Great egret, Ardea alba, in the breakwater swamps inland of Monterrico.

A black vulture, Coragyps atratus, on the ruins of Temple 1.

I think this is a tyrant flycatcher, Tyrannus verticalis. They nest in the western US in the summer.

And a gray-necked wood-rail or chiricote, Aramides cajanea. These were super hilarious to watch walking around with their little tail-feather tuft and their bizarro backwards knees. They are lowland marsh birds, no doubt prayed upon by the caimán–of which I have a picture somewhere.

Getting to the end of the Guate pictures, though. I’ll save that one for last.

Fine thing about these Guatemala pictures…I get to gaze on their green jewel-eyed wonder and not think about how spring is not yet here and there’s still snow in the hills. Going to the Smith Bulb Show this week–another ritual of anticipation.

My sister Danielle/Daniela/El Nubo/La Nuba/Udi is the reason I went to Guatemala and the reason I came back alive. She led me around by the gills speaking Spanish for me until I learned not to feel so much like a fish out of water, made a pleasant and challenging dinner companion, and tolerated a lot of long ass bus rides and obsessive Mayanist geeking with a smile. So I figure I owe her.

Nubo is in Guatemala volunteering for two different organizations: CasaSito and Cultural Survival. For one, she teaches English and maintains a fine compost heap. For the other she runs around Guatemala trying to organize, fund and promote community radio stations by and for the indigenous Maya, giving them the chance to use and share their incredible, tiny, struggling culture and language via mass communication. Both are excellent causes and would, I am sure, not object to having a little of your moola.

Nubo keeps a blog, http://danielle-daniela.blogspot.com/, where she writes about Guatemala and what she’s doing there. I wish she would post more.

She also has started making these cool earrings, using dried pinto beans she buys from the local ladies down at the mercado:
Pretty, no?

The more of your moola you give her in exchange for them, the longer she gets to stay down in Guate doing good deeds. And I, for one, need a little time to scrape together plane fare enough to visit her again before she leaves. So. Buy earrings.

Thank you for your kind attention.

And now, to distract you from the above philanthropic shill, here’s el Volcán de Fuego flowing its top:

I never noticed it while I was staying down in Antigua, but the one night I slept up in the hills, I woke up without knowing why around three in the morning, then lay there for an hour, listening to it cough up ashes and fire–and feeling it, in the pit of my stomach: like a distant, staccato thunder-roll that just goes on and on. In the darkness, sometimes you can see it glowing.

Don’t know what those berries are he’s eating–looks like a lot of work for not a lot of payoff. But I get the impression he knew we were watching. Maybe it was all an elaborate ploy.

If those friendly gun-toting dudes I ran into at Tikal were indeed hunters, they were probably looking for this guy. But I guess that’s what you get for crossing the gods: joyful tree-swinging, and a whole lot of maize-beings hankering after a rack of your ribs grilled with chiles and lime.

It was getting near dark. Mist all day had turned to a plopping, chilly rain. We hiked for half an hour in squelching shoes along the treacherously slippery moss and crumbled limestone of the Mendez Causeway, leading out from the central plaza to the Temple of the Inscriptions. The park closes at sunset. The forest was noisy, deep and enormous. There was no one else around.

We discussed half-jokingly the hunting habits of jaguars. A spooked deer crashed off into the forest; the noise made El Nubo nearly jump out of her skin. Then the howler monkeys started up, hooting like straightjacketed nutcases all around, and we started to get downright edgy.

We were chattering nervously about cutting down one of the enormous palm leaves that hang over the causeway to use as an umbrella, lamenting our lack of a machete, when three locals materialized out of the rain ahead. They carried rifles under their arms and didn’t wear any of the usual park rangers’ insignia. This, it seemed to me, was bad. Still nobody else in sight. The rangers and the guidebooks had warned not to enter the park at night without a guide. It used to be you could bribe a ranger to let you sleep overnight on the platform at the top of Temple IV, but those days are long gone.

Nubo has said that walking around Guatemala with me in tow made her noticeably less prone to catcalls and generally more comfortable venturing into areas less well-trodden by turistas. I am a big tall scary white guy, I guess, though in all other ways but appearance I am a mushy pushover. I had, however, formed the habit of carrying my large, L-shaped camera slung conspicuously underneath my shirt. It only occurred to me much later that to ye passerby, it sort of looks like I’m packing a handcannon.

