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Authors: Christopher S. Stewart
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stayed almost seventy years before, and I followed the cracks in the plaster as if they were lines of a maze. The night before, we’d arrived at La Ceiba from San Pedro Sula. On the dusty road into town, heavily armed patrols had blocked traffic, a tactic meant to deter anyone looking to cause trouble. At one point, gunshots had filled the soupy air, and I’d sunk low in my seat, expecting my door to be shot out. I sensed that I’d entered a Graham Greene novel, a world of intrigue where anything could happen. I was anxious and a little afraid, and I remembered that early on in his journey, Morde had been that way too.
La Ceiba is now a city of more than 100,000 people, but the docks that once greeted the fruit ships that brought Morde and Brown here slid sadly into the sea years ago. La Ceiba has the typical trappings of a third-world city: ambitious structures from a bygone era crammed next to shacks with metal roofs. Armed guards protect the banks, and the American fast-food restaurants—Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Popeyes. The streets are noisy with traffic and littered with garbage. The buildings fronting the water are falling down or in various stages of salty decrepitude. Gates, wrapped in concertina wire or topped with broken glass, cordon off the miniature compounds of the wealthy.
The window air conditioner thrummed, holding off the tropical heat, which is oppressive even before the sun comes up. Chris Begley, who had flown down the week before for the river trip, was snoring in the sagging twin bed next to me, unbothered by what loomed ahead. The two locals he had hired to help us on our journey would meet us later.
It was 5 a.m. We would leave in six hours. Like Morde when he first arrived, I was hot and disoriented. I threw freezing faucet water on my face and sorted through my equipment, just to make sure everything was still there. All of my notebooks and maps and pills were packed in Ziploc bags to protect against humidity and rain—and against rivers when we would have no other way of crossing but by plunging in. With all of our food supplies—spaghetti, canned sausages, pancake mix, Tang, coffee grinds—my frame pack weighed about sixty pounds. Chris’s monster green army bag was about eighty pounds, jammed with everything I had in my pack, as well as American Geographical Society topographic maps, a GPS, and a bulky satellite phone with one backup battery. The satellite phone was for emergencies, and we hoped that its battery would last us for the full trip.
As Chris slept, I went downstairs to send off some e-mails to family saying I’d made it to La Ceiba and that I wasn’t sure when they’d hear from me again. The hotel didn’t have many customers because of the overthrow, and the only people up at the time were two straight-faced men in uniforms carrying shotguns, a bored guy at the desk scribbling on a pad of paper, and a flabby black man in a Mets T-shirt and sweatpants plopped down in front of the lobby computer, the one I needed to use.
The Men Without Hats song “Safety Dance” drifted quietly through the fake gray marble lobby. It made me think of a middle school dance, long in my past. A warm nostalgia pulsed through me; it was kind of comforting, an antidote for the loneliness that had already begun creeping in. I felt old again. Where did all those years go?
When I came up behind the guy at the computer, I noticed a window open to a Web site for black singles in La Ceiba, and another window was open to a chat screen, featuring someone with the handle “hotstuffie92.” Slumped over the keyboard, he pecked at the keys in slow motion as if weighing very carefully every single letter.
Eventually, he noticed that I was watching and turned. “Is there a problem?” he asked wheezily, moving his body in front of the screen. He appeared to be in his forties. I apologized for appearing intrusive and said I was just curious how long he’d be.
“American,” he said,
La Ceiba is now a city of more than 100,000 people, but the docks that once greeted the fruit ships that brought Morde and Brown here slid sadly into the sea years ago. La Ceiba has the typical trappings of a third-world city: ambitious structures from a bygone era crammed next to shacks with metal roofs. Armed guards protect the banks, and the American fast-food restaurants—Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Popeyes. The streets are noisy with traffic and littered with garbage. The buildings fronting the water are falling down or in various stages of salty decrepitude. Gates, wrapped in concertina wire or topped with broken glass, cordon off the miniature compounds of the wealthy.
The window air conditioner thrummed, holding off the tropical heat, which is oppressive even before the sun comes up. Chris Begley, who had flown down the week before for the river trip, was snoring in the sagging twin bed next to me, unbothered by what loomed ahead. The two locals he had hired to help us on our journey would meet us later.
It was 5 a.m. We would leave in six hours. Like Morde when he first arrived, I was hot and disoriented. I threw freezing faucet water on my face and sorted through my equipment, just to make sure everything was still there. All of my notebooks and maps and pills were packed in Ziploc bags to protect against humidity and rain—and against rivers when we would have no other way of crossing but by plunging in. With all of our food supplies—spaghetti, canned sausages, pancake mix, Tang, coffee grinds—my frame pack weighed about sixty pounds. Chris’s monster green army bag was about eighty pounds, jammed with everything I had in my pack, as well as American Geographical Society topographic maps, a GPS, and a bulky satellite phone with one backup battery. The satellite phone was for emergencies, and we hoped that its battery would last us for the full trip.
As Chris slept, I went downstairs to send off some e-mails to family saying I’d made it to La Ceiba and that I wasn’t sure when they’d hear from me again. The hotel didn’t have many customers because of the overthrow, and the only people up at the time were two straight-faced men in uniforms carrying shotguns, a bored guy at the desk scribbling on a pad of paper, and a flabby black man in a Mets T-shirt and sweatpants plopped down in front of the lobby computer, the one I needed to use.
The Men Without Hats song “Safety Dance” drifted quietly through the fake gray marble lobby. It made me think of a middle school dance, long in my past. A warm nostalgia pulsed through me; it was kind of comforting, an antidote for the loneliness that had already begun creeping in. I felt old again. Where did all those years go?
When I came up behind the guy at the computer, I noticed a window open to a Web site for black singles in La Ceiba, and another window was open to a chat screen, featuring someone with the handle “hotstuffie92.” Slumped over the keyboard, he pecked at the keys in slow motion as if weighing very carefully every single letter.
Eventually, he noticed that I was watching and turned. “Is there a problem?” he asked wheezily, moving his body in front of the screen. He appeared to be in his forties. I apologized for appearing intrusive and said I was just curious how long he’d be.
“American,” he said,
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