Southbound

Saturday
6.28.2008

Today does not make sense without reference to the previous two days. I'm in sync with the universe. For six months I had worried that I would miss the birth of my first nephew. After four days in Toronto at the 15th Annual International Boys School Conference (See link on the right side of the screen) I returned on Wednesday night. By 10am the next morning Amanda Keith was in labor and my beautiful nephew was born at 5:52pm. Friday I had the entire day to pack for Belize/Central America and that night Sarah and I got to have an unforgettable dinner together at Cafe Nonna. I was badly missing "baby Joseph" Friday afternoon, but I got to see him for two hours (I probably cradled him for an hour while he slept). See video links on the right.

This brings me to Saturday. The trip down to Belize was simple. In Dallas, Texas I had a two hour layover and rode the Skylink train around the entire airport twice. It was like the monorail at Disney World - lots of free fun. From the Skylink I could see Los Colinas skyscrapers overlapping a slender University of Dallas Tower, silhouetted against the white bulk of Texas Stadium, that in turn overlapped downtown Dallas about 10 miles away. So many seminal growing up experiences at UD seemed, simultaneously, close and far from my memory.



Most of the flight from Dallas to Belize City was shrouded in humid, low floating clouds. I had not been this studious since college and had diligently penetrated the forest of words in my lonely planet guidebook. Did you know, for instance, that 40% of Belize's land is protected in some way - that Belize practically invented eco-tourism - or, that the Caste Wars of the 1840s have everything to do with the great variety of ethnicities that colors the country? All of a sudden we burst through the bottom of the clouds and the white gave way to a vast expanse of vivid coastal green, pock marked with shimmering swamps.

Belize international airport does not deserve its name - it's the smallest airport I have ever been to I think. Surprisingly, or appropriately perhaps, I had met a Toronto couple on the plane ride who were headed for Ambergris Caye to close on their condo. Lucky them.

My first impression of the country was a collision of the senses. I felt the wind rush off the Caribbean, I felt the salt stick to my skin, I smelled that salty coastal dew, I saw the dark skin of the Afro-Caribs who dominate the Belize City population, I rejoiced at the sight of the brightly painted buildings and signs, and I heard the din of multiple languages. Suddenly, upon my arrival, all those words, those symbolic black and white abstractions, became instantly enfleshed, knit up by bones and blood and history. This man stamping my passport may have had ancestors who canvassed for votes which led to Belize's independence in 1981, who had ancestors who survived the brutal British suppresion of Mestizo resistance in the Caste Wars of the 1840s, whose ancestor intermarried with a British Mahogany logger in the 1750s, who had ancestors who worshipped with Spannish missionaries throughout the early 1600s, who had post-classic Mayan ancestors who witnessed the first bloody conquest of the Belizean Mayans in 1544, whose ancestors quarried stones to build the high-classic temple complex of Lamanai in 650AD at the height of the Mayan civilation. And so on . . . before memory.




Zac Hood picked me up at the airport. Cars sped down dusty roads past shacks and brightly painted dilapidated houses. A shocking number of people biked everywhere and many people walked these dangerous roads, often frighteningly bottle-necking. We rendezvoused with David, Georgia, and Clara. Clara took us to the Baboon (i.e. Howler Monkey) sanctuary. An old, strong, thin, dark, seemingly withered, bearded, man guided us into the sanctuary and the alpha male Howler Monkey answered his calls with deafening whoops.




Everywhere armies of Belize's most productive citizens, the leaf-cutter ants marched with huge photosynthetic loads on their backs. On the forest floor they had cut a dirt highway through the thick, dead-leaf cover. Clara treated us to Belikin Beer, locally brewed in Ladyville, which boasts a Mayan ruin on its label. David, Zac, and I sped north to Corozal Town, racing the setting sun and swerving around slower moving vehicles in the night. The stars were magnificent, even out of the car windows, and my readings came back to me - how, according to the account in the Popol Vuh, the three stars in Orion's belt are recreated in the arrangement of three Mayan temple around a central plaza, emodying the three mountains and hearths of the cosmos that sprang up from the watery void at the beginning of creation.

The internet cafe is closing up for lunch, I guess. More to come! And hopefully less wordy.

- Andrew