Teacher on Two Wheels

Friday 1/11/08 Maderas Beach, San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua

Above:  Right when I started wondering if I made a wrong turn.

When a long runway of green grass suddenly popped up in the middle of the dirt road I had been traveling on, the one that was marked as a major highway on my map, I stopped the bike. A gentle breeze carried the scents of wildflowers and piney shrubs past my nose like some invisible arboreal bus with its windows down. Had I taken a wrong turn? Could this narrow dusty path really be the bright yellow coastal road on my map, the road that connects cities with names printed in big fonts?

I looked behind me. Held my hand to my brow to block the sun and looked in front of me. No one was around. Only me and the trees. And the sun. Always the sun.

I hadn’t seen another road all morning and was convinced I hadn’t taken a wrong turn. I mounted the bike and rode on with the unsettling uncertainty people incubate when they fear they might be lost. This uncertainty makes time drag and stretches out distances. It magnifies exhaustion and fuels irrational fears. What if this road leads straight into a den of jaguars? Is grass growing here because few cars travel this road because it has a reputation for being bandit-ish? Did a bandit just ruffle those leaves off to my right?

The clik-clak-clik-clak of hooves on rock brought me back to the present and made me turn around. A man with an unbuttoned dirty cotton shirt and a weathered tan cowboy hat approached me on horseback.

“Good morning,” I said in Spanish.

“Good morning.” The man stopped his horse and, in one motion, removed his hat and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

“I’m trying to get to Veracruz. Is this the right way?” I asked as I pointed to the dirt road ahead of me.

“Yes, this road goes to Veracruz. But…it’s very…” The man smiled and shook his head a bit. “It’s a very interesting road. Cows love it. People do not.” The man laughed.

Frustration started to well up inside of me. I had been riding for almost two weeks without a proper rest day and I desperately wanted to make it to my destination, San Juan Del Sur, as quickly as possible. A week of swimming, hammocks, naps, and pineapple eating awaited me there.

I opened my map and showed the horseman where I was trying to go, hoping it would somehow make him change what he said about the road ahead, about the cows and all. He studied my map for a moment and then looked at me.

“Yes, this is the road on your map. There is only one way to get to Veracruz and this is it.” He wished me luck on my trip and rode off.

If only the road stayed as smooth and as flat as it was when I talked to the horseman, my trip to San Juan Del Sur would have been a cinch. The runway of grass that split the road into two rutted paths soon disappeared and was replaced by basketball-sized boulders, holes big enough to hide small dogs, and creeping jagged roots aspiring to morph into young trees. The front wheel of my bike bounced and rolled over terrain it had never seen before, stuff that was almost humorous in how un-road-like it was, sending muscle-tiring vibrations up the front fork of the bike and into my hands and arms. The flatness that the road once had gave way to surprise hills that bulged up through the ground in random places like tumorous growths on the skin of the land. Nothing came easy. Every moment required concentration. Looking down, avoiding potholes here, small boulders there.

Above:  This was the path…for hours.  Impossible to ride.

At one point, after a steep descent, the path ran right into a river. From above, the path and river would have looked like a perfect letter ‘T’ with the path being the upright line and the river being the side-to-side line. I propped the bike up on the sandy beach and waded into the river to see how deep it was. Just above my knees in its deepest part. I removed my bag from the trailer and lugged it across to the other side. Then I pushed the bike across. When it first reached the water, wispy trails of dirt streamed off the bike and were pulled down stream. Bike blood. I leaned into the handlebars and guided the wheels over algae covered rocks to the other side.

Above:  Action shot

As the sun snuck across the sky and stretched the shadows around me, the road also seemed to stretch and thin. Like a band of taffy being pulled at both ends, the road thinned (a path really at this point), broke apart in certain places, and lost the strength that once held it together. Mountains tried to push up through it. Dried ravines that surge with rain run off in the rainy season crossed it and tried to flood it with boulders. Cows pulverized it with the smashing of their hooves and covered it with long stretches of dried, cratered mud. It wasn’t long before I was off the bike and pushing. Pushing up. Holding the bike from sliding down. Pushing through. Up. Through. Rest. Down. River. Up. Over. Through. Around. Rest. Up. Up. Down. River. Up.

*****

An oasis of humanity, a wooden shack and a few empty cattle barns, emerged in a clearing in the woods and was lit up by a spotlight of sunbeams like a lone musician on an empty stage. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had passed about a dozen turn-offs and other paths in the forest and was dying to confirm whether or not I was still on the right path to Veracruz. I rolled up to a simple barbed wire fence that lined the property and called out to no one in particular; the place looked as if it might possibly be abandoned.

“Good afternoon?” I asked/said. Nothing stirred. “Good afternoon,” I said again, louder.

The torso of woman slid into view in the main doorway of the house like those targets that pop up in shoot-em-up games in the arcade. She waited to greet me until she looked at me and tried to make sense of the situation, of the fact that a white man on a bicycle was in front of her home in the middle of the jungle, hours from any other town or city by foot.

“Good afternoon,” she called out just loud enough for me to hear her. She didn’t move, holding herself adjacent to the door frame like a leaf sprouting from a branch.

“I’m a bicyclist on a long trip and I’m trying to find Veracruz. Am I going the right way?”

“Veracruz? Why do you want to go there?” Her accent, steeped in the silence of the woods, was thick and made her Spanish difficult to understand. She stepped from the doorway and took a few steps closer to me. Behind her trailed a small naked boy, no more than three or four-years-old.

“I want to go to San Juan Del Sur, but first I need to go to Veracruz.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s the other way.” She pointed back toward the direction I had just come from. “This way, the way you are traveling, leads only to a few small shacks about an hour away. Veracruz is the other way, but it’s a very long way from here.”

I looked at my watch. 2:30 p.m. My heart sank. I wiped sweat and fatigue from my eyes with my dirty hands. Not only had I been traveling in the wrong direction for who knows how long, but I didn’t have enough time to make it to the city of Veracruz, the place where I was hoping to add to my dwindling supply of food. The thought of a night in the jungle after a hard day of pushing the bike with nothing more than a banana sandwich to hold me over made my shoulders and my head drop.

“How far back is the road to Veracruz?” I asked, almost pleading with the woman, hoping for her to say it was just a few minutes.

“Thirty to forty-five minutes. Back that way. Make a left when you get to the fork. Then walk and go straight for a long, long time. You’ll reach Veracruz.”

All I wanted to do was sit in the dirt with my back to a fence post and wallow in my exhaustion and disappointment. I didn’t feel like taking another step, crossing another river, making another wrong turn, sweating away another drop of valuable liquid. I just wanted to be still, to do nothing, to think about nothing. Thinking of sweat made me think of my water supply.

“Do you have any fresh water here?”

“Yes, we have some. Do you need to fill your bottles?”

“Yes, please.” I gave her my empty bottle and finished the water that was left in the other. The woman went into the shack and emerged with a plastic jug. The sight of the water splashing in my bottle as she poured made me feel a little cooler.

“Is that potable water?” I asked just to make conversation.

“Yes, it’s from the river, but it tastes good.”

A big green leaf flowed over the waterfall of water gushing from the jug and dropped into my bottle.

When the bottles were filled, I thanked the woman and turned the bike around. After some time, I came to an intersection and turned left. The path became even thinner than the one I was on. Hills outnumbered the flat sections. Smooth dirt emerged in small patches between long expanses of boulder fields. I pushed the bike as riding was impossible. Pushed and pushed. Up and over. Down and through. Pushed and pushed.

*****

Two-and-a-half hours later I came to a cluster of small houses. A smile stretched across my weary face. The sun was getting low. I assumed I had made it to the outskirts of Veracruz. I rolled the bike up to the gate of a house with two women out front hanging laundry.

“Excuse me, is this Veracruz?” I asked.

The women turned and were shocked to see a foreigner, and one on a bicycle no less.

“Uh, yes, this is Veracruz,” one woman in a stretched tank top said.

“Excellent! It took me all day to get here—the roads are horrible! Where is the center of town, I need to buy some more food.”

“The center?” Both women looked confused.

“Yes, the center of town? Isn’t there a place with some stores and restaurants? The center?” I thought maybe they hadn’t understood me.

“There is no center in Veracruz. This is Veracruz,” the one woman said laughing as she looked around and gestured toward the cluster of houses. “There are only six houses in Veracruz, but a store would be nice!”

I tried to laugh with them but found it difficult. I flipped open my map. Veracruz was marked as a major city. Too tired and hungry to be angry, I simply let my disbelief wash over me like a gentle wave.

“My map has many incorrect parts,” I half-whispered. Pause. “I’m sorry, but is there any house here that would sell me a simple plate of rice and beans? I have only a little food left and I wanted to buy more in Veracruz.”

“Just rice and beans?”

“Yes, something simple.”

“We can sell you something. Please, sit,” the woman in the tank top said as she motioned toward an empty plastic chair in front of the house.

I flopped down into the chair like a sack of bricks. I ate. The women tried to refuse my offer of money for the food, but eventually gave in when I insisted on paying. I thanked them and pushed my bike out to the beach five minutes away. I set up my tent and jumped inside just as the mosquitoes started their hunts.

Above:  My reward for a long day of pushing.  Camp spot outside Veracruz

Teetering on the edge of the abyss of sleep, I was yanked back into awake-ness by lights dancing on the side of my tent. Voices rung out in the darkness. I put on my shirt and turned on my headlamp.

“Hello? Good evening,” a voice called out to me in Spanish.

“Good evening,” I said. I climbed out of my tent. Two men stepped into the white glow of my headlamp. Both had machetes and were wearing knee-high rubber waders.

“Hello. We don’t want to scare you,” one of the men said, “But we just want to tell you to be careful. You are camped in a dangerous place.” Pause. “Some of the people around here have black hearts,” he warned.

Fear has long arms, I thought.

“Thank you. Do many people come down here at night?” The beam of light emanating from my headlamp like the tail of a comet lit up the empty beach around me. No one was around. None of the people who lived in the six houses in Veracruz were walking down the beach.

“Yes, many people like us,” one man said.

“We’re turtle hunters,” the other man chimed in, holding up a net.

I thanked the men for their advice and wished them good luck. Laying in my tent, I chewed on the following idea:

People of nearly every area I have passed through have warned me about areas further down the road, often areas they had never visited. In the U.S., people told me I’d be kidnapped in Mexico or robbed in New Orleans. In northern Mexico, people warned me about the darker-skinned Mexicans further south. In southern Mexico, people told me to hide my wallet at all times from people in Guatemala—They’re different from Mexicans, you know. In Guatemala, people wished that I’d skip El Salvador all together. In El Salvador, people told me I was safe but once I crossed to Honduras, things changed. On and on. On and on. Across borders, through cultures.

Fear, like a sickness, is contagious and debilitating.