Fire Island

“Travel is a fool’s paradise.”

--Emerson

Directly off the northern coast of Honduras, Utila Island was lousy with backpackers. Cheap, hedonistic, and English-language driven, Utila was a welcome break from the rest of the urbanized sprawl of Latin America. If you were looking to do nothing but swing from a hammock, smoke a little dope, and scuba dive for mere pennies on the dollar, Utila was the answer.

The bad news was the bombs.

I’m not talking about some new type of bong hit; I mean actual explosives. To pass time, teenagers chucked hissing half-sticks of dynamite at travelers as they tried to pass through the town square. It was total sport. Even the parents came out to watch, several encamped on their lawn chairs, laughing. The two cops on the island turned a blind eye.

“There he goes,” one of the kids would say as another backpacker rushed wild-eyed through the fracas amid smoke and flying debris. “Quick—his girlfriend’s getting away!” Boom, boom, boom. The power of these explosions cannot be overstated. It was possible to feel the actual wave when the bomb erupted, pushing at you like a hot shout.

The strangest part is that none of the kids ever looked angry, or acted like they believed limbs could actually be lost and blood copiously spilled. They always grinned widely as they assaulted the foreigners; bright white smiles as one shirtless boy after another lightly tossed these sizzling grenades in our zig-zagging direction.

This was back in 1994, and I was on Utila with Lisa for the Christmas holidays. We had no idea this was happening before we arrived. By the third day, Christmas Eve, several of us backpackers planned a proper holiday party in spite of the Lord of the Flies atmosphere. I think we tolerated it all because we just believed it to be part of the backpacking deal—a kind of what’d-you-expect-when-tooling-around-in-strange-places-vibe.

At midnight, we exchanged impromptu gifts: cans of Pringles wrapped in week-old newspapers, Kit Kat bars enfolded in bright t-shirts. Clark, who had been traveling with Lisa and me for weeks and had also experienced several close calls on the island, handed me one of the purple sticks of dynamite. It was thankfully unlit. “Merry Christmas,” he said. We both laughed.

“Come on,” he said. “I also bought this huge-ass Wile E. Coyote rocket. Let’s go set these things off down by the water.”

I held the bomb in my hand. It weighed as much as a small flashlight. The fuse was long and sparkled gray. “Sure,” I said drunkenly. “Let’s blow this shit up.”

***

When we arrived in Honduras a month earlier, Lisa and I were prepared: getting ready to descend onto the blistering tarmac at the Tegucigalpa airport, we had our return tickets firmly and visibly in our hands as evidence we would be returning to the United States. We’d read everywhere that failure to produce these tickets as proof we weren’t planning on staying in the country to partake in some baby-smuggling scheme or whatever would be instant reason to send us back from whence we came, which for us was Boston.

I held my ticket up in front of me like a paper crucifix as I took my first step outside the plane and onto the stairs. And like that, ~whoosh~ an errant wind grabbed my ticket from my hand and sent it fluttering down onto the ground and out towards a small scrub of trees, vines, and a dusty little field.

It was only after I bolted down the rickety stairs and across the runway, futilely stomping at the ground in an effort to cease my ticket’s joyride did I half-realize I was a good 100 feet away from all the other passengers entering the terminal. And it was only after my fifth or sixth lunge that I finally secured the ticket. Out of breath and fully pleased with myself, I turned around to see three armed soldiers, none of them older than eighteen, standing a few feet from me. With M16’s in hand, they watched with controlled anxiety as I unfurled the ticket in a gesture of smiling goodwill.

At the time, I had no idea how close I came to getting shot during my first two minutes in-country.

Waiting to claim our backpacks in the airport, I watched a chicken calmly stand and ride the conveyor belt between two baby blue Samsonites. We found our bags and stood in line for customs when suddenly we heard our first English that afternoon:

“Ya’ll travelin’ alone?”

We turned to see a Romanesque looking white dude in shorts and a plain t-shirt standing behind us, small bag slung over his shoulder. He smiled openly and said his name was Clark. After quick introductions, we decided to go into the capital together and find a hotel. I soon learned that traveling does that; you became 8-years-old again and eagerly make fast friends.

Clark was from Utah by way of Kentucky. An avid photographer, Clark was immensely likable: worldly, handsome, a few years older, and a tad burnished around the edges like he’d felt and seen more that Lisa and I put together. We radiated wholesome naivety and he exuded experience; we were the perfect foil for each other.

