Teacher on Two Wheels

Sunday 1/13/08 Maderas Beach, San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua

Nine people said it was impossible. Two people said I could only do it if I had a horse. Three people said it might be possible, but they hadn’t heard of anyone who had done it. One person said it was possible. She was confident when she spoke.

“I know it can be done. The path is narrow and difficult in many parts and there is a large mountain in the middle, but you can push a bicycle up it. If you really want to do it, you can make it.”

I hoped she was right.

By the time I started pushing my bicycle up the coastal trail that led from the community of Brito, Nicaragua to the bustling tourist town of San Juan Del Sur, it was already 2:00 p.m. I had refilled my water bottles at a house at the start of the trail and I had three days worth of bananas, bread, and peanut butter in my bag. I knew I wouldn’t make it there that day, but at least I could get started, put a few rocky kilometers behind me before the sun set and the forest swallowed me up for the night.

Within the first hour, the trail led me straight into five barbed-wire and wooden gates that blocked my path. Each one made me question whether or not I was going the right way. The fifth one, however, was bigger than all the rest and couldn’t be unlatched and pushed aside like the others. To the right of the gate was a small thatch cabana that kept two dozing security guards out of the sun’s reach. Across it read the words “Santana Ranch” in thick white letters.

“Good afternoon!” One security guard rolled to his feet from his hammock and walked over to the gate to greet me.

“Good afternoon. Is this the path to San Juan Del Sur?” I asked.

“Yes, but it’s uh…it’s very difficult ahead. Do you know there is a large mountain in-between here and San Juan Del Sur? It’s very steep, like this,” the man said as he straightened his hand and shot it toward the sky as if he were pointing at something with all of his fingers. “You will never make it there today.”

I looked at my map. As I expected, no mountain was indicated.

“Well it’s OK if there is a mountain there,” I said, “Because I’m going to only go for one or two more hours today. Tomorrow I’ll go up the mountain and get closer to San Juan Del Sur.”

The man made a face like he had just eaten a sour grape.

“But sir, it’s very dangerous around here in the late afternoon,” he said. “There are people in the trees with—” He formed his hand into the shape of a gun and pretended to load it. “Many hunters look for big cats and monkeys up in the mountains. If they see you, they will shoot you and take your bicycle. I’m sure of it. Hmmmm.” The man looked at the ground and pondered my dilemma.

I looked at the trail up ahead beyond the gate. Like a rollercoaster through the woods, it dropped away into a steep descent that led straight into a tunnel of trees. I thought about what it would be like were it paved, how it would feel to fly down the hill and into the green tunnel at full speed, like a bullet through the barrel of one of Nature’s guns.

“Hmmm, I have an idea,” the security guard said, pulling me back from my daydreaming. “I have a horse near here. I can get the horse, tie your bike to it, and pull you up the mountain. We have time,” he said as he looked at his watch. “I will leave you at the top and you can go down the other side. Near the bottom is a house where my friend lives. You can sleep there tonight where it’s safe and then go to San Juan tomorrow.”

I imagined the mountain the man spoke of. I pictured a green spire rising thousands of feet above the smaller hills and mountains below like some sort of gruesome thorn. Straight up. No mercy for the foolish creatures that try to scale it.

“That sounds great, thank you! Thank you so much,” I said, failing to give the man’s plan as much thought as I probably should have.

“OK, wait here, Enrique will watch the gate while I go get the horse. Wences, by the way. My name is Wences.”

Strangely, sounds a lot like Winches, I thought.

We shook. The strength wound up in his small hand caught me by surprise.

*****

We reached the beginning of the ascent and Wences dismounted the muscular horse he had chosen to use for the ride. The horse dwarfed Wences; the animal’s haunches bulged as if they were trying to rip through the skin that insulated them.

“Tie this to the front of your bike,” Wences said as he handed me a rope.

