Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, October, 2021

“You guys might have to get out,” Ryan said as the rental truck’s clutch spoke to him in vibrations known only to his left foot. I could tell the tires had been struggling before we got to this turn. I would have pivoted to stare at him inquisitively, but I was busy studying the dirt road hairpin switchback that had been paved over in textured concrete. It looked like a ski jump. That cement might as well have been someone’s headstone. No one paves 1% of a road to make it safer; they pave it because someone’s widow made them.

I had been watching him working the shifter/clutch/gas pedal/brake pedal as he tried to coax the rental 4×4 up the last of a series of ever increasingly steep corners on the road that circumnavigates Late Atitlan. I was impressed. We could have taken the well-worn route but they had done that part and I’m a sucker for “circumnavigating” anything. A lake, an island, a freeway loop in Houston… if you can enclose a geometric area in a path, I want to do it. Hence, we took the scenic route so we could get this truck all the way around the lake.

“One more try and then you guys have to get out…”

The engineer in me was confused.

“I’m not sure making the truck lighter would help,” my brain was trying to force the words out of my mouth as I realized that he meant if he was going to push the truck any harder he’d prefer to be the only one to go over the edge. The road had a steep enough drop off that knowing how far the truck would plummet would have just been academic. I did look at the trees to see if they would stop the truck. It didn’t look promising.

I’m suddenly picturing myself with my wife, his wife and his two kids standing on the side of an extinct volcano in central Guatemala as he tries to run this truck he barely knows up some insane hairpin turn that might as well have been part half-pipe. I can almost picture him saluting me as the truck tires spin on the gravel. A strange John Glenn in some reverse rocket launch. The national anthem playing as the back axle slides over the ledge, the back half of the truck hangs in space, then dips, and then cements his fate just as he ends the salute with a wink. “Godspeed Margarita Monday, I’ll see you in hell,” I say as I lift one last blended drink in his honor.

Of course, no one was getting out of the truck. It was either possible for all of us or too stupid to try. After all, this wasn’t Dunkirk, the sinking of the Titanic or 9/11. I say send the children and women first. If they won’t go then it’s probably not a good idea. I can tell you that if the women Ryan and I married wouldn’t go… then it is not advisable for any man, woman, child or beast to attempt.

However, turning around also was an eyebrow raising situation. Sliding down a steep grade in reverse wasn’t on my bucket list. The moments in which I know I’m having an adventure – indeed the moments I seek out – are when I start repeating to myself, “the only way out is forward.”

“I can help with the hand brake,” I offered trying to be helpful.

I was really just unwilling to confront the scenario where I’m standing around watching. I’ve had enough of watching. When you are a cog in the vast machinery of making things, you often see slow motion disasters. I’ve been forced to stand by and watch things I didn’t agree with, things I actively fought against, and even things that everyone involved agreed were bad come to fruition because the inertia of the task was greater than the combined influence of everyone involved. Those moments where good intentions are no longer enough and we find ourselves in some process that no one understood in its totality churn out bad outcomes.

We had met up with the Wolfe family – Ryan, Andrea, Kiara, and Sean in Panajachel in Guatemala after having spent time in Rio Dulce, Guatemala. They were aboard the custom catamaran “Low Expectations” and we were connected via a nebulous web of friendships in the hurricane hole that cutter Pelican took shelter in for the storm season. They had visited Guatemala before via motorcycle so understood the treasures were inland and up mountain. Soon enough we were also killing time. After exactly one invitation to “hop on a bus,” and catch up with them, we hopped on a bus. We were thick as thieves for more than a week. The entire trip became such a kaleidoscope of memories that it’s hard to think of them before “Lake Vacay.” Clearly, we must have spent time with them before signing up for a trek in the highlands of Guatemala, but only in foreign lands do casual encounters become life bending relationships.

Back on the mountain, I’m working the hand brake as Ryan feathers the clutch, gas, and brake while he’s shifting to make it up the last hairpin turn. It’s 101 degrees in the Rio but the air is crisp in the mountains. I’m sweating like I’m in the Rio. Even using pen and paper I still can’t explain but it took two feet and three hands. Even the kids were quiet for a few seconds. Eventually the rubber caught the grooves in the concrete and the clutch sighed relief as the truck crested the worst of the grade. The truck no longer a Saturn V rocket on a launch pad, it became just another mountain road.

Several miles down the road we pull over to have a look at the now gently sloping mountain. There is coffee growing. Avocados. Mangos. I take a piss in the bushes. It strikes me that some time from now I might be single sourcing some fair-trade coffee that is downhill from me at the moment.

Ryan was afraid of the hill climb, we all were, mostly in an excited way. He isn’t a reckless man. His kids can’t take two steps out of their cabins with getting a life jacket thrown around them. Being open to the unknown as a source of excitement makes the fear a catalyst to excitement. The engineer in me still wants a safety factor. I prefer the know the outcome with a level of certainty before I execute the maneuver. There is an honesty in not knowing though. Some sort of self-knowledge that is hard to pin down.

Perhaps it is that I have the sea in my gut, brains and blood so the hard part of traveling for me isn’t the moving on the ocean but the blending into the foreign. Not that Ryan blends in. He’s got two feet of height on most Guatemalan men and is loud as a siren after a few beers. Still he has that air of an American who belongs in other places. My marlinespike seamanship is coming along. The business of running the ship approaches mundane. Land, for me, presents challenges. That is where the intersection between sailor and traveler makes itself apparent. From that hill climb on, I look for opportunities to travel with low expectations and be open to the unknown.  