Whether or not that illusory deterrent had anything to do with it, I don’t know. But to our immense relief, the three armed men smiled, said “Good afternoon,” and walked on by.

I figure they might have been poachers.

On the way back, we found Grupo G: a warren of moss-choked rooms, two-storied, forming a three-walled courtyard around the side of a wooded hill, covered with sapodilla and mahogany trees, which, chances are, probably has yet another ruin underneath it. We passed through the tunnel and poked about inside, studying a giant, many-chambered leafcutter anthill we found at the foot of the hill, feeling oddly comforted by the huge, crumbling walls that shielded us from the howls of the forest and the eyes of those dudes with guns.

As we were walking out, knowing we had a long way to go still to reach the entrance before nightfall, we met an indigeno guy pushing a baby in a stroller, with six kids scampering around behind him, teasing each other and laughing. These kids clearly had no fear, and their mood was contagious. One of them, a boy of ten or twelve, ran into the blackness of the dank tunnel behind us until he disappeared from sight. A moment later, his voice emerged from within, raised to a roar:

“¡Soy un maya con hambre!”

Which means in English: “I am a hungry maya!”

I repeated this over and over, at an interval of every one or two minutes, all the way back to the gate, laughing myself to tears.

Tikal is the second major Maya site I’ve visited, after Chichén Itzá. It was founded before 300 BC, reached its peak around 600 – 800 AD, and was abandoned by 1100. In between, it was conquered, razed and rebuilt at least three different times. You can tell. The faces of the kings on all these altars and stelae and statues have been chiseled off by the conquerors–like this dude, my Facebook dopplegaanger:

Tikal went down around the same time as the rest of the great lowland Maya city-states, and presumably for the same reasons: conspiracy theories and over-sanguine academic speculations aside, because they overpopulated, overtaxed their resources and consequently starved themselves out of power. In the 900 years since the Maya collapse, Tikal, El Mirador, Uaxactun and the dozens of other Maya sites that occupy the misty lowland region of Northern Guatemala known as El Peten have all been completely covered over with full-on, mature rainforest. As a result, I never really experienced that eerie sense of connectedness and presence I met with among the ruins of Yucatan. Instead, Tikal filled me with an awareness of time. 900 years. The trees–like the colossal ceiba just outside the gate–are as awe-inspiring as the temples: trunks seven feet across with root systems big enough to get lost in, canopies dotted with epiphytes, toucans and spider monkeys hundreds of feet overhead. The mist comes down in constant curtains. The stone steps of the temples are treacherous, slick with rain. Howler monkeys shriek past unseen in the distance at dusk, with all the deliberate, unstoppable pacing, the intensity and elemental inexorability of a thunderstorm. Moss covers everything–skulls included–and it doesn’t restrain itself to making them look all epic and cool. It devours them. Nature, in El Peten, gave humanity its chance. Then it came and took everything back.

The temples are still there, huge and steep and imposing, as are the stelae and the altars, the aqueducts, the limestone causeways running miles through the woods. But the artwork, the stucco reliefs and stone carvings that were so gloriously and spine-tinglingly evident at Chichén Itzá and Tulum–the ones that hadn’t already been defaced by the vicissitudes of war, anyway–have almost all been wiped away by rain, time, and the gods.

Temple V. Back in AD 700, at its construction, all that gray mush of rubble above the doorway was a super-complicated monolithic frieze depicting masks of kings, the gods of sun and rain.

If you zoom in on this photo (click on it), you can see on the far left the top of the rickety-ass, near-vertical, 180-foot wooden scaffolding you have to climb to get to the top (here–the wikipedia photo shows it better). This was fricking terrifying. The steps were all covered with rain and mud, slippery as hell. This dude who was there on his honeymoon climbed up maybe 20 steps before his wife made him give up and come down. Wisely, I left my wife at home. At the top, there’s maybe three feet of crumbling stone to stand on. While I was up there, this one lady made it up, took one step away from the ladder and collapsed into a ball of whimper until her people had to physically help her back down. I, on the other hand, was totally unfazed, and walked all the way around to the right side of the platform, where there was only a foot and a half of space between myself and death by rainforest canopy laceration, to take this:

Yes, I am indeed wicked tough. Thank you for noticing.

