 It’s only 90 minutes in the rickety old Blue Bird school bus (whose drivers navigate the twisting mountainous roads of Belize way too fast) from the impoverished Southern coastal Garifuna village of Hopkins that I described in Part One of this article yesterday, to the daunting entranceway to Caves Branch, in the rugged interior of West Central Belize. The bus drops me off at the edge of the highway, and it’s a mile hike in sweltering 90F heat and occasional torrential rain up the mountain road through stunning tropical rainforest to the ecotourist Caves Branch “jungle lodge” owned by Vancouverite Ian Anderson, who I meet almost as soon as I arrive. On the trek up, I keep stopping and staring, taking photos of the towering tangle of ferns, vines and immense (100′) trees that extend darkly into the distance on both sides of the road, and create an imposing archway over the dirt and stone road. And I think to myself, breathlessly: I am home. This is where we humans were meant to live. The jungle calls me, inviting me in. I have no fear of the poisonous snakes and spiders, or the jaguars and other wild cats whose last remaining Earthly refuge is in this country. I haven’t felt this way, this sense of instinctive belonging, about a place I do not live, since I walked through the temperate rainforest in Qualicum BC, and the 300′ redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest. The other people staying at the lodge are all North Americans — couples in their 50s and 60s, some with kids and inlaws in tow. The cheerful workers, mostly Mayan youngsters, are as culturally different from the Garifuna I’ve been living among for the previous three days, as day is from night. They patiently explain their history, culture, lifestyle, and the nearby archaeological sites, to me and the other curious tourists. They ask no questions of me, about how I live, what I think, or the unimaginable snow-covered country I come from. I keep looking for good conversation in Belize, but, other than with Joe Bageant, I haven’t found it. The Garifuna, the North American tourists, the Mayan workers, all seem to live in their own narrow, isolated worlds, and are disinterested in the future, in philosophy, in the purpose of life or in any other profound or long-term subject. Their intellectual curiosity is shallow, their imagination dormant. More than anything in this natural paradise I miss you, dear online friends. This is a staggeringly beautiful land, but to me, except when I imagine you here with me, it’s an intensely lonely one. The night in the rainforest, in my bug- and water-proof but authentic-looking cabana, is delightful. I awake to the cries of the howler monkeys, the macaws, and the driving downpour of a wall of rain so heavy I cannot see through it. The forest smells are so dense and rich I can taste them. The foolishness of the sense of invulnerability I feel in the rainforest becomes apparent the next day when the inner tube I’m riding down the the river through Belize’s vast rainforest cave system hits the rapids, and I cannot stop from crashing into the riverbank, carving up my arms and spraining two fingers in a spiky stand of bamboo, and losing my only pair of glasses in the process. One of our young guides has to steer me through the rest of the journey, hooking her feet under my tube and answering my questions about Mayan history and culture as I squint to see at least the nearby sights. I complete the arduous five-hour tour in tow, but I feel humiliated, and worried about the risk of infection and making my way home visually impaired. I decide to cut my trip short, a day early, and book a flightback home. Paradise found, and lost. Category: Memoirs and Dispatches
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January 29, 2008
Pilgrimage, Part Two: A Night in the Rainforest
“Community is Born of Necessity”
 Joe Bageant, at home in Hopkins, Belize The above quote is from Joe Bageant’s son. It came up in our recent discussion on Intentional Community versus ‘Accidental’ Community. Community is born of necessity. This one sentence, Joe believed, explained the success of Accidental Communities, and the failure of so many well-considered Intentional Communities. I should have realized this, of course; it’s an affirmation of Pollard’s Law — we do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. My ancestors, thrown together with strangers in a frontier land two centuries ago under harsh conditions, American ex-pats sharing a common passion (loyalty to the King of England) had no choice but to make their Accidental Community of 13 families work, carving homes out of the frozen wilderness without electric light, electric power or hydrocarbons. Thousands of Canadians can now, like me, trace their ancestry to this community. Likewise, the Garifuna of Belize, who bailed out of shipwrecked slave ships over three centuries ago, had no choice but to make their Accidental Community work, and its culture remains, improbably and against all odds, prevalent today in much of the country. Meanwhile, the Intentional Communities of the world have a low success rate and an average population of just eleven people. They are the product, often, of affluent, comfortable people who have selected each other carefully and patiently, and who have a shared passion that most Accidental Communities lack. They are experiments of joy designed to discover what works and what doesn’t, by learning from failure. They never reallysucceed, most of them, perhaps because they don’t have to. Category: Intentional Community
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