Guatemala

It’s amazing the effect that nature has on me. It’s not supposed to. I’m the indoor type, content to spend my time inside, staring at a written page or computer screen. But every time I’m forced outside for any space of time, I find myself eventually staring slack-jawed at the majesty of my environment. Even the stark flat white of the salt plain manages to grip my imagination as the hot, dry wind whips the sweat so fast that the body stays completely dry. The horizon blends blue and white, and your mind belies the fact that this was once an ocean because it is so impossible to be anything but dry there.

Everything is always so much more than it seems in pictures. The sensory rush of every aspect of a place is so almost-overwhelming that a photograph can be little more than a gentle seduction that entices you to wonder what exactly it must be like to look two miles down to the bottom of a canyon, or place your hand upon a tree so wide it takes two minutes to walk around it.

You can’t escape your surroundings, no matter how hard you try. The fact that I live among trees or wheat fields has an inevitable effect on how I think. And by living and being human, I can’t escape carving out my niche from the materials I find, changing my everything around me, even while I’m being changed.

But in these northern temperate zones (the realm of civilization), we sterilize ourselves, push the environment far away from us, creating pristine preserves of “nature” the size of nations which we visit on vacation. We isolate the time and place when we may be affected into discrete doses, a dietary supplement of raw environment. We call our wildlife sacred so we do not eradicate it.

Not so in southern, undeveloped countries. They cannot afford the genocide of removing so many people from their historic homes. We pity them when we see them: the poor, the indigenous, inadvertently raping their environment to light the morning fire. They carve away the mountainsides to make a place to live, replacing cliffs with concrete erosion walls, and coating the barren earth with political agendas in the tradition of painted caves.

Every morning, on a mountainside in Guatemala, my counterpart, a nameless farmer, wakes. He tills his nearly vertical plantation, or makes a smoldering fire of unused husks or stalks of maize to refertilize the soil. He pauses for a moment, leaning on his hoe to watch the smoke as it rises to mingle with the clouds. He glances out across the valley, filled with a thousand painted-concrete huts, each billowing with smoke, to the opposite mountain ridge, a thousand feet above his own, lined with a single oil-slicked road. Behind that mountain lies another; and further, in the hazy blue, another, each filled with uncounted concrete villages like his own.

He sighs and lifts his instrument again and thinks how beautiful, how beautiful the earth is.