The Story Garden 5.0
Nonfiction
Roatan: A Prairie Gringo's Travels In Paradise
We had two days to go before vacation and the irrigation pump quit working. A garden full of tomatoes and peppers and zucchinis and stuff sat broiling under a prairie drought, and the pump wouldn’t pump.
I called the plumber and he fixed it. He said the foot valve went bad. Sure, why not? The foot valve is a simple check valve placed at the bottom of the uptake pipe, so you don’t have to prime the pump every time you use it. If I’d known what was wrong I could have fixed it myself. But I was running short of time and needed something to screw things up, and the foot valve was convenient and didn’t require a lot of preparation.
The bill for $95 was the first thing I opened when I got back, so really I got two pains in the butt out of one minor malfunction.
These days, you’ve got to take any bargain you can find.
~ ~ ~
We hadn’t traveled out of the country since 9/11, so I was figuring something had to go wrong. Things go wrong so often when I travel that I treat everything that does like a zen koan, a mystery to unravel like the meaning of a blind old monk whopping me in the groin with a broom. The trick is to never go berserk.
I looked at our passports the night before we left, just to see our pictures. I noticed Maria’s passport had expired. “It’s OK,” she said. “It happens all the time. I have a Honduran passport, so I can get it renewed there. All I need here is my Green Card.” I felt a crawly feeling in my shorts and meditated on whatever that yoga position is where you grab your ankles while a uniformed airport official checks you out with a flashlight.
We got to the ticket counter. “Your passport is expired,” the Continental check-in lady told my wife.
My wife got steamed and started to argue. I strapped on my “traveler’s calm.”
“We can go to Houston, can’t we?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Check-In Lady. “But you won’t be able to fly out of the country on an expired passport.”
There’s a Honduran consulate in Houston. I figured we could straighten it out there. My wife fumed. My daughter rolled her eyes. The line through security crawled from side to side like a python.
~ ~ ~
We stayed at a hotel near the Houston airport. It had no restaurant and virtually no service. I sat by the pool and read Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” for a couple of hours and never saw another guest. The joint was essentially a storage locker for airline passengers. To eat, we had to walk to a local restaurant, where a sweet old waitress with big blond hair sashayed up to our table and drawled, “Ow ridey! Whud kin ah gitch’all?” I bought six books to take along, because whenever we go to Honduras I have a lot of time to read. I should explain that we go to Honduras every two years because that’s where my wife, Maria, is from. My mother is from England, and she had to wait years after coming to America before getting the opportunity to go back. I promised Maria that I wouldn’t let that happen to her. I don’t want her to miss her family, and we want our daughter, Sara, to understand that she’s a product of different cultures as well as different nationalities.
I used to feel strange and out of place when I visited Honduras, because I don't speak much Spanish. Compared with most of the folks down there I look like Shrek in a Hawaiian shirt. But I've never experienced any hostility in the streets beyond the rare dirty look, and to all the in-laws I'm just the big goofy gringo who married Maria.
I take along books to help pass the time between visits to myriad friends and family members. This time I read seven, including “The Call of the Wild,” “Catch 22,” “Heart of Darkness” and “The Shipping News.” Before we even left home, I finished “Frannie and Zooie,” but I’m going to count it anyway. And while I was there I read the second volume of “Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chaipas and Yucatan” by John L. Stephens, published in 1841. He was the first American to travel extensively in the area and explored the Mayan ruins of Copan, Pelanque and Uxmal. He got mixed up in revolutions, skirted active volcanoes, rode everywhere on muleback through jungles and over mountains, stayed in peasant villages built around the ruins of 300-year-old Spanish churches and unearthed Mayan ruins all over Central America.
I figure none of that will ever happen to me, but I’ve learned never to rule anything out.
~ ~ ~
The Honduran consulate in Houston looked more like a dental clinic than an embassy. It was on the seventh floor of an office building. People sat in the lobby and took a number. During the cab ride through the city I got to play the prairie geek, looking up at all the oil money piled skyscraper high. There were lots of signs in Spanish, and all the freeway ramps were spray-painted with wild Tex-Mex graffiti that was much cooler than the art-for-art’s-sake plopped into all the “public spaces” between the skyscrapers. The city is largely a spaghetti of looping freeway ramps built on top of a swamp. Drain trenches divide the scrub jungle that fondles the edges of all the concrete. Without air-conditioning, the whole steaming mess would be unlivable.
It cost us $45 in taxi fare to get to the consulate and $45 to get back, plus tips. Plus $85 to update the passport. Money fixes everything.
That night the power went out all over the eastern United States, and we watched the ensuring chaos on TV. New Yorkers trudged across the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. I figured if you had to walk to the Honduran consulate from our hotel, it would take you months, since nothing in Houston seems made for walking. We didn’t have a car and had to walk a couple of blocks to a convenience store just to get some booze. I wanted whiskey, but they don’t sell whiskey in Texas gas stations – a policy that seems out of character, if you ask me. I bought some "Bartles & James Hard Lemonaid," which sounded good but turned out to be a wretched teeny-bopper party drink.