When it came time to pony up reasons why we were all down in Honduras, Lisa and I were earnest till bursting, expressing the desire to see those places most avoided by the typical ignorant American. We loathed the humiliating map-toting, fanny pack-wearing, bling-bling, obese American douchebag who yelled because he thought that would make his English more understandable. In the words of Paul Bowles, we fancied ourselves travelers, not tourists…even though by that point, honestly, the only experience Lisa and I had together outside the U.S. was during a harmless weekend spent lollygagging around Montreal. Clark, on the other hand, was reticent, more secretive about his reasons for choosing Honduras. “Oh, you know,” he said. “Women issues.” And he left it at that.

The three of us became inseparable. We trekked into dripping cloud forests in search of the elusive quetzal bird; explored abandoned gold mines; withstood long bus trips without fresh air or access to clean water while tolerating the endless stream of hawkers trying to sell anything and everything at bus stops, from tube socks to basketfuls of loose D batteries. Clark even had an entire skewered fish shoved through his open window in an attempt to collect a sale. Clark, who had been dozing, simply opened his eyes, blinked at the speared meal precariously inches from his face and muttered, “Not today”, drifting comfortably back to sleep. God, I wish I was that cool, I thought.

When our travels finally brought us to the beach town of Tela on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, (think a more rustic episode of Jersey Shore, but in Spanish), we decided we needed to jump ship and that Utila would be perfect for the Christmas holidays. We bought our $30 plane tickets in the nearby town of La Ceiba the next day and made the ten minute flight in a Russian-made puddle jumper that shook like an asthmatic, the screws in the walls visibly shaking all the way.

***

When Clark and I finally found our way down to the water, the first thing I noticed was all the kids. Where the hell did they come from? It was midnight. On Christmas Eve, no less. Shouldn’t you brats be home asleep and hoping you made the good list?

I had Clark’s gift tucked into my nylon shorts, fuse poking out. Clark was lighting some harmless firecrackers and tossing them at driftwood lining the shore. The crackers popped like gunshots from movies. All the while, the kids danced around us, wanting to light stuff, asking to throw the lit firecrackers, when were we gonna set off that rocket?

The stars burned high above. I was transfixed by their metallic clarity, the way they glowed like small chips of aluminum breath. I turned to say something to Clark, something I no longer remember, but at the time thought brilliant and witty, seemed like the perfect ironic comment that summed up everything we had endured and witnessed and beheld over the last four weeks of uninterrupted travel in this beautiful, strange, and beguiling country.

That’s when I heard the flick of a lighter.

Dreamily investigating where that sound was coming from, I looked down at my shorts and saw a small black hand reaching from behind. The hand held a lighter, and its flame, oddly, was against the fuse. Startled, all I thought to do was look up at Clark.

I was then consumed by such a blinding, hollow roar as to be completely erased of all conscious thought and awareness of self; I was reduced to something akin to a garden-variety amoeba. The next thing I heard was a boy’s voice. He sounded extraordinarily calm, and uttered a simple, declarative sentence that would have made Hemingway proud:

“That’s what you get, man.”

I noticed my shirt was on fire, and so dragged my left hand across my chest to put it put. The kids then scattered faster than they first appeared. My nylon shorts were completely blown off and I was now standing naked from the waist down. Clark came over, helped me pat my shirt out even though it was no longer burning. He kept looking around, asking if I was okay and I kept saying sure, sure, no problem. It was the first time I ever noticed Clark afraid.

Clark handed me my shorts, and I wrapped them around me like a cheap, melted towel. My left leg hurt and looked black around the thigh, but I tried not to stare at it directly.

“Don’t move,” Clark finally said. “I’m gonna get Lisa.”

***

Walking in a circle and mumbling, if ever I closely resembled a lunatic, it was the moment immediately following my attempted assassination.

Lisa then appeared. Her eyes were wide and mouth open.

“What happened?” she asked, putting her hand on my shoulder. I said I didn’t know.

As it turned out, the bomb blew out parallel to my leg, leaving nasty burns and a bit of cauterized flesh on either of my thigh. The next morning, I realized with sickening doom that if the bomb had been rotated merely 45 degrees in either direction, the force of the explosion would have blown out and away from my thigh as well as into it, more than likely taking my leg off and leaving me to bleed out atop the rocky shore.

Also, in another extraordinary occurrence of dumb luck, up until the very last moment, I had the bomb tucked deftly into my pocket and against my left testicle. If it had blown while there…well, I don’t think I need to say much else.

Lisa helped me fashion my shorts around my waist so they wouldn’t fall and said she needed to get to me a doctor. Clark said he had already asked and that not a single doctor resided on the island, only a nurse, and that she was attending midnight mass.

