The Spinach and the Crocodile

I had just returned from my third and last trip to the biological station for my last 10 days in Paso Caballos. I was not feeling good - I was incredibly sad to have said goodbye to the bio station guys for the last time, and I had returned to a town that was too hot, too dirty, and most of all, too boring.

Miguel, my translator, and I had worked out our interviewing schedule so that we would go out every afternoon around 2 or 3pm, when "people" (men) would be at home and not out working in their fields. This meant that every morning, starting from when I woke up around 6, stretched out over long dusty hours with absolutely nothing to do. I wrote a lot of letters.

On this one particular morning, I was writing a letter to my dear friend fidget, describing how hot and bored I was, and how much, more than anything in the world, I would like to get my hands on a fresh pile of delicious green spinach. As the sun climbed higher and the daily scorching began, I decided to head down to my little spot in the river where I went to bathe.

Now, bathing was one of my absolute favorite things to do in Paso Caballos. This is probably because the first week that I was there, I didn't bathe for five days straight, and I am fairly convinced that this was the dirtiest I have ever been in my life. It was so hot, so humid, so dusty when it was dry and so muddy when it was raining, that within a day and a half in town my skin would be at the point where rubbing my fingers along my arm would produce sticky rolls of greyish brown grime.

There was no running water in the town, and I didn't bathe for that first week because I didn't know how... I knew that people bathed in the river, but there were so many little spots that seemed associated with different families, as well as different times of day for men and women. Every time I wandered down to the river, either it would be in the afternoon when only the men were bathing and they would give me funny looks, or the women would be clustered in little familial groupings with their children and piles of laundry and dishes, and would also give me funny looks. Eventually I asked one of the children how to say "I want to bathe" in Q'eqchi', and then relayed my desire to Doña Elena, who grabbed the two youngest children and set off to lead me to the little stream that would become my regular bathing spot:


The spot was located right where a small stream rippled over a fallen log and fed into the larger murky Rio San Pedro. Right before the log, the stream widened into a small pool that reached up to my hips, or sometimes up to my waist if there had been a few days of heavy rains. The water was clear and cold, with a gentle but swift current that I always imagined was helping sweep away the grime as I rubbed it off my skin.

On this particular day I was surprised while in the water by two young guys, around 15 or 16 years old, who came silently shuttling down the little stream in their rickety dugout canoe and bumped over the log into the big river to go fishing. (Don't worry, my modesty was uncompromised, as I always bathed in my swimsuit.) The boys disappeared around a bend in the big river, and when I had finished bathing I stood out on the bank for a while and enjoyed the feeling of drying in the sunshine and the rare opportunity for a bit of solitude.

After a while, the boys drifted back into view, trailing their fishing lines, apparently without luck. They floated up by the bank, and I was just thinking about gathering up my stuff to hike back into town when one of the boys started yelling. I looked over at their canoe, and saw a fat triangular shape coming up through the water towards them. Both of the boys started whooping and hollering and jumped up out of the canoe, into the water, and up onto the shore as the rest of the crocodile surfaced behind them. Before I had really even realized what happened, one of the boys grabbed a rifle from over his shoulder, whipped around back towards the river and - BAM - shot the crocodile in the head.

I shrieked, and it was only after returning to the states, when somebody asked me, that I realized that not only was that the first time I had seen a crocodile in the wild, it was also the first time I've ever seen a gun shot.

So much for another boring day in Paso Caballos! The boys were also very excited, laughing and hooting and generally causing such a ruckus that another older man who was fishing on the other side of the river paddled his canoe over to see what all the fuss was about. The two boys got back in their canoe, and the three of them pushed the croc - not dead yet, but barely able to swim - back towards the shore with their paddles. One of the boys jumped out and grabbed it by it's tail, and pulled the dying animal up onto the shore, where it lay without moving as the four of us stood a few meters away, watching it.

The three men were chattering rapidly in Q'eqchi', and then one of them approached the crocodile and gave it a little poke with the end of his machete. It didn't move. He poked it a little harder. It still didn't move. The other two men joined in, testing the animal to see if it was really immobilized, or whether it was just waiting to rear up and attack, but it seemed to be too badly injured to resist and we could touch it freely. So then we really started playing with it - one of its rear legs was broken (I later guessed that maybe this was why it was surfacing during the day in the first place, since they are usually nocturnal hunters and very shy of humans), and we played with its legs and feet, knocked on it's armored back, felt the fallen strength of it's spiny-ridged tail...