If you ever get stranded at an airport hotel in Houston because your wife’s Honduran passport has expired, pick something better.
~ ~ ~
Once airborne, our plane hugged the Mexican coast because of Hurricane Ericka, which sounded dramatic but turned out to be a tropical storm of little consequence. We swooped into Toncontin Airport in Tegucigalpa from high in the clouds, deplaned onto the concrete tarmac and sloshed through a bath of toxic chemicals designed to keep foot-and-mouth disease out of the country. I’ve grown used to stuff like that. I’ve been to Honduras eight times now, and it no longer seems strange to see razor wire and high walls surrounding the homes in the city, or people in the country riding horses and pulling cargo on oxcarts. We cleared customs quickly, in contrast to some of the hard-eyed luggage-picking I’ve endured in years past. They ran our stuff through an X-ray machine and we were out the door. When we got back outside a tropical rain hammered down, the best rain I’d felt in months. We ate that evening in an open-air restaurant – no walls, just a roof. Blaring salsa music, bare bulbs, wooden tables, long slices of log for bar stools. I asked about security, and one of my brothers-in-law told me the joint usually never closed. When it did, a guard sat around all night with an assault rifle to discourage looters.
My sister-in-law had a cable Internet connection that was slower than my dial-up. I tried to log in to some of my usual sites, but it took at least three minutes for a click to stir whatever was on the screen. Luckily, I spilled a cup of coffee over the keyboard, so I didn’t have to fool with it much. I briefly tried to fix that disaster myself and dumped out a whole mess of little rubber cups that spring up the keys. I didn’t know that’s how they made computer keyboards.
It made me glad I brought plenty of books.
~ ~ ~
The first time I went to Honduras, in about 1978, I stayed in my future in-laws’ house in the mountains. It had no electricity and was surrounded by a citrus orchard and all kinds of tropical greenery. Toads bounced around the yard, and parakeets decorated the trees. I picked bananas off a palm next to the driveway. My mother-in-law cooked on a wood stove in a pantry topped with a translucent fiberglass skylight. Lizards as long as your leg sunned themselves up there and cast ominous shadows on the wall. I went onto the porch during a downpour and a bolt of lightning crackled for a moment before it hit, then blew a tree in half and left it smoldering until the next morning. They put me up in the spare room, a barracks arrangement with a bunch of bunk beds and a shower that no one used unless they had company. I pulled back the curtain and found a spider in there with a butt the size of a nickel and a four-inch leg span. Being buck naked and leery of sharing my shower with a bug, I gassed him until he dropped to the tiles, then I gassed him some more. I had to flush the carcass down the toilet because it wouldn’t fit in the drain. I got dressed and showered later.
During that same trip we went to Tela, a beach near La Ceiba, one of the larger towns on the country's Caribbean coast. The town sits in the heart of banana country, and from the air you can see the neat rows of planted palms.
Four of us went: Maria (who was then my girlfriend), her sister and her youngest brother. We drove down a sandy dirt road to get the beach, emerging from the tropical scrub under straight rows of stately coconut palms. We found an octagon-shaped cabana with a tall table and some rough stools, along with a few rickety picnic tables. It had a smooth stone floor and a rusty tin roof. Later on, a guy drove up in a panel truck and parked next to the tall table. He opened the side doors and revealed rows of bottles and glasses - a complete bar set up in the side of his truck.
Nearby was also an oversized outhouse with a little bench in it where you could change clothes. From there to the water lay about 100 yards of cream-colored sand, with a small thatched canaba at the halfway point. I started to walk to the surf in my bare feet, and after a few steps my feet began to burn like hell in the hot sand. I started running and made it to the cabana. After my feet cooled down I made another hot run to the water.
We parked most of our stuff under the cabana and would jog up to the bartender guy for beers or down to the water to swim. The water was clear and swimming-pool warm, with not a hint of surf.
Two scruffy kids walked the beach leading a big blue crab by a shred of nylon rope, and later on another kid came by balancing a basket of fresh banana bread on his head. We bought some to go with our beers. Other than the bartender, those were the only people we saw all day.
We went to Roatan on my second trip down there, after we had pretty much made up our minds to get married. We took a plane from Tegucigalpa to La Ceiba and got rained in at the airport. I remember lying on a hotel bed and trying to talk with a tropical downpour chattering on the roof. We flew over to the island the next morning and caught a cab to our hotel. The roads were rough and cluttered with small landslides that kept us creeping along. A freighter had run hard aground off one of the beaches; I saw it again, much more rusted away, as we flew off the island on this last trip.
