Nature's mercy

At the beginning of October a tropical storm hits the Pacific coast of Central America and we lose sight of the sky for three weeks. It rains day and night; thick, oily drops falling heavily from cloying cloud. Several people lose their lives in mudslides and the main road into Panajachel is closed for a week.

By the time I get back from my visa run to Mexico, the lake has risen by almost a metre on top of the half metre or so already gained in the first half of the season. The entire lake edge is littered with semi-submerged houses and farms.

Trees arch gracefully from the water. Everyone has a new dock, and every dock is built precariously over the remains of others. The shops near the water in Santiago are filled to the ceiling.

There being no outlet, Lake Atitlan is vulnerable to weather and follows cycles of growth and recession that the locals meet with ancient acceptance.

If this had happened anywhere else it would have made international news, but the pace of this creep over six months of rain is too slow for today's press.

I arrive home to a considerably smaller farm. Reed islands have lodged themselves on our new dock, shielding the farm front with a wall of green. Kale lurches soggily from the shallows, the leaves of a baby lime tree barely surfacing. The lakeside path has shifted to run around the yoga shala, which used to lie twenty metres from the water's edge when I arrived at the farm in March.


At this rate, the entire farm will be under within a couple of years.


I fall into bed in the dark and wake up crawling in ants. I rip up my mattress and watch as hundreds of red leaf-cutters scatter, desperately collecting waxy white eggs and disappearing between the floorboards. Every surface blooms pale with mould. The eaves are strung with a dense network of dusty white spider's webs and my clothes are full of giant crickets.
My home has been reclaimed by the jungle.


I spend an exhausting day scrubbing and beating as much life from my belongings as I can. The rain beats rivers down the windows and the light fades through a grey imperceptibly tinged with pink.


Nico and I eat in silence in a damp rancho. With no residents at the moment the farm is strangely empty. At some point, the rain stops. I fail to notice exactly when.

I wash my dishes and walk outside.

Above me shines a star.


A small patch of the night sky overhead has cleared. It has been a long time, so I walk down to our new dock to watch from the water. The lake is glossy.


The atmosphere is light with shifting energy, the post-deluge air impeccably clean. A clear line divides the sky; on one side the nothingness of thick cloud, on the other sparkling pinpricks of light. I sit and watch for an hour as our world changes.


Like a magician, revealing his last secret, the sky is gradually unveiled. The line moves across the sky as the black hole recedes.


The wall of cloud slips behind Volcan San Pedro and at once the sky is infinite.

And, just like that, the rainy season comes to an end.

Waterlogged

We close the farm for two weeks as July swans her way in on a chariot of thunderclouds. Morale is low as the wet season's sickness sets in and the realities of living on an isolated farm, with far too much to do, become less bearable.

Besides, my visa is almost up.

Mexico calls me with her brassy tones.

A year ago, I left San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, for Lago Atitlan, Guatemala, hoping to find my truth. Now, I leave my truth to get perspective in Mexico.

Sweet symmetry.

I learned early on that to read the last page of a book first ruins the story. Thus, I usually steer clear of divination. However, before I leave I get out the medicine cards - each one with an animal and a story from Native American tradition.

The frog hops out at me, symbolising cleansing. That makes sense, I suppose, thinking with downturned mouth as my eyes trace the artwork on the card. It tells me to be careful of becoming waterlogged, caught up in emotion and logistics.

Reading this makes me nervous, as I am facing a return to San Cristobal de las Casas, my home of last summer. So much happened there and it wasn't always positive. The streets will be paved with memories. I wonder if the nostalgia will be too much.

As I hop over the border with my amphibian legs I am captivated by drifts of clouds, snagged on the furry green of the northern Guatemalan mountains. The land flattens as we cross the border and the sun burns my arm through the window. The rain starts, as usual, in the early afternoon, and I watch as the road flows down a hill.

I'm not sure what I expected but I am somewhat underwhelmed on my arrival. I quickly move through the market and the french bakery and then find myself at a loss. Although it is pleasant to return to a town I know and love, I understand instantly that I'm going to have to look elsewhere for my inspiration.

The ghost of my former self runs barefoot along a street flowing with rain, hand in hand with the ghost of my former boyfriend. But the vision raises little emotion. Perhaps my frog skin is thicker than I thought.

