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Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: Mark Plimsoll, LLC
ISBN-10: 0976779544
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 671
Copyright: Feb. 14, 2006
ISBN-13: 9780976779544
Price: $5.00 (eBook)
Creative nonfiction memoir about a young American's coming-of-age in Guatemala's killer earthquake. Takes place in 1975, teh author just twenty-two, alone, without knowing Spanish in a land that speaks Mayan anyway...
The Pan-American "Huckleberry Finn" for the Twenty-first Century, a memoir of the young author's struggle with two realities, one Anglo-Saxon and the other Hispanic. In this picaresque "coming-of-age" memoir, we see a vision of North America's future in twenty-five years, when the Hispanic minority becomes the largest minority, and changes not only the demographics of America, but its culture. The author sweeps us along on a whirlwind of culture shock as he chronicles the adventures of a disgruntled industrial-age young man who feels a tribal and instinctual reluctance to accept the Third World's view of the US and its foreign policy. With Guatemala on the brink of war with Belice, before he can assimilate this alternative language, culture, and reality, along comes a new relationship and an earthquake that stops the war with the deaths of twenty two thousand people.
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Excerpt
One day, as I sat deep in thought about a story of a manta ray that washed ashore and how I wished I could see something like that, I heard shrill screams of giddy children, both gleeful and terrorized.
Down the beach, some children chased each other with the top of a long shrub of denuded branches. Near the top in the thin twigs, a long slender snake draped limp.
The children screamed and laughed, and ran from the child who carried the bare shrub, who laughed with insane pleasure, power mad. With each attempt to throw the snake at the other children, those closest screamed and laughed with a shivery note of terror. Each time a child dropped the branch, another closed in to grab it to enjoy lethal power over others.
I ran down towards them, and noticed the pallid whiteness of Connie's face rise up like the moon to peek over the top of a sand dune. She pulled on a parachute size T-shirt and almost fell as she bounded over the top of the dune, her towel tangled around her feet. I could smell the coconut oil as she passed.
I ran after her.
The children's shouts mixed fear and glee, "It kills, it kills you!" as they chased each other.
The skinny snake's limp curves seemed lifeless within the branches, as the child in possession twisted the branch to keep the snake off the sand, to thrust it at other children.
They stopped their game as she approached. I grabbed the branch and broke off a section, about three foot long and straight. The snake fell onto the sand, motionless, emerald green in sunshine.
She yelled at me to leave it alone, and I ignored her.
It sported a lateral stripe along the sides, and its long triangular head ended in a very flat rectangular box of a nose instead of a curved or pointed snout like most snakes. Its little tongue flickered between its twin rows of lip scales like a tiny spark of life.
The tail flattened and widened, vertical, like a rudder. A sea snake.
The children yelled "Veneno," and huge Connie translated it for me with pedantic professionalism, as if to prove her superiority in Spanish. "They say it's a poisonous snake, it will kill you. Don't mess with it. Just let it go."
I used the small branch to pin it down behind the head, then picked it up by the neck and forced its mouth open with a twig. I didn't see any fangs, but the vibrant green plastic toy head shape, coupled with the kids continual yell about how it kills, gave it an aura of danger and poison, an inscrutable denizen of the sea, foreign and exotic.
Perhaps it got sick at sea and washed ashore.
I squatted down to the cocoa sand and felt the reradiated heat of the sun. I felt sweat run from my temples to chin as I let the exhausted animal go and jumped back as if it might spring to life with some deep reserve of lethal energy. The children batted it around until it died, or finished dying.
For most of the day, I noticed a huge cloud build up over the ocean, and by sunset it matured into a massive thunderhead. The dark bottom smeared downward as rain fell and lightning played about and through the anvil cloud. Many people, attracted to the beach to watch it, talked about the danger of floods and waves in little Hawaii, built upon dunes about two or three meters, six to nine feet, above the sea.
The sun set right over the beach and it took a long time before the last rays of red light disappeared from the cumulus cloud's wispy cirrus crown. The atmosphere over the sea glowed a creamy yellow behind the cloud's dark shadow.
The moon came up inland, over the palms and mangroves, announced by a golden glow over a far volcano.
The cloud's color in twilight shadow ran through a rainbow, from rust red to green to deep blue. In the East, the earth's orange rimmed shadow moved up and trailed the almost full moon into a red streaked purple sky.
An hour or so later, the rains came, and everyone scurried into their huts to hang in their cocoon hammocks to stay dry, while rivulets invaded their huts.
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