Field Notes from Belize
Emily Hiestand

First published in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and The Very Rich Hours (Beacon Press, 1992); revised slightly 2023
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One summer when the American heartland was hit by drought, driven by climate change or a convincing portent, when the eastern seaboard was washed with hospital wastes, and heavy rains added storm-sewer debris to the harbor of Boston, I traveled with my artist friend Katherine to Belize. While we packed jungle boots and snake bite kits, our husbands, friends, and families gave blank stares as they searched mental globes to find a country by this name. “It was once called British Honduras,” stirred vague recollection, but no one placed the nation on the limestone shelf that juts into the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, bounded on the north by Yucatan, west by the Peten forest of Guatemala. No one remembered its eastern shore as a swath of the Spanish Main, nor its interior as home to the Maya, whose world this was when Greece was having its Golden Age. 

Living in forest villages away from the sea, small groups of Maya survive in modern Belize, each one speaking a different dialect of their tongue, raising black beans and maize as they did anciently on small shifting plots called milpas after an Aztec word for corn. Many more Belizeans are self-described Creoles — African Europeans descended from enslaved people who labored for colonial timber merchants. Garifunas, descended from South American Caribs intermarried with Africans, live along the southern coast where the women uphold traditional ceremonial life. A goodly fifth of the population are Mestizos of Mayan–Spanish roots. A small number descend from Spanish buccaneers and British colonials, and from Scotsman Peter Wallace and his fellow pirates. There are also small groups of Chinese, Lebanese, and Eastern European people. Near Orange Walk in the north dwells a Mennonite community whose members who speak an archaic form of German. In an understatement, one student of Belizeans says: “It is clear they do not subscribe to a common culture, ideology, or value system.”1

On an average day in the country a traveler can encounter “byl–ups” (boil-ups) of cassava roots and fish; roofs built by Scots to withstand the snow loads of Inverness; Rastafarians moving through fragrant ganja swirls; clerks with racks of stamps to certify the formidable paperwork of a post–colonial bureaucracy; the Maya god of writing who is a monkey that roars like a jaguar; schoolgirls in navy-blue uniforms and white knee socks; Mestizo boys tattooed in honor of their pirate ancestors; a nine–foot boa constrictor run over by a car in the downtown shopping area; mom and pop stores where, if you are low on cash, you may buy one cup's worth of corn flour on credit, where an elder's authority emanates from behind the counter, light creeps through a dusty window, and a child sits on a stool learning by watching. 

To my eyes, as yet unschooled in things Belizean, it appears that this rich human world manages to conduct life without overly rigid organizing principles. When journalist Norman Lewis traveled to what was still British Honduras in the 1950s, he described a population moving about somewhat “aimlessly” in the fierce tropical climate or else “asleep in the attitudes of victims of murder.” Since all members of this society descend from cultures with highly organized values, aesthetics, and economies, one can guess that some X factor, beyond the heat, accounts for the casual, desultory tone. Perhaps Lewis meant only to convey the informal street scene, but his observation about crime is right in the largest sense, as British Honduras was one of the inhumane, slave–based New World economies.

Not only obscure but anomalous, the tiny land is the only English–speaking nation in Mesoamerica, more akin to the Caribbean countries than its contiguous neighbors. But in the eighteenth century, the sail to Belize from the British West Indies was a long one, the barrier reef in the Bay of Honduras daunting, and a struggle for control between Spain and England further dissuaded either power from fully settling the territory. As a result, Belize was not only exploited but considerably more neglected than a standard colony. What’s surprising is not that the infrastructure remains somewhat tenuous, but that so many veins of deep cultural wisdom have survived.

In one of the ironies of history, it is partly due to the sorrowful particulars of their past that Belizeans now occupy their land in an unusually sound ecological manner. With a tiny human population, the lowest population density in Central America,2 no industrial pollution to speak of, and low–impact subsistence farming, the region appears very much as it did in earlier British accounts such as this one: “Approach to the coast is through the islets known as cayes and through coral reefs. For some miles inland the ground is low and swampy, with mangroves and tropical jungle.…Further inland comes the less elevated country of mixed scrub. These tracts are intersected by…palm trees and broad savannas.”3

As I am traveling in Belize in the late 1980s the country is still blanketed by palm trees and broad savannas interlaced by lagoons, mangrove swamps, and gallery forests that line streams and rivers. Limestone spines of fossil coral reefs fold through the northern half of the country, shaping jungle–covered ridges whose valleys hold the Nuevo and Hondo rivers. In the days when the territory was a backwater Crown colony, mahogany was the economic staple, and some tall red mahogany trees remain in the rainforests of the south where lianas and epiphytes also swag over Mexican cedars and mayflower trees, and the canopy soars one hundred and twenty feet and disappears into clouds. The jagged Maya Mountains create the Cockscomb Basin where jaguars, pumas, ocelots, and coatimundis live in a preserve. The coastal savannas and marshes are home for osprey and laughing falcons, snowy egrets, and white–crowned parrots. Dense mangroves cloak the mainland coasts. Clusters of cayes shelter the mainland, and receive shelter from the barrier reef of the Caribbean, a coral wall that grows up to twenty-one miles wide and stretches one hundred and sixty miles up the Yucatan peninsula. After Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, it is the largest coral being on the planet. 

To those sobered by the current state of the planet, Belize appears as a hopeful land, a place where sustained–yield conservation principles might outpace conventional development and keep the ecosystems healthy. Among the species that teem in its rainforests, marshes, and reefs are a near tribe of conservationists, ecologists, and enlightened natural-resource planners, converging especially from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Naturally, to marina and hotel builders, land speculators, and cattle ranchers Belize looks like a promising place for commercial endeavors. To refugee farmers from neighboring Guatemala, Honduras, and the Yucatan, the tropical forests look like next year's milpa fields. Belizeans themselves come to nationhood and modern technology at a time when not only the goods, but the devastations of modernity, industrialism, and untempered capitalism have unfolded for all the world to see. 

It is hard to say whether a tropical country with an emerging economy can forgo immediate income from agribusiness and forest–destroying cattle ranches, but the innate worth of their land is not lost on Belizeans. Through private and government efforts, they have placed nearly one–third of their country in reserves and sanctuaries, and have welcomed many plans that marry ecological wisdom with economics, notably the Programme for Belize, which conserves an enormous land tract in the Rio Bravo River area and hopes to generate income through natural history tourism, research, and selective agro–forestry. Economically fragile, as yet unable to feed its citizens from local sources. Belize has staked its future on an ecological agenda that includes the view that tourism can evolve into a force for conservation and sustainable development. Here, the Minister of Tourism, Mr. Glenn Godfrey, is also the Minister of the Environment. In an open letter to travelers, he writes: “We are unwavering in the protection of our environmental treasures... [and] you will derive considerable satisfaction from knowing you are making a positive contribution to [our natural wonders] simply by visiting them.”  

So abundant are professional environmentalists in this hospitable climate that Katherine and I cannot get from airport to inn without meeting one. We share a taxi with a British coastal ecologist studying the destabilizing practice of clearing mangrove for home sites along the Belize River, and as the rattling vehicle hurtles by the olive brown river, we are briefed in detail on the role of Rhizophora mangle (red mangrove) in protecting against hurricanes. Once in Belize City we meet the following in quick succession: a Canadian engineer who is researching expansion of the port city's primitive sewer system; the U.S. Aid for International Development officer for environmental projects in Belize; a senior political scientist researching forest management techniques; the director of the Belize Center for Environmental Studies who is planning a conference of herbal healers; and a young English field researcher whose card reads “Institute of Biological Control, West Indian Station, Trinidad, W.I., with compliments, Graham Breen.”    

Freshening up from the wild

Instead of believing that we are deceived by matter or our senses... we can assert, since we do experience color, that in our experience of colour we have entered into a union with what we perceive. That together with matter we create colour.

Graham Breen's mission is to locate plants that repel insects, plants that could be used to diminish the use of chemical pesticides. We meet on the veranda of a guest house with no vacancies, and share a ride to another where the room card says that here one can, “at the most reasonable rates, enjoy bi–fo–time olde Belize Creole hospitality and breakfast in a dis–ya–time modern Belizean home.” Breen is on his bi–weekly return from the rainforest for an indoor shower and city food, and before zipping out to scour the nearby roadside for insect–repelling plants, he suggests we meet for dinner at the nearby Fort George Hotel. In the 1950s, Lewis found roast tapir, roast armadillo and roast paca being served as delicacies in this very dining room. Endangered species acts now keep these creatures off the menu, and during our stay offerings are further distilled. Usually shrimp, many fishes, and conch are plentiful in the hotel dining room, but this July the only first course is lobster cocktail and the only entree, “mixed seafood grille,” is composed entirely of the local spiny lobster. Thus, lobster cocktail followed by lobster grille, followed by a lobster salad, is the standard dinner. It’s delicious.

Over dinner conversation, we discover that Breen has an active affection for the tropical woods he frequently inhabits — for its creatures and calls, the light that filters through tangled lianas, and the salmon–hued amapolas that relieve the many greens. He tells us that he often falls asleep to rain drumming the leaves, wakes to the full–throttle songs of birds, and feels at home weaving among the tree trunks whose bases spread like the shaggy fetlocks of workhorses. So I’m surprised when he says that razing these forests for commercial interests is perfectly acceptable. Scientific data about the role of the forests in climate regulation dissuades many from this opinion; and actually experiencing the beauty of forests often leads to a protective view. But Breen does not trust his own keen sense of beauty, and notes that “it doesn't come up that much in science.” The ravishing Landsat photos are among thousands of images that say otherwise, but what Breen means is that aesthetic experience does not have the status of fact.   

•

Thought Balloon Sidebar — In common parlance, “objective” means an account of the world uncolored by the emotional, aesthetic, and experiential intelligences that produces subjective insight. However, as philosopher Erazim Kohák notes in The Embers and The Stars, his eloquent inquiry into the moral sense of nature, “the opposite seems far closer to the truth.... It is what we are used to treating as ‘objective reality’ — the conception of nature as a system of dead matter propelled by blind force — that is in truth the product of a subject's activity...a sophisticated abstraction. It is, undeniably, a highly useful construct for accomplishing a whole range of legitimate tasks. Still, it is a construct not an experiential given. In a real, though not customary sense, it is what we mislabel ‘poetic imagination’ that is, ‘objective,’ a spontaneous experiential given.” 

As scientists themselves were among the first to notice, the sophisticated, useful abstraction called “objective reality” rests on the view that mind and the rest of nature are separable phenomena, and that such things as forests are objects, while such things as people are subjects. Although the human senses, by drawing us into communion with tidal pools and butterflies, suggest such a rigid separation is a false notion, knowledge from the senses — arising from a synthesis of aesthetic, emotional, empirical data — has long been suspect in both religious and scientific doctrines of the West: either it led to damnation, or it was untrustworthy, or both. Nevertheless, as poet Susan Griffin notes in her essay on Newton's Opticks, we can make a very different interpretation of sense knowledge: “Instead of believing that we are deceived by matter or our senses... we can assert, since we do experience colour, that in our experience of color we have entered into a union with what we perceive. That together with matter we create colour.” In this view, beauty is evidence of a joyful connection, one that French mathematician and physicist, Henri Poincare, discerns at the very heart of the scientific quest: “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful: he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.”

In his study of the place of beauty in physics, Fang Lizhi goes so far to say that science “arises from the search for and the creation of beauty,” and that since nature “has the property that all truths are necessarily beautiful.... the pursuit of beauty will inevitably lead to the discovery of truth.” Among Lizhi's examples of this heuristic are: Copernicus, who puts the sun at the center of the solar system, not because heliocentrism better fit current empirical observations, but because he found its image “more perfect in form,” and the English physicist Dirac who, on the strength of its beauty and against all evidence, held to his equation for symmetry between positive and negative charges in nature until the positron that satisfied his theory was discovered.4 Champions of objective fact are surely right when they claim that the senses can distort and obscure; and yet, curiously, this flaw does not diminish the vital role aesthetic knowledge plays in our conversation with the world. 

•

Over our dinner, I venture a greatly distilled version of those thoughts, offered merely as an interesting point of view. And so pleasant are Graham Breen's manners that by the time we are having tea, he is not so much agreeing with the hypothesis about sense knowledge as cheerfully alternating between two minds: one that communes with a living forest, one that objectifies the forest as inert products–to–be.

It is not unusual to find both forms of knowing coexisting within one person. Most of us hold various, conflicting ideas about nature — drawn from a mélange of literary images, physics, spiritual insight, animism, and contemporary ecological science. As a result we call our surround the world, the planet Earth, a mechanism, the biosphere, Mother Nature, fallen matter, wilderness, the ecosphere, the natural resource base, and of course, Nature. But these are not perfectly interchangeable words; each carries a different, implied philosophy about how our species might inhabit the Earth. The interwoven ideas are so numerous and individually understood that any two humans who care about the Earth rarely mean to offer their affection to the same being.

Eventually, Graham, Katherine, and I agree on this: that present human activities, if continued, will lead to collapse, not of nature per se, which will certainly continue in new forms, but of the life that presently comprises the planet. A surprise solution is proposed by our dinner companion. Not all is lost, he says, because human beings can colonize space! At just this moment desert arrives, and our conversation shifts, mercifully, to ice cream. 

•

Less than an hour after dinner,  back at our small inn, I spot the first tropical wildlife! It is a massive, unknown insect specimen skittering down the wall next to the bed in my room. In an unfamiliar, high–pitched voice, I invite our new entomologist friend to identify it. Graham arrives on the double in his fatigues and jungle boots, but the specimen has escaped. Nevertheless, he takes a moment to reassure me by describing both the tropical forest roach and the coastal roach; noting that the primary difference is size: the forest roach reaches eight inches while the coastal roach obtains to only to six inches. Since the room insect had appeared to me to be about 20 inches, we cannot make a positive identification. Graham is quite sure, however, that whatever size it is, it’s not harmful and will not trouble me further. As it has been an eventful day, I close my eyes on day one in the tropics.

By day three in the unrelieved humid midsummer heat of Belize, enough disorienting events have occurred that Katherine and I have suspended all conversation about human cognition. It is quite enough, at day's end, to get to an eatery, gaze at dim lanterns, sip cold bubbling water, and be grateful for ceiling fans. These mild activities are just right after broiling upriver in a skiff, searching for manatees, or walking in a forest with numberless mosquitos.


Mangroves, manatees

On the day we take a small motorboat upstream on Haulover Creek, we are tracing the Belize River's route back from the port city, through brackish veins and mangrove swamp toward its headwaters in the Peten rainforest. At the river's mouth in the bay, we pass a local fleet of shallow–draft barges with large, open decks and hulls swathed in strips of old rubber tires. The water at the port itself is so shallow that cargo ships must rest at anchor a mile offshore while their holds are loaded and unloaded onto these barges. Always ships shimmer on the eastern horizon, colossal tankers reduced to pale silhouettes. The congestion of the port causes us to sidle next to a small wooden pitpan hauling bundles of mahogany. The short reddish logs are stacked on the decks and poke from cabin windows; blue smoke sputters in a thin trail from the pitpan’s engine.

The crew of this little boat is a Maya family, a mother, father, a girl, and two boys settled here and there on log bundles under a canvas shade tarp. The oldest boy, maybe twelve, is at the helm; the mother wears a flame–red chemise for the trip into town. As our boats pass, they slightly graze and squeak, causing the boy–pilot to grin. Along this urban stretch, the riverbanks are shored-up with metal and wood reinforcements that give the rive the appearance of being a canal. Square wooden houses on stilts are built directly up to the water's edge; high as they are, the houses catch such breezes as come from the ocean, and each has a small veranda laden with drying clothes and men rocking in chairs. The roofs are corrugated zinc; the walls glow even under grey skies in a medley of peeling paint — hues of lime green, blue, coral, and white. Built Belize is worn, flaking, and rusting away in layers of lovely color, with the tops of ragged palm trees swaying above the sheets of metal.  

Beyond the port, our boat travels under clearing clouds; the houses thin, then disappear until we are skimming along under an arch of thick green mangrove trees. Slender aerial roots drop from the high limbs of trees, dangling in midair. Enormous nests, three feet around, swell in the crooks of trees. These nests are the cradles of jungle termites whose trails lead up and down the trunk to the water line: closely observed, the bark is alive with wavering golden–brown lines, the insects glinting in what sun comes through the tangle of trees. The river surface itself glows with flotillas of leaves, some green, many turned bright yellow and brown. We are floating in the local ecological nursery, a cycle that goes like this: continuously shed mangrove leaves decompose, filling the estuarial rivers and coastal waters with slurries of phosphorus bits that appeal to local shrimps and crabs who feed on the phosphorus, filtering the particles from the water, placing them in a marl from which the phosphorus is released by mud feeders to grasses and plankton, who feed the fishes whose droppings are taken up by the trees and other plants. 

The boat we have taken for this little voyage has a brilliant turquoise hull that shines against the dull green river. Later, when the boat enters the bay and the mangrove cayes, we reach a spot where the hull perfectly matches the color of the sea. This, we realize, must be the color our young boatman wanted to capture. His name is Bandula, after the name of an elephant in a children’s story, he tells us, and he makes a living from his boat, from fishing, and by selling jewelry that he smooths from corals, whelks, and coconuts. He is jaunty and stylish, his forearms tattooed with mermaids who flicker in the light dappling through the shiny mangroves. Further upstream, where the mangrove stands are eighty feet high, Bandula turns off the motor; the engine noise dies away, revealing the deep, minor key hum of insects that rises, a curtain of sound, from the forest. We drift for while in the current, searching for manatees. The story that Spanish sailors mistook manatees for mermaids strains credulity when you see what lumpish, placid creatures they are with bristling whiskers, and so peaceful that they are thought to be the only mammals that cannot be goaded into fighting.

Mrs. Winil Grant Borg

At the guest house where we first stay in Belize City, a decorative iron grille and a heavy carved wooden door are locked behind every guest who enters, and mahogany slat–blinds over the front windows keep the sun from entering the cool marble foyer. Inside, it is Winil's world. Born in Belize, Winil Grant Borg inherited the stately white house on Barrack Road from her parents, the Grants, and, a decade ago, converted it into a guest house that she named Glenthorne Manor. Is she forty–five, fifty? She has radiant skin and a queenly aura that make speculation moot. Evenings, she entertains a handful of friends in her private sitting room on the second floor. As her guests glide up the stairs, one has a glimpse of men in white, embroidered shirts, women with elegant shell and silver earrings. From the window onto the street comes the faint clink of ice in their glasses and the tumble of Belizean Kriol, a full-fledged language based in English and influenced by Spanish, and several West African and Bantu languages. Occasionally, Winil and her guests effortlessly shift into a nearly Jamesian English rhetoric, and like most Belizeans they all speak fluent Spanish as well.

Mornings, Winil arrives in the breakfast room in a flowing, formal dressing gown, urging us to nibble the toast points, kippers, muffins, and marmalade arranged on salvers and China plates on a table under the slow ceiling fan. There are two other guests at the Glenthorne, but by the breakfast hour Graham Breen has long been in the countryside, and the young Canadian woman in the room with a poster bed will not rise until afternoon, when she will set out on rounds to discuss hydrological schemes for the new sewer system. Katherine and I sit alone with our hostess, taking bits of smoked fish and toast, trying to rise to what is a formal morning tea. Nearly forty years ago, during the beginnings of the independence movement in Belize, Mr. Leigh Richardson was a founder and leader of the reform–minded People's United Party. In his desire to hasten independence, Mr. Richardson sought to purge British Honduras of all things colonial: its name, the game of cricket, above all, tea drinking. Happily, independence came and tea remained. Winil offers us a choice of Earl Grey or Prince of  Wales tea. 

From the other end of the guest parlor comes the muted monologue of an enormous television set mounted on the wall. Belize produces radio but no visual broadcasting of its own; the curvature of the Earth and international broadcasting regulations combine to allow the signal from just one television station to reach Belize: CTV9 from Chicago beams into the region; a young entrepreneur catches (that is, pirates) the signal on several satellite dishes mounted in his backyard and relays it to all of Belize for a fee. Television screens flicker throughout the city, permanently on, alerting residents to ice storms and winds over Lake Michigan and the perennially sad news about the Cubs. The woebegone team has gripped the affections of Belizeans; a program guide in the weekly newspaper prints Cubs games (this week with the Padres, Expos, and Phillies) in bold type under the heading: Please Take Special Note. Pointedly, there are no listings for cricket, neither for the Maya ball game once played for keeps in the nearby pyramid cities of Caracol and Lamanai.

When she was ten, Winil followed her brother to school in England, returning summers to Belize or traveling with her parents. “In the theatre” is how she describes her mother and father. One morning, Winil brings out a box of souvenirs from their performances in the thirties and forties; there are playbills and thick, pasteboard posters printed in fine, faded black and orange inks, the images of Hamlet, Puck, Othello, and Titania slightly mottled by tropical molds that have spread delicately across the paper. Winil first settled in Europe, she tells us, married, then moved for a time to California where a daughter is now studying at Berkeley. About the decision to return to Belize for good, she supplies only hints. A death was involved and above all the disappointments that must come in America to a Black woman with a memory of bi–fo–time Belizean hospitality. 

After breakfast, Winil goes downstairs to oversee the washing. Her housekeeper, Mrs. Welch, has sorted the laundry from three large baskets into piles and has begun the first load in a small washing machine. The scents of Twenty Mule Team Borax and a lemon soap mingle in the humid room. Winil is still in her morning gown; Mrs. Welch wears a long, deep–purple scarf around her head, the shape towering like a headdress. Through an open door to the interior courtyard, a stand of Royal Poinciana trees shine in the sun, the last of their flame flowers fading. meant to linger just a moment in the laundry room door, pausing on my way to look for wonders in the jungle. The two women gently wrap me into their morning chat. They say that when they were girls and young women, the thing to do was to dance the quadrille. Yes, the quadrille, do I not know it?  

As they begin to reminisce, the sheets hang in the women’s hands, and their smiles seems not so much for me, nor even each other, but for some much larger, vanished audience. The conversation is like a dance, each woman supplying phrases as they resurrect the world in an old dance hall whose gleaming cedar and rosewood floors were logged from forests south of the Cockscomb mountains. The dances were held on Sunday afternoons and into the early evening. The young Creole men and women of the capital city came in finery; older people came as matchmakers and chaperones. To begin, the men formed one long line, the women another; as the music began, they processed in concentric rings around the hall, advancing at a signal toward their chosen partners, and forming squares of six couples each in which the quadrille is danced. It is of French origin, the five figures and the finale of the quadrilles des contredanses derived from the ballet: Le Pantalon, l’Ete, La Poule, La Trenitz, La Pastourelle. It is easy to believe that, as Winil says, the dancers were light on their feet. 

When the music of their conversation comes to its last notes, the women come back to the laundry room, where they see Katherine who has joined us, and me, gradually swimming into view with our polite questions. No, there is no more dancing the quadrille, they tell us. Have we seen the discos in Belize City? Cheap places with fights, drinking, drugs, the music too loud, and worst of all — everyone dancing alone. The woven figures of elegant order have disappeared from the dance floor. But “Oh,” the women say, not willing to be curmudgeonly, “it is what they are like now.” And Winil goes further, bravely admitting about the discos, “I do not attend very often, but if you want to dance...”

Ways of traveling

At Altun Ha, we innocently climbed the invisible axis mundi and stood in the doorway to time and space. As it turns out, the pyramid was designed as a means to move from earthly to celestial geography.

Here are some of the ways the earliest people known to occupy this land described their world. The limestone sponge of the territory said to be the flat back of a crocodile resting in lily pads. The limestone sponge of the territory is said to be the flat back of a crocodile resting in lily pads. Itzamna, a lizard god, links heaven and earth; a young man with almond eyes is the perennial god of maize. Frogs and tortoises sing to help the Chacs bring rain; the unfaithful moon, Ix Chel, weaves and heals. The people giving this account say that they themselves are made of maize dough after attempts to fashion them in mud, wood, and flesh each failed. They love chocolate, and its beans are money. Very prized too are the long, iridescent tail feathers of the quetzal. Settled by the mangrove estuaries, these early inhabitants like oysters, pumpkins, custard apples, and the eggs of iguanas. They keep stingless bees in hollow logs. Deities abound — for beekeepers, poets, and tattoo artists, for lovers, and fishermen. In the sky, the North Star is the god of travelers. The god of the underworld smokes a cigar.

In time, the maize–made people engineer the swamps, the tintal bajos, into fertile land and terrace their fields with wide canals. Fish can be numbed and caused to float into their weirs. Shields are made from tapir hides. They think of zero, and each number is divine. From the swirling, elegant glyphs they have left behind some fragments can be interpreted: “it had existed”; “he entered the sky”; “the child of.” For six thousand years, they evolved with the forest and estuaries, and between 150 and 950 A.D., the Maya way of life became one of the great human experiments.   

Thirty miles north of the modern port city, near Corozal province and a scant six miles from the sea, the Maya of 200 B.C. began to build what would become a small ceremonial and trade center that linked their southern lowland region with the far city of Teotihuacan (northeast of modern Mexico City). At the ruin of Altun Ha, Katherine and I are met by the custodian, a dignified middle–aged man named Louis who wears a machete at his waist and, despite the heat, knee–high rubber boots. Dr. David Pendergast of Canada and the team of archaeologists who excavated Altun Ha in the 1960s long ago returned to their universities and museums; since they went home, it has been up to Louis and a teenage helper to keep the rampaging foliage from swallowing up the stout pyramids again. Beyond the area of Louis’s patrol lies another mile and a half of soft green mounds: temples, dwellings, and urban structures yet uncovered. By now, these are even more grown over than the models for Frederick Catherwood’s moody, 19th-century engravings of crumbled cities: trees erupting from broken steps, pyramids covered in mats of roots and vines quietly crushing the stone, images that stoked the nineteenth century idea of ruin as a romance.

During our walk up, over, and among the several pyramids that enclose a central courtyard, Louis is ever on guard for weeds which he dismisses with a flick of his steel blade. Even when we stand atop the largest crumbling structure, Louis hacks away at the stubborn rooted wildflowers and grasses that spring from every crevice. From this spot, three other pyramids are visible, their wide bases enclosing several large, green plazas. We pause for a long while here, studying the enigmatic scene. No kiva, longhouse, or sweat lodge in the north remotely resembles this staggering rubble. Our attempts to elicit information about the ruins from Louis go like this:

Me: “Did they worship the sun god here?” 
Louis: “They buried the priest over there.”   
Katherine: “Oh, priests were buried inside the pyramids?”
Louis: “The jade treasure from the tomb was stolen.”

High up on the pyramid, the world spilling away on every side, Katherine and I squint into the sun, peering into the air, light, and surrounding jungle as though there we might see what the Maya did on this spot and in the chambers below. Quite suddenly, Louis announces that he will now take us to the pond! “What pond, a Mayan pond?, we wonder, but answers to our questions have thus far been elusive, so we silently follow Louis into the woods, giving him clearance for swinging his machete at green tendrils invading the path. Giant fern fronds sway overhead. Louis trudges on without explanation, giving us time to consider what we are doing two thousand miles from home in the jungle with a stranger…when, at last, the pond! Louis looks extremely pleased. We have a chat:

Katherine: “Is the pond very old?” 
Louis: “A farmer dug it for his horses.”  
Me: “There must be wonderful wildlife here.” 
Louis: “I don't use mosquito repellent; I just swat them.”

And then, Louis turns and leads us back through the mud, mosquitos, and swaying fronds in a companionable silence. From the trees and lianas comes the call of the bill bird, the keel–billed toucan, whose steady crick crick carries through the forest. Back at the ceremonial center, we buy a booklet (c.1970) that says that pyramid B–1 may have been more complex than pyramid A–4, that pyramid B–4 may be the site where copal and jade were cast into a blazing fire, that the shape of structure B–2 suggests a palace, but we can never be certain; that the glyph–writing is not yet cracked, and that the true name of the city is unknown.5

Altun Ha, we also learn, is the modern Maya language equivalent for “Rockstone Waters” — the pond! — which is partially clay-lined, indicating ancient engineering. As it turns out, the nameless pyramid we were standing on in casual cotton tee shirts was designed as a structure to both focus and manifest divine energy for the human world, and as a means to move from earthly to celestial geography.

Just tiptoeing into the ancient Maya world, you can find yourself in a vastly new reality, an experience not unlike the one the Maya meant to embody via their pyramids. They had noticed that the Earth was a thin band of existence, so they constructed gateways into the fullness of the universe. The pyramids are special points, intersections of the vertical and horizontal planes through which the sacred ceiba (silk-cotton) tree may grow from the underworld to the Earth and onward into celestial regions. This was a route by which the Maya expressed the continuum between the natural and numinous worlds. To link worlds they felt the geometry and siting of the pyramids must be precise, so each one is aligned to one of the four cardinal points of Mayan space which was — like time for Einstein — as much an autonomous, pervasive force as an abstract measuring device.

The four points are marked by ceiba trees and are also guarded by four invisible jaguar priests, the Bacabs, whose task it is to hold together time and space. The resulting architecture and landscape do not so much symbolize as embody the structure of heaven for the Maya. Just so, the steps that sheath one side of the pyramids mark the days of the year, but moreover, they express the unique quality of each day, which like every other thing and creature of the ancient Mayan universe is animate, brimming with significance. Scholars often speak admiringly of the economy of Mayan symbols and suggest that the pyramid, in its densely packed meanings, served as an “index to the complicated natural ciphers” of the world.6

Later that day, sitting on the seawall back in Belize City, Katherine admires the huge black birds soaring on eight foot wings over the bay. “Magnificent Frigatebirds,” she says, and it takes a little Abbot and Costello “who’s on first” go–round for me to realize that “magnificent” is part of the bird’s name — not an adjective Katherine is supplying. As we watch the birds with their sharp, pointed wings and red gullets sailing wind currents out to sea and then back to shore, Katherine and I discuss the Maya constructions: in the conjunction of space, time, and matter, they seem to have been making a kind of unified field theory, one that also included the union of spirit and matter. The pyramids also served as tombs from which rulers launched their souls’ journeys through the afterlife. 

At Altun Ha, we had innocently climbed an invisible axis mundi and, wearing T-shirts, stood in the doorway to time and space. On the crest of the pyramid, led by its shape, we had instinctively turned toward the four directions, to view the surrounding in the quadrants that characterize Amerindian geography: to the East is birth and vitality; to the North, maturity; to the West, old age. And in the South — ahhh. Ignorant of the implications of traveling, or even facing, to the Maya south we had looked directly into the jungle thicket that grows where a soul may become lost, unable to return to the center.7 While gazing out on the Maya landscape of life, we had also been standing above the chambered tomb of some elite person who had been buried with mounds of jade carvings, shell necklaces, jaguar claws, a folding book written on bark from the wild fig tree, and a cache of stingray spines used in ritual blood lettings. Scholarly accounts from the 1950s are tinged with a sadness that arose as the older view of the Maya as a peaceful theocracy yielded to evidence of a society that knew war and whose citizens engaged in ritual sacrifices.


“All moons, all years, all days, all winds, reach their completion”

“The loss of their intellectual records is especially sad for a people whose supreme deity is Itzamna, inventor of writing and the patron of learning.”

We had asked Louis why the central Maya ceremonial centers had been abandoned around the late tenth century. “The route to the sea is this way,” he replied, pointing to the East. The many reasons suggested by historians include diseases, drought, and the unintentional creation of savannas — which, lacking the plow, the Mayas could not till. Of the abundant theories of collapse, Algar Gregg has said, “Guessing the reason for this failure of social organization is a favorite pastime for archaeologists in Central America.”8

While the collapse was drastic, it was not complete. Construction in some centers, Altun Ha for one, continued for a century after the fateful changes elsewhere and, after Maya migrated north into Yucatán, the region they called the Land of the Turkey and the Deer, their ceremonial centers, endured into the thirteenth century. By the time Francisco Hernández de Córdoba’s conquistadors arrived in Yucatán in 1517, Maya in many parts had been subdued by a Toltec/Mexican people, but the latter had greatly absorbed Maya culture. At Chichen Itza, the Mexican lords were dismissively described by Maya citizens as those who “speak our language brokenly.” In their remotest Yucatán dwellings, the Maya rebuffed the Toltec and Aztec and were still holding out against Porfirio Díaz in the late nineteenth century. At some sites to the south, the stone stelae that recorded annual events continued to appear well after the tenth-century disintegration, although the monuments were usually erected upside down or in the wrong kinds of places. “These aberrations,” archaeologist Patrick Culbert muses, “look not so much like impiety as like efforts [to] continue the stelae cult by people who had lost the knowledge of the proper way of doing things.”9

More propriety disappeared when sixteenth-century Spanish missionaries burned the Maya books and yet, a millennium after the classic Maya culture collapsed, one can come upon a bowl of copal burning at the base of a stone stair in the jungle, the incense smoke twining thinly and bluely through the leaves, giving off what the Maya call the “odor of the center of heaven.” The loss of their intellectual records is especially sad for a people whose supreme deity is Itzamna, inventor of writing, patron of learning.

For centuries this people has been so resistant to our understanding that the late dean of Mayanists, Sir Eric Thompson, conceded of encounters with them: “[T]ravelers…return from their journeys, physical or mental, curiously unsatisfied.” Now, in the late twentieth century, even as we walk their old forest home, the Maya glyphs are yielding to the epigrapher’s art. Taking the view that the marks are both phonetic and logographic signs (capable of representing words and syllables), scholars Linda Schele and David Stuart are beginning to read and pronounce the plump, convoluted marks. Glyph T539, says Stuart, speaks of “co-essence,” the Maya knowledge that other creatures and things, ocelots and comets, for example, can “share in the consciousness” of a human being.10 This is spine-tingling stuff, signaling a phase in Maya research that Schele, alluding to the decipherer of the Rosetta Stone, names “the time of Champollion.”11 And yet, so much was burned by friars and dissolved by humidity that Thompson may always be right.  

His famous books are full of burro rides, fleas, hammocks strung in bat–filled temples, questions coming in the middle of Yucatán nights. He uses the word “quest,” and thinks it is relevant to write down his feelings about the intellectuals of Mesoamerica. Sir Eric is fun to read and he is scrupulous, modestly introducing his own theory about the collapse (peasant revolt) by recalling Hilaire Belloc’s reflection on all theories: “Their whole point and value is that they are not susceptible to proof.”12

We do know that they dared to conduct civilization on a thin, poor soil with few water reservoirs, and the most suggestive of current theories is that the collapse was precipitated by strains laced into the very success of a rainforest culture. Their clever, intensive, fixed–field agriculture led to population increases, to a rise in building programs, and new standards of leisure among the elite. Inevitably then, the human expansion overwhelmed the fragile forest ecology. Soil depletion and malnutrition arose; management failures ensued, along with violence between the great cities of Tikal and Caracol; and a desperate demand for labor soured the bond between the peasant and elite classes. Patrick Culbert believes that, once degraded, “the ravaged land offered little potential for re-population,” and notes that today “the rain forest home of the Maya still remains an unpopulated wilderness.”13

It could be that the Maya were not surprisedby discovering the limits of their way of life. Ptolemy Tompkins finds that in myth they foresaw “the dangers and contradictions of human progress” and told themselves the story of evolving from village life “plagued with...guilt and ambiguity,” warning themselves that a culture growing in scale courts the loss of knowledge about how to properly live on the Earth.14 Certainly, modernity echoes their anxiety. Mercifully, a handful of Maya sacred texts were translated, by Maya-speakers, into Spanish under the supervision of sixteenth-century friars. Though these translations weave strands of Christianity into Maya cosmology, they comprise some of the most reliable clues about ancient Maya thought. From one of the books, known to us as the Chilam Balam of Chumayel (The Book of the Jaguar Priests of Chumayel ), comes this observation:

“All moons, all years, all days, all winds, reach their completion and pass away.
So does all blood reach its place of quiet, as it reaches its power and its throne. 
Measured was the time in which they could praise the splendor of the [divinities]. Measured was the time in which they could know the Sun’s benevolence. Measured
was the time in which the grid of the stars would look down upon them; and
through it, keeping watch over their safety, the gods trapped within the stars
would contemplate them.”15

In the Maya measure, time flows eternally from past into future, a conception that sounds plausible enough to our minds. But our linear notion of history is alien to their view that the past reoccurs in cyclical, specified time periods. In such a reality, history is prophecy; thus, the three interlocking Maya calendars, numerical grids by which learned squadrons might mark returns of time periods and predict life’s events. The time frame observed is very long indeed: the Maya measured in days, months, and tuns (a 360-day unit), in katun (about 20 years), baktun (400 years), pictun (8,000 years), calabtun (158,000 years), kincultun (3M years), and alantun (about 60M years.) Thompson marvels at the Maya ability to perfectly compute day and month positions three hundred million years in the past and what this suggests about their vision. Theirs was, he says, “an appraisal of the ages which would have been utterly inconceivable to us even today, had not our minds been conditioned to their vastness by the writings of the astronomers and geologists of the nineteenth century.”16

That a numerical count was not the only Maya idea of order can be known from a glance at any of their ceramic pots or stone serpent heads. Some suggest that the teeming, convoluted imagery shows a fear of empty space, and some have praised the proliferation of form, but no one doubts the plasticity the artwork embodies. Roger Fry finds nothing in Europe to match the Maya “power to suggest all the complexity of nature.” A “dynamic imbalance…leads the eye restlessly along,” says Michael Coe. Here is the ceaseless drama that saturates beetles and civilizations, in whose reverberation nothing endures save energy and change. Perhaps the rigid, predictive calendar and the fluid, intricate art represent two veins of the Maya vision, and perhaps under the strains of population explosion and ecological depletion — stresses we can well appreciate — the balance was lost.  

By the sixteenth century, however, Maya society had evolved again. The priestly astronomy and fine mathematics were long lost, and life had returned to the calendar of maize and calabash in fields ringed by shining pepper plants. In what would become Belize, villages were situated along the fertile coast and central lagoons, and were, predictably, devastated by Spanish weapons and diseases. Although the Maya sometimes appeared to embrace the beliefs of their oppressors — expediency, diplomacy, curiosity, and similarities between Christian and Maya thought are some of the reasons — they quickly discovered the foreigners’ lack of reciprocal tact.17 By the time British loggers arrived, in the middle of the seventeenth century, coastal Belize was empty of human settlements. As a poem from the Chilam Balam laments, Maya who survived violence and pandemics had melted into the forest interior:           

On that day, the tender leaf is destroyed ...
On that day, three signs are on the tree,
On that day, three generations hang there ...
And they are scattered afar in the forests.18

The Maya tactics of retreat and resistance, as well as the influx of Yucatec Maya, have resulted in the northwest Belizean forests being lightly dotted with villages named Yo Chen, Chunox, and Xcanha.19 In these places, artisans weave an old cosmology into contermporary shirts and blankets: white for North, red for East, yellow for the South and maize, black for the West and war, blue for sacrifice, green for life. Here, too, villagers seek the traditional healing arts practiced by the H’men, an old word that means “those who understand and can do.” 


Questions of order
Those who understand and can do is definitely not what Katherine and I are while maneuvering in this sub–tropical reality. What happens when we attempt to visit one of the old H’men is an example. We had learned that a respected herbalist named Rosita Arvigo studies Maya traditional medicine with Don Eligio Panti, the renowned ninety-year-old hierbatero, or herbal healer, who lives in the San Ignacio village. En route to the village, the back axle of our hired car breaks in two on a road full of potholes. We have the means to change a flat tire but not to weld an axle, so we wait on the dirt road for some three hours until a truck laden beans happens by, and the driver kindly ferries us back to the port city. But spending a late afternoon on the scruff of a pineland savanna is not regrettable; vines and craboo grow up to the road, blue butterflies flutter over the dusty leaves and, as the heat abates, birds begin to appear: most prominently a bevy of Ruddy Ground Doves. We chat about Montale’s poetry, the heat, whether or not to get out our snake bite kit, and the art of abandoning plans as needed.

Another day, we set forth on a walk to see more of Belize City and hope to find the office of Dora Weyer, the legendary naturalist who founded Parrot’s Wood Biological Station in Belize. We ask at various places until a store clerk gives us the in–town address for the office. Ringing the bell in mid–afternoon, we are politely admitted to a cool interior with an elegant tile floor and dark, regal Spanish chairs. When we ask the kind receptionist if the office is for the naturalists in this building, she looks amused, and a group of women sitting in the lobby, who are painting their nails red and silver, all begin to laugh. It takes us a few more minutes to realize that we have been given the address for an elegant bordello and that the kind receptionist is the Madame. The ladies are still laughing, and we are too, as we say “Oh, so sorry,” and make our retreat.

Settling for simpler outings, we head next for the Philatelic Office to collect some of the gorgeous local stamps, especially the one with an illustration of a yellow–tail snapper who swims across a rectangle of blue water, toward a tiny silhouette of Elizabeth II in the corner. But the Philatelic Office is closed and there’s no sign to say when it will reopen. Next we hope to make a copy of a playbill that Winil has shown us, but the machine in the only copy shop serving the city is broken, awaiting a crucial part from a factory in Connecticut. We chat with the owner for a while and, all in all, it was a fine day in Belize City.

El Mero (The Real One)

Had we actually reached Don Eligio’s small shack outside San Ignacio, chances are we might not have found his disciple, Rosita Arvigo, in residence. She often travels to the New York Botanical Garden where she teaches ethnobotanists what she has learned from el mero, who himself learned medicine from a healer who kept the old ways, such as turning himself, when required, into a jaguar. In a letter to Sanctuary magazine, Arvigo describes her typical day with Don Eligio: at dawn, he and she set out to gather roots, leaves, bark, and vines from the campo; by afternoon, they are back at the medicine shack, where they reduce the plant materials into potion-sized chips. Each year, she says, they must walk farther and farther, past newly parched, cleared forests to get to the source of healing plants. 

One day, as Mrs. Arvigo and Don Eligio were passing a field of watermelons blanketed white with insecticide, the hierbatero had this to say about agribusiness developers: “They are fooling themselves, and the earth will make them pay for this cruel treatment.” He later added, “I cannot see why people of today do not understand that the soil is like a bank account. You must put in and put in and wait for the interest to grow before you start making withdrawals.”

Of elders like el mero, ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin has said, “Every time one of these medicine men dies before someone can capture his knowledge, it is as though an entire library has burned down.” The ethnopharmacologist Elaine Elisabetsky has described why the intellectual property of traditional healers deserves the status afforded the results of industrial research: 

To transform a plant into a medicine one has to know the correct
species, its location, the proper time of collection (some plants are
poisonous in certain seasons), the part to be used, how to prepare it
(fresh, dried, cut in small pieces, smashed), the solvent to be used
(cold, warm, or boiling water; alcohol, addition of salt, etc.), the way to
prepare it (time and conditions to be left on the solvent), and, finally
posology (route of administration, dosage). Needless to say, curers also
have to diagnose and select the right medicine for the right patients.20

Sub Umbra Floreo

In 1840, the territory was made a crown colony with a legislature and a motto. Sub Umbra Floreo — “I flower in the shade”— is a poignant motto that seems to refer equally to the shaded, flowery forests, to the marginal state of the colony relative to London, and to the dark conditions by which this, and virtually all colonial lands, produced wealth for others.

An excursion into history goes more smoothly than some of our expeditions in current time. We learn that after the Maya, there was another failed human endeavor in this land. The tall, red, fine–grained mahoganies sought by seventeenth century British woodcutters were found growing abundantly in Belize because fifth-century Maya farmers had planted them in great bands to cool the soils of the permanent terrace fields that they had recently invented to feed the growing population of the ceremonial centers.21

After the cities declined and Maya farmers returned to shifting–field milpa farming, the mahoganies continued growing in size until Europeans made them the raison d’etre of British Honduras, whose coat of arms was a shield held by a brace of woodcutters, axes in hand. (The lovely wood was prized for making Chippendale sideboards, paneled railroad coaches, elegant dining tables and desks.) Spain and England bickered endlessly over the endeavor, finally agreeing that British woodcutters could harvest trees but could not own land. To reach this solution, neither empire consulted Guatemala and until quite recently maps on the walls of Guatemalan diplomats showed the Belizean territory as the easternmost province of their country. The arrangement did please the British loggers and export merchants whose interest was in extracting fortunes from the land.

The settlements of Baymen (as British loggers called themselves) remained raw frontier camps where the only formal code of behavior, drawn up in 1765 by Rear Admiral Sir William Burnaby on a visit from Jamaica, included this rule: “No kidnapping, that is, press gang methods of recruiting, except for pilots for one trip only.” The Burnaby Code prevailed until 1840 when, partly in response to conditions described by visitors as “anarchy,” the territory was made a crown colony with a legislature and a motto: Sub Umbra Floreo, which means “I flower in the shade.” The poignant motto seems to refer equally to the shaded, flowery forests, to the marginal state of the colony relative to London, and to the horrific conditions by which this, and virtually all colonial lands, produced wealth for others.

Finding no indigenous labor force in Belize, the eighteenth-century logging merchants followed the enslaved labor model of West Indian plantations. Enslaved people were brought from Jamaica as early as 1724; they were most likely people originally from present–day Nigeria, Congo, and Angola. As loggers, their work took place in remote forests from which escape to Yucatán and Guatemala was possible and as a result the timber captains created conditions somewhat less brutal than those in the West Indies. Merchant records say that “there were no whip drivers, and the liberties found in forestry work, the isolation and lack of constant control, contrast sharply with the labor gangs on the sugar estates.”22 A history published in 1968 by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office even claimed that a “rough comradeship existed between black and white” in British Honduras, and that “a free man could not live better than the well-treated slave.” On this subject, however, the definitive judgment was made by the enslaved workers themselves whose responses to their life conditions included frequent escapes, suicide, high abortion rates among women who chose not to bring babies into such a world, numerous revolts, and after abolition, migration in hearty numbers over the borders.  

To keep skilled laborers in the region after abolition, logging companies began to offer relatively high wages and some former slaves continued woodcutting as free men. For another century, the territory remained an extractive endeavor organized around mahogany profits. A thoughtful colonial administrator would now and then propose that, in a climate with a long growing season, agriculture would seem plausible, but timber merchants thwarted such diversification even after the mahogany trade declined. As the mahogany profits flowed entirely toward foreign investments, no capital remained in the colony to create schools, hospitals, theaters, or roads. With only rivers to ship produce to the market port, farm costs were too high to be viable; the only planting occurred on small family plots and in a flurry of underfunded attempts to start banana and cacao plantations. The latter resulted, above all, in the Chinese–Belizeans who trace their ancestors to laborers imported for these failed schemes.

At the turn of the century, as the mahogany market remained sluggish and logging was mechanized, the prolonged failure to create an infrastructure, a diversified economy, and a social order, came home to roost. In response to widespread unemployment, the colonial government created a few small relief programs, but as absentee merchants controlled the legislature, relief monies were commonly distributed for such things as building new sawmills. Only in the 1950s, with the rise of a working class independence movement, did a government at last emerge that had the well–being of local inhabitants as its primary mission. Now, the past is being shed. By1991, ten years after independence, agriculture was among the most promising sources of national income, but although Belize has high unemployment, centuries of colonial laws that hindered planting and denied land to Creole peoples have produced a great number of citizens who have no tradition of farming. Agriculture is further arrested because a handful of absentee foreign owners hold fifty percent of arable land and choose to leave it idle.

A land tax, meant to stimulate such landowners to sell or develop their land in ways beneficial to the country, had disastrous results initially: owners arranged an exemption for improving a fraction of their holdings. Virtually no tax was produced, and one such “improvement” was the clear–cutting of the handsome forest that bordered the Hummingbird Highway. As for the logged–out mahogany stands of Belize, however, Algar Gregg reports that the Kekchi Maya farmers are successfully restoring mahoganies in the Chiquibul Forest Reserve. Along with corn, they drop mahogany seeds into their planting rows; several years later, when they abandon these fields for others, saplings are rising above the harvested stalks. [See end note links for an update on the Belizean economy and agriculture.]

A window on the park

During our visit, the historic hotel Chateau Caribbean was still in its glory, situated across from the seawall in Belize City. Two formal parlors serve as the lobby, both airy rooms with tall slender doors that give onto the veranda and frame views of balustrades and the brilliant, sparkling light from the nearby sea. The hotel served as first as a private home and we found its broad Victorian veranda an idyllic place to sip a cool afternoon drink and gaze at the sea. The window in my room upstairs overlooks a small, sandy city park with a grove of weathered palm trees. At six o’clock in the evening, as I’m looking out on the park, the sun has backed off slightly and the park is inhabited by three social groups. A group of teenage boys, many of them Rastafarians with dreadlocks flying as they run, are playing an informal soccer match. On the other side of the park a group of young, teenage girls are practicing a cheerleading routine, which closely resembles one of the subtle, elegant African-Caribbean dances of their culture. And nearby, an elderly man and his grandson, maybe five, are playing a game with a kite. This is the game: the grandpa holds the reel of an airborne kite; the little boy holds the kite string and starts running with it, bringing the kite much closer to the ground. He then stops, turns, and looks back at his grandpa. With big smiles and gestures, the man encourages the boy to release the string. When he does, the kite leaps back into the sky like a jack–in–the–box, whereupon both players collapse in hilarity.

Bird's eye view

“When Massachusetts Audubon leaders realized that a conservation project was welcome in Belize, they initiated negotiations between the government and private landowners, a patient effort under Jim Baird's guidance that has led to three hundred thousand acres of adjacent forest preserves.”

The scarlet tanager, magnolia warbler, and rose–breasted grosbeak appear in field guides to the birds of eastern North America, and in New England we think of them as our birds. In truth, they are tropical creatures who live eight months in the Central American rainforests, visiting New England only to breed. It is a good scheme, for in the tropics food is steadily present but never plentiful, while in New England the abundant food needed for nesting is available, but only during the summer. By their ingenious adaptation, birds demonstrate how tropical forests and northern meadows are interrelated habitats. This bird’s eye view was also ornithologist Jim Baird’s view when he and Jerry Bertrand launched Programme for Belize from a dell in Massachusetts, saying, “It does no good whatsoever to protect the areas in Massachusetts where wood thrushes nest if when the wood thrushes leave here, they have no place to go.”  

The two men were then vice president and president respectively of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, which had been assisting its Belizean counterpart for several years, helping the group become a stronger voice for conservation in the land where New England birds overwinter. When the Audubon leaders realized that a conservation project was welcome in Belize, they initiated negotiations between the government and private landowners, a patient effort under Baird’s guidance that has led to three hundred thousand acres of adjacent forest preserves.

Sometime after my return from Belize, I visit Jim Baird at his home in Massachusetts to ask him how the Programme for Belize has fared. As we talk that day, Belize City is filled with parades, dancing, and speech making; four beautiful stamps have just been issued from the Philatelic Office, naming as heroes men who led revolts and hastened freedom. It is September 21, 1991, the tenth anniversary of Belize’s independence. As we stroll Baird’s wooded land, he shows me his bird banding nets and tools, and tells me that the People’s United Party had not only continued but strengthened the Programme which had become a Belizean–run enterprise. The Programme then had a fifteen person staff and a research station, and is attempting to discover just what will constitute sustained–yield management of a tropical forest. Baird tells me that former editor of the National Geographic has also proposed a regional plan called La Ruta Maya that will link parks in Guatemala and Mexico with the Rio Bravo lands, creating something comparable to East Africa’s Serengeti Park. Such plans have already altered regional dynamics and helped prompt Guatemala and Belize to settle their centuries old border dispute. 

•

As Jim and I reflect on Belizean realities, I’m reminded that the country is a living riddle about order: what it is, what place it has in our affections, what approaches to human society align sustainably with our surround. In the 1980s, Belize was in a window of possibilities between the collapses of two successive, non-sustainable approaches to order. Like other emerging countries, Belizeans now wonder whether economic development means acquiring the environmental damage of the affluent West. And while no one denies that by industrial standards, Belize is poor, as forests, animals, plants, water and good air begin to vanish, they are newly included in the definition of wealth. By this gauge, Belize is already rich. Programme for Belize, which is responding to these puzzles, is asking, in praxis, huge questions about humans on the Earth.

The pirate Peter Wallace, who helped launch the European presence in Mesoamerica, was Scottish, and in a kind of historical bookend, it turns out that Jim Baird is also a full–fledged Scot, one who has had the vision and expertise to touch the region beneficially. The scale and impact of Baird’s work notwithstanding, he doesn’t consider his efforts out of the ordinary. His manner embodies the daily decency, la decenza quotidiana, that Eugenio Montale names “the hardest of all virtues.”

As I leave from our visit, the afternoon air is squeaky as an apple and alive with hints of the coming fall; crickets and wind rustle through the bending grasses, but no birds call from any of the trees in the area. A small notebook that Jim keeps records the situation: from the middle of August through early fall, not a single Redstart has come to his birding net; one Red–eyed Vireo flew by, one Warbler, and six Ovenbirds. These numbers record a stunning decline of the New England/Central American songbirds, losses traceable to forest cutting on both ends of the migratory route. Interpreting the songbird numbers, Baird uses the phrase “imminent collapse.”


At the mooring in Belize City
Returning now to our weeks in Belize: Katherine and I are at a dock in Belize City waiting for a boat to take us to Caye Caulker. Skiffs leave Belize City for the offshore cayes at unpredictable times from moorings next to a Shell marine fuel station on Haulover Creek. The creek water is as dark as asphalt, shimmering with the same rainbow of oil as the pools spilled near the station pumps. The city’s sewage canal runs alongside the shed at one end of the station and empties into the river at just this point. Drizzling rain brings most everyone waiting for boats under the roof of the shed. Our companions at the shed are a platoon of off–duty Canadian sailors who are beginning to crack beers and two women in paramilitary camouflage pants, hunting knifes on their belts, and tee shirts announcing that the days of the patriarchy are numbered.

On the other side of the station, near the river under the marina’s tiny roof overhang, is most of a Maya family — a mother with five children arrayed around her full cotton skirt. Over the many hours that we all wait for skiffs, the children never once cry out or run around the station; even the toddlers are patient, their eyes luminous under straight dark bangs, closing at times in sleep. There is also a group of young, bare-chested Creole men in oil-stained pants who seem to want to provoke someone, anyone, but especially the two gay women. There is a man with a faintly Canadian accent, who carries a flask in his back pocket. And there are two young Mestizo boys, about twelve, in short sleeve dress shirts, carrying knapsacks from which protrude books and fishing gear.  

The atmosphere in the marina station is moody. For solidarity, Katherine and I gravitate toward the other two traveling women and are well into a conversation about their adventures in the Guatemalan jungle (setting up a matriarchal socialism among the ruins is their idea), when the two women suddenly leap up, responding to the young men’s taunts by unsheathing knives and some spicy rhetoric. The men reply by swaggering closer in a line dance. As the two camps advance, Katherine pales and sinks to the ground, an unpremeditated act that, surprisingly, diffuses the situation. Everyone puts their knives and egos back in their cases. Though they clearly need no physical protection, we persuade our fierce sisters to take “some fresh air,” and they resettle with us on the sea wall not far from the twelve-year-old boys who have mastered the trick of being left alone.

Another hour passes with neither skiffs, nor torrential rain, nor gender wars. The sun comes out, and the Maya children stare silently at the river. We turn to books to pass the time. Katherine reaches for her volume on Rome — brought as counterweight to the tropics — and, trying to adjust her eyeglasses at the same time, accidentally drops her glasses into the open sewer.

“Well,” she says, “I am blind.”  
“Blind?” I ask. 
“For all intents and purposes,” she says formally. “For example, I cannot make out where the river is. Can you see my glasses? Are they floating?”

They are not floating. We stare sadly into the murky water. Everyone, save the tactful, insular Maya, gathers to laugh, commiserate, or just see what will happen next. From the gang of bobbing Creole men emerges one thin, barefoot fellow, maybe twenty years old. All morning he has been the butt of teasing by the other men. His name is Cecil. Now he prances up to us and announces that he will dive into the river and search for the glasses.

“Is it safe?” we ask.  
“I will do it,” he says.

Even the bullies are quieted by Cecil’s proposal. He strips off his shirt and slips into the filthy water, which stands about four feet deep along the sea wall. Someone throws him a pair of underwater goggles. After ten minutes of diving, feeling with his feet, diving again, Cecil comes up victoriously, holding Katherine’s glasses in one hand, his body dripping with sediment. Everyone cheers and laughs; even the stoic Maya are smiling and Katherine seems about to swoon again, now with happiness. Cecil walks up to her, and proudly presents the dripping glasses. The Creole guys give a cheer. We thank Cecil profusely, glad to help his elevation. He has not asked for payment, but we plan to offer some. On the way to the station washroom where we insist that Cecil rinse with hot water and soap, he suggests a payment and we give it gladly. We praise him again in front of the still-watching gang and make him promise to go to a doctor for an antibiotic. He points out that medicine will cost more money; we give it without hesitation. Katherine then washes her glasses in the washroom for about an hour, and when she comes out the skiff to Caye Caulker has arrived.

Some days later, back in Belize City, Cecil comes to our hotel and shows us an envelope of small red pills the doctor prescribed. The pills are expensive, Cecil says, looking mournful. We’re relieved he has the medication, give twice what he asks for, and urge him to see the doctor again if needed. We see Cecil one more time just before we leave Belize. He comes for a visit on the veranda, and this time we can tell he has come only to bask one more time in praise, to hear us use the word “hero” again.

On Caye Caulker

The two boys who were waiting near us at the marine gas station are natives of Caye Caulker on their way home. As we get into the small skiff, they settle next to us on the plank seat in the boat and are pleased to tell us about their island for the duration of the boat ride. We’ve wanted to visit because we learned that the people of Caye Caulker have organized a fishing cooperative that brings them considerable economic well–being as well as a measure of independence from unwanted influence.  

En route, the sea is choppy, a storm is brewing, the skies massing with dark thunderheads, glints of silvery light at the horizon, the first rain in a month. The skipper heads the boat straight for the caye, twenty-one miles northeast of Belize City, eleven miles offshore, and keeps his boat at full throttle hoping to outrun the storm. The unmuffled decibel level inhabits the skiff. The boys, Bepo and Thomas, are so accustomed to boats and engines that they converse as though we are in a parlor. They tell us that they are native islanders, Jicaquenos, and like most islanders, they are Mestizos. They don’t say so but this means that they are descendants of refugees who fled from la guerra de las castas, the mid–nineteenth century effort by the remaining Maya of Yucatán to reassert their territorial heritage, which began with hostilities toward their Spanish Creole and Mestizo neighbors. 

The boys speak fluent Spanish, English, and Belizan Kriol. Thomas is studying to be a mathematician and loves computers; to practice his skills he will likely join the brain drain that routinely robs Belize of skilled technicians, educators, and managers. Bepo likes fishing and is already an expert. Both boys have the grace and self–confidence characteristic of their community. When we reach the caye, they direct us to a small cottage with a room to let and they invite us to meet them after evening church services when they will introduce us to their Uncle Rojilio. While we’re checking in at the cottage, the owner’s pet monkey jumps on my shoulder and tries to take my ear off. (That’s what it felt like. The owner assures me it was an affectionate gesture.)

By five o’clock in the afternoon, the storm has passed and when we emerge to circumnavigate the island, we encounter several young girls walking barefoot in clumps along the sand paths, carrying tin pans of their mothers’ powder bun biscuits and chocolate–coconut tarts to neighbors’ houses, the warm breads and sweets wrapped in cotton cloths. The round metal pans are dented and burst with light reflected from the sliding red sun. As we pass the girls, they nod calmly. Sand paths are the only streets on the island, two long ones called Front and Back Streets, on the windward and leeward sides of the island respectively, and several short paths the cross the main ones. Sand muffles our footfalls; there are no motor vehicles; the only sounds are from palm fronds rustling in the wind, women calling their children, the evensong of birds. Houses are much like the mainland houses along the river: wooden, squarish, raised ten feet off the ground on stilts, with zinc roofs and thin layers of paint lingering over weathered wood. A large, wooden rain barrel stands alongside each house; underneath the houses are such things as washing machines and baskets full of fishing gear and clothes. After nightfall, as we set out for the church, the paths are cool and the dark sky is framed by yet darker, blowsy palms scratching roofs as a wind sweeps across the island. 

The church is a small cement–block building whose main room has perhaps nine short pews. The congregation has dispersed save for a few people standing in the doorway, talking, with prayer books under their arms. From the path where we stand, the interior glows with a yellow–orange light against the dark streets and bushes. The boys appear and show us to the outdoor café where we drink coconut sodas and wait for their Uncle Rojilio. From the cafe kitchen comes the evening programming of Radio Belize, Spanish ballads and Jamaican reggae punctuated by a melodious voice broadcasting death notices and emergency news for listeners who have relatives in remote parts of the country. Typically, Belizeans stop and listen intently whenever such announcements interrupt the music. Rojilio arrives, sixtyish, white haired, and because the boys have told him that we are poets, with his copy of The Star Apple Kingdom by the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. We order local Belikan beers and more coconut sodas for Bepo and Thomas.

“I have only one theme,” Rojilio says, reading from The Schooner Flight:
The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart — 
the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know, 
vain search for one island that heals with its harbor 
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow 
doesn’t injure the sand... “   

Derek himself was a mesmerizing reader, but even he might have deferred as his poetry rolls into the air near the sea, from a fisherman’s lips.  It is a wonderful welcoming gesture, and here as elsewhere in Belize we are moved by the delight in learning that gives rise to the country’s astonishing literacy rate of ninety percent. When the talk turns from poetry to the fishing cooperative of which Rojilio is a member, I ask how the islanders had become so independent. “It is the way we are,” he replies, suggesting that autonomy is their original state. That this peppercorn of a caye is remote and remained invisible to colonial merchants, and that it is located amongst some of the most plentiful lobster fishing grounds on the planet are supporting factors. “Bugs,” Rojilio calls the clawless, spiny lobster. At first, fishing for bugs was only a supplement to work on the coconut plantations, but by the 1920s workers could make a living selling lobster to foreign exporters in Belize City.23

In the 1950s, when an American company named Del Caribe Fisheries bought out other exporting companies and fixed prices below market rates, the fishermen of Caye Caulker remembered Father Ganey. A decade earlier the Jesuit priest had suggested that the jicaquenos start a fishing cooperative, and they decided that the time had come. In the summer of 1960, the fishermen boycotted Del Caribe and demanded their own export license from the colonial government. They had a powerful ally: Bucher Scott of Baymen Fisheries in Belize City kept their lobsters fresh in his freezers until the fishermen prevailed. Since that time, the co–operative has gained control of processing, packing, and marketing its fish and lobster catches. It sends likely members to management programs and produces healthy incomes for islanders. The sand streets and modest houses are choices made by people who believe themselves to be among the wealthiest communities in Central America. 

It is a happy story, and yet Rojilio does not mention something that the anthropologist Anne Sutherland noticed in her years studying and admiring the island. As of the late twentieth century, the economic well–being of Caye Caulker is entirely controlled by men; there are no women in the fishing cooperative and until the recent increase in tourism made it profitable for women to let rooms to guests, island women had no economic independence. One man, whose son chooses not to fish and whose daughter is naturally gifted with boats and lines, told Anne Sutherland rather sadly: “She loves to work with me when I go out. She handles the sails and loves to fish. Too bad she can never make a living from fishing.”24

Bepo and Thomas are now asleep with their heads on the table. We say goodnight and poke back to our landlady’s house along a dim, sand road. As we walk, scuttling sounds issue from the foliage along the paths, and we glimpse backs and legs of large land crabs whose claws scrape the dry underbrush. In our room there are two cots, one chair, a hurricane lamp, a mosquito coil, and a small mirror. We fall asleep to a chorus of crickets.

“A three hour sail”

At the glimmer of dawn, the morning song of the island birds explodes: lunatic calls of an operatic soprano rushing up and down the scale, vast choruses of twittering small birds, rogue contraltos, and tuneless wonders. The birds are directly outside our windows, in a miniature forest of coconut palms, tall papayas, and lime trees swaying over a sprawling hedge of blooming bougainvillea. Rojilio has alerted us that boats to the nearby reef leave very early, so we stumble down the windward path, along the way passing a woman raking her sand yard, smoothing the grains into grooved patterns. From open windows in the neighborhood comes the aroma of fried dough breads (called journey cakes) and the slap of flour tortillas being shaped. Here and there, a stream of shower water flows from a house into a catch basin on the ground. Later in the day, the islanders will reuse the water for plants on their small terraces.

We are headed first to rent snorkeling fins and masks at a tiny, weathered house with a large painted sign that reads: Yogurt, Tapes, Masks & Fin Rentals. Inside we find Martha, who sells us a breakfast of homemade yogurt and cups of strong tea. An expatriate American, Martha is eager to talk about island life, “a dream,”she says, compared to New Jersey where her parents live, the ones who disowned her for moving here, “but that is their trip and life in the U.S. is frantic and expensive,” she continues, “and a person cannot be really free like you can here where the ocean is just outside the door and where really you have everything you need.” Martha pauses briefly to sweep her hand around the room. One wall is floor–to–ceiling cassette tapes, another is formed entirely of radios and speakers with wires dangling from one to the other in intricate swirls and loops. Off the main room is another, screened by a tied–dyed sheet, from behind which comes a pleasant, herbal scent of marijuana.  

“Mart,” a deep voice calls from behind the pattern. Martha smiles at us, conspiratorially. “That’s Gamoosa,” she says. As she pulls the curtain aside to enter, there is a quick view of a tall man sprawled on a couch. Martha returns to turn up the reggae volume. We like Martha, who sits down again at the table and asks if we would like the recipe for her yogurt. After carefully copying the yogurt recipe into our notebooks, we rent fins and masks and make our way down to the dock. It is still early, the air is cool, no one else is in sight, so we sit on the end of the dock and look out toward the reef. 

Due in part to the voracious feeding habits of the crown of thorns starfish, many parts of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia are dead. One veteran naturalist in Belize thinks that makes the Caribbean’s the largest living reef on the planet. Moreover, he speculates that since the polyps that make up a coral reef are best understood as one interrelated organism, the Caribbean reef is the “largest living thing” on the planet. Biologists find this idea provocative and controversial; there is still uncertainty about what exactly constitutes an organism, ranging from the view that the physical outlines of an organism are the extent of its being to the notion that the planet itself has properties of an organism. We are pondering these points when the skipper arrives, and to our surprise, he is the risen Gamoosa. We are even more surprised when fifteen vacationing American college students rush down the dock and come aboard Gamoosa’s small wooden sailboat. It is a handsome, hand-built boat, with heavy canvas sails that are stitched with patches like an heirloom quilt.

At ten o’clock we set sail on what our skipper describes as a “three hour cruise.” When he first says that phrase, it does not recall for me the theme song from the “Gilligan’s Island” shipwreck sitcom, but fourteen hours later, at midnight as the sparse lights of the Caye Caulker dock are finally, faintly coming into view again, we have had time to remember all the lyrics and many other aspects of the castaway’s “fateful trip…aboard this tiny ship.” Our sailing sitcom involved a boatload of young persons to whom the idea of swimming about what is one of the largest living things on the planet was not sufficiently thrilling without large doses of other stimulants.25 As the students drink tequila, pass spliffs, and swallow an assortment of tablets, Katherine and I gradually become the only two clear–eyed persons aboard. Gamoosa and his helms mate Kavo had arrived at the dock mildly stoned, but I considered their mellow condition neutral to good. Kavo spends the seaborne hours languishing in the small hold, but on the reef he comes alive, a kindly guide and master of tapping one gently on the arm to point out stunning tropical fish, including a Shy Hamlet and the Harlequin Pipefish.

Gamoosa is a highly skilled mariner and navigates smoothly to the three thousand acre Hol Chan Marine Preserve, where fish are protected and have responded by swarming there in luscious schools. But the expedition is vastly prolonged when the skipper yields to the students’ pleas to stop on Ambergris Caye where they buy more substances. And it is made sad and scary by the eventual collapse of one youngster in an overdose. We do what we can to help revive him, and once he seems safe, we sit on the deck under a luminous moon watching the ink-dark sea. The day-into-night reef trip demands diplomacy and patience, but the fraction of time spent snorkeling at the reef itself is glorious. Those two hours are another world whose colors are cobalt, turquoise, magenta, chartreuse, and rose–red. Our boar is anchored near the reef crest, where the lagoon floor rises from twenty feet to only inches deep. Beyond this zone, the floor drops four thousand feet into what the Caye Caulker fishermen call “the Blue.” These contrasting depths indicate the geomorphology of a barrier reef and the lagoon created between reef and shore. Shallow just offshore, the water grows slightly deeper before becoming shallow again as the reef rises; once past the reef crest — the breaker zone called the palmata — the floor slopes abruptly down terraces and escarpments of the fore reef, finally plunging down a vertical cliff.

The corals in the palmata area are barely submerged and combers roll on them at full force, breaking off brittle elkhorn corals and creating a surreal surf line that from any distance crashes for no apparent reason, on no apparent shore. When a large wave breaks, a rush of water pulses through the underwater coral structure, ruffles the sand floor, swirls the waving arms of plants, and will hurl a human body into the nearest coral skeleton. We learn that when such a wave seems imminent, it is wise to swim free of the branching alleyways of elkhorn coral and to hover, more safely, in the rubble zone over the large, freestanding grey–brown lumps called brain corals, roundish beings that look just as you would imagine.

Less beautiful and prickly than their brilliantly colored kin, they nevertheless produce a fine souvenir: a big brain coral scar on my knee. This was obtained while twisting between outcroppings of staghorn corals, avoiding fire corals, breathing through a tube and gasping at the sight of harmless nurse sharks, in order to get closer to a school of huge fish. Three feet long, mere inches thick, they are are serene, platter–like fish with yellow–green scales that shimmer with flecks of red and azure blue. As they swim, all five fish turn as one, gliding adroitly as thin sheets of paper through the intricate corridors of coral structures. 

