Taking refuge in cool Cusuco

The mountains in Cusuco are so beautiful. In the dusk they are beautiful and dark in the ever-darkening sky and no camera can capture them. I have never seen so many stars before—not even that time in Maine when I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face. I can’t count those stars, could never count them, and the big aloneness of it or the old friends in my mind or the cold breeze on my bare feet make tears roll around my eyes. The stars stay up there, blinking and blurring, but the tears will not fall out.

The town lies below, like in storybooks, but not with poetic pinpricks of light: the blobs of orange light are streetlights that supervise the cars I can’t see swerving around dusty deep potholes and expose the green in the puddles I can’t see where frogs ping like a fast-paced video game. I feel homesick for this place that is not mine, knowing the cars and frogs are there. It has made itself present to me through a real expression of its essential self. Human-made, it declares, shining into the mountains covered in types of ferns that dinosaurs once ate.

The coffee we drink in Cusuco is straight from the palo, rich and warm. In the morning I dip in pieces of my puffy fried tortillas, already sugary-sweet with naranja marmelada that the cooking women have made in their homes. How, I ask them. I think, How and who and what and when and why. The jelly, I clarify. Yes, the delicious jelly. How do you make the jelly, and how do you live this life—this life that is yours and mine and not ever ours. They tell me how. They pick the fruit near their homes and boil it, they say, they add the sugar and the pectin, they say, they put it in jars when it is gelatinous and hot hot, they say, really hot. They tell me that tomatoes are out of season already, planted in January and harvested in June or July. For the tortillas, they make three slits in each—look, like this, así—to make them expand with the heat of the stove. Two of the sons of the cooking women sit on a bench, whispering to each other. One boy tells me he likes mathematics best in school. That detail seems more important than the two teachers in the school, than the hundred students in the school. Scrawny chicks huddle together under a small overhang to get out of the rain and they are more important than me getting soaked. The woman at the top of a mountain nearby has story lines in her face. But I just coo at the plants that she sells. I just offer her a leftover piece of breakfast tortilla and ask, How many years have you lived here? Forty, she says. The number weighs her down, makes her sink into a pace in my mind where she will not flit away.

In the forest our guide feeds us tart citrus fruit, guayaba, or guava, and pieces of an acidic stem that supposedly alleviates thirst. There are too many plants and too many plant names. One tree grows flowers that are an official plant of El Salvador—and that Hondurans eat fried with nationalistic glee. There are three kinds of ferns. Some vines are like wood and good for swinging. Some vines that look the same are like plants and will break under your weight. Cola de mono looks like a monkey’s hairy tail, curled towards the sun, oreja del burro is a split-open seed-pod that falls to the ground. Labios de mujer look lascivious, painted a too-bright purple. We hike to a waterfall and lie on rocks near the cold spray.

One day we get a ride down to our lodge with a family from the city who escaped for the weekend to camp in the coolness of the mountains. They talk about colonias in New Jersey they have visited and I am startled to realize a colonia is not something exclusive to here—it’s just a word. The truck’s CD player shows reggaeton music videos. The contrast between it and the truck we take to school sometimes was as great as the climate difference between the mountains and our town in its heat-trapping valley.

After a tranquil weekend, the ride home is violent—an appropriately driving rain bombards us as we squat in the back of a pickup truck. Water puddles in our clothes and stings our faces. We slide backward and forward as the truck strains to climb inclines and swung around steep downhill curves. My arms get sore from bracing myself on the side of the truck. But as we descend, the air gets thicker and warmer and the rain slows to a drizzle. Our clothes begin to dry and we lose the subdued, survivalist look of endurance. As we drive back into the colonias surrounding the center of town, we began to sing—Disney’s greatest hits. We swing our dripping, sleeve-sheathed arms to wave adios to gawking families. On foot we might have been embarrassed, but soaking, exhausted from hiking, and anxious to be home, we are glad to be united, singing, back in the gringo spotlight.