As you might guess, I have way more pictures. Maybe I’ll share some more of them a little later on.

I took a series of chickenbuses to Chichcastenango, a highland maya town on a hilly plateau at about 6,000 feet where they have a big market on Thursdays and Sundays. It was windy and cold and the thin air made it hard to walk uphill. At one end of town, there’s a pastel-colored graveyard on a cliff, at the other, a stark white church built in 1600 on whose steps the local adherents of the maya religion make their offerings of flowers, tobacco and copal.

Five steps into the market I met a lady selling packets of medicine to kill stomach parasites, ringworm and the like. Four pills for four days. She had a collection of specimens–actual stomach parasites preserved in alcohol in baby food jars. She picked them up one at a time as she lectured. “Look at the size of this one,” she’d say. “This demon came out of the belly of a twelve year old girl.”

Chichicastenango, you’ll recall from my earlier ranting about it, is the town where the Popol Vuh was hidden away for 250 years before Friar Ximenez found it in 1701, transcribed it and copied it into Spanish. I went to the museum in Chicago where that copy now resides; they wouldn’t let me see it, but the whole manuscript’s been scanned online anyway. Anyhow. I went to the monastery courtyard where Ximenez would have sat to make the translation. It’s right in the middle of the market, and it was packed with people resting from the ordeal of shopping. A man by the fountain was telling a story to a crowd of a hundred mostly boys, teenagers and young men. The story consisted of a long series of ad-libbed episodes illustrating how the magic elixir of strength he was offering–in clear plastic vacuum bags with straws like those juice packs you drank in junior high–had caused hilarious awesomeness to spring out wherever it fell. He’d puncture a bag of elixir and use it as a visual aid to demonstrate peeing, a pregnant lady giving milk, a guy spitting at a joke, some more peeing, wine being turned to water, water to blood, hooch being drunk, rain. The resourcefulness of it was impressive, despite the lowbrowness perhaps of the humor. And I stood there and listened for 15 minutes, trying to figure out if there was some underlying thread I’d missed or wasn’t picking up, or if this was just how the story went. Everybody was having a good time, anyhow. And when I left, he still hadn’t tried to sell anybody anything.

Now there’s a storyteller.

A bridge in Chichi. Note the depiction of quetzalcoatl above the arch. (That’s El Nubo in the backpack–my intrepid guide.)

On the long bus ride back from Chichi, a twelve year-old kid got on for the leg from Chimaltenango to Jocotenango with a shoebox full of glue sticks–paste glue in a blue lipstick tube, like I used in 2nd grade. He handed two glue sticks out to every person. He clambered to the middle of the bus, gave a three minute lecture on the proper use and benefits of these glue sticks–great for arts and crafts, a great gift for the niños, easy to use, no mess. He named a price. Then he walked back around collecting up most of the sticks he’d handed out and some money from people who wanted to keep theirs. He got off in Joco, replenished his supply from a bigger box guarded by a girl a couple years younger, and climbed back onto the return bus to present his spiel again.

Then there were the “saved” men. Usually with scars or an arm missing from the civil war. Booming preacher voices, a summary of their path from loneliness and sin to oneness with Dios. They are performing a public service, providing a lesson with a clear moral. They ask for donations.

So now The Mossy Skull and The Homeless Moon and various other internet projects of mine are carbon-positive. You, gentle reader, need not bother about that so much, except perhaps in that you can feel slightly less guilty as you read. Sadly, I haven’t gained much benefit on that account myself–it still feels like too little, too late. I need to do more. But them’s my personal neuroses, gentle reader, and they need not concern you.

There has, however, been one more substantial change that may require your brief attention. The Mossy Skull has moved–it used to be at the slightly unwieldy, mildly counterintuitive http://mjd.joskinandlob.com/wordpress/, and now it’s at the the satisfyingly clean and transparent http://mossyskull.com/. If you would be so kind, please change your bookmarks accordingly. Those of you following via RSS, make sure you’re syndicating http://feeds.feedburner.com/themossyskull and you should be all right.

And thanks for reading!

Everybody should visit a third world country at least once, if only so they can come to a more round understanding of that term. I don’t know how I ever got on without having been to one.

