Chapter 6: Ecuador

CHAPTER 6: ECUADOR

After the bar closed, the rugby club bought an old duplex and opened a clubhouse in New Orleans, not too far from Maple Leaf Bar. Barry, a rugby player who had rented Steve's room in Spilfters', was hosting his bachelor party in the clubhouse . Two guys with shotguns came in, had everybody lie on the floor, and robbed everybody and everything - including tv, stag films, pot, and any hard liquor. We still had keg beer.  When the police came, everybody had a different description of how many robbers, what kind of guns, what they were wearing, which way they came in, how they left, ...

During my career I taught on five continents. Each place I lived inspired different emotions,  and each changed me. If I had come to each experience at a different time in my life, my feelings about that country, and the job there would have been different. My first overseas teaching job was in Ecuador. It was a fantastic experience. Perhaps because it was first, Ecuador became very special. I continue to visit it regularly. My daughter was born there.

In the spring of 1979 I was separated from my first wife. Wally, who is mentioned in chapter two for going through Central America with me, saw an advertisement on a bulletin board at the University of New Orleans for teachers in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He told me about the job. I was restless to get out of town. I had been teaching for three years at the same school where I did a teaching assistantship. I was teaching the same subject, fifth grade. My wife and I were separated. She had moved away. The head of the school said he would give me a leave of absence for a year. I interviewed, got the job, and was on my way to Guayaquil for a year to teach fourth grade.

The school director told me he would arrange for a plane ticket at a travel agent in New Orleans. The school guidance counselor called me from Guayaquil and asked me to bring peanut butter and flaked coconut. When I went to pick-up my ticket the travel agent told me, “The school hasn’t paid its bill. You need to pay for the ticket.” Phone communication with Ecuador was not easy, and this was a couple decades before email.

I had rented out the house my wife and I bought in an attempt to salvage a failing relationship through home ownership. My job had been given to someone else. I had a bag packed with a lot of peanut butter and flaked coconut. I bought the ticket and got on the plane.

I left New Orleans on a steamy June morning. The school year in Guayaquil ran from June through February. The director met me at the airport. His home had several bedrooms. He and his wife were hosting the school counselor and their son and daughter-in-law who worked at another school in Guayaquil. 

The school had been the English language section of a much larger school that also had a Spanish section and a bi-lingual section.  The larger school had gotten a grant from the US Government for the English language section. Concerns that the money was not being used to adequately support the English language section grew over the years. The English language section was encouraged by the US government to split off, and it did the year I arrived. The new location was on the fourth floor of a downtown office building. Because there was no outside play area nor place for lunch, the school day was from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. For half a day every two weeks the students were bussed to a playground for physical education.

I would ride to work with the director in the morning and take a public bus home. Before going home I would often have lunch at a restaurant on the four lane avenue that ran through Guayaquil down to the Guayas River. There were outside tables where I could enjoy the daily luncheon special and passing merchants who would be selling everything from ocelots to chiclets. Often a child would come by carrying another child whose legs were horribly deformed. I later learned these crippled children had often been intentionally crippled to provide the child with a profession, begging. Also there was usually an older German fellow in the restaurant. We would chat. It became evident that he fled Germany sometime toward the end of World War II and was possibly a war criminal. Although Guayaquil reminded me a lot of New Orleans because of climate and being situated on a river with a lively party oriented population, it was a world apart.

I entered the country on a tourist visa and worked illegally for awhile. To become legal, I had to leave the country to obtain a work visa. The school arranged for me to go with two teachers from the larger school we had split from who had a similar problem. We were driven with a lawyer to an Ecuadorian consulate in Peru where a work visa could be obtained. It was a long days journey each way with a border crossing, but the lawyer knew how to make things go smoothly. It was not her first illegal worker rodeo.