I wanted them to kill it outright, but I wasn't surprised that they didn't. All animals in the town - cats, dogs, chickens, pigs, horses - were treated with incredible cruelty. It didn't even cross their minds to waste another bullet to put the beast out of its misery, even when they started hacking its teeth out with their machetes. It started with one of them finding that one of its teeth was loose, and pulling it out by hand. After that, they all wanted the teeth, so they started chopping and digging and pulling, which was truly disturbing to watch. Still, I was so fascinated by the whole thing that I couldn't leave, either.

They gave me two of the teeth: one big one and one small one.


I asked them if they were going to eat it, and they said no, but that some people did eat the tail, and that if I wanted they would cut the tail off for me and I could take it to eat. I considered it, because if I were ever going to eat a strange animal, it would be one that I had just seen killed where I had been swimming moments before. But then I imagined showing up at Doña Elena's house carrying a giant leathery tail over my shoulder, after having turned down all the other, more traditional meats, and it was just too much... so instead the boys dragged the animal off into the bushes and left it to die, saying they would come back later to take its skin to decorate their houses. It was nine of my flip-flop feet long including the tail, which I later figured out is about 7 1/2 feet.

The worst part, of course, was that I had my camera with me, but when I pulled it out of my bag to take a picture, the batteries chose that exact moment to crap out, and my little silver camera shut itself down with a friendly little beep. However, let's take a little look at that bathing picture again... the white arrow indicates where I had been standing to bathe, the red arrow where the crocodile surfaced. Um.......


Of course, my trip wasn't over, either, so I ended up going back to that same spot to bathe twice more before leaving, which made me a wee bit nervous to be sure.

The species is known as Morelet's crocodile, or Crocodylus moreletii. Here's a pic of one in captivity in Florida somewhere that lost most of its teeth not through the machetes of Q'eqchi' kids but through banging its head against the sides of its enclosure:



Eventually, when the older man had taken off fishing again and the boys were still laughing and talking about the adventure, I realized that I had been down at the river for a couple of hours, and was getting very hungry for lunch. It was then that I headed back up to the house - without the crocodile tail - and found waiting for me a bowl of bitter, dirty-tasting, overcooked spinach-like greens. What a joy! It wasn't spinach, per se, but hierba mora, a member of the nightshade family that grows wild around the cornfields. Doña Elena was scared that I wouldn't like it, but I was so excited that I ate enough to give myself a stomach ache.

After that, I had to go back to my letter to set the record straight. Turns out even in a town like Paso Caballos, sometimes you get what you wish for.

La Cenicienta

Once upon a time in Paso Caballos, I was very bored. I asked the oldest (22 years) son of Don Nicolas if he knew any jokes. Ismael, who I also called profe because he was a teacher in the elementary school (the only teacher who didn't come from outside the community), responded that he didn't know any jokes, but he knew plenty of stories.

OK, I responded, even better.

So Ismael told me the story of La Cenicienta:

Cenicienta was a very good girl, but she had no mother. Her mother had died when she was very young, so she just lived with her father, who was a good man. Then her father married another woman, and this woman was very bad, and mean to Cenicienta. She also had two other daughters, and they were all cruel and unfair, especially after Cenicienta's father also died.

They made Cenicienta do all of the work, she was like a slave. She had to clean out the house, do all of the washing, and had to make tortillas all of the time. She was always stuck in the kitchen, making tortillas all day long, while her stepmother and stepsisters lay around in their hammocks doing nothing.

Then one day a prince who lived in the pueblo decided that he wanted to find a wife, so he announced that he was going to have a big dance and invite all of the women from all around. Cenicienta's sisters were allowed to go, but she wasn't, because she had to stay home and clean the house and make tortilla, like always. In any case, she didn't have any nice clothes to wear to the dance, she just had her usual corte, camisa, and güipil.