Our hotel that time was an old one right on one of the beaches at French Harbor. It had a big deck across the front with a dock extending on each side. I went snorkling off the docks over the nearby reef, picking up shells off the bottom. Every time I brushed against the coral I got welts from the stingers.
I found a big conch shell and carried it back to the dock. I went to get Maria to show her, but when we got back it was gone. I thought some bastard stole it, but then we saw it scuttling slowly away. It was still alive and somehow had managed to toss itself off the dock. We ended up buying an empty shell from a guy who had a pile of them in his yard. Beers were 70 cents then, icy cold and dripping with condensation, brought to your lawn chair by a doe-eyed teen-age Latina.
So anyway, I always wanted to go back there. Instead, we'd usually stay at my sister-in-law's house with all her pets and our kid. Now that Sara was 10, I told Maria it was time we took her out to Roatan.
We visited a few travel agents, and they all wanted to send us to some abomination called Fantasy Island. I figured they were getting a kickback or figured us for rich rubes. If I want concrete pools, dolphin shows, and glass-bottom boats, I’ll go to Florida. I ticked off my demands on my fingers, speaking slow and loud: “Beach. Bar. Palm trees.”
~ ~ ~
But before we made it to the island, we had to visit our in-laws. We went with some of them to an “Ecoparque” that had fishing ponds, swimming pools, an outdoor bar, a restaurant, cages full of parrots, toucans, monkeys and other critters. A guard lounged at the gate with a machine gun. You could climb on an oxcart and ride to all the attractions. It got old pretty quick, except for when a monsoon rain came barreling down from the mountains. We sat in the bar and watched the rain pour off the tile roof like a waterfall.
We gathered at the in-laws’ home that evening, where we all sat around joking and drinking rum. When it was time to leave, my sister-in-law couldn’t get her truck started. One of her brothers jumped in and we pushed it down a hill and around a corner, but it wouldn’t turn over. Finally, he tripped the car alarm, and it squalled and squawked until every watchdog in the neighborhood was going berserk. My sister-in-law came tottering down the hill in her heels to turn off the alarm, and of course the truck started immediately.
It’s good for me to go to Honduras. I’m a journalist, and seeing it every few years helps me keep things in perspective. I’ve grown used to seeing old women with filmy white eyes begging for money, guys with no legs rolling around on skateboards, kids with no shoes, people living in cardboard shacks, wretches who grub in garbage dumps in order to eat. The country has virtually no system of social services, only limited educational opportunities, no garbage collection, open sewers and water that flows only sporadically and can't be drunk from the tap. Cops spend their time as security guards for banks and supermarkets. The government consists of a cadre of wealthy rogues barely tolerated by the military.
When I come back to America, I get letters to the editor from grumps who think doing away with government is the way to go. But they still want somebody to do something about the neighbor's dog crapping on their precious lawn.
~ ~ ~
From Tegucigalpa we traveled into the mountains to Minas de Oro, a colonial-era mining town where my wife’s parents lived in an unfinished hotel with nine rooms. It was adjacent to the town’s main plaza, and a balcony offered a bucolic view of uniformed school kids kicking soccer balls, hard-eyed vaqueros on horseback, cobble streets and tiled roofs. The hotel had a metal roof that roared during the rainstorms and creaked and groaned under every passing cloud.
A chorus of roosters greeted each day, and we awoke the first morning to a brown moth the size of my hand fluttering around in the rafters. I drank strong homegrown coffee by the potful and read nearly all day long, while my wife tended to her 90-year-old mother. Her dad, who used to be an educator, had long conversations with me about how he had managed to extract scraps of Mayan language from the local slang. It was interesting at the time, but I was drinking the occasional rum and can’t really offer you a lucid explanation of his discoveries.
My wife and daughter ganged up on a cockroach and killed it by themselves, which they celebrated as some sort of primordial triumph. I bought a Chinese Swiss Army Knife from maybe the coolest store in the world, a Third-World version of Wal-Mart lodged in a barn of a place where you could buy anything from ginseng root to knock-off Levi’s. I also found some crooked peasant cigars for what amounted to about seven cents apiece. A couple of other customers were siphoning raw kerosene from a barrel into plastic buckets.
That’s Honduras: Charming, earthy, raw, occasionally dangerous, one of the original Banana Republics, a place where you can still catch dengue fever and malaria and, I gather, foot-and-mouth. The explorer Stephens wrote of ticks that crawled under his toenails and multiplied until he marched them out at the point of a knife. But I came back home to find out that people were dying from West Nile disease, and my American airline got me home 90 minutes late.
I wouldn’t walk the streets of Tegucigalpa at night. But when you think about it, a Honduran wouldn’t be any safer in Washington, D.C.