My fellow teachers were from the United States, friendly, and attractive. They had just found an apartment. It had three bedrooms. By the end of the trip they had decided I would be an acceptable roommate and offered me the third bedroom. I eagerly accepted. Things had gotten a little weird at the director’s house. His wife had gone back to the U.S. The school counselor, who was keeping the peanut butter as his personal stash and wanted flaked coconut because it was too hard to flake the very abundant coconuts found in Guayaquil, had moved into the director’s bedroom. The director’s son and daughter-in-law seemed to be oblivious to the change in sleeping arrangements. The wife was expected back soon, so as much as I was interested in seeing first hand how that was going to play out, I moved and set up house with two attractive adventurous teachers. I had been legally separated for about three months. 

During my college days I became interested in Erickson’s theory of human development. I believe that I feel this theory playing out personally in my life. As the relationship that became my first marriage fell apart, mental constructs that created my sources of trust, shame, initiative, industry, identity, and ultimately intimacy had to be rebuilt. When I arrived in Ecuador, I felt I was well on my way in most of those departments and not in a hurry on the emotional intimacy front. 

I moved in and was getting along very nicely with my two new roommates. We had a lot in common being teachers, ex-pats from the same country, speaking very poor Spanish, and liking an evening Cuba libre or dos. We were cautious about how the whole roommate thing could be if romance got involved, so we were restrained. One of my roommates was dark haired with a Natalie Wood look to her. The other was taller and a kind of Lisa Kudrow look. I’ll call them Natalie and Lisa. Natalie was the one I was more attracted to. She was a little older and seemed to have no romantic interest in me.

We shared stories about where we had already traveled in Ecuador. I told my roommates about a lovely stretch of near deserted beach in Jaramijo, a little fishing village outside of Manta. Jaramijo consisted of little more than a restaurant perched on the side of a cliff overlooking the beach where colorful fishing boats were rolled out of the ocean by teams of fishermen who wrestled the large boats out of the surf on wooden logs. The restaurant served incomparably fresh fried sea bass and cold beer. You could camp out on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean within crawling distance of the restaurant. After living together for about three weeks we were going on a field trip to Jaramijo.

We left on a Friday afternoon and arrived in Manta a little before sunset. We set up camp on a cliff overlooking the ocean and gathered firewood. After the fire roared to life, we opened the rum bottle and were well into telling stories about everything from our pasts to our current students and administrators. The sparks from the fire floated into the night sky and mixed with the universe of stars.  We felt safe and glorious to be alive perched on a cliff above the world’s biggest ocean surrounded by stars and the sound of the surf gently rolling to shore beneath us.

Natalie excused herself to stroll out into the scrub and answer nature’s call. As soon as she passed into the dark. Lisa came and sat beside me. She put her hands on my cheeks and kissed me.

I kissed her back. We heard Natalie coming back through the scrub brush. Lisa stood up, winked at me, and said she had to use the facilities. Natalie passed Lisa as one returned and the other moved into the dark. Natalie sat down next to me, put her hand behind my head, pulled me to her, and kissed me deeply. The earth moved a little.

Lisa sensed things had changed when she came back to the fire. Natalie and I started sleeping together. Our relationship with Lisa was unraveling . We would still do things together and she was always welcome to come along, but it was different. She got an Ecuadorian boyfriend. We would hang out some with them and his friends. Our Spanish was bad, so it was a little awkward. Some of his friends started hanging around our house when he was visiting. We didn’t feel the need to entertain them, but it was uncomfortably intrusive. Our relationship soon hit a point of open hostility when a parrot I bought from one of the street vendors escaped the cage. It was a little aggressive, so I was letting it calm down some before trying to get it back in the cage. In that time period it perched in Lisa’s closet and relaxed over a good bit of her wardrobe. I found him in the toilet soon after that. Lisa swore she didn’t do it, but to this day I’m not so sure she didn’t put out a hit on the parrot which one of her boyfriend’s buddies carried out.

I started spending most weekends in Quito. There was a rugby club there which had a game among whomever showed up on Sunday mornings. The team was started by Huw from the chapter about Rugby World Cup press credentials. I would leave work at one and be at the Guayaquil airport by two. I would jump up and down in the middle of a crowd of people to get the attention of the TAME agent writing out the tickets for the flights to Quito. I would put a twenty dollar bill in my hand and usually get on a flight within an hour or two.