All of a sudden a wizard appeared, and he told Cenicienta that he would help her go to the dance. She showed him that she didn't have anything to wear, so he transformed her clothes into a beautiful dress. She told the wizard that she didn't have a way to get to the dance, so he found a watermelon and turned it into a beautiful carriage, and took two rats and transformed them into two horses to pull the carriage. He then told her that she had to leave the dance by midnight, or else everything that he had transformed would turn back to the way that it was before.

At the dance, the prince was dancing with all of the women, but he was very bored. All of a sudden, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen showed up in a carriage. She was wearing a very pretty long dress, and nice shoes, and she was very beautiful. The prince danced with her all night long, and Cenicienta was having so much fun that she forgot to pay attention to what time it was.

All of a sudden, she started to hear the clock strike midnight. She was still dancing with the prince, but she broke away from him and started running for the front door. She ran all the way to her carriage, and ran so fast that she lost one of her shoes, and left it on the stairs up to the castle.

The prince tried to follow her, but he couldn't catch her, and he had forgotten to ask her name. After the dance, he couldn't forget about her, and tried to find her again. He searched all the pueblo, and all the houses in the little villages around where he lived. He couldn't find her. At last he came to the house where Cenicienta lived with her stepmother and stepsisters, who of course had no idea that she had gone to the dance at all. They told him that there was nobody else who lived there, but at that moment Cenicienta came out of the kitchen and saw the prince. He didn't recognize her because she was dressed in her normal clothes and dirty from cleaning, but it was her, so he took her home and they got married.

(the end.)

I love this story, for several reasons. There are the Guatemalan details, like the tortillas and hammocks and rats, and then there is the simple fact that several key Cinderella details are missing that make the story a little bit less... coherent. Never mind the fact that the shoe wasn't made of glass, it also had nothing to do with the prince finding her again. In fact, the prince finding her kind of made no sense at all, it just happens. Fabulous.

Foodstuffs

I made my first Guatemala-nostalgia meal last night - black beans cooked with onion and habañero pepper, spinach with garlic, and fresh tortillas. OK, so the spinach was not a regular occurrence down there, but it does remind me of one of the best days I had in Paso Caballos, when the tedium of life and food were doubly broken by the exciting appearance of a crocodile (story to follow in another post) and a very overcooked spinach-like vegetable for lunch. I had been writing letters about spinach for weeks...

For last night's nostalgic tortillas, I was not going to be satisfied with a bag of thin machine-pressed standard fare, so I found dried masa flour in the hispanic aisle of the supermarket, and mixed up the masa and patted out the tortillas by hand - Guatemalan tortillas are slightly bigger and about two or three times as thick as your typical Mexican corn tortilla. The process of mixing the masa dough and the sound of a bare hand slapping out the tortilla were probably more exciting to me than the eventual product, although I did get better as I went and ended up making some deliciously soft, fat, chewy-on-the-inside-with-a-slight-toasty-crunch tortillas. Yum!

I actually only patted out tortillas once while in Guatemala, and that was in my very first two weeks, while staying with a family in San Andres. But I watched Doña Elena, the wife of Don Nicolas, and her oldest daughter Leni as they cranked out piles of steaming fresh tortillas for every meal in Paso Caballos. While it takes me a few minutes to carefully imitate their movements and slowly form a rough-edged circle that's still a little bit too thick, they would have produced ten beautiful, perfectly even tortillas. I guess they do have a bit of a headstart in terms of practice, they probably produce about 100 tortillas per day! By the end of my trip, I was eating about 10 tortillas per day, and that was still less than the rest of the family. So with me, the parents, and 7 kids (the 8th was off studying in San Andres), Elena and Leni were tortellando up a storm.(Doña Elena in her house, making tortilla)

Yes, "to tortilla" is a verb en Español. And it doesn't really count as food, either, there is comida, and there is tortilla, and they are different things. People would always ask me if we had tortilla in the United States, and I would tell them that they existed, but they were mostly made of flour, or otherwise thin and machine-made corn tortillas, but that people didn't really eat them with everything like they do in Guatemala. They would ask what we ate instead of tortillas - bread? But I would explain that we don't really have an equivalent, there is no staple so central, nothing that so brilliantly combines sustenance and eating utensil - because there certainly weren't any other utensils in Paso Caballos!