~ ~ ~
After the mandatory family schmoozing, we finally got to Roatan, a sliver of paradise that’s drawn foreign travelers since the days of Columbus. To give you an idea of its scale, Roatan is 40 miles long and has a land mass of 49 square miles. It's long and snaky narrow, breezy, fragrant, lush. In recent years the island has developed a lively tourist trade based on diving. We met local shopkeepers who had emigrated from England and France and settled there. One hotel caters to Italians; a restaurant offers authentic Argentinean cuisine. A cab driver told us that the Americans who choose to ride in air-conditioned vans to air-conditioned suites, never leaving the grounds except to go diving, are missing the best part of the island.
Our hotel was about seven miles from West End. The village, a magnet for tourists, had a dirt road along the beach lined with dive shops, cafes and bars. One bar reminded me of that long-ago set-up at Tela: A square of bar stools under a thatched cabana, serving a clutch of Euro-diver types in bikinis and Speedos.
I bought some cigars from a French guy who spoke a bunch of different languages. He warned us not to snorkel near the tourist boats, because every once in awhile they'd lose track of their passengers and run over someone. A big round black woman who spoke a musical pidgin English (imagine the bald "Un-Cola” guy from the old 7-Up commercials) tried to talk Sara into letting her do her hair up in little braids with beads at the end.
Houses on stilts and bars built on docks rimmed the bay. Bugs bit my ankles, and dust got into my sandals and in between my toes. Needlefish probed the seagrass off the docks, and crabs and perch took turns tormenting each other.
A cabbie took us to Coxen Hole, the biggest town on the island. The town has a British colonial feel, with old brick buildings painted in bright dissonant colors. Boats abound. The cabbie told us that many of the villages on the north coast have no access by road. Many are home to the native blacks, who are descended from freed or escaped slaves. Known as Garifuna, they’re famed for a regional music and dance style and earthy native pottery and woodcarving.
Our travel agent booked us a room in the Tri R Resort – stupidly named but as close to perfect as you could hope for. It was on a hill above a small beach at Sandy Bay, looking north onto the Caribbean. It had several guest wings splaying out from a central office/lobby/bar/restaurant, all housed in one big room with ceiling fans and screens to keep out bugs. From there a wooden gangway with several sets of stairs dropped down to the beach, where there was a dock and a large thatched cabana and coconut palms. Every house along the waterfront had a hand-built wooden boat out back, pulled up onto the sand or overturned in the yards.
Although it was humid and warm, the trees provided plenty of shade, and the fans kept the lobby cool. If I wanted a coffee or beer, all I had to do was ask. Hummingbirds buzzed outside the screens, and insect-sized geckoes stalked bugs along the walls. The garden was well-tended, with a riot of potted plants inside and tropical flowers creeping up the walls outside. A round-faced cook served us meals prepared entirely from scratch, and the gangway, adorned with butterflies and hibiscus flowers, led to a thatched cabana and a beach we had all to ourselves.
My daughter Sara and I rented masks and fins and went snorkeling. Later we sat in lawn chairs and watched a sailboat pass. “I want to live in this hotel,” she said.
~ ~ ~
Someday I might tell her this story: The maids did live in the hotel, in a space hidden under the main floor. The building sat on a slope facing the ocean, and the front side had a stairway that led to the gangway to the beach. Alongside the stairs were wooden lattice and shrubbery that blocked off the underside of the building. You wouldn't see the apartments if you didn’t know they were there.
Two young girls served as waitresses and barmaids and made up the rooms. They worked all day and late into the night. One had a sweet, shy smile and spoke no English. The first time I left her a tip she asked my wife if it was for her, as if she'd never got a tip before. She liked my kid and drew a picture of her and mounted it on red paper with a hand-drawn border. The other one was a little older, muscular and more businesslike, like she knew the ropes.
I had a few fine Honduran cigars, like the little ones Clint Eastwood used to use to light sticks of dynamite. I could smoke in the lobby if I wanted to, but I didn't want to stink up the joint, so I went down on the boardwalk one night, well after sundown, and smoked one there. I remember seeing butterflies flitting at the walkway lights and thinking that on the prairie they'd be gnats and mosquitoes.
As I was walking back up, a light went on under the building. This was the first time I realized that anyone lived under there. The second maid, the older one, walked out of her little apartment. She couldn't see me through the lattice because of the light. She lit a cigarette and began to unbutton her blouse. She wore a dark blue bra underneath.
She took off her blouse and folded it up and hung it on a line. Then she began to unhook her skirt. I got weirded out at that point, because I was standing on the other side of the stairway and I was afraid if I moved she'd see me and scream.
Then she turned around and folded her skirt. That was the last image I got of her – her strong brown back with a blue strap across it and these white bikini panties. I crept up the stairs as fast as I could with my mind racing and my heart hammering and thinking that with my luck I’d get shot as a prowler on some humid, exotic night in Honduras when all I really wanted, for once, was to smoke a goddamn cigar.
--Steve Frederick
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