Flights were every thirty minutes. They cost $35 at most. I went from an often sweltering lively city perched (literally on stilts in places) on the banks of the Guayas River to the quieter  chilly  mountain valley city of Quito two miles above sea level nestled among the snow-capped volcanoes in the Andes. Natalie would usually stay in Guayaquil. The first time I did this I went on information that there was a bar in Quito called El Pub where the rugby team hung-out.

I showed up one Friday afternoon in September with a small backpack and asked the Germanic looking ex-pat behind the bar if he knew how I could get in touch with the Quito Rugby Club. Gerhard turned out to be the Austrian owner of the bar and a member of the team. He offered me a beer and an upstairs storage room as a place to sleep. He said most of the team would be in later that evening. As I met the team that night, they were all amazed that Gerhard had offered me a place to stay and even more amazed that he had given me a free beer.

I soon met John, the only other player from the U.S. We became fairly inseparable on weekends. We would meet at El Pub after I arrived, have a couple drinks, and then taxi to the Lord Byron, another ex-pat bar. After drinks there we would stroll down to Dorothy’s, another ex-pat bar. It was usually rather late and Dorothy didn’t mind us singing to the few customers she had left.  

The next morning we would get up around 9 and hitchhike until a bus passed us going to the mountain town of Papallacta. Carolyn and I still try to go to Papallacta every year when we go to Ecuador for our business. It has changed a lot. When John and I first went, the road was dirt. From two miles high in Quito, the dusty trail climbed another two thousand feet to cross over the eastern range of the Andes before winding down five hundred feet to the tiny village of Papallacta and then on into the Amazon basin. When two buses passed each other, everyone made the sign of the cross. 

One time we got picked up by a flat bed eighteen wheeler heading into the jungle for logs. The driver said we could sit on the back. When he let us off in Papallacta an hour later, we were beat to hell and had dust in places we had to wonder, “How did it get way up there?” 

From the main dirt road heading to Tena and the jungle you had a two mile hike up a hill to a dairy farm. The owner of the farm had created a twenty by thirty foot thermal swimming pool with a few thatched changing rooms. The area was full of thermal springs. On the two mile hike up to the dairy, the stream steamed as it ran through the lush green hill side scattered with dairy cattle and the occasional snow capped volcano. For less than $5 you could swim in the pool and enjoy all the fresh milk and cheese you cared to consume. 

About 3 pm we would head back to Quito for what should have been an early night because Sunday was rugby practice. Practice was at a semi-international school called Colegio Americano. The school had a site on a hill across the valley from the volcano Pichincha which loomed over the city. It would erupt in 1998 covering Quito in ash for several months. People who showed up would split in two sides which was usually Spanish speaking on one team and English on the other. The French players could pick.  One of the older British ex-pats, who wasn’t too hungover from Saturday night, would ref, and we would play for an hour. Afterwards we would meet at La Fuente, an outdoor cafe on Amazonas. Double decker buses rolled by and the view of Pichincha hadn’t been destroyed yet by the hideous multi-story mess that would spring up across the street.  Liter bottles of Pilsener lager cost fifty cents and large portions of fries weren’t much more.

The afternoon would be spent in enjoying the sun and the passing parade of tourists and indigenous while getting pleasantly buzzed. There were always new people joining and some leaving, so there were things to celebrate or drink farewell to. The upcoming season was discussed. We played Bogota and Lima in a home and away series. Occasionally a touring team would come through.

I had been doing this for a few weeks. Natalie usually stayed in Guayaquil. She knew my routine in Quito. She was saving money to travel when her job finished. Had Natalie and I talked about being faithful, I think I would have waffled my answer. I wasn’t ready to trust another woman; much less, think I should be trusted.