Well, OK, the first time I was there they had a spoon, which the family would sometimes give to me if I was eating soup. When I returned, however, the spoon appeared to have been lost, at which point I figured out how to eat my ramen with tortilla.

My diet in Paso Caballos consisted almost exclusively of the three following items (tortilla not included, of course): black beans, eggs, and chicken-flavored ramen noodle soup. A typical day would be ramen for breakfast, eggs for lunch, eggs for dinner. The next day? Beans for breakfast, beans for lunch, eggs for dinner. Green matter was scarce enough that I started considering a bit of fresh chile or onion cooked in with the beans to be a "vegetable." One day I was presented with a tomato that had been boiled and then smashed up with chili powder - I was nearly ecstatic!

Don Nicolas's family would eat meat every once in a while, and I would have happily broken my vegetarianism for a bit of variety in my diet, but I just couldn't do it... I tried a little piece of chicken one day, and it grossed me out, and even just looking at the other meats was entirely unappetizing. I guess I've been a vegetarian for too long, I just couldn't bring myself to take a bite. But when the family did cook meat for themselves (maybe a couple of times a week) I would take a bowl of the broth it was cooked in, as that usually contained some onion, wild cilantro, and maybe even a tomato or two. Over the course of my stay there, I consumed the broths of many different animals: chicken, turkey (both domestic and wild), pig (domestic and wild), deer, tepiscuintle (image of this large forest rodent below), and some things that were just called "meat."
The deer was my favorite.

By the end of my trip, I had figured out some key strategies on how to get vitamins into my diet. I had located the store that sold V8 juice, and then during my last week Don Nicolas's store got a crate of orange juice, and I probably consumed as much as the rest of the town put together. I also learned to keep an eye on the kids, because they could sometimes be seen munching on fruit during the afternoon, and I would ask them to share with me. This prevented fruit-related heartbreak, like the one beans-beans-egg day when I came around to the house for dinner and saw the empty husks of a couple of fresh pineapples outside, but all the sweet juicy goodness was long gone.

At the biological station the situation was a bit better - for one thing, once I knew the drill I was able to bring food and cook for myself, which meant not only that I could eat lots of veggies, but that I could also introduce the bio station boys to funny american foods like sapo en el agujero (toad in the hole), and sandwich de queso a la plancha (grilled cheese), which caused great amusement and were consumed with plenty of tortilla, of course.

I also went fishing out there once per visit (I visited the station three times, for 3-5 days each time), and caught fish for lunch directly under the "no fishing, area of investigation" signs (right behind the pole in the picture below), which made me feel like a good representative of a snooty ivy league environmental school. The fish were just called blanco, in typical descriptive Central American style. They are endemic to the region, and delicious.

¿Donde empezar?

I can't figure out what to write first about Guatemala... somebody suggested that I start at the beginning, but I don't even know what the beginning was. When I touched down in Guatemala city? When I arrived in el Peten? When I headed out into the field to do my research?

My experience there seems so far away from me now that I have been back for almost two weeks. Most of my culture shock has worn off, although when I think about the people in Paso Caballos or the guys working at the bio station, Connecticut starts looking a little bit uglier and I start thinking about whether I can afford a plane ticket just to go visit sometime. Sometime before I head back for my PhD research, that is. The I-will-return promises that I made to people got more and more sincere as the summer went on.

Perhaps I'll just start with a brief description of "the beginning", and then fill in more stories and details in the random and shuffled order of my memory. Here are the various places that I went:

I started in San Andres:A little town on the side of lake Peten Itza, where I stayed with a family for my first two weeks, attending a little Spanish school. It was nice to start here, and get a little bit adjusted to the heat and the Guatemalan pace (s-l-o-w) before actually starting to try to work. Still, even though the Spanish school helped me immensely, by the end of the summer I ended up wishing I had spent less time here so that I could have had more time out in the field. The un-readyness to leave that I felt at the end of my trip will likely be a recurring theme.

After San Andres I spent a week in Flores, the tourist-dominated capital of the Peten, where I claimed to be getting things ready for my research, but was really just too scared to start right away. I was all of a sudden overwhelmed with the realization that I was about to head out into a part of Guatemala where I would have no telephone, no internet, without knowing a single person who would be there, or having any kind of idea what I was supposed to be doing for this "research" business. I was terrified, really. Freaking the fuck out, even though I was only going to be out in the field for about twelve days that first time.