The restlessness of indecision plagues me for a day before I decide to simply start walking to the bus station. On the way there I pass a banda boy I said hello to in a shop earlier. I recognise him because his legs are strange in some way, the feet bent and small. He has an inviting smile under tiny glasses.

I stop to say hello again and the greeting turns into a coffee. By the end of it I have a page of scribbled notes and an instruction that starts with getting the night bus to Mexico in 45 minutes.

I'm on the move again.

Two days later and I'm in a nameless city on an unseen map, somewhere on the Gulf Coast in Northern Veracruz. I've wandered the streets and indulged in my first bit of shopping for months. I've written a poem. I'm damp.

The rain hasn't stopped since I arrived, alternating between a light, but quenching mist and furious sheets that fall so hard they fill the air with spray and turn the streets into instant rivers. At the farm, I frequently talk about how much I love the rain. Now, I remember what it's like to travel in it. Once wet, always wet, as they say. Who says? Only me, perhaps.

But its true. You just have to get used to being damp. Or sodden, as is the case during today's visit to the El Tajin ruins. The site is different to the other ruins I've seen; so different in fact that archaeologists cannot understand who built it. The temples are covered in spirals.

My attempts to dodge raindrops fall flat as I feel my trousers sticking to my legs. I try to evoke images of bustling streets in pre-Colombian Mexico, building the temples up in my mind, drawing energy through my feet as I slosh through the puddles. I sit down on what was once someone's house to eat a huge mango and I think about how clean everything is underneath the water.

After two hours I collect my pack from the entrance with a sigh and trudge through the rain to the motorway, trying in vain to mentally ascertain an onward route from a plan that doesn't exist, on a map that I have never seen.

I duck into a collectivo going to the nearest town and wipe the steam from the window with my sleeve.

I see a hotel and impulsively tell the driver to stop. The room is cheap but has hooks to dry my clothes. I make myself some guacamole and ground down, pulling myself together, solidifying my thoughts from their fluid-flowing escape. When I am satisfied and more-or-less dry, I go out.

It is still raining.

I am wandering the streets of this new town, trying to make the most of my decision to stay, when I remember about the medicine card and laugh out loud.

Waterlogged. They have to be joking.

Photography

I am put in charge of the garden. The soil is volcanic sand, hard as stone. As a result, I pass many hours forcing shovels into the ground and fingering through manure.

Scorpions curl quivering tails from underneath bedspreads, erotically poised to sting those who worry about them. Nick has a near-miss with a baby fer-de-lance, one of the most deadly vipers in the world. I continue to walk around in bare feet, worrying more about flattening the tree frogs than about painful death.


I spend days with a seventy-five year old man who says he is releasing so much energy right now that he has to masturbate three to four times a day. Horrified, we ask him how he gets away with it, whilst sharing a room with five other men. He tells us he is "quite effective" as long as he lies on his front.


The rains have started early and the lake is already full of clumping strands of algae, fed by the rushing run-off pulling agro-chemicals from the land into the water. I no longer swim.


I live in the mezzanine attic of a small, wooden cabin called Amor. To get to my bed I have to climb a ladder and duck under the eaves, crawling on my knees until I trip into my futon bed. I ease myself into sleep with candles to brighten the light-less night.


I take my first day off in the town of San Pedro, on the other side of our volcano, two hours away by boat. I first came here almost two and a half years ago and fell in love. This time it feels strange to meet friends who have been drinking all day. I am woken up by the yelps of a couple having sex in our dormitory. My fond memories of before contrast sharply with my discomfort of the memories of today, and I realise how much life has changed.

One of the guests tries to move seats in the sauna and grabs the metal chimney. His hand sizzles and he leaps outside, naked, screaming in pain. We try to take him seriously as we avoid looking at his swinging ballsack. We pull together our painkillers and smear his hand with aloe cut from the garden.


When in town, I buy twenty metres of black tubing to make and sell hula hoops. As I descend the steep hill down to the dock, tube heavy over my shoulder, a man actually stops his ascent purely to laugh at me. A few weeks later I see the same man in another town. I don't think he recognises me without the tubing. Regardless, he once again begins to laugh. I look down. Huge yellow genie pants, bulging backpack, hula hoop and djembe drum, all balanced awkwardly as I attempt to suck smoothie from a sandwich bag. Forget him. I make myself laugh.