On my birthday weekend I went to Quito. There was a teacher party that Pat, a tall red headed Geordie (person from Newcastle) who was working as an electrician in the oil field, knew about. A teacher party was  a loose connection of English speaking ex-pat teachers and some host country teachers getting together in someone’s apartment to drink too much, dance, tell personal stories of how they came to be in Quito, brag about travel experiences, explore the intricacies of the profession we loved, and somewhere in there decide if you were getting signs of flirtation. Soon after entering and pouring a rum and Coke, I spotted a tall thin gringa who was smiling at me. She had a slight resemblance to Julia Roberts. 

Fortified by afternoon beers at El Pub and a strong rum and Coke, I asked the tall gringa to dance. The music blared, so it was hard to talk. I struggled to catch her name, Moya. I caught signs of flirtation. We spent the rest of the party together. We took breaks in the music to explore where we came from, who we were, and who we wanted to be.

Moya was a twenty seven year old Canadian who had  recently moved to Quito to take a job at a bilingual school. She was an artist in her soul, but maintaining her body required her to teach. We danced. We drank. We went back to her place. It was a small eight foot box attached to the side of a house. You had to stoop to enter. I think it had been built for llamas or goats. There was a mattress on the floor, a chair,  and a small table. She had not been in the country long. She paid the equivalent ofntwo dollars a day. We spent the next day in that room. Our destinies would bring us together and keep us apart many times over the next forty years.

On Sunday morning we strolled to rugby practice. Moya didn’t live far from the field. She taught at the school where we practiced. She sat on the sidelines and talked to people she knew. At the half time whistle I started for the sideline. Natalie was sitting next to Moya.

I had told Moya about my living situation in Guayaquil. Natalie and I had never talked about being exclusive. 

I hugged Natalie. There were several spectators, and she obviously had already met Moya, so no need to make an awkward introduction. Natalie said she had come up to surprise me on my birthday. She had spent the night at El Pub because that is where she thought I always stayed. I lied about staying at my friend John’s. I then worried that John had been in El Pub on Saturday night. Before we started the second half I checked with John and asked him to cover my lie.

I think Natalie knew something had happened. We went for the usual post practice beers and then caught an evening flight back to Guayaquil. Nothing more was said about where I had spent the night. The next week I found Moya had moved out of her llama shed and moved in with John.

It is very difficult to be certain about intention. A lot of what we do is driven by unconscious motivation or, more often than not, forces beyond our control. As my identity was reforming as an unmarried man without a significant partner in life, I was unconsciously grasping for the right person to share life with,  but consciously avoiding a commitment.  It was an impossible polemic because I was not ready to trust myself to be a faithful partner. There was no way forward in resolving life’s major conflicts, but in the short term I dashed with heedless abandon into the embrace of physical passion and emotional intimacy.

Natalie and I arranged to get a week off toward the end of the school year for a Galapagos tour. Because of our work visas we got the special locals’ Galapagos tour rate and both of our schools were very supportive of our having this unique experience. We were so pleased with ourselves that the night before we were to fly out we drank a couple bottles of Chilean rose’ we had at home and then went out and got two more. The flight was at 7 a.m. We dragged our hungover selves out of bed and were at the airport an hour before the flight.

The time for the flight came and went and a couple hours passed with no news on when the flight would leave. The gate area was crowded with people. We sat down next to the door that everyone had to pass through to get on the plane and fell asleep. We awoke to find the gate area deserted. At first we thought the flight must have been cancelled. Surely everyone hadn’t walked past us, and the gate attendants hadn’t just let us sleep through boarding, but that is what happened. Our luggage was on its way to the island of Baltra, but we were not leaving Guayaquil. We contacted the tour agency. They wouldn’t give us our money back, but they would let us take the tour the following week. The very embarrassing task of going to school and asking our school directors for the next week off went better than expected. The next time we remained sober the night before the flight. Our backpacks had suffered some pilferage during their week in the Galapagos when we found them. None of that and the aggravation of the previous week mattered. We were in the land of the Galapagos tortoise and Darwin’s supposed “ah-hah” moment of evolutionary insight. We were on volcanic islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the equator!

