Surprise Lessons from the Scene of a Guatemalan Dine-and-Dash
Breaking rules abroad has never been so thought provoking.
The sun was setting over a small town in the far north of the Guatemalan forest land. We had all escaped for a weekend break, rumbling out of Guatemala City on an eight-hour overnight bus journey to see the Mayan ruins at Tikal.
The morning had been early, and the sun hot, but all six of us managed to hike around the gigantic complex of temples, dwellings, and commercial spaces that once writhed with life. Now a different sort of life saturated the countless stone structures: Ray Bans and Nikon cameras — aliens to the two thousand year old habitat.
At a time like this, calmer heads prevail, but there is never time to calm those heads already in the process of losing it.
From the rooftop dining room we began toasting to the adventure, and lamenting a certain set of circumstances that had brought us to this tiny lake-island city in Central America. See, we were all teachers that had arrived at a new school just months prior — and some of us had already made the decision to leave in the coming month. But this is not about that.
Finally, after a few pints and the shuffle to our table the waiter arrived to take our order. Even with two fluent Spanish speakers in our ranks, it took several minutes for him to take in our requests, and he hastily made his exit all while other tables around us filled up with other hungry travelers. People would come and go for the next two hours, but we remained fixed to our table, central in the space.
All told, we must have waited for our server for about three hours. First, he didn’t have any food for us, while other tables continued to be fed around ours. And then when it finally did arrive everything was stone cold, and he never returned with the bill — even after one of our designated translators went to find him to ask for it.
Now obviously as the title might suggest, we didn’t pay the check. But the method by which this came about is something altogether different from your typical non-payment. It’s an odd thing, how the actions of others create a domino effect. One choice balloons out into an infinite network of repercussions — and yet we only see those just before our eyes.
“I’ll go down to get the bill,” called the second bilingual voice from across the table. Four chairs moved as two of us went to the bathroom and two started for the stairs. Time stood still as I arrived at the sink along the terrace edge and saw the flight of my two friends down below on the street. What do you do?
I know what I did: Right or wrong, I rounded up the others still up above. Without the slightest explanation I forced them into a flurry of action and we scampered down the external stairwell connecting the rooftop to the first floor like dogs on the hunt. Weaving our way through the streets, one of the girls began panicking: “What if he finds us?” she moaned. “They won’t,” was all I could say. At a time like this, calmer heads prevail, but there is never time to calm those heads already in the process of losing it.
Our foursome scurried across alleyways and through the now-dimly lit cuts of cobblestone roadway. Each corner presented a new threat, a man in the distance sipping tea or whiskey, the sudden appearance of a busboy tossing the evening’s trash out by a dumpster. Every new face presented a new chance of failure. And what would happen if we were caught? Would we simply pay the bill we had walked out on, claiming it to just be a big misunderstanding? Would we be attacked; jailed; fired from our measly jobs? And where the hell were the other two?
I couldn’t allow us to take the risk, we had to make it back to the hostel quickly, quietly, and without being noticed by what our collective paranoid now had inflated into an angry torch-carrying mob, seeking to exact mortal revenge for our unpaid forty-something dollar check.
After a seemingly five-hour exodus, many degrees of magnitude greater than the actual walk back, we arrived and came face to face with the original perpetrators. Laughter erupted from the lot of us, and the two instigators spent the next thirty minutes waiting for the bus in a state of panic.
I’m not sure that any of us really considered the threat of exposure to be significant at that point, but they stood in the cool night air shivering from something beyond the power of a thermostat. Only once we were all safely aboard the night bus and in motion back down to Guatemala City did they relax.
We laughed. But we should have spent just a few moments considering the series of events that had just played out under our pounding feet. Amid the chaos set in motion, each of us justified what was happening through some lens of the terrible service and barely edible food we had just received and consumed. But beneath that veneer, we truly had made the wrong choice. In the temple of Judy: “if you eat the steak, you have to pay for it!”
What my two friends had initiated was a chain reaction. Specifically, they dictated a series of reactions for the rest of us. I cannot remember exactly why my instinct told me to run, but I do know that the other three came to the very same conclusion once they were clued in to what had been started only moments before.
The choices made outside of your control sometimes play an outsize role in the limiting of your options in response. Now, I — or we — certainly could have laughed at the pair as they faded into the night below and then paid our check. But none of us did that. When it came to me, I chose another path. And by doing so limited the responses available to the remaining individuals alongside me down to one: run.