Walking the darkened road, I resembled an extra from Night of the Living Dead as I lurched slowly behind Lisa and Clark. When we found the church and got the nurse’s attention, she came outside and eyeballed my leg. She shook her head pitifully as she inspected my burns, picking some of the gunpowder out of the wounds with long, pink fingernails, making me wince.

“Be sure to wash that thing, and get plenty of rest, but I’m sorry,” she said.

“I cannot help you right now.”

“Why,” I asked. “Because it’s Christmas?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t have a key to the clinic.”

“Well, who does,” Lisa demanded.

“The other nurse who lives here,” she said.

“So go and wake her,” Lisa said, losing her patience.

“I can’t,” the nurse said calmly. “She went to the mainland on vacation a week ago and took the key with her.”

The three of us stood there silently for a moment looking at the nurse, dumfounded. In the distance, small explosions could be heard filling the night air.

***

We all agreed I needed to get back to the hotel and dig out the med kit—a med kit I initially said we would never need during our six month trip through Central America. Lisa, I’m telling you, you’re way over-packing. We won’t need that thing, I admonished as she packed and then unpacked her rucksack, looking for space. I remember standing in the bedroom doorway, arms crossed, shaking my head condescendingly as she found a way to make it fit.

Back in the States, Lisa was a nanny for a very nice family, the mom and dad both doctors. Lisa and I didn’t have health insurance, so they gave us prescription antibiotics, anti-malarial drugs, and various creams and salves free of charge.

And as we approached Utila’s town square on the way to our hotel, I understood with growing anxiety that we would have to pass through the melee once again, face all the teenagers and their bombs. I couldn’t run. I was already injured. There was no way I could make it.

Lisa was in front, and as we stepped into the warzone, kids turned around, laughing, smiling, pointing in our direction as we made our way toward them. Easy targets.

But Lisa did something extraordinary: she rushed up to the biggest boy and stuck her chest out, fists clenched and arms at her side, bellowing “Back away!!! Put those fucking things down and let us through!”

And sure enough, they relented. Smiling, laughing to save face, they put their bombs down, feigned courtly manners and stepped aside and let us pass. It was the only time I had witnessed them allow foreigners to pass unmolested. But they had no choice. After all, if you come face to face with a lion in the dead of night, you will surely step aside.

***

The amount of times I would say thank you to Lisa for packing the meds, all the while trying not to eat too much crow would be immeasurable. By that point I knew I would ask Lisa to marry me, and not just because she was a hell of Boy Scout and knew how to plan ahead, but because I was deeply and hopelessly in love with her: she was funny, easy going, kind of had this smoothed-out, go-with-the-flow demeanor that was simultaneously charming to men and nonthreatening to other women. She was whip-smart, pragmatic, cared deeply about justice, and was, to be perfectly honest, sexy as all get out. I could think of nothing better than spending the rest of my life with this woman.

But that would come later. The day after I had my leg almost blown off I took the antibiotic Cipro and generously applied plenty of fresh gauze to my injury. By the third day, my wound looked much better. I could walk around without much of a noticeable limp. Clark even took a photo of me that night after we got back to my hotel. I tried my best to make light, and goofed a silly pose. But it didn’t matter: I looked ghastly, like I was pulled from the rumble of some firebombed city.

The day before New Year’s Eve, we took a boat back to the mainland. It was time to start practicing our Spanish again, to steel ourselves in preparation of mercilessly long bus rides atop precarious mountain roads, and to again embrace the swelter of jungle heat.

We said goodbye to Clark as he planned to continue down the Mosquito Coast, Lisa and I the opposite direction as the village Copan and its Mayan ruins beckoned. We ate fresh coconut bread together at a small outdoor market before he left. We fumbled at half attempts to recount our time together, knew that we would miss each other greatly and more than likely would never see each other again.

“Stay strong, dude. That’s a great woman you have there.”

We embraced. He then gave Lisa a hug and climbed into the back of a small pick-up; earlier, Clark negotiated a price with a man going the same direction. I watched as the truck shined red intermittently between the plentiful dust and then turned around a corner, gone. Lisa and I grabbed our backpacks off the curb, by now used to their 65 pound weight, and slung them to our backs. In the small town, people were going on with their lives: a couple of women were indifferently selling a palette full of bananas on the corner, three men were gathered around the open puzzle of a car engine that wouldn’t turn over, two little kids with sticks yelled and chased a mortified black dog across the street

“Which way again,” Lisa asked.

And I said, “There,” jutting out my chin toward a bus station we couldn’t yet see, toward the heavy and blistering day.

END