Jungleland (26 page)

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Authors: Christopher S. Stewart

BOOK: Jungleland
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The Lost City

D
O YOU KNOW
in the Bible when Jesus’ disciples go out to sea on a boat and they are struck by a storm?” Pancho asked. We were bumping along a dirt logging track in the back of a mud-caked 4×4. “They didn’t think they would make it out alive. They thought they were dead.”

Before going on, we were taking Pancho to Bonanza—the village he had left behind some ten years before. We had gotten lucky with the pickup truck and were now heading west, after slogging for a day through the mountains. Pancho paused, probably remembering something that he didn’t want to talk about yet.

“They were so afraid,” he finally said, raising his hands at the wet green horizon. “And then Jesus said, ‘Be still,’ and everything was still. It is beautiful suddenly when the storm ends. That is Bonanza. That is the name of my old village.
Mucho
beauty and peace. It is
tranquillo
.”

The last two days it had rained and rained. Earlier in the afternoon, we had made a quick visit to an old Indian cacique whom Chris had known for many years. When Chris had told him where we were headed, the cacique had said that the secluded area of jungle was known as a “doorway,” suggesting that it led to another reality. He had never been there himself, but his grandfather and father had told him, “It is where the gods live. It is the White City.”

The cacique said that the stories we had heard about the lost city were mistaken. “You can only go there if you know all the languages of our people,” he said, wiping a drip of sweat from his creased cheek. “And if they let you in, you will never leave. They don’t let you come and then go.” Chris smiled as if to say, the riddle only deepens.

The dirt roads went up and down through the hills of Olancho, and as we got closer to Bonanza, the rain ceased and the afternoon air was cooling. I couldn’t stop thinking about Pancho’s past. Why does a man flee a place he loves? What happened? And what would he find there now?

Pancho had switched off his radio and mostly stared off at the fog-draped treetops, perhaps bracing for what was to come. There was no news on the coup. President Mel Zelaya was still promising an armed return, and the rebel government was still promising to squash him if he tried. Months would pass before the end of the curfews, the protesting, and the general unrest. It wouldn’t be until the fall that Mel would secretly return to Honduras, holing up in the Brazilian embassy. But he never returned to power. He would eventually concede the election of a new president and then fly into exile in the Dominican Republic, where he would complain that the United States had been against him all along.

 

THE SUN WAS
falling when we arrived in Bonanza, a village of about a dozen shacks flung over a few hills. Stepping out of the truck, Pancho, in his blue perma-pressed shirt, paused on the wet ground, as if to get his footing, and looked up at the rising pale half-moon. He then walked us down a mud-slicked path to meet his sister. The three-room house was built next to a wide stream, surrounded by tall cocoa plants and corn stalks that creaked in the early-evening breeze. When he walked in, Pancho took off his hat and his sister threw her arms around him. There were elated shouts from nieces and nephews, who swarmed him and Angel. There were hours of reminiscing and laughing. Later, I could hear a man at a tiny church on the hill singing “It’s the Word, the Word is here” in the quiet air. For dinner, Pancho’s sister’s husband killed a chicken, and in the yellow candlelight his smiling face glowed. It was as though he had never left.

We spent the night on the porch in hammocks, and the next morning Pancho borrowed a .22-caliber rifle. It seemed to me that we had made it this far without a gun and could finish the journey without one. But Pancho was insistent. After black coffee and rice, we said good-bye to his family, and Pancho, wearing his perfect blue button-down shirt, led us twenty minutes up a muddy path to a two-story shack with a tin roof.

“My house,” he said, stepping up to a wood fence. There were no other places in sight. “I built that with my hands.” We stood there until a man—the new owner—emerged with a rifle, and then we continued on.

Farther uphill, Pancho pointed out a dilapidated shack in an overgrown pasture. “That was once our school,” he said. “I built that too.”

He bit his lip and looked at his hands. At one time, Angel, his two brothers, and thirty-seven other Bonanza kids had taken classes there. But now the wood walls were warping and peeling away, the roof was coming undone, and the jungle grass had begun to devour it. “It is all gone,” he said.

