thereturnofscipio.com

Spending more than 14 years teaching, traveling, exploring, hitch-hiking, writing and backpacking alone while wandering far and away from the US has a certain effect upon a man. I cannot yet say whether all that hanging around in “wild weird climes lying most sublime, out of space, out of time” is a good thing or a bad thing. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was a life lived in all the fullness of my imagining.

There was the near shipwreck off the Mosquito Coast of Honduras. There were the animal encounters of a personal kind. There were the many exotic diseases. There was that unpleasant introduction to Venezuelan quicksand. There were the all too frequent run-ins with men with guns. There were dinners aplenty with foreign ambassadors and their families. There was cigar and whiskey sharing among high and mighty CEOs. There were days spent lost wandering around jungles and Andes. There were the many treks to ancient ruins and remains of vanished civilizations. There was the unplanned and quite unwelcome meeting with some Guatemalan communist guerrillas.

There were the fantasies of lost cities and gold mines far distant. There were the Indian tribes—some friendly, some not. I am surprised I survived it all. It was a time well and truly spent. And such things still beckon, a call from lands south of the Rio Grande that will one day pull me back. When, I cannot say. But for now memory serves. It has a habit of pulling me back to days long passed.

Some years ago I was looking for a gold mine in Honduras. Or a lost city. Or both. Anyway, I was somewhere in the province of Colon walking from the Sico River toward the Mosquito Coast.

The trail was muddy and difficult. I ended up in a village along some unnamed jungle river. The locals were hospitable and curious, and they competed among themselves to see who would provide me with a place to camp. The winner was the Jones family.

The Jones clan had migrated to Honduras almost 100 years before, first from England, then Jamaica, then the Bay Islands. They settled in the jungles of the province of Olancho on the Honduran mainland. There they contracted ‘the gold disease,’ la fiebre de oro. Over the ensuing decades the life and vitality of this family were drained away in the fruitless search for gold. When I met them they had so intermingled with the locals that they had forgotten much about their heritage; they had become pure Honduran.

My first night there the Jones family invited me into the hut for a dinner of rice, beans and iguana. The unlucky reptile was pulled alive from a cotton sack and slaughtered then and there.

It screamed and writhed while the knife sliced it open but at last gave up the ghost. I had never eaten iguana and hoped never to eat it again. Its flesh was oily and repellent, and nothing like chicken.

The Jones family talked of gold, of nuggets seen and unseen, of rivers somewhere deep in the jungle that shimmered from the glint of golden ore that lay beneath the surface waters. They fed me hints of a strange god, a monkey god of white gold buried by the Chorotega Indians when they heard of the approach of the conqueror of the Aztecs, Cortez. The Jones swore to me that they could find that monkey god. They wanted me to go with them. We would get some rifles (”for the crocodiles”) and some canoes and head out on the river in a search for white gold. Though their eyes had the look of madness, I said I would think about it. It turned out that I declined the expedition, to my occasional regret. I know perfectly well what happens when a group of well-armed gold seekers finds gold. Men die.

After a few days I walked further into the jungle to find another member of the Jones clan, the patriarch really. He had a house some 20 miles away. It took some doing to get there. There was no path but only a muddy trail used by horses and mules. There was no way I could find the house by myself, so I hired a mule and driver who knew the route.

The driver carried a live iguana. This was to be my dinner, alas.

It took some time getting there as I knew nothing of the ways of mules. I halted the beast on a particularly muddy trail 100 feet above a small river. I asked the mule driver if the animal could make it, as the trail was a bit narrow. I was worried that the creature would slip and throw me off. He said, “No. This mule has never fallen.”

Half way across the animal slipped and fell. I jumped off in mid-air, having no desire for that mule to land on me and break a bunch of my bones. We both rolled over and over, finally coming to rest in the muddy river. Naturally I was furious at the beast and at the driver. I got up and punched the mule hard right below his eye. The driver was horrified, but I was now content. The debt had been paid.

I walked the rest of the way.

The patriarch’s house was remarkable. It lay along a stream that he had dammed to supply power to the machines that sluiced for gold. He also had built a crude canal system. There were several houses; the patriarch Jones and his wife put me up in their own. After the ghastly dinner of iguana I asked them about the tale of the monkey god. For the next hour Jones spoke of treasure, of conquistadors infected with gold fever, of Indians hiding their precious god from rapacious Spaniards, of doomed expeditions lost while seeking the monkey god of gold.

When he was done Jones saw the crucifix around my neck. He asked to touch it, and then held it between his thumb and forefinger in the same way that I hold the Rosary. His eyes sparkled as he exclaimed, “It is gold!” The others in the house gathered around to touch the crucifix. They were not entranced by what it represented but by the golden ore of which it was made.

I left the next day. The driver came with me. We both walked as that clumsy mule stayed at the house. Back again at the first Jones’ house I set my tent and marveled at lives wasted away in forsaken jungles in the quest for shiny metal.

Yet there is something to it after all. The tale of that monkey god has never ventured far from my thoughts. Dream-like and ghostly, it wanders in and out of my consciousness, as tempting and as alluring as a fantasy of a beautiful woman.