Honduras North Coast
opportunity grows slim
I sit on the beach at night.
Tonight is like most. A slight breeze, just enough to cool my brow.
The humidity is always here, night or day, but you get used to it. Dogs barking at imagined adversaries up and down the beach line. A lone late night fisherman just off the surf, I can hear his oars bumping off the edge of the heavy dugout.
The Caribbean is much calmer than our southern Pacific side and the tides are much higher. That’s why here on our north coast we can have our homes almost right on the water’s edge, as the tide will not rise at night and sweep you into the sea.
Far off the distant lights of Tela beckon, glimmer, and shimmer. From this distance, it looks so peaceful. The town itself is another reality. People trying to get by, trying to make sense of the endless wave of crime that addles one’s brain. Hurts my head. Reality as gangs have taken over and rule by fear and pain. No authority shows its face.
It’s no wonder so many of my friends and even some family have gone to the north with the caravans. Honduras has become an impossibility. I hear that even stacking boxes in a storeroom I could make a living. A comfortable one. They even say I could own a car! They say the young Americans don’t want to do those jobs.
I once considered it until I remembered my mother almost in the same breath.
Any authority, like the police, who tries to go against the gangs pays the bloody price almost immediately. They slaughter their family without restraint. The police are useless. The army is at its lowest point of effectiveness since the 80s when the communist scare was real and Uncle Sam saw it necessary to fully equip and train our military.
No longer. Now when the gangs rampaged, the army is mostly powerless to do anything about it.
But life does and will go on. We will simply hang in there. Sitting on the isolated beach at my mother’s house close to here. My livelihood comes from fishing. My father died of tuberculosis recently and my mother called me home from Tela. She gave me my father’s small but solid fishing business. Three small boats, each with 80 horse motors, a shed and work building on the protected lagoon side. An area for cleaning and prepping the catch.
Lately, though, the catch has been far too low to have employees, so it’s just me and one other trusted employee who does countless tasks besides fishing. There’s more talk that the spill off from the silver mines near the shoreline just down the road has contaminated the waters in our area. It’s as if someone reached out and simply turned the spigot off. No more fish!
I see them floating belly up.
This has to do with the contamination. The Canadians paid off the high authorities in Tegucigalpa and in Tela to give them the rights to mine protected areas near the coast. Years ago, a crew from the Smithsonian in Washington did a study here and showed that mining silver along the coastline was contaminating our waters. This problem appeared some years ago, and the fish died. Brave people stood up against the municipality and could finally force the Canadians to shut down.
Life is nothing but change. It’s our ability or lack of dealing with these changes.
What helped hugely was the famous TV show Sixty Minutes coming from the US to do a story on the Canadians mining operations. The uproar was such that the Canadians had nothing other to do than to pack up and leave. As soon as they had abandoned their facilities just off the coastline, one night the sky lit up by fire. Some locals took things into their own hands to make sure the mines would never re-open.
Though life is nothing but changes.
Now years later. The silver is still there, and the miners have never forgotten this. One thing led to another; a new series of corrupt authorities signed off on permits so the Canadians could mine. Now the stench of the mines reaches the small village my mother lives in. It’s like rotten eggs. Even some children get sick.
Sometimes, though, when the wind is in our favor, you can’t smell it.
Watching the stars overhead, I can’t help but wonder what the future might bring. My mother is not well. No longer has that vital physical and mental strength which had so well defined her amongst her friends and family. Now more of a broken soul. Hard to explain, as it’s too painful.
She is doing what she can to help me by giving me my father’s fishing equipment instead of selling it. She had a handsome offer a year ago before I came home from Tela. My small convenience store fell prey to the extortionists. Sure, I paid them off monthly as most everyone does, but finally they began threatening for higher payoffs.
War taxes, it’s called.
Now a year has passed since I closed the store and mostly gave away the inventory still on the shelves. I certainly wasn’t getting rich. The store was enough to keep food on my table. It was enough to keep my mother’s kitchen cupboard with enough supplies, too. My wife seemed happy too. The extortionists showed up and everything just seemed to die a slow ,an airless death. Even my wife, after our first and only pregnancy, ended with our child not living through birth.
My wife decided she would not go with me to the small coastal town my mother lived in. She said she had to stay in Tela and try to find a meaningful life. I was so down and out, I barely put up any resistance. I let her go. We had a small house just back behind the huge public school. We’d imagined our child going there. We used to share dreams about how smart our child would look in his or her student’s uniform.
Once our dream was taken from us, there was little else holding us together. A well-to-do trucker who covered three central American countries with his six sixteen wheelers soon caught her eye.
I was in no shape financially to fight then. Am I sorry I didn’t fight for my wife then? Of course, I am. But that was then. This is now.