Earlier, I hadn’t felt comfortable pressing him about why he had left Bonanza, but now seemed like the right time. I had talked about what I left behind in New York, about my searching, about my life. We had come to know each other, even become friends. When I asked, Pancho looked at Angel as if to make sure his son didn’t mind.

“There were once sixteen houses in this part of the village,” he began, staring off at the wall of forest surrounding us. “Now there are none.” He walked on, the rifle slung over one shoulder. “It started when the bandits came. They said they wanted the land, but we said no, and they kept coming back with their guns.” He stopped, took off his hat, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “When we said no, the bandits tried to take our girls away.”

I wasn’t sure that I had heard him right, so I asked what he meant. “They said they were going to take some of the village girls away if we didn’t give them the land. They wanted to scare us, but we stopped them,” he said.

He squeezed his eyes shut, as though he was fighting back emotions that were contorting his face. It was the first time that I had seen him look so vulnerable since our scare driving across Bandit Alley at the trip’s start.

“There was a shoot-out,” he said, kneeling at a stream to fill up his water bottle. “Two of the bandits were killed. The leader of the village also died.”

I asked if he had been responsible for killing the two bad men, but he didn’t answer in a straightforward way, and I didn’t push him. “I was involved in the dispute,” he said.

“So why did you leave?”

“We feared that there would be more killings, so I left.”

“What about the other bandits?” I asked. “Did they keep coming back?”

He looked back at the path that led to Bonanza, as if to suggest that they lived there now, but he didn’t elaborate. When I asked Chris about it later, he didn’t fully understand the conclusion of the story either.

There was one last thing that Pancho needed to do before we moved on. He wanted to see his son, Francisco Noel, who had died of asthma when he was seventeen months old. Were he alive today, the little boy would be a teenager. But in Pancho’s mind, he remained a child, with large blinking eyes and little feet. The day he died, Pancho had carried his tiny body to a small field of high razor grass three hours by foot from Bonanza. With a shovel, he had dug a hole and buried his baby son. He hadn’t marked the grave with a headstone. Instead, he had planted yellow vine flowers that now crowned the grass like a necklace.

As Chris and I hung back, Pancho and Angel walked into the field, found the grave, and knelt to the ground. Pancho put his hands to his face and leaned downward, as if to get closer to the son he had buried in the earth so many years before. He spent close to half an hour there in silent conversation with his two sons, one living and one dead, among the yellow flowers.

When he returned to us, he was smiling. “Isn’t it beautiful out here?” he said, the insects singing in the summer heat.
“Tranquillo.”

 

WE HEADED WEST
toward the Río Plátano. Morde’s mysterious Trujillo source had spoken of a buried city somewhere around this river, “over high mountains, where there grow strange large flowers.” Around here, the source had also mentioned a “burial ground.”

“It’s not much farther,” Chris said after hours of walking through tangled and muddy terrain. “We should make it by night.”

By now we had entered a swath of protected jungle, called the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve: 3,262 square miles of mostly undisturbed and roadless mountains, valleys, rivers, and swamps—about the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the reserve is also mostly uninhabited, except for the indigenous who come to hunt and the narcos who operate in its unreachable shadows.

Chris led us, occasionally pulling out his GPS to check coordinates. Trees climbed ten and fifteen stories high, their heavy canopies alive with noise. Occasionally I looked down and noticed more stones imprinted with strange shapes. The jungle grew so deep and dark that at times I couldn’t see Chris or Pancho in front of me, and I felt as if I had been swallowed up. Even though the sun was still out, it felt like evening under the trees, and everything was in shadow. On a descent into a valley, Pancho swung his machete at the ground and killed a coral snake. Another time, we barely missed stepping into a nest of bullet ants. Pancho reared back and threw his arms out. Although there were hundreds of them, each about an inch long, I would never have seen them in the dark mud. Later, I would come across a pain scale—known as the Schmidt Sting Pain Index after its developer, the entomologist Justin O. Schmidt—that described the bullet ant’s sting this way: “Pure, intense, brilliant. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail grinding into your heel.” Of all the jungle we’d walked so far, this was the most treacherous.