We are working in the kitchen when we notice that fifty or so wasps have entered through the gap in between the windows and the roof. Within an hour they have all spontaneously died. I uncover two of them in my grated carrot.


We have to piss in one toilet and shit in another. We frequently discuss how difficult this is. Once a week Nick has to stir the number 2 toilet tank. It may disgust, but we're some of the only people that don't dump their sewage in the lake.


Twelve ladies and their children walk the path from Chakaya, the nearest village, barefoot and sparkling like jewels in their beautiful woven costumes. They have come to sing for the farm director's birthday. Singing develops into a church service, recruiting us to evangelist hoards. I stay in the kitchen and make mango buttercream.


I am woken frequently by the cries of a dog who has worms and howls as he drags himself along the ground. He was called Gary, until we found out he doesn't have a penis. Now he answers to Gariela.


We get high one night by drinking pure cacao. We drum and dance like sorcerers in strobes of candlelight.


And then we pause… for a moment… in the electricity-free night….

Look up at the sleeping cone-shadow of Volcan San Pedro, silently eating the stars.

Owls bassline the forest symphony with eerie, flute-like notes, toads with cartoonlike feet expanding their throats in reply.

Fireflies flick along the mountainside in dissonant sparkle, spotlighting our secret arena.

Outtakes

My mind flicks images like film memories. I close my eyes and watch the last six weeks flash by in a montage I'd give anything to record.

   Scaling the pyramids of Palenque in the searing midday heat, jungle rising on all sides under a deep, indigo sky.


   Crouching next to the fire in our borrowed, three bedroom house, burning pine copal incense and a list of all the negativity we want to spring clean from our heads.


   A moment's interrupted sleep on a concrete patio on the beach, four-way-sandwiched between a rollmat, a mosquito-net, Michael, and a love-deprived cat, who shows his appreciation with a sharp-clawed massage and purrs as loud as the waves behind.


   Rejecting Saturday night drinking in San Cristòbal de las Casas, in favour of apple juice and mariachi in the square and a packet of ham for the street dogs.


   Eating termites from a jungle tree, mouth bizarrely filling with the taste of buttery, peppered carrots.


   Laughing as the heavens open on the first day of the rainy season and squealing with delight and blessed relief as I am soaked to the bone. Retiring to a hammock under the shelter of a rustling pelapa roof, darkness so thick I am aware of my friends only from the sound of their breathing. The evening strobe lighting - so familiar now - flashes images of my swinging feet in snapshot stills.


   Running through a forest that blooms a green carpet in three days of solid rain.

   Hopping the fence to the restricted area of the ruins of Monte Alban; the highest pyramid of all. Being ordered to climb down. The surreality of the pale brown, pyramid studded landscape far below, as if it belongs to the future rather than thousands of years in the past.

   Winning my first ever game of chess in style on a home-made board (card, marker pen and nail varnish). Subsequently winning again.

   Breakfasting on pork tortas by the side of the road, from plates that have "unimpressive" printed around the edges.

   Watching the live chicken stalls in the covered market, birds passed upside down by their legs to bargaining old ladies. Shock deepening as we compare this apparently cruel treatment to the western style 6-to-a-box, beaks-cut-off factory tradition. We buy a bag of fake meat and retreat.

   Crumbling fresh-baked cookies in front of a log fire, clothes steaming, rain teeming.

   Running after my inebriated friend to save her from the clutches of a man. Feeling my feet slide from beneath me. Smacking the stones of the polished pavement with outstretched hand and smashing bracelets.

   Sitting on a bench in the rain watching the embroidered skirts of the Mayan ladies, like colourful dolls, crouched in front of piles of vegetables and coal-grilled corn.

   Plunging my hands into giant sacks of dry black beans, cool and liquidlike.

   The dampness of the sheets around Michael as he moans with the aches of Dengue fever. Reversed roles when I contract a stomach infection the following week.


   The utter silence of a mountain morning, lit by the ethereal beams of sunlight through a tent door.