Far out into Tela Bay a tanker’s lights twinkle, an atmosphere trick, making slow progress. If I breathe very still, I can often hear and almost feel the deep throb of its engines. The big ship will offload petroleum at Tela’s depot.
At least now I can concentrate on my mother’s well-being and watch after her health. When I first arrived back from Tela, the teary-eyed joy in her eyes was enough to make me decide to stay.
One of her life’s highlights is when I take her to mass. She grabs my arm, a black shawl about her frail shoulders. Her rich black hair past her shoulders, which she assures me, does not tint out any white. Her lips freshly painted and her perfume never sweeter, and we walk the block and a half to church. Lately we go two days a week.
After seeing how important going to church is to her, I’ve started getting us more involved with the church’s activities, drives for the less fortunate, church h maintenance projects, building a new children’s classroom and others. It was wonderful to see these activities bring such cheer into her heart.
Then, about six months ago, the first of several heart attacks took her out of her active daily life. Seeing her now broke my heart. She fights the chronic fatigue and although she says she has none; she fights a deep-seated pain that never seems to subside.
The doctors at the Public don’t seem to do much, but she loves going and carries on with the nurses. It’s the visit to the healer across our town who brings her some comfort. For at least five days after we visit, her pain is gone.
Oh, there are a few good things. My mother wisely never sold her home or her nearby property, where now I help her with her coconut trees and mangoes. Lately we’ve been planting more okra as the market is there. We discovered that there’s a market for small hot peppers too.
Though these things have come along, my mother can’t help but show an almost daily decline of strength and will. For a person once so strong and sure of herself.
She offers gentle and wise tips for regenerating the fishing business. I try to explain to her that with the Canadian silver mines, there’s just no way to find fish. More and more, the ones you catch will often have signs of illness, degeneration. Their scales covered in off colored growths. No one would, of course, ever buy such fish.
She suggests I go further out to sea. I try to explain to her that to get far enough out to sea, the cost of gas for the motors is excessive. By the time I’ve gotten out beyond the line of contamination, which is even visible as a light purple hue in the water, I’m almost halfway through my fuel for the trip.
There’s no money to be made in this situation.
Lately, the fishermen have organized against the miners and their cohorts in the municipality. There is hope this criminal group will be voted out. Once they go, then the miners would sooner than later have to go too.
Just when I think progress is being made, a fellow fisherman gets killed just outside his small home. His wife watched as three gunmen fired repeatedly into the man. A warning to those of us trying to get the miners out.
If I get killed, then no one will be here to watch after my mother. I cannot take that risk.
Still, I go to the meetings held in the church every Thursday night where we heap arguments one upon another as to why the miners need to go. Once leaving the meeting, they met me on the dark path leading home. In the far distance, dogs barked. Three men stopped my progress.
- I was sure I recognized two of them, even though they wore masks. They warned me and assured me they did not want a bad end for me. They even mentioned my mother asking what would become of her were I suddenly gone.
I’ve curbed my protest activities. My loss would be too great. I can’t imagine my mother alone and trying to get by in life with no one to help her is unacceptable. It wasn’t so long ago, just before she invited me back to live with her after my father died, that she was doing rather well. Shed even take the boats outs out on the water with two boatmen.
She could fish as well, or better than most fishermen. But then her health took a downward turn. She invited me home. She knew full well that my wife had left me.
She was right in thinking I was looking for direction.
I sit on the nighttime beach just in front of my mother’s home. I know she was in her room and was probably asleep by then. At day’s end, I will often sit at the water’s edge. It was important though that Id put in a full and hard day’s work. Sitting on the beach just felt all the more welcome.
Occasionally, a subtle breeze creeps up from across the bay and comes over me and our land. The coconut trees shuffle gently.
I turned my gaze up to the stars, the night impossibly clear and as it was moonless, the stars glimmered like diamonds. The gentle lapping of the surf telling me it was still far from hurricane season. Every once in a while, a lone walker or two or three greeted me as they passed by. Sometimes one or the other would stop for a quick catchup.
Life here, despite the impossible odds, had its pristine moments.
It occurred to me sitting on the beach that finding another wife might make sense. Maria Carmen had lately been going out of her way at her parents’ small pharmacy, offering me this or that other product. Her mother was a close friend of my mother’s and I had to think that there was some kind of conspiracy under way.
Not far from where I sat, a mature coconut fell to the ground with a solid thud. Just for a moment, the crickets were silenced. The noise apparently got their attention. They say that if a coconut lands on your head, it can kill you. Mr. Juan died from this supposedly several years before.
Funny, in a way. Life is so full of difficulty and unpredictable it’s not enough unless a coconut finds you one night as you’re walking under a grove of the tall trees.
I guess then that life isn’t so, so bad. It could be worse. I mostly resist thinking of the number of ways that it could be worse.
Little point in churning up darkness.