It was dark when we reached the Plátano, but a rainstorm forced us to stop. It came down with a fury that broke branches and made it almost impossible to see even with our headlamps switched on. In the wet darkness, Pancho said, “The ghosts are here.” We climbed into our hammocks and tried to sleep.

In the morning, Chris said, “We’ll have to swim the river. There’s no other way.” I could see the Plátano now, about thirty yards across and full of white rapids. It was impossible to know its depth.

Fully clothed, Chris stepped into the river and disappeared. My clothes were still wet from the storm; my bones ached as always. Having hardly slept, I looked at Angel, who shrugged, and then I walked into the water as if in a dream. Almost immediately, I was knocked down, pulled underwater, and thrown back first into a shoal of rocks. I felt my breath go as the water dragged me at least thirty yards downstream before I could snatch a vine and pull myself up the other side.

As I caught my breath, Chris appeared, pointed at the forest, and said, “So this is it.”

I didn’t see anything. “What’s it?”

He chopped away some brush with his machete, and a three-foot-high cobblestone wall, covered in moss, appeared. “This way,” he said. We followed it into the forest and stopped on a rock slab that was etched with various figures. “This is what I wanted to show you,” he said.

“This is the White City?”

He smiled. “It’s the first lost city that I discovered here. It’s where this began for me,” he said, gesturing at the forest around us.

“What?”

“This is where my understanding of Ciudad Blanca began.”

“But what about the city?” I asked.

“Be patient,” he said. “You see, when I started asking about the city’s location, people told me different stories. The Pech have two or three versions of the city, and so do the Tawahka.”

Chris had lived with the Pech for almost six years. “I came here and then found some other places that seemed like they could be the White City. So at first I thought, there’s not one White City, but maybe there are multiple lost cities, any of which could be the White City. But then over the years I started to believe something else.”

He paused to watch a troop of monkeys pass loudly overhead, branches and fruit dropping into space. “You’re probably not going to like this.”

I already didn’t like it.

“Well, I started to believe that the White City was not actually a physical place.”

Not a physical place? I wanted to grab him by the neck. Punch him in his glasses. We’d walked all the way out here, through the mud and the bush, with the mosquitoes and the snakes and the damn bullet ants. I’d almost died! “Are you serious?”

“I said you weren’t going to like it.”

I wondered if his head was on straight. I said he was starting to sound like the Pech chief and his “doorway” theory. I was tired of riddles.

He laughed. “Are you calm now?” he asked.

I nodded. He waited. I breathed. “Okay,” I said, “I’m calm.”

“The White City, in my mind, is not a literal place,” he said now. “I think that it’s a metaphor for what is lost—that is, what’s been lost.”

Like my youth, I thought for a moment. That gallivanting kid I was before Amy and I had had a child, bought a house, moved to Brooklyn. And the adult I was supposed to be, looking back on those lost days, once with nerves and a little sadness but now with something else like understanding. I had missed a lot back home. Sky wouldn’t always be four. She wouldn’t always care about my being around. In obsessing about what I’d lost, it was easy to forget about what had been gained in growing older—being a husband and a father. I saw it so clearly. I remember the first time I’d taken Sky on the spinning teacups ride at a festival in upstate New York. She was three, and, as the teacup car whipped around in quick, jerky circles, she screamed and screamed at the top of her lungs. When the cup came groaning to a stop, I thought for sure that she’d be crying. But she looked up at me, her hair a mess in her little face, and said, “I almost threw up, Daddy! Let’s do that again!” There were other moments just like that, moments when my old world receded and I saw the world through her eyes, with surprise, with newness, as if its own discovery.

This was how Morde and I were different. Morde had tried to settle down, but he’d continued to itch and the itching had in part killed him. I understood the itch and that there would likely be other moments in life when the itch came on and I would have to deal with it. I knew it would be hard fighting it off. But as I stood there soaking wet, sleep deprived, and aching, I wanted to change more than anything. I needed to get out of here. In my notebook, I wrote, “You are so close. Go home.”

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