But on Friday morning at 7am, when ProPeten (the Guatemalan organization that runs the biological station, and with whom I coordinated my research) took off to the station in their rickety blue Toyota pickup truck, I was inside. So was Don Raquel, who later became a good friend of mine... but he, like me, tends to be very quiet at first, so we rode the two and a half hours up to Paso Caballos in silence, watching sprawling cattle ranches and tiny aldeas passing by as we made our way over the rutted, washed out dirt road.

I was still freaked out for my first two or three days there, it took a while for the sounds of the howler monkeys, birds, and the friendly chatting of Raquel and the other Bio Station workers to calm me down. Mostly I hid in my dormitory, or sat out on the porch and watched a hummingbird chase the butterflies away from its favorite flower bush. Here's a picture of my dorm:

The station was nearly empty. They have two big dormitory buildings, this one for "investigators" and another for tourists, volunteers, or other visitors, but I was the only person there. There was also a huge separate kitchen for visitors, with a fridge and gas stove, but the three men who were working that week invited me to come and cook and eat with them in their kitchen, in which they each had their own fire-pit stove. Of course, in the midst of all my terror and confusion before heading out there, nobody had told me that I was supposed to bring my own food supplies, so I was forced to ask the guys to help me out, which only added to my anguish and unhappiness... Who does this gringa think she is? She can barely speak the language, she doesn't seem to know what she's doing here although she claims to be a researcher, and now she wants us to feed her???

Luckily, the guys were incredibly nice, and took me fishing my first afternoon so that I at least felt a little bit like I was contributing to the food (I caught three fish!), and in the end eating with them was probably one of the best ways that I got to know them, and the conversations over meals were sometimes the most informative for my research. Even when I went back the next time and brought all my own food, I continued to head down to their kitchen and use their fires to cook, and shared my food with them as they had shared with me before.

After a few days at the station, I had some thirty pages of research notes in my moleskine, a belly full of fresh-caught fish and wild cilantro, and a regained feeling that maybe everything was going to work out ok.

And then Don Raquel took me into Paso Caballos.

We hiked up the river, me carrying my ridiculously over-filled backpack, to the "new house" of Don Nicolas, the mayor of Paso. Luckily, Don Nicolas was taking a day of rest from his work, so he was in his little store that occupied about a sixth of the space of the house, and was able to sit down while Raquel introduced me and helped me ask permission to stay in the town and interview people who lived there.

Don Nicolas was incredibly wary, and insisted that there was nowhere in the town for visitors to stay - there were no dormitories, or anything like that. I said that I didn't need much, just a bed in some family's house, and that I would be able to pay the family for a bed and for food. When I said I could pay, Don Nicolas declared that I could stay right there in that house, in the back where his oldest son also lived, and he would bring a bed over from their other house where he lived with his wife and six youngest kids.

The first day was nothing. Don Nicolas barely talked to me, nor did anybody else. I was under the impression that I was supposed to wait for the other men of the town council to come for a meeting that afternoon, and that I could present myself to them and ask for permission to study in their town, but eventually it became clear that the meeting had been cancelled, somehow, and I had simply spent the day waiting for nothing.

Nobody talked to me in Paso Caballos. Mostly because many of them didn't speak Spanish at all, they only spoke Q'eqchi' Mayan, but also because of a general distrust and wariness of outsiders that I had only started to break through just as I was getting ready to leave. It was a very lonely place.

I got very good at sitting still, and doing nothing. This is a difficult skill to learn, and one that is already lost to me in the land of constant wireless internet and other hi-tech distractions. The sense of isolation was immense, and as a result I spent more time reflecting on myself, on my life, and on all of the people who I have ever known or who ever influenced me, than I have done in a long long time. If you are reading this, you were probably in my thoughts while I was lying in a hammock one day, or while sitting watching the boys play checkers in front of the store in the unbearable heat. I wrote very long letters, most of which seem to have been lost in the Guatemalan mail system.

Sometimes, I did some research.