Prior to visiting Guatemala, I had operated under the not-entirely-inaccurate assumption that “third world” referred to a region of the planet whose human inhabitants suffered, in varying degrees of severity, reduced access to economic infrastructure including but not limited to sewer systems, utilities, clean water, health care, education, technology, and/or rule of law. As compared to the status of said amenities here in the “first world”. I understood, if only on an abstract, liberal-educated, political-correctness level, that the term “third world” was to be considered flawed in its one-sidedness, its inherent superiority, and its general lack of empathy.

What I didn’t understand until I went there was that none of the above in any way impedes the daily functioning of a society.

I didn’t encounter a single traffic light anywhere in Guatemala outside the capital city, and I traveled a lot. Shockingly, traffic doesn’t screech to a halt at every intersection for lack of a traffic light. Drivers tap their horns three or four times in quick succession, as a warning or a greeting, rather than leaning on them uselessly for minutes at a time like we do here. Then they go with the flow.

Wrecked cars and buses are a common occurrence on the sides of highways; trash is more common–heaps of it, collecting in corners shielded from the wind. Most people’s houses are of flaking stucco: a few low rooms, inadequately windowed, with a sheet of corrugated tin for a roof and rainwater running freely over the floor. Nobody has a lawn. Even the locals can’t drink the water from the taps without boiling or filtering it first, because it contains e. coli bacteria, the result of poor waste management and inadequate sewage systems.

Nobody seems fazed by any of this.

And–after a day or two–I’m not fazed by it either. Clean water running from the tap isn’t such a hard thing to live without. Lots of people have rainwater collectors on their roofs. Lots more have big, terracotta water filters in their kitchens, like Brita filters, only you don’t have to keep buying more of them, and they serve an actual health purpose. Seatbelts–can’t say I really miss those. Have you ever noticed how people, not just in this country, but in Canada, Britain, Europe–pretty much everywhere I’ve been in the “first” world–are afraid to touch each other? On subways, the Tube, public buses, passing in the street, waiting in line. God forbid you give me your cooties. That taboo doesn’t seem exist in Guatemala. One time I spent an hour on a really ridiculously packed chicken bus between Dos Encuentros and Chimaltenango, standing just behind the driver, hanging onto the luggage rack for dear life as we careened around mountain turns, my huge backpack pressed against the shoulders of a dude sitting on a bucket in the aisle, my legs completely enclosed to the point of immobility by the knees and calves and hips and packages of six mayan ladies on their way home from market all crammed into the first row. A little baby napping in her abuela’s lap kept kicking me adorably in the shins. I kept glancing back over the sea of faces in the rows behind me, and every time I did, I found a different kid staring at me with big, brown, liquid eyes, breaking into a huge, shy smile when I caught her gaze. And when it was over, when the dude on the bucket got off and I got to sit down for a minute before we finally made it to my stop, the mayan ladies all started chattering about what a good sport this big galumphing gringo boy had been, standing up all that time on those sharp mountain turns, and how sorry they were they couldn’t have made more room. When I got off, I was pretty much in love with those ladies.

A chicken bus outside Ciudad Vieja, with volcanoes.

There are stray dogs everywhere in Guatemala–not in any sort of evil, ravening pack mentality kind of way–they’re dirty and fleabitten and bone-skinny, and nobody tells them what to do or where to go, but they don’t beg constantly, and they only bark and howl and run around like hooting hordes of ancestor ghosts in the dark of night, in the distance. They’re much more patient, more respectful, than you’d expect any horde of stray dogs to be. Mostly, they just seem tired. For me, it was somehow uncanny to see a long-faced brown mongrel with eight full dugs swinging and ribs standing out against her sides ambling past me down a dusty cobbled street, like the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. And after the fact, I’m actually more unsettled that I could have become sufficiently detached from reality that the sight of a pregnant dog could come across as something so alien.

The cheap beer, in this third world country? It’s not cheap beer at all–it’s good beer, cheap! The national brew, Gallo, is a thirst-quenching, medium-bodied amber lager with a fine refreshing fruitiness. Gallo makes Corona cry. And I can’t even begin to articulate how badly it beats the tar out of ye great American workingman’s brew. And you know what really blows me about it? They reuse every single bottle they ship out. They don’t throw away their glass. They don’t recycle it. They don’t have to. Every morning, the Gallo truck shows up outside the cantina, drops off full bottles, picks up empties, and takes them back to the plant to be cleaned and refilled. Where the $*%& are we on that, first world?

