The night before our trip to el Salvador, something happened to all the doors. I came back from watching some kids play basketball in the centro and went to use the bathroom but the door was warped and wouldn't close. The door to my room, which had always been warped and hard to open or close, swung easy, opening and closing without any problem. And the slide lock on the front door to the casita my room is in was kind of bent and hard to slide. I showed Suzana the bathroom door and she was just as baffled.
El Salvador was true to its name. We stayed in a surf resort right on the beach complete with a pool and really good restaurant . The first night I ate fresh mahi mahi caught that morning by the hotel owner. In a mushroom sauce. Soooo good. The restaurant is on a raised concrete platform right on the beach, and the waves wash up against it at high tide. Out in the surf a ways is a big lava rock formation. I'm guessing that the breakdown of lava rock is what has makes the sand black. However it happened, it's beautiful. When the water washes back down the beach it leaves sparkling trails of an almost purple or blue.
You could get lost in so much foam and never go home. I can hear it whispering on my shoulders like a sleepy lover. I wanted to slide out over its brilliance on a yellow surfboard at sunset and ride waves colored like flowers. Supposedly it's one of the best spots for learning to surf, but the waves were so rough while we were there that they weren't even offering lessons. Our second day we hit the beach to do some swimming and found out just how rough it was. I love playing rough with the waves though. I like diving right at the base of big ones and feeling all that energy bless my whole body and then stand me back upright. Or letting it slowly suck me towards it, and then, right before it crushes me, “sliding home.” Or jumping over top and crowd surfing. Sometimes I just take 'em straight in the chest and try to keep my balance. I had a flashback to when Aaron and Nate and I used to sit on the beach right where the waves would break, whenever there was bearable shorepound, and play chicken with the waves.
The rhythm of the waves gets down inside you. I let it move me for hours, singing, “Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I'm feelin'.”
We met a couple of fellow travelers on the beach that had come to try and surf but weren't confident enough to go out under the current conditions. One guy (Bryce) was traveling with his girlfriend, and the other (Gabriel) was traveling around with his son (maybe 12 years old). We ended up meeting up with them on the beach almost everyday to hack the waves together. That first day Andy and I decided to leave and get lunch around one (it was like a two minute walk down the beach to our hotel) and they decided to stay a little longer. Leaving an angry sea can be harder than leaving a love-sick lady. Just ask Ruben Dario (I guess she was after his money though). You're not getting out until she lets you go. I think it took me half an hour to work my way back up to the black sand. We got our stuff and then realized we hadn't said goodbye to Gabriel and Bryce, who were now standing and talking in ankle-deep water. We were in middle of saying our goodbyes when a big surge of water rushed up the beach. I had my shirt in my hand and lifted it over my head to keep it out of the suddenly-waist-high water. “Keep that shirt hight and dry,” Gabriel said. But then I saw their faces and turned around to look. The backlash came fast and was even worse. I was the only one left standing. Andy got dropped hard and he had his moral (side bag) on with his camera and some of my books in it. Luckily he didn't get hurt too bad, and he has a really good moral so nothing got wet. I know it shouldn't have been funny, but I couldn't keep from laughing.
The next day we rented boogie boards. Gabriel said his place wouldn't even rent them with the waves like they were. But we gave it a go. Didn't work out so well though. I was trying to coach Andy a little on how to catch a wave, it was his first time to the beach, but I was barely keeping my own neck above water. The one good wave I caught left me naked on the rocks. No joke. But my strange ability to never bruise endures. We ended up leaving the boards behind because, oddly enough, it was easier to work the waves without them.
The beach was so beautiful at night. I got so caught up considering the great lily of the sky, I had a hard time going in before midnight. More like one thirty. I met all kinds of interesting people that way, including the security guards who I'm sure usually got tired and lonely on those late shifts. At least they seemed grateful for a new face and good old conversation. But I figure they too might often prefer solitary stretches alone with a world of beauty. So I never kept them long.
One night I was looking out over the beach from the edge of our hotel property. There was a crowd of people playing soccer a little ways up. Just past them the town's little stream ran down the beach and emptied into the waves. Just beyond that a senorita came walking down the beach in a white dress. There were two flood lights further down that cast solid parallel beams of light across the water all the way up to where she stood, staring out at the sea. The moon left a lazy trail of light in the sand around her. It all made for a spectacular, surreal scene. She just stood there in her white dress looking out at the sea. Every now and then she bent over and fiddled with something at her feet, and then stood back up and kept staring. I couldn't help it. I hopped down and started walking towards her. But when I got to the bank of the stream crossing the beach I got swarmed by the soccer players, many of which were drunk, but still friendly. I never made it to where she was. I noticed there were a couple of men and kids waiting behind her just out of the water's reach. Once the drunk soccer players left me, I stood on the edge of the stream for a few seconds watching in confused awe, and then walked back over by our hotel and searched for colored sea stones and got my feet wet. The wet sand feels so good on bare feet. Why don't we fill our houses with some kind of non-stick wet sand instead of carpet? And walls with lightning horizons.