The Galapagos was the amazing animal wonderland you have  probably heard described many times.The sea lions or seals (I forget how to tell the difference. Something to do with the ears, I think. ) swam with you and would check you out.  The blue-footed boobies tolerated you when you walked the trail inches from their nest. The scenery was everything from a couple decades old lava flows to tropical island paradises overgrown with lush vegetation and hidden ponds filled with flamingoes.

The trip we took was on a converted fishing boat. There were ten of us sharing bunk beds in the main cabin and the captain, mate, and guide shared the Captain’s room. We were out for a week. Drink was rationed. Food was not. Food was largely fresh fish and rice with aji, Ecuadorean hot sauce. Once I was invited along with the captain and the mate to get lobster. My job was to keep the lobster in the skiff when they threw them in. In thirty minutes they pulled out enough for a lobster salad that more than filled us all. They didn’t use anything to catch the lobsters but a sock for a glove and a small stick.

Another day the captain said he saw goats. He knew where they would be the next morning. There were two other converted fishing boats in the same small bay. The captains arranged for all the able bodied men to go ashore the next morning, surround the goats, and on a shouted command charge the goats. As I think about this, I am convinced it was the captains way of playing the old “snipe hunt” trick. Before dawn about six of us from each boat loaded into the tender skiffs and went ashore. We split up and climbed two rocky hills on each side of the valley where the goats were peacefully grazing. One of the captains yelled, “Mata los chivos !” 

With goat blood in our eyes and the imagined taste of roasted goat on our lips, we charged. Stumbling over rocks we tumbled toward the spooked goats. As I angled myself to intersect an escaping goat, a disturbing thought occurred to me, “What do I do if I catch one?” 

With a bleat or two they scooted between us and scurried off to destroy more tortoise habitat. As they loped off into the distance the bang of a gun could be heard. That evening’s dinner was goat stew.

My school year concluded the end of February. Natalie’s school had another month of classes. I was going to travel around Ecuador some before leaving and traveling overland back through Colombia and Central America. I had to have an ‘exit visa’ to leave Ecuador. The purpose of the ‘exit visa’ was to make sure I had paid all my taxes. At Christmas I had flown home and the travel company that arranged my flight provided the exit visa for $20. Since I was not in a rush or flying out, I decided to get my exit visa myself. The information I had was that once I had the ‘exit visa’ I would have two weeks to leave Ecuador.

Two days after school finished I was up early to take the bus to downtown Guayaquil and get in line for the ‘exit visa’. I was about ten people back. When the kiosk opened, the scrum started. The line dissolved into a mass of bodies sweating and slowly pushing toward the front. Occasionally a runner from a travel company would show up with a stack of passports and be waved right to the front of the line. Inside the top passport would be some money that the Ecuadorean official would slip into his pocket. By lunch I was about five people back. None of us left for lunch. A couple hours after the lunch break I finally was at the front of the line. I paid the equivalent of two dollars in Sucres for the visa and was sent to an office area where the ‘exit visa’ processing was taking place. It was about four in the afternoon when I was handed my passport with the ‘exit visa’ and the warning that I had 72 hours to leave the country.

Two weeks reduced to three days to pack-up and leave a country where I had lived for the past ten months. Overnight I reduced my possessions to what fit in a backpack. I said a tearful good-bye to Natalie. We left our relationship open, but personally I had little hope this long distance relationship would endure. When Natalie finished her contract, she was planning to return to her home state of Michigan.

The next morning I flew to Quito and headed to El Pub to say farewell to friends there. Moya was there. She and John had amiably split. Our relationship reignited. We spent a wonderful day as I said good-bye to Quito. The next day we took a bus to the town of Tulcan on the Colombian border. We spent what we thought could be our last night together in a basic hotel in sight of the border. The next day we hugged for what we thought might be the last time. With tears in my eyes, I walked across the border, turned and waved goodbye. In three months we would be sharing an apartment in Guayaquil and teaching at the same school. Our lives would cross many times over the next forty years.