   Burying feet deep into sand the exact shade and fine texture of wholewheat flour, lapped by coral-slowed, translucent waves.


   Running through the drenching rain in San Cris, where the cobbled streets flow like rivers and the lightning freezeframes the mountains around us; fairy lights in the central square twinkling through the blurred darkness.

Rain, rain, clean my brain

In the middle of May, the rains began.



Until that point, the world held its breath. It pushed as far as it could under an airless environment -- began to swallow down on barren lungs.


Everything was brown. Plants were skeletons that crumbled at the touch. Even those that remained green -- banana palms, coconut, papaya -- seemed almost frozen in a vacuum that pulverised the life from us.


We flailed limply, like damp dishcloths, drinking in water by the gallon only to vaporise it almost instantly from our pores.


In Mexico, the dry season, although one of the wettest on record, was the only reality I could conceive of. It had always been dizzyingly hot. Rivers had always been dusty. I had always balanced the dry heat of the coast with an escape to the cool, pine-clad mountains forming the spine of the country.


But in the month before the rains came, I barely moved. Things stopped quietly around me, without me really noticing. Wasps lurched drunkenly from one melting pastry to another. Ice cream paused briefly in its frozen state, before giving in to the shimmery air in a sticky slide of white along the forearms. Even birdsong became lazy.


When on the coast, the only way to survive was to stay under cover. Ideas came and went, too slippery for the lazy thinker to clasp his sweaty fingers around.


The world around me and within me was pregnant. Pregnant and uncomfortable, with all the things that could be and that weren't.


Energy built up and intensified and waited; steam in a closed kettle, whistling with impatience.

My head pounded.

And then, in one day, everything changed.


I was at a petrol station at the time, on the side of the carretera running down the Pacific coast, having just crossed into Chiapas, the southernmost state. We were packed in the back of film-maker Dan's van, sulking on the bunk under the weight of the cloying air. I had stepped out for a little respite and to clean the windows. The grease on them almost obliterated the waving palms and swelling mountains taking over the landscape with heavily approaching footsteps.


I had just picked up the bucket, much to the amusement of the macho service men, who hollered and stared as I took their job from them.


Within less than a minute I was soaked to the point of dripping. Or was it flowing? Hard to say. It was more that me and the water were one and the same; I was wetter than I would have been if I had just climbed fully clothed from a pool.

The air was my sea. Around me, people fled like animals from a fire.

Dan banged on the window, urging me to get inside.

I just stared at the sky, blinking the water from my eyes and feeling the streams running down my cheeks.


This rain was to me the sweetest gift in a long stream of beautiful moments. I had waited for a long time. With it came the release of a million trapped thoughts and the relaxation of muscles turned taught by stagnant energy.


Bizarrely, I remained the only person outside on the petrol forecourt, washing the windows with soap that slid off the sodden glass in an instant, laughing at the ridiculousness of all those damp souls hiding under shelter, staring at me with confused faces.


The interest they offered me evidently discarded memories of just hours earlier, when they had all hung desperately from car windows, tongues flapping in the wind like dogs, or fleshy sails breached wide to catch the wind.

The concrete soon ran with inches of warm water that sluiced residue from roads in greasy channels.


Eventually these new rivers would find their way to fields, where earth lay waiting, imitating rocks, anticipating the day when the water would release their particles in crumbling mini-avalanches.


Under that earth lay seeds, dormant, parched. Many were dead.


But for some, the water brought life. As I jumped up and down in the Petrol Station Lake, tiny proteins started forming within them, deep below the ground. All over Mexico, seeds began to germinate.


By the time I climbed, sodden but happy, into Dan's van, laying a towel on the bunk to catch my drips, things had already started to grow.

The windows were sparkling and so was I. I watched the mountains stand straighter, like pictures of evolution from monkey to man, becoming more confident as we progressed, and yet smudged into doubt by the rivers of water that raced in diagonals down the windows.


Water dripped through holes in the roof. The bunk grew damp. The road became rapids, but the cars did not slow down.


And in my head, the thoughts that had been hanging unattached like dust for so many months began to congeal, like the earth in the fields.

Within them, awaking from the incubation of many months, things began to germinate.