duck, dip, dive, dodge through the Trans-Panama highway, our driver muses on the names of places, the history, the trips and plans to make and take, all in his skillful dance between traffic and the road. The road itself seems to be a living being, an extension of the land tended to not by the government, but by neighbors with enough heart and strength and immediate benefit to tend the lanes themselves.
Guatemala is an agricultural country. Guatemala is the land.
I am an engineer, I work -?used to work?- in land development.
“How do the roads break down and who pays for them?”
We talk about politics and history of the country and its infrastructure.
“Tell the people you meet who you are and what you do” our driver says to me.
After he says that, our driver turns through a gap in the highway median to cross the oncoming lanes and we pull into a beautiful restaurant, a clearing, an escape. Perhaps the most thoughtfully cultivated spot I have ever seen.
This place sprung from a woman-run co-op on this side of the internal conflict (a conflict spanning 50 years, regarding control of land and agriculture).
Full bellies and more sudden lane changes later, I was caught reaching for a good photo out the window. Laughing at my feeble attempts, our driver pulls onto an overlook adorned with a darling set of swings peering over a valley.
“How about this for a photo?”
Perfect. Here’s my sigh of relief, my first peek at Lake Atitlán. (you can see it on the top left of that photo above). I’m only now beginning to arrive.
Traffic, potholes, debris, road, road, road, we pull into another town, so we can take a boat.
I see my first street dogs.
“Look! A dog.”
“Ha! Yes, it is Guatemala, there are so many dogs here.”
The next steps are a blur
We stopped in town at the bank to get cash.
We hauled our stuff down to a private boat, we crossed the lake and landed at the dock of our final destination. We fire-bucket carried our heavy bags up the street, we heaved our stuff into my travel companion’s house so we could take a load off our shoulders to walk around time and start up my wi-fi, pick up my keys.
We stopped by a fruit stand and I’m handed a new fruit I don’t recognize, I peeled nervously and my hands are sticky.
Mind spinning from the whole day, suddenly having arrived at my destination, nowhere to wash my hands, my whole system is stiff just getting from one place to the next. I must be with my sticky hands until I can return home. My first lesson from the welcome wagon.
“I can smell the rain coming. I’m going to get us some soup before the rain comes.”
As soon as she left, the sky wept for my arrival, a greeting, lamenting, grieving what was to clear space for what is here for me right now. The rain really came down hard.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
...budget for a breakdown.
“They we’re out of soup”
She returned, soaked, I’m just sitting in shock, waiting in the dry house.
“I think it would be good for us to take some of our own space to settle in. You want to go get some burgers together first?”
We walked to the burger place, just a couple minutes down the road. We walk onto a sizable patio with a number of tables and a large white sofa for lounging.
Inside it’s poker night, on a big round table to my left. Ahead there’s a long bar with stools, more tables to choose from, also. There’s a lot of wood and dark coloring, a speaker, we sit at the bar to order.
The man serving us is from Texas, he’s perfected his burger, he leans into me: “listen, I’m going to level with you. This place is an energy vortex. After some time here, you’ll feel your emotions more, all of them, heightened. At some point, you’ll be on the floor crying like a baby. I did. Either you make it through that and come through the other side, or you say enough and go home. I’ve seen it both ways.”
We step back out onto the patio. My shock eases to arrival slowly, rattled by his warning, almost identical to what I’ve been told. Ghost stories. I’m watching the most vast lightning storm I’ve ever seen, one after the other, a massive lighting lamp unto itself. My friend with her head on my lap, speaking softly about the day, both our voices rattled by all the movement, aching for stillness, safety, to spread out and set myself down.
—
I came home for the first time to this new place that evening.
Upstairs I was met at home by a grandmother spider, with long legs and a sprinting gait. I sink into this freeze experience with the spider. One last hurdle, a wave of panic ripples through me, Okay, I just need to take a deep breath, come back home to myself, I’m home, this is home now, now where are the cups so I can take this spider out? Where in this house is a place that I can sleep without thinking about spiders?
-deep breath-
Helping grandmother spider find her way to the yard, I toured the rest of the house, sensing into where a safe, settled feeling was, and decided to set my roots into the main floor room. It’s cozier, quieter, darker. I unpack and nest as much as I need to in order to fall asleep and it’s only moments after I wrap around a pillow that I sink into vivid dreams of arrival.