The most memorable part of a series of long, hot dusty bus rides from the Colombian border to Cartagena, asides from the marvelous scenery of the Colombian Andes and the often questionable wisdom of eating food served from someone standing at a stop light beside the bus, was the night we pulled out of Medellin. The bus left an hour before sunset. It was the overnight run to Cartagena. People and chickens were in the aisle. There was a general dislike of the USA among the people on the bus. I was claiming to be Canadian. Most were very confused by that. The others liked Canadians.

The bus broke down after a long chug out of Medellin into the mountains just at sunset. Most of the people on the bus weren’t going all the way to Cartagena, so they caught other buses. A few chose after a couple hours to just catch another bus going anywhere. And then there were a few of us who were being reassured that the bus company knew we had broken down and would soon have another bus to take us to Cartagena. Five hours later another rickety bus shows up. I had made a Colombian friend while waiting. I was telling him all about where I lived in Canada. He had some pot. The bus was mostly empty when it showed up, so we went to the back of the bus to smoke a joint. We got a few wary looks, but my new friend didn’t seem to think there would be a problem.

The frustrations of the delay had drifted away when we stopped at a roadside food place. My new friend and I had stretched out on a row of seats across from each other. I got off the bus to get a bag of plantain chips and a cola. When I turned to come back, I saw my new friend had moved to my row of seats and was going through my backpack. Everything of value was on my body except my camera. He looked up. Our eyes met. He knew he was caught. He had another quick look in my pack and then moved back to his row of seats. I got back on the bus. The camera was still in the pack. I moved to the front.

Late the next afternoon we pulled into Cartagena. I could smell the history of the city. It was a Caribbean port of swashbuckling legend. Odors of ancient gunpowder, blood, and courage oozed from the walls of the catacombs underneath the fort that guarded the harbor. I found a small hotel not far from the beach, and soon the crystal water washed away the aches and misery of the bus ride. A couple Cuba libres later I was thinking about next stop. My ultimate destination was my high school roommate’s wedding in Washington. I had a couple weeks to get there. My old job at the private school in New Orleans was still waiting for me. The headmaster had given me a year’s leave of absence for the Ecuador job, but it was only early March, and that job was five months away.

I was planning to take my time traveling through Central America. There was a war in Nicaragua I was going to fly over. From Cartagena taking a boat trip to an island and then another boat to Panama or Costa Rica seemed an adventurous next step. Down at the harbor I met a couple guys who seemed to be sailors and some how associated with the marina. When asked about boats to islands or Costa Rica or Panama, they knew boats going anywhere I wanted to go. I just had to meet them that night at 9 o’clock and bring everything. I went to the airport and looked at flights. 

I booked a flight to the island of San Andres. The waiting area for the flight was almost empty except for a woman whom I would soon learn was from Argentina. She looked like a thin auburn haired Ximena Herrera, actress from the telenovela El Senor de los Cielos. We were soon talking about “The Dirty War” which had gripped Argentina since the military coup that took control of the country in 1976. The right-wing death squads targeted students, journalists, artists, and anyone who had connections to Peronism. My new acquaintance, Maria Elena, was all four and spoke of her fear and friends who had disappeared. She was a very curious person and fascinated by the books of Carlos Castaneda. I told her about my drug experiences including some hallucinogenic trips. 

When we landed, she went to the hotel the Argentinian travel agency provided and I to a youth hostel where I shared a room with six other people. We agreed to meet the next day and rent bikes to ride to the blowholes at the southern end of the island. It was a glorious day even if the bikes were a struggle. The final kilometer or so to the blowholes was over craggy rocky terrain, so we left the bikes and walked. 

On our way back we passed a little homestead of four or five thatched huts. The boundary of the homestead was distinguished from the path and the surrounding area by a ring of conch shells. Out of one of the huts came a thin white bearded black man calling to us. He said, “I have what you need.”

We kept walking. He was insistent and caught us just as the path passed the edge of his conch border. “I have what you need”, and he made a gesture like he was smoking a joint. 

