BY CLINTON KALEY
In the year 2020 the most widespread pandemic in human history stole across the globe. Businesses shuttered, lives were paused, the world seemed almost to stop as people retreated to their homes and donned their masks.
I bought a one way ticket to Mexico, I left behind my career, my family, my whole life. I did not cower in my home like so many, assured that they were doing the noble thing. I took my backpack, my laptop, and my mask and stepped into the fray. I traversed the southern border of the US, into Mexico, to Puerto Rico, into Colombia, and finally landed in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
•
The sweltering heat retreats behind the concrete bodegas and abandoned buildings. Somewhere I can hear a tomcat yowling in unison with the chirp of some unknown air-fowl. A gentle breeze rustles the leaves as I sit outside my tiny studio apartment. I am alone. I can feel it tightening around me already. This is my first day in Mexico. It’s very different than I remembered and expected. I spent too much money on a decent meal, beer, and finding some terrible weed. I am learning.
The street lights begin to flicker and cast shadows on the crumbling streets of the city. Eerily beautiful. Disconcertingly comforting, reminding me that even paradise crumbles eventually. Its as if the world of clocking in, sitting in traffic, and overly-expensive coffee is very far removed from me now. And physically, it is. For me.
For the people around me, life is as usual. And the strong push to “do something” already sets in. Be a producer. Don’t sit on the porch of your $10-a-night lodging and drink beer. Apply for a job. Find a plane ticket home. Go back to everything you hold such disdain for, but everything that comforts you.
I play mixed visions of this trip in my mind. In one fantasy I am a modern day Hunter Thompson living my own version of “The Rum Diaries”. In another I am a broken-hearted vagabond searching for myself in a foreign land. In yet a third I am suave, adventurous, dangerous; meeting women who do not look like me and seducing them.
The reality is much more mundane and and simplistic: I am out of my element in totality.
I know not a soul. My grasp on the language is tenuous at best. My knowledge of local custom is minimal and bastardized by my appearance as a gringo tourist. I don’t feel the Herculean counterpart of Thompson. I don’t feel like a lost romantic in search of a lover’s meaning. I just feel like me, mediocrely drunk and chattering away at a keyboard as so many times before. The street below me is empty as the light dies and full dark falls. I sweat and so does my beer bottle, the heat and humidity here rivals and bests that of Texas. Relentless. Like so many urges: familiarity, acclaim, comfort. Even my writing this seems pretentious, overly dramatic. But I said I would do this, every day. Clickity-clack on the keyboard.
Rest assured, this is not the world of Thompson’s hay-day. My cellphone explodes with new dating matches from the local women. I find that hopeful, as though I am suddenly a rarity, a commodity in demand. My GPS app guides me, however incorrectly, from bodega to restaurant to bar to domicile with relative certainty. I am not the careening vigilante journalist I fantasize about. I am a man far from home, yet armed with all the technological power of a science fiction robot.
And still there is romance here. I have taken this terrifying leap. Now it terrifies me all the more. To think that my nomadic holiday will be haunted with reminiscing of home and those remaining there. To think that I will not connect, other than via an ethernet cable.
The tomcat yowls again and I realize that perhaps I am connecting now. Coming into contact with a deeper understanding of myself. Minus the constant influx of mind-numbing stimulus of the world I ventured from. As though, I, of a brave few, have dared traverse beyond the borders of my normality and comfortability. Romanticizing every moment, letting my mind run wild with the possibility of adventure. The women are beautiful, the beer is cold and cheap. For today, that is enough.
•
Our shuttle bus is fully loaded as we leave Baranquilla, bound for the beautiful white sandy beaches and crystal blue waters of Santa Marta. I arrived in Colombia only two days ago and already I wander northward.
Somewhere near the halfway point I am awakened by a boom of thunder and the sound of raindrops impacting the vehicle’s exterior. My companion stirs awake as well and we both survey the new world of which we are, gratefully, only passing by.
The pueblo of Cienaga sprawls out around us on both sides of the road. This is a new experience for me: I have never witnessed this magnitude of abject poverty in my life. Here it is, just beyond the window of the bus, an almost unearthly landscape.
The heavy grey sky and driving rain serves only to accentuate the bleakness of the scene. This place is a cross between a swamp, a literal shanty-town city, and an overflowing landfill.
Detritus and filth as far as the eye can see, mountains of garbage. Shacks of tin, brick, concrete, wood, and literally anything else that can serve as a roof or facade are crammed together in chaotic masses. Dogs roam the trash laden alleys, wild and otherwise. The dense precipitation couples brackish with the encroaching sea, both threatening to and entering the crumbling patchwork structures.
I try to imagine what I would be doing if this were my home. No one seems to be struggling against the rising water that will certainly invade their habitations, if it has not already. I can see whole families hunkered under makeshift awnings, ankle deep in murky puddles, the doors of their domiciles open and dark, the sludgy mixture of rain, sea, mud, and trash lapping at their thresholds.
It is difficult to imagine that these buildings, if it is possible to name them as such, are plumbed, let alone wired for power. Still, children are gathered in the downpour, running, laughing, shouting as they kick a weathered soccer ball to each other through ever thickening mud.
This scene repeats itself for miles as we fly by, secure and untouched by the gloom surrounding us. It is palpable. I try to further imagine what day to day life might be like here and find that I am incapable of conceptualizing it.
One day prior we had entered a sprawling local market in search of cheap seafood, which we found early en masse. We finished our meal and ventured deeper into the ever dilapidating mercado. My sense of unease began to build as the walkways narrowed and crumbled, the tiny passages overlaid with a din of shadowy desperation. A man sat using a single match to light a blackened glass crackpipe. Further on a young woman clutched a homeless looking man by the collar as they argued. Suddenly, he forcibly shoved her backward and they began to struggle violently. We made a quick escape back into the sweltering sun of the calle, hailed a taxi, and left the mercado, wide-eyed.
My native partner clutched my hand tighter in the heat of the cab and whispered to me in her broken but functional English, “Colombia is a savage country.”
END
