The guts of the Mind Fish

Many people ask me why I have not written anything since August.  I fumble and excuse with poorly rehearsed lines, confusing myself as to why my spool of memories has failed.  With a familiar start I realise almost four months have passed since I made the decision to leave Guatemala and re-enter the western world.  So many philosophies, so many moments, unrecorded.  They dance underneath my eyelids, taunting me with half-formed answers.  I reach to grab them and my fingers close over empty air, the moment vanquished.

The truth is, every time I sit down to write, a Mind Fisherman, high up in the clouds, stabs his hook through my skull and pulls, hard, until I find myself floating several feet above the ground and unable to reach the keyboard.  There I stay, sometimes flailing, sometimes still, waiting for the fisherman to either pull me up for inspection or release me back into the wild. 

For months, I have been the subject of examination by those above, who comb my brainwaves for meaty morsels, judge me on the beauty and fleshiness of my thoughts, while I stare at them with shiny circle eyes. 

After each encounter I am left confused and decompressed, with a hole in the head, leaking words in a stream of empty metaphor and overly descriptive expression. I am fit only for laughter or tears, or both, in a manic combination of emotion too strong to withhold.




But for now, I am free.  Finally I am able to finger those thoughts, squishing them and rolling them in search of meaning.

America... America was, well... not so bad, actually.

I enjoyed myself.  I made a lot of friends.  I'll probably go back.  But I'm not in a rush.

Most Americans are wonderful people.  They have travellers, just like the rest of the world.  Except this generation of travellers all have the same passport.

They don't seem to mind that every town looks the same.  The landscape is, as they say, awesome.

We went to some festivals unlike anything I've ever seen.  We drove around with a group of kids from Indiana.  We stayed high, high up in the mountains.  We ran along deserted beaches.  In three months, we stayed in just three hotels.  The rest of our beds were donated by the seemingly endless generosity of the locals.

America certainly is the country of superlatives.  Biggest.  Wildest.  Most Generic.  Craziest.  I saw a lot of crazy things, actually.  Naked people riding bicycles through the desert.  A greenhouse brimming with fresh marijuana.

San Francisco, the city that everyone raves on about, was mediocre.  A city, really.  A nice one, sure, but full of twitching meth-addicts and shiny-shoed fashion victims, alongside slow-walking tourists and over-priced chips.  I smiled blandly as person after person warned me of the horrific dangers of Mexico, and stared at the corner of Union Square where a German tourist was shot dead outside Macy's department store the month previously. 

I admired very much the hippy mentality of northern California.  There, amidst stunning mountain backdrops and small, colonial towns, a subculture has become a monoculture and everyone buys organic.  The people are unbelievably jovial, love yoga and religiously re-fill their shampoo bottles at the corner store.

But despite the similar vital statistics, I did not fit in, even there. Everywhere I went, I found ego to be too huge a part of life.  People seemed obsessed with labelling themselves.

There, you do not just like yoga, you are 'a yogi'.  You are not just an independent, free-spirited woman. You are A Goddess.  You cannot say, "I like to paint" without someone replying, "Ahh, so you are An Artist".  And everyone asks you what your star sign is, and nods knowingly when you reply.  Even if you lie.

To be honest, harsh though it sounds, I just got bored of people talking about themselves.  Perhaps it was just the people I met.  Ironic really, for me to write this in a blog of My Take On Life.  But at least I see the satire.

Despite this, I loved almost everyone that I met.  Some of them were incredibly inspiring.  Take Jay - the man who picked us up as hitch-hikers on the road from Yosemite. He had just finished scattering his wife's ashes to the wind.  I sat down in the front seat of the car and promptly broke the urn.  For some reason this meant something to him and he drove us six hours west to Santa Cruz and gave us a bed for the night.

He talked of his struggle to make his life his own since his wife's sudden death a year previously.  He'd started by getting up at 4am every morning.  He had pictures of a year's worth of sunrises, seen from the beach.  The light from these suns shone from his eyes as he talked.  Then he made a vow to rid himself of 'two square inches of surplus stuff' per day, in order to recover his house and his mind from a dead person's weight.  I understood every nuance.

I cooked him chickpea tagine and told him stories, and watched his face animate in front of me.  He later told me he'd started to cook again for the first time since she died.  He dropped us off in San Francisco with two new rollmats (a rather large 'two inches' he cheerfully cried), sheets hemmed by his wife, and forty bucks to buy myself a jacket.  We were left to hitch on Golden Gate Bridge, hidden by the mist and the bewilderment of a man who gave everything just for love.

Now I find myself in England.  It was, as always, almost an accident.  A split-second decision.  By coincidence or design, I can't be sure, but I arrived home exactly a year after I first left.

I've a ticket booked back for January.  I have, dare I say it, A Plan.  But of that, I will refrain from writing.  That is a morsel best conserved for me.  I currently have both feet firmly on the ground, fingers rooted to the keyboard, and mind free from molestation.  I spill my guts voluntarily, this time.

Hitch-hopping

On the first of August I leave Michael and resume the trail solita. He has his work to do, I have to explore my soul. Both of us need to do this alone.



I'm not quite alone though… Eva and her banda boyfriend Toño are heading towards Guatemala. It's with them that I find myself waiting for a lift in the rain, on the highway leading out of San Cristobal, sipping thick pozol (chocolate-tortilla drink) that sends curls of steam into the misty air.