In a fraction of the time it took me to tie my end of the rope, Wences had tied his and remounted his horse. He made quick, calculated movements and seemed at ease yet focused when he was near his horse. In the zone. When I was ready, he dug his spurs into the sides of the horse and we began our ascent.

Above:  Starting the ascent.

At first, I thought that the journey would be easy, that the warnings from Wences and others in the area about the steepness of the mountain were unfounded. I held the bike upright as the horse pulled. Neither it nor I broke a sweat as we went up the gentle incline. The path was rocky, but free of debris and plants. I couldn’t see the path up ahead because it wrapped its way around the edge of the mountain.

In five minutes, I was cursing myself for ever being so foolish as to doubt Wences and the others. The path got so incredibly steep, so hopelessly overgrown with waist-high shrubs and weeds, that simply holding the bike steady as it rolled became a Herculean task. The horse would pull and the bike would get stuck on a rock or a shrub. It would pull harder until it freed the bike with force. The bike would fall and the horse would stop and lose its momentum. Wences would spur the horse on just as I tripped on some rock or shrub and the bike would escape me. It took all my energy to simply hold the bike upright and navigate it through the labyrinth of shrubs and rocks that riddled the path. Pushing it without the aid of a horse would have been a miserable and futile ordeal. I showered the shrubs below with my sweat.

Every 10 minutes, Wences stopped to allow the horse to rest. It panted with its tongue slipping in and out of its mouth like a dog. Sweat poured down the skin of its dark amber belly and looked like blood in the late afternoon sun. Every time we stopped, I watched the horse’s face bob with exhaustion. It must have hated me.
*****

When we were 45 minutes up the side of the mountain, Wences stopped with no warning. He turned back to me and held his index finger to his mouth. I wasn’t saying anything at the time, but I tried to get more quiet than I already was. Stopped moving. The confidence that shone in his eyes when he was tying his end of the rope to the horse earlier had disappeared. He now looked like a sailor who, after a calm, clear day, had just spotted ominous storm clouds out on the horizon.

He pointed to his eyes with two fingers and then made a sweeping gesture toward the trees with his other hand and outstretched index finger. Be alert, look around, he signed.

I looked up into the wilderness around me. A dense canopy of trees, a motley quilt of leaves in varying sizes and shades of green, shrouded the mountain and all those around it so densely that any root-less, leaf-less, bark-less thing or creature felt out of place in its midst. The bird songs and the wind swelled and spiraled out through the trees in unison and in waves, as if one were scared to venture through the woods without the other. In-between their surges of sound, silence bloomed around us. Wences wanted me to probe this silence, overturn it, watch and listen to it for clues.

Above:  View from halfway up the mountain.

For five long minutes we waited. Wences turned his head back and forth in slow motion, over and over, like a large satellite scanning the heavens for some sort of pulse. I got lost in the view after a moment or two and couldn’t tap into the fear that Wences was using to fuel his concentration.

Then, as if he finally picked up some sort of promising signal from the silence, he spoke.

“OK, everything is OK, let’s move on.”

We continued up the hill. More panting, sweating, falling. At some point, I remember feeling faint and under-powered, and I began to wonder if I had made a mistake ignoring the people in town who said the trail was impossible to cross with a bicycle. What if I am too weak to make it down when we reach the top? What if I pass out and bang my head on some particularly sharp part of my bicycle? I fought to hold the bike upright and started asking Wences for rest breaks in between the breaks we made for the horse.

It took us an hour-and-a-half, but we finally reached the top. I looked at my watch. 4:30 p.m. The sun was already coloring the clouds with her afternoon hues and dusk was stretching just offstage, getting ready for its daily performance. Wences looked down the back side of the mountain and let a puzzled look creep across his countenance, a chess player’s look. He studied the next stage of my journey.

“Hmmm. I thought you could roll the bike down here, but look,” he said as he pointed to one nasty stretch of the trail steeper than anything we’d seen on the ascent. “I think you need the horse for this. Hmmmm. OK, you go in front of the horse now. I will stay behind. The horse will hold you so you don’t slide down.”