Mariel and I looked at each other and then followed him into his hut. San Andres is a strange island in many ways. One is the people speak English at home, but are taught only in Spanish at school. It is Colombian, but sits a little over two hundred miles due east of Nicaragua. We found out the old guy’s name was Pepa. He told us to be very careful on the island, and that if we wanted to smoke marijuana, we should just come to his hut. He rolled a joint and we smoked. It was Mariel’s first time. She coughed a little, but she had smoked cigarettes, so she soon caught on. He wouldn’t take any money, but said if we wanted to leave something as a gift, he would accept it. 

As he was saying this another gringo came in. He was from someplace in the northeast USA. He and Pepa knew each other. The new gringo came down once a year to snorkel, enjoy the sun, and spend time with Pepa. He had a present. It was a snorkel. He said he tried to bring a fish spear, but it was confiscated in customs. While I am watching this annual reunion, a trail of ants adjusted their path and were now going over both Pepa’s legs on their way across his cot. Pepa paid no attention to the endless stream of ants that industriously trudged up one side of a thigh and down the other.

Pepa told Mariel and me to go visit a beach nearby as he and his old friend caught up and to come back to see him before we left. He said it would be fine to leave our bikes and packs. The beach was lovely, secluded, and deserted. Mariel was excited and animated by the new experience of being high. We talked about our futures. With that sense of touching universal truths that comes with being high, we opened up about our dreams of being writers. I talked about wanting to write a children’s book. We swam and lay back to sun dry and take a nap. An idea for a children’s book came into my head. I would pursue that idea until the book, Caught in the Web, was completed and self-published. 

After what seemed like days, but was only a couple hours, we went back to Pepa’s. We smoked another joint and said good-bye. He firmly warned us again about only smoking marijuana at his place and, again, he refused our offer of money. I gave him my harmonica, and we peddled back to the center of the town of San Andres.  The glow and buzz of the experience hung with us through the evening. As we were wandering back to Mariel’s hotel, she expressed concerns about inviting me to stay in her room. Her concerns were an ambiguous fear that the tour company would know and report it to the military junta in control of Argentina. I offered to get another hotel room and we began to look. As we strolled, we would occasionally stop to enjoy the beauty of the island and our lips would passionately search to connect. 

While sitting on a bench by the beach, a group of Colombian military approached us. Mariel tensed and began to shake a little. They asked us to stand up and if we had any drugs. We said we didn’t. They searched us, thoroughly. They found nothing, but Mariel was still shaking. We increased our search for a place where we could stay together and were soon laying in each other’s arms in a room we would share for the next two wonderful days and nights.

Mariel’s tour only had a three night stop in San Andres. When Mariel left, she took the joy of being in paradise with her. I moved back to the hostel. It was close to the airport. I booked a flight out the next day to Tegucigalpa. I spent a night there with little memory of the place except spending the evening in a movie theatre with three Hondurans two rows behind me sniffing glue. The next morning I caught a flight to New Orleans.

 The hope that I would see Mariel again were strong at first. We wrote for awhile, but after a year back in New Orleans, I moved to the Bahamas and we lost touch. The year I left the Bahamas and before the beginning of the part of my life that is described in Chapter 2, I came back to a house in New Orleans my ex-wife and I had bought. We were renting it to friends while we took seven years to settle our community property. The friends who were renting it were home when I showed up to see how things were going. They said an Argentinian woman had just been there looking for me. It hadn’t been thirty minutes since she left.

The only information they had was that she was staying in the French Quarter. I spent the rest of the day and night wandering The Quarter. As I sat in Jackson Square anxiously scanning for Mariel, I forlornly retraced everything I did that day. Pointlessly angry at myself for not doing one thing faster or skipping some other pointless activity, so I would have been at my house thirty minutes sooner. 

Email was still over a decade away. My discovery of the person who would become my life mate and allow me to continue a healthy journey through the stages of conflict that shape a developing person was close to two decades away. Ultimately a few months’ continental lag in the emergence of ubiquitous global email would facilitate our destiny.