It takes us just two days and four rides to make it to the border. We share pick up trucks with tarpaulins, small children and, on one particularly memorable ride, several hundred cans of pizza sauce, around which we contort ourselves in the storm-force winds.


I duck down to protect my face and when I raise my head I am captured by the most beautifully brief moment… a rainbow in the field next to me, hanging clean and sparkling and radiant with stunning colours, perfectly poised for a moment before it is whisked away in the slipstream.


I am left with the traces of a kaleidoscope smile on my lips.


We swerve to avoid a cow in the road.


In the next town they stop to haul a pizza oven into the back of the truck. I assume they want us to leave, but they insist they can make this work to meet everyone's needs. They spend half an hour levering the enormous hulk of metal into the back, shifting can after can after bag of pepperoni in a tetris solely designed to ensure our (relative) safety.


I do not understand why people would go to so much effort, just to make sure there are three squares of space for a few bums they've picked up, when clearly the addition of the 2-metre square pizza oven to the truck is a strain alone.


Eva says simply: "Because they can."


They drop us at a border town, where a fairground has just pulled up. The need for the pizza oven becomes clear. We are left in the flashing lights of a pathetic-looking rollercoaster and the enticing oil smells of fresh-fried churros.


For la banda, every hour can be a work hour. Toño plays drums at restaurants as we pass, begging for a few pennies to buy himself a beer. We see the same two skinny girls that we met on my birthday, twirling their fire, seeming small and out of place at the semaphoros.

We eat popcorn and hula hoop under the tinny sounds of the fair and I feel wonderful to have regained my independence.


I miss Mike but I am glad I am here alone. Crouched under the lights, echoing fairy lights from a time long gone, I realise how important it is for me to have the space to be truly me, not cramped or compromised by another.


I have a fire inside and I need to feed it. I cannot wait for Guatemala.

Nos sentamos en la calle

I turn twenty six on the twenty seventh of July. It is raining in San Cristobal de las Casas. At 6200 feet the drops fall cold and the ancient rocks of the pavement seem slicker than normal.



Michael and I spend all day looking for plush hotels and decide at the end that we'd rather spend the money on food.


Eva is here; my long-lost buddy with whom I spent December. It is wonderful to have a friend, although I've spent enough time here now that I recognise faces on the andador. We pass the evening on the slick streets, drinking maiz spirit and coconut juice out of plastic bottles and hula hooping through the puddles alongside la banda.


La banda. What a wonderful phenomenon to be part of during my travels here in Mexico.


It literally means the band, and is a term used to describe Mexico's hobos: a network of young pirates, dreadlocked, pierced, dressed in an assortment of rags. They travel their country in the back of pick up trucks, conjuring pennies to live by working the streets, the restaurants and the buses.


You're not banda unless you have a prop - a tambor drum, a fire stick, a roll of macrame bracelets. I have a hula hoop, therefore I am accepted as one of them. Whenever I travel with Eva, we listen for the sound of drums.


Like a subtle web of entertainers for the nation, these kids are always present, always audible. Their tambors sing the same rhythms in every town. Their jewellery glitters under streetlights. Traffic light junctions are fought over as the best location for fire spinning, where the perpetrators spend hours in exhaust fumes and whirls of flame, paid five pesos each by the most generous drivers.


Tonight my attention is caught by a pair of girls. Their collar bones show sharply under stained t shirts. One of them has shaved the sides of her hair and allowed the rest of it to dreadlock in a kind of parrot's tuft. The other wears a coloured scarf round her head and has eyes that move too fast. They pass a stolen cigarette between them and try to blend in. They are only seventeen.


I've seen them on the semaphoros, one with poi and the other with a fire stick. They look like they might break. They sit in the puddles like scruffy dolls, seeking their adventure in dark streets, far away from any family they may have had.


They dance well and guzzle their beer with prowess. They have the urchin look down to a T. The only thing that belies them is the nervous darting of their eyes.


I wonder where they came from…where any of them came from.


Some run, bored, from families with big homes, rejecting the streamlined world of the rich mexican for the grit of the streets. Others have no relatives at all. Some just haven't come up with anything better to do yet. These details don't appear to matter because each is accepted within the greater family of la banda.


They are the people's army; the underbelly, proudly displaying the happiness that having nothing can bring. They proclaim the alternatives: that you do not have to have a regular job, a safe house and a non-descript image to be happy.

The conditions for the movement are perfect - anyone with a grain of sense can earn money in Mexico, albeit at different rates. There is no web of legislation to climb through -- if there is, no one cares. Hitchhiking is commonplace, and pick up trucks form the greater part of Mexico's fleet.


Life on the road is exhilarating. There is no purpose to it other than to live and continue to live.


I am happy to flit in and out of the situation. Their company is interesting for a while but as Eva points out, one can become bored easily when faced with too many nights of sharing caguamons and paying for things with handfuls of change.


A stranger might look at me, hair wraps, hula hoop and holes in my clothes, and place me in their box.


For me, the difference is subtle and comes in a cup.


I am happy to have included the luxury of coffee within my budget.


For la banda, the coffee shop is on the other side of their grimy viewing window. They peer through it with interest, knowing they would never choose to fritter away hard-earned beer money on a meaningless hot beverage.

Rain splats the glass as they sit, crouched, waiting for the customer who will whisk them away.