I had no other options. Even with the horse behind me, I doubted whether or not a descent would be possible without destroying the bike or the horse’s legs in the process. Some places on this planet are just too steep for horses or bikes. Period.

Wences seemed optimistic, though. I agreed to his suggestion—I didn’t really have any other options.

We began our descent. The strength required to hold the brakes down, stomp down brushes and shrubs in my path, and keep the bike upright made the ascent seem like a mere warm-up. Time after time, the bike fell as I lost my balance stepping over rocks and bushes.

Once during the descent, I looked back when I heard what sounded like a bag of rocks being dragged down a dirt road. The horse was perched up above me with locked legs, fear spilling from its open mouth and bulging eyes. Its hooves slid across the dirt of the trail as it slowly submitted to the weight of the bike and trailer. It didn’t want to continue and told me so with its neighing. Gravity, however, makes no exceptions. Even for scared horses.

We slid together in a slow, tense slide.

We moved foot by foot down the face of the mountain. I lost track of time, of the sun setting behind me. Move. Rest. Move. Rest. Move. Rest.

When we reached the bottom of the mountain, Wences’ friend greeted me with suspicion. Never before had a white person showed up unannounced (or announced) on his property. He directed us to a gate further down the trail past his house.

“There’s another house there, take him there tonight and see if he will even be allowed to continue further—I think he’ll have problems on the trail tomorrow,” the man said to Wences.

“What kind of problems?” Wences asked.

I heard the word gringo tossed around. Something about no gringos being allowed to travel on the trail, only locals. I was too tired to worry much about it and listened as Wences tried to sort out the problem. I let Wences lead me around like a master leads his dog.

The man at the next house was just as skeptical as the first.

“I don’t think he’ll be able to make it to San Juan Del Sur,” he told us from behind a high wooden gate. “The trail further up has a security checkpoint. No foreigners ever travel here and they’ll give him problems if he tries to cross it. This path is for Nicaraguan people only. Gringos use the main roads that lead into San Juan.”

“But if we tell them his story, that he just wants to make it to San Juan Del Sur and that he came the whole way by bicycle, that I pulled him here with my horse and it’s too difficult to return the way he came, don’t you think they’ll let him pass?” Wences asked.

“I don’t want to risk it. They’ll come to me and ask me why I unlocked my gate to let some stranger pass. Please, I would feel more comfortable if you took him back to where you started.”

My heart sank.

Wences looked up at the sky at nothing in particular. After a moment, he spoke.

“I don’t think we can go back. The horse and the bike will not be able to withstand it. The crossing was more difficult that I thought it would be and plus, we don’t have time,” Wences said as he pointed toward the darkening sky above. “Hmmmm. OK, how about this—can you let him stay here tonight in his tent, on this side of the gate, so that tomorrow morning he can try to pass? I know the phone number of the police office nearby. I’ll call them in the morning and see if they can contact the security checkpoint, explain his situation before he arrives.”

“Don’t bother, I know the number for the checkpoint, I can call them. I just don’t feel comfortable doing it. There will be too many questions.”

“Please,” Wences pleaded. “He has nowhere else to go. We can’t make it back over the mountain again.”

Pause.

Pause.

“OK, I will call in the morning. But give me your cell phone number so I can call you to pick him up if they refuse to let him pass,” the man said. They swapped numbers. I said good-bye to Wences and thanked him a million times over. He rode off back toward the mountain as the stars began to poke through the darkness above us.

*****

The next morning, after one call and some sort of passport check done over the phone, I passed the security checkpoint and followed the trail until it bled into one of the main roads that led to San Juan Del Sur.

The pineapple I ate while sitting on the beach later that morning tasted so sweet I could feel each bite of it.

Above: Sunset at Maderas Beach, San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua