Tunnels and Light

The light mist hanging clammy on the eucalyptus trees towering across from this upstairs window of a late Sunday afternoon heralds, somehow, the end of our short journey away from Tegucigalpa. I want to begin at this ending because of what it means to be here: how to be here. The desire for psychological order required to come home is hotter and more acute than I remember in the past. A clean, well lighted house eases the rocky transition from freedom and experiences to whatever you call this: our daily life. My mother and father used to cushion their return by allowing an extra day before going back to work, and I never understood the value—mistaken, I thought when young—of chopping off a whole day from our holiday, but I understand now. We relish so sweetly our time away from this rather boring, barbed-wire strewn city that our sour return would sink our souls if we didn’t prepare for the inevitable plunge. Part of what we dread is what we know we’ll encounter until our next flight: our reality is narrowed into tunnels, and they aren’t very interesting ones. One tunnel takes us from our townhouse to work; that same tunnel returns us again. Carrie has a few tunnels that take her and a friend exercising. I have a tunnel bi-weekly burrowed to the supermarket, La Colonia, via car and back again. Occasionally a tunnel opens to a restaurant, but these are more diversionary than destinations, for the food here is fair, not spectacular, nothing to sweep your mind away from the tunnel’s gritty gray walls on the drive home. Some of the tunnels are pathetic and I wouldn’t a few years ago have thought I’d ever catch myself coming out the other side: to PriceSmart, even a WalMart in a mall. But if we don’t get outside every once in a while we’ll go effing crazy. But it’s only to a narrow, enclosed destination, then home. There is no wandering curious in an open downtown plaza, because there’s nothing interesting there. There’s not hopping from bar to bar down leafy streets because the bars of flashing lights and laughter don’t exist. What exist are shopping malls and chain fastfood restaurants. People are everywhere walking around, standing around, sitting around, strolling around, to where and why I don't know. And besides there being nothing interesting to do or see or hear, the city has the added benefit of being crime-ridden: robberies, murders, and kidnappings. I must have killed a beloved fair-haired, charitable Bulgarian princess in a past life… We took a four-day weekend and vacationed on the island of Roatán, in the Caribbean Sea north of Honduras fifteen minutes by plane. That you can lift off Tegucigalpa airport at 7 in the morning and have a coldie in your hand and toes in the white sand by 9 is nothing short of miraculous, and manages to justify the daily grind (side note: Honduras has spectacularly good local coffee from plantations a few hours from here in the Santa Barbara mountains; thank Zeus for small dark rich mercies). Having received our open water diving certification in Thailand, we were eager to submerge again, and for two days we floated down 60-70 feet of crystal clear Caribbean to bob and bubble in strange coral canyons. Sea turtles sailing gracefully, rainbow spangled fish, and a massive grouper curious and plodding who followed our group a ways, sometimes gently cruising right under you unafraid. We slithered along a high coral wall that dropped to sand below us, and the sand ran out toward a deep and dark sapphire emptiness like an undulating unfolding crest of a galaxy. Out in the air our days were spent lounging and reading. When not eating, sleeping, diving or swimming, I followed Patrick Leigh Fermor in his Between Woods and Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland, as he wandered in the early 1930s the sweeping plains of Hungary and sipped plum brandies with pre-war estate dwellers on horseback who welcomed the Ovid quoting merry young man from England into their libraries and grassy hillsides and wildflower dappled meadows. Looking up from those pages one afternoon I quietly watched a golden retriever pawing through the shallows peering after minnowy translucent fish, and his intent was as severe and patient as a hungry stork among reeds at softly hushed twilight. Occasionally the amiable dog would wade and paddle out a bit, turning circles and biting at clumps of water. I watched him do this a few times over the course of our stay, and couldn’t figure what this exercise provided him. When on vacations what often I most miss is doing my own cooking, for invariably in these regions I’ll have some criticism of the food preparation and presentation. A few times within this past year I’ve made soups that I would humbly rank as good as any fine eatery could manage, and better than many. But what I cherish most are the mornings Carrie and I would swim before breakfast, upon waking. Shoals of sea grass gliding underneath us as we breast-stroke out to a sandy patch and stand on toes. Gazing below the surface at our bodies, the water was clear as air, in Carrie’s simple and apt phrase. The day had begun, and we were together and free.