One night I sat on the edge of the hotel's concrete barrier, dangling my feet and writing a little in my notebook. I sat there for awhile. Then another resident of our hotel came back from a walk and stopped next to me. “You alright man?” “Yeah, just enjoying the night and writing a little.” He told me that earlier a surfer got washed up on the lava rock and almost killed, but Jesus, one of the waiters, went out and saved him. He asked me about what I was writing, and what I was up to in Central America. Then we got into a long conversation about poetry. Turns out he's a high school English teacher and teaches a poetry class. And he's studied Spanish literature. He said he wanted to do comparative literature but he would have had to pick up a third language and he wasn't up for that. So he did English. We talked a little about the future of poetry, and how I wish there were more people that enjoyed long poems like Larry Levis and Octavio Paz used to write. About the lost art of attention. I gave him a few recommendations of people to read. A few quotes he really liked. He showed me the only tattoo that's ever made any sense to me. It was a line from one of Neruda's veinte poemas arranged in a ring on the inside of his left arm: Juegas cada dia con la luz del universo.
One night I was up wandering around the beach under the moon. The security guards kept telling me to stay close, so I kind of did. Eventually this Salvadorian man wandered over holding a wooden paddle wrapped in fishing line, his index finger tugging on a strand trailing way out into the surf. He was fishing for some fish whose name I don't know in English. We talked for awhile and then he asked if I wanted to try. So he got me all rigged up and let me loose. I tried casting as far as I could but it was hard to tell where it ended up. When he finally dragged his line in it had an eel tangled in it. He started talking about how someone had told him that kind was poisonous. I think it was just a normal eel, but it was completely tangled in the line, and he didn't want to take any chances, so he just cut the line and let it die on the beach. It was really sad. I pulled mine in hoping there would be nothing on it, and then cast it back out one more time. Andy came around about then to see where I'd been. And there I was fishing with a couple of natives. He laughed and said, “Your life is so random.” I fished a little longer. My fellow fisherman asked me if I had any pretty American girls I could lend him. I said, “I thought you were married.” “Yeah, but I love to fish and often hop from beach to beach.” I looked at him and said, “That's a metaphor, isn't it.” He just laughed and we kept fishing.
I ate mahi mahi three times, lobster once, and these really good kebabs with beef, chicken and the biggest shrimp I've ever eaten. Fresh squeezed orange juice everyday. And fantastic banana splits.
I stayed out in the water so long one day, my eyelids start to chafe from the salt.
El Salvador is overrun by butterflies. There were these solid-colored ones that would dance around the restaurant tables. All yellow, all wing on the wind. Deborah, one of the students living in another town, said that she read in the Lonely Planet that there are such-and-such thousands of species in el Salvador, and half of them are butterflies.
One night I left our hotel and walked down the dirt road to the restaurant next door to sit and watch the water. There were a couple of tourists sitting off to my right. To my left, the joint's owners and family and friends playing cards under a single dim light bulb. I sat on the low wall that met the beach and dangled my legs. Soon I was getting swarmed by little hermit crabs. I picked one up and let it crawl all over my hands and arms. Amazing and frightening all at once.
A couple of evenings I stayed in the water long enough to see the sunset. It was always worth it. The last time was unreal though. I stood and faced the ocean. To my right a soft, lovely sunset painted the horizon and spilled into the water and over the sand. To my left a huge storm cloud was rolling in with thunder and lightning. It was the craziest cloud I've ever seen. I stood there and marveled at the divided sky, soaking my feet in the warm ocean water, when cold rain began to fall on my shoulders. People started running past me to find shelter, and I just stood there and let it soak me. After awhile I walked back to our place and used the beach shower in the rain in the weather's contagious spirit of excess and extravagance. Then I jumped back onto the beach with a shirt and my camera (shirt to cover the camera) and took some pictures. That was a good night.
The bus ride to and from el Salvador was beautiful. I love long bus rides. Lately I've been thinking a lot about “coincidence.” I've been thinking that maybe the “uncanniness” in movies isn't so overdone after all. Sometimes you take a corner and cross a bridge and the muddy river comes into view just long enough to see a dark-skinned kid wearing bright red briefs jump from the banks and enter with a splash. Sometimes there are miraculous rescues. Sometimes your sister's car tips and rolls and she comes out untouched. Sometimes birds fly overhead at just the right moment. Sometimes a girl walks beneath your bus window wearing a shirt that says, in English, “Love Exists,” when you most need it.
Breathcatching Moment
In Santa Clara there are a number of homeless people that wander around drunk asking for money. Some of them are old couples. It makes me wonder what happened. Did they lose everything to debt and modernization? Were they abandoned by their own children? Yesterday I passed one of them on the way home from church. This time it was the old lady. She was sitting on the steps of a shop, gathering herself like she'd just woken up. When I walked by she looked up—her face was covered in scabs and crusted blood, her nose obviously broken—and smiled the most sincere good-morning smile. There was a distant, hazy look in her sunlit eyes, like she was just coming to from a good dream or a deep memory of happiness, which overflowed with her into the present and ended up pointed in my direction. For a moment she looked as tender and blessed as a loved mother. I felt weak in the knees, wanted to fall down and honor her “muchness”, to praise and thank her for what she'd unwittingly done for my own hopes. I know God lives.
Today Ramonita came up to me and grabbed my hands so I would lift her. So I tossed her up a few times and put her down, and she started to tickle me. We often play a game of who can keep from laughing the longest, or rather, who will laugh first. “Cosquillas,” she said, drawing the word out as she tickled me. “No tengo,” I said through clenched teeth. “Las vendi en el mercado.” “Por cuanto?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. “Cien quetzales cada una. Son buenas cosquillas.” I heard Suzana laugh out in the hallway.
I think I felt a small earthquake at like three in the morning.
What is up with the doors?
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