Also, as far as I experienced it, the entire nation of Guatemala has already switched over from incandescent to CFL bulbs. I didn’t see an incandescent bulb while I was there. And they did it without needing a massive PR campaign or even a giant self-stroking internet site where people can congratulate themselves for accomplishing some kind of change.

All in all, it’s kind of refreshing to see that, yes, life actually can and does go on in the absence of antibacterial cream, small claims courts, individually-wrapped sanitary towelettes, subsidized insurance coverage for antidepressants, styrofoam coffee cups, laws regulating windshield cracks, twenty-four hour news networks, the grocery store, or even a ratio of at least two branded napkins to each food or beverage item purchased. You don’t need any of that stuff to live, or even to be happy. You don’t need phones or the internet or TV either.

All that being said, having been back safe and coddled in the states for a week, with the Haiti earthquake heavily in the news, I am painfully aware that my envy for the lifestyle of the average Guatemalan is at best problematic, and seriously flawed. I went down there with money. They hadn’t just suffered an earthquake, nor were they engaged in civil war. If they had been, I’d have been much more aware of the absence of hospitals and clean water, and the danger of those mountain roads. And I’d have been a hell of a lot more scared of all those dudes with guns.

But the main point, I think, still holds: there’s no third world and no first world. There’s the world. What we do affects them, what they do affects us. More importantly, there, but for the grace of a giant, complicated mess of circumstance and stuff, go we. And vice versa.

I don’t know that it’s a sentiment I can fully convey, without just telling you to go there and see. But okay, how about this? Have you ever had one of those conversations with a dedicated doer of recreational drugs, ecstasy or lsd or mushrooms or even weed, wherein said day tripper gushes about how all the world’s problems would be solved if only the leaders of the world could be introduced to the recreational drug in question?

That’s how I feel about going to Guatemala.

Trouble is, all those world leaders I want to teach a little empathy (or a lot) have probably already been there.

So I went to Guatemala the other week.

I don’t get to travel that often. Travel costs a lot, and my life strategy has been to spend just barely enough of my time working to keep myself alive, so as to have as much free time for writing as possible and not much else. I have heard this strategy questioned more than once exactly on the basis that it doesn’t permit me to travel. “How can you have anything to write about,” goes the conventional wisdom, “when you haven’t done anything?” My college advisor asked me that, among others. It sort of pissed me off. I’d like to give more credit than that to the imagination: sure, you can’t write compelling fiction in a vacuum, and yes, uncountable great writers spent their lives wandering the earth. But it’s a matter of how you look at the world, not what you’re looking at. Thoreau never left New England. Emily Dickinson barely left her house. There are new and unique things to see, even in things you’ve looked at a hundred thousand times.

That said, every time I do manage to abroad, I come back with ideas spilling out my ears–like what happened when I went to Yucatan. The conventional wisdom isn’t wrong, it’s just narrow. And it presupposes a certain level of financial independence, doesn’t it? Travel is hard–not just emotionally and physically (as I have well learned), but financially. So is writing. Just ask Nabokov, Lord Dunsany, or Anthony Bourdain: it’s a lot easier to bum around the world telling awesome stories when you don’t have to worry where your next meal is coming from. But nothing beats experience.

Upon returning from Guatemala, I have gained the following:

• Exactly 25 angry red mosquito bites, mostly on my ankles, hips, and the backs of my knees, that will not f’ing go away.
• Stomach parasites.
• A persistent, atmospheric lightheadedness that, for a few moments before waking, makes me believe I never left. Or else that I’m entering the preliminary stages of a mushroom trip. Whether this has something to do with the aforementioned parasites, maybe in the style of those freaky bugs that alter the personality of rodents to make them more inclined to commit suicide by cat, I know not.
• Enlightenment.

Was all of the former worth the latter? Yes.

So for a little while, this blog is going to turn into a travelogue.

A colossal ceiba tree that grows at the gate to Tikal.
Ceiba pentandra

More next week.