Bryan Bywalec

S/V Pelican

Las Perlas Islands, Panama, May 2022

The islands strung out like thier namesake in a north-south line were a surprising mixture of remoteness salted with the ever-present specter of development. Off the coast of Panama City, I write this as we head back in anticipation of receiving our long stay visas for French Polynesia next week. We have a few boat chores and a lot of provisioning to do before we cross the Pacific.  While I could have lived nestled in some sand flat anchorage for a month, I’m also dedicated to having the Pelican ship shape for the crossing so parting with our first set of Pacific islands was truly a sweet sorrow.

My favorite anchorage in the islands was near Isla Mogo Mogo. The island’s claim to fame is that three seasons of a TV show were filmed there – Survivor. The TV crews are long gone. There are some thatched roof semi-structures that appear to be active in some capacity. What they were offering we could never divine. The west side of the island we had to ourselves. We did meet a couple with two kids and two crew who were stopping over before heading out to the Galapagos. They seemed impressed we were going to make the longer journey to the Marquesas without additional crew; I was impressed that they had six persons living on a boat smaller than the Pelican. We all have our way of making things easier.

Other than those interlopers we were alone and happy. Panama City notwithstanding, this was our first anchorage with large tides. The city has a gentle coast with long flats but here there were rock cliffs that made the difference between high and low tide expose hidden worlds. Every now and then the tides would be at the exact right height and the surge would produce jets of water shooting out of the top of a cave. The sound was as if the rock was breathing, like whale breath. It is one of those things that I experience that will stick with me. It was like watching fish swim in heavy surge. Alternatively drifting back and then swimming as hard as they can… over and over again, until the tide slacks and they can go about the business of being a fish. These experiences, the regularity of the dynamic, are the ones that seem burned into my memory. I will lay awake some years from now and remember that somewhere the water is still shooting out of that cave just before and after high tide. I’ll be an old man and take comfort in the cave with the fountain in Panama just like I’ll see the fish in my mind, forever swimming and being still in sync with the never-ending swell.

On one of our snorkel excursions we brought our new speargun. It changes the way you swim, holding it in one hand. In the Taoist tradition, once you name something prey you automatically name yourself a predator. What were the fish to me before the speargun? I suppose they were a curiosity. Some sort of living art exhibit making me a dilatant scientist. Now with 90 cm of speargun in my hand I had a purpose, a tangible goal for the afternoon and responsible for violence in the ocean.

Having never fired it in anger before the first shot was an exploratory waste into a large school of fish. I’m not even sure they would be good to eat – fish identification has sense become extremely important to me – but there were so many of them that it seemed a safer bet than picking off some other reef fish. Schooling seems to be an effective defense mechanism because picking a point to aim at was nearly impossible in the mass of fish but the shot was mostly meant to get the first time excitement out of my finger. I didn’t mind when the spear reached the end of its tether, hung defeated in the water and drifted down empty.

After reloading the spear and stretching the band back I set out. Active in the swimming now, active in the viewing. There was a fish we saw on the swim over that looked promising. It wasn’t easily spooked and just looked like a fish that would be good to eat. It reminded me of the fish that was served whole at my sister’s wedding reception in California. On the swim back towards what we instinctually identified as the entrance to the reef I saw it again. It might have been the same fish, it certainly felt familiar. When I focus really hard underwater the scene becomes a strange mixture of tunnel vision and special awareness. By focusing on the fish, perfectly balanced in this environment, its almost as if the water loses its weight – or maybe that the surface disappears — and everything is water. Right up to space, just a deep ocean and then the nothingness above it. If you start looking around the vision of the undulating surface ruins the effect. In the moment of feeling the weight of the speargun moving to line up with the fish, my vision is centered enough, and the seawater clear enough, that the medium is irrelevant.

Looking back, it is hard to say if I decided to pull the trigger. It was more like a forgone conclusion of the fish, me and the speargun all occupying the scene. It isn’t quite a hair trigger, but it certainly pulls easier than a firearm and the recoil isn’t as intense. The space between my brain lining up the shot and the spear flying through the water was small enough that my intention and my action were simultaneous. It wasn’t like the first shot, a blind, “lets see what happens;” I knew the fish was there for the taking this time. Ultimately it wasn’t like I decided that it was going to happen… it had already occurred. Then again, I was a man with a speargun and it was a stupid brave fish so not sure what else could have been. Perhaps I was just surprised it worked.

The fish had a metal spear jammed through its body under its backbone. It wasn’t a clean kill but it got enough of the fish that it wasn’t going anywhere. Now the fish and I are quite literally connected. Not having any expectations, I was also woefully unprepared for the eventuality now squirming before me. I know now that breaking its backbone, slitting its gills or otherwise causing it to bleed out underwater is the humane thing to do. I just hung there – very much aware of the surface now that my lungs were pointing out my need to take a breath – with a fish on a spear wondering what one does now. The blood from the fish was just a dispersing cloud in the water. There is no gory liquid like when you land them on deck. The dinghy wasn’t far away so it seemed best to get the fish in the boat to deal with ugly end of being self-sufficient.

It turned out to be a Pacific Dog Snapper.

Fishing with bait and hook seems almost more barbaric now. Unselective and passive. It seems a cruelty compared to the stalking of some fish in among the rocks of the reef. The speargun was cleaned and leaned against a bulkhead in the boat. Having a newfound respect for its utility, it will graduate from being stowed somewhere in a dark locker to being hung up ready for action. It has turned the reef into a countryside to be understood so that it can be hunted. While calling something prey turns you into a predator, there is a long tradition of love between hunter and prey. I have come to know that I’m not a natural hunter. I don’t take joy in the bloodlust of it. I do want to feed myself. I do not make others do for me what I am unwilling to do. I can only work hard to make sure we waste as little as we can and take only what we need. To do the taking with as much skill and knowledge as possible. To love that what you kill is the strange place I find myself when I swim with a spear.