Nothing on either side of the border of air and water is more astonishing that the demarcation itself, a line both fluid and firm depending on whether one is a ray of light, a sailfish, a sponge, or a harlequin brittle star. The human talent for likening is everywhere in the given names of the things growing, swimming, and undulating underwater: here are fans, shaving brushes, feathers, pudding wives, cucumbers, eggs and urchins, pens, umbrellas, walnuts, and colonials. Corals are named for fingers, cacti, stars, pillars, flowers, elks, starlets, stags, plumes, candelabras, lettuce leaves, and sun’s rays. Sponges are chimneys, softballs, pillows, vases, and lavender tubes. Underwater brain corals can be common, grooved, depressed, or tan. Worms are elegant, magnificent, luminescent, Christmas, and Medusa.

In the lavish waters, we see no phytoplankton and would not even if our snorkeling masks were fitted with microscopes. It startled me to learn that the clarity of tropical waters is a sign that nutritious green algae are but sparsely present in the water itself, that the “meadows of the sea,” are found only in temperate and polar waters.26 How can it be that the vibrant reef worlds exist without the vital biomass of chlorophyll? A mystery was solved when Eugene and Howard Odum found that on tropical reefs biomass occurs in the sand–dwelling bottom algae, in the algae that encrusts dead coral, and in the coral polyps themselves. By one of those inventive arrangements found everywhere in nature, an algae named zooxanthellae inhabits the coral polyp, feeds it, and becomes nearly half its weight.

Living national treasure

Another entirely remarkable boat to take in Belize is the surplus skiff that glides through the waters of Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. This small boat is skippered by Mr. John Jex (pronounced Jakes), a man who could be named a living national treasure. “Call me Jex,” he says. Aboard his skiff for a day-long exploration, we discover immediately that his trained eyes are far better even than binoculars. As we pass stretches of unrelieved green jungle — apparently only vines and tangles of vegetation in truly alarming profusion — Jex will suddenly slow his skiff to point out a rare black–collared hawk, or to point up to a tree in which some primates, Jex calls them “baboons,” are napping. With the motor turned off, the boat drifts silently under the limbs. Two of the baboons wake up and swing close to gaze back at us.

Natural history nomenclature in Belize, which is more idiosyncratic than most local lexicons, arises from a blend of the diverse languages of settlers and pirates, from nostalgia for distant floras and faunas, and from mistaken identities. Here, jaguars are tigers, moths are bats, bats are rat bats; great blue herons are Toby full pots, green–backed heron are poor Joes; storks are Turks, grackles blackbirds, the tapir is a mountain cow, the basilisk lizard is the cock makala, agouti are rabbits, scaley–tailed iguanas are wish-willys. And what, to official taxonomy is the black howler monkey is, to Belize, a “baboon.” Black howlers (Alouatta pigra) are an agile new world primate unrelated to the larger old world baboon, and are rather rare, found only in southern Mexico, northern Guatemala and parts of Belize.

As the awakened monkeys swing toward our boat, they make almost no sound beyond the light thrashing of branches. If we want to hear the calls that give rise to the howler name, Jex says we must come back late in the evening, in the early morning, or when a rainstorm batters the forest. At those times, he says, the lagoon reverberates with a sound that, in full–grown males, is less a howl than a roar, a sound that novices routinely mistake for tigers, that is, jaguars. The monkeys live in small family groups, four to ten members each, and primatologists speculate that the roars produced by resonating chambers in the throats of males are signals between rivals and relations, a way of placing each other on a map of sound.  

Jex laughs at the youngest howler in this group of six, so sleepy that it seems in danger of sliding off its limb. These monkeys have long endeared themselves to local humans because of their play, their expressive faces, and the adults’ devotion to their infants. A thousand years ago, Maya artists were painting the monkeys on ceramic pots as images of divine writing: shaggy hands scribbling on bark paper. Coming from the people who created the most sophisticated written language in the Americas, this image of divinity is either a high compliment or an irony worthy of those modern linguistic theorists who stress the arbitrariness and playfulness at the root of language.

Modern Belizeans are so fond of their baboons that thirty miles southeast of Crooked Tree, Creole farmers and local landowners who live along the Belize River run a community baboon sanctuary. Jex tells us that one thousand howlers live along the riverbanks among stands of figs, hogplums, and sapodillas that comprise the baboon diet. The sanctuary began in Bermudian Landing and has spread to include the villages of Double Head Cabbage, Willow’s Bank, Big Falls, Isabella Bank, and Flowers Bank. Ecologist Carolyn Miller reports that there is a waiting list of local landowners who wish to pledge use of their lands for the sanctuary, insuring that the monkeys have the range and aerial pathways they need for forest travel.27

It is a sweet–spirited success, the boon of a longstanding rapport. “Baboon ya de fu we,” is the local sentiment as expressed in Kriol: “Baboons, we are for you!” As Jex moves his boat away from under the howlers’ sleeping tree, a large male in the troop swings down from a branch, balances himself by his prehensile tail, grasps the trunk with his front hands, stretches his shaggy head toward us, and opens his mouth, impressing us with two remarkable teeth that jut from his lower jaw at rakish angles. Jex waves and moves away, yielding the territory.  

Enroute back to the village boat launch, Jex navigates along serpentine strips of clear water that thread through water hyacinths and dense mats of overlapping lily pads. Hundreds of red–brown jacanas poke along the thick green pads on thin legs; as we pass, they rise up en masse in clusters of beating wings, a froth of yellow as late sun illuminates the delicate flight feathers of their wings. After poking through the waters for hours in the sun, it’s nice to disembark and cool down under a shade tree across from the village store, drinking cold sodas and pressing the icy glass to our temples. There are several modern, unpainted cement block houses nearby, structures that appeal to the villagers, and one older style bush house with a roof thatched with palm leaves secured by liana vines. “Tie–ties,” Jex calls them. He is pleased that we saw the black–collared hawk from the boat. We are lucky, he says. Birders come from the north, from America, and can search the lagoon for a week without seeing this handsome hawk. Jex’s tone suggests he is amused that the rare bird has shown itself to people too naïve about birds to be astonished.

It is early evening, and children are coming to the store for tins of evaporated milk, breads, and fruit to take home for dinner. Passing by our bench, each child gives a courteous nod of the head, saying “Good evening, Mr. Jex.” At that, the village elder pauses in his story about the woman he calls Miss Dora to reply, “Good evening.” Certainly Dora Weyer must consider John Jex a living treasure. She and her husband came to Belize from America in 1960 to research tropical birds, and soon began to envision a sanctuary in the Crooked Tree lagoon, an especially lush area that is wet the year long. She asked Jex to show her the Belize River, Black Creek, Revenge Lagoon, Calabash Pond, and the Crooked Tree Lagoon itself — a great green and silver maze that Jex knew intimately from a life lived close to the inland waterways. If she was impressed by his knowledge, the compliment was returned.

Of these initial boat trips, Jex recalls that “Miss Dora called to the birds and brought them to the boat. She whistled an ivory–billed wood–creeper right to the boat.” After several scouting trips, Jex acquired three skiffs, and he and Dora created this arrangement: Weyer lined up naturalists, mostly American birders, to visit Belize, and sent an advisory note ahead of time. As there was then no road into Crooked Tree, Jex picked up the adventurers at a designated time and place along the river, and they set out through the teeming waterways. After many years of this shoestring labor of love, the boat tours for intrepid birders have resulted in sixteen thousand acres being designated the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary — now a solid operation.

Even in Crooked Tree Sanctuary, Mr. Jex occasionally finds a skinned Morelet’s crocodile or its dried skeleton on a sandy bank of the lagoon — evidence that a poacher has been hunting in the protected area. And beyond the sanctuary’s borders, as throughout the tropics, poachers take crocodile hides, or tropical fish, parakeets, and parrots to sell to pet stores and collectors. Because the Scarlet Macaw is among the gaudiest beauties of the jungle, it has been hunted down to about one hundred birds. “This Is Their Land Too” read posters featuring Macaws or parrots or tapirs and tacked up in gas stations, post offices, and little markets throughout Belize. It is illegal to kill any of these creatures or to smuggle them out of Belize.

At the country’s airport, Belizean custom officials take this latter possibility seriously, and my smallish duffel bag is inspected as though it might contain a tapir. The only physical items I am taking home from Belize are a packet of the unpredictable Belizean matches and the souvenir brain coral wound on my knee. The scar that forms, which is three inches round and looks like a brand, will later impress my small nephew. Three weeks after my return to New England, the brand has not entirely disappeared, and when I chance to go swimming in the warm, saltwater of Peconic Bay, it surges back into visibility.

•

NOTES

The names of Caye Caulker residents, the plant biologist, and some Belizean citizens have been changed to respect their privacy. John Jex, Jim Baird, Dora Weyer, Winil Grant Borg, Rosita Arviga, and Don Eligio are themselves.

1. O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 197.
2. Ancient Mayan civilization sustained a population of several million in what is now Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and Mexico; in Belize, there were nearly one million Mayan souls, five times the present population of 200,000.  Modern Belize has the sparsest population in Central America, less than twenty four inhabitants per square mile. For contrast, consider that El Salvador, only very slightly smaller than Belize, has seven million inhabitants. 
3. Sydney Olivier, 1st Baron Olivier of Ramsden, Late Governor of Jamaica. “British Honduras,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 1937. Based on Hummel and Gibbs, Report on the Forests of British Honduras ;  Dunlop, Handbook of British Honduras (W.I. Committee, 1925); Gann, Mystery Cities (1925 and 1926); Joyce, Lubaantun (1926). 
4. Fang Lizhi, “Form and Physics,” Partisan Review 4, 1991, p. 657-664. Translated by David Moser.
5. The pamphlet at Altun Ha in the late 1980s was published before later advances in translating Maya glyphs. See Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
6. Ptolemy Tompkins, This Tree Grows Out of Hell (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990).
7. Tompkins, p. 10. Tompkins suggests that the East is the fifth as well as first direction, the place of birth and rebirth. Other sources indicate that the center is the fifth, regenerative locus. 
8. Algar Robert Gregg, British Honduras (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1968), p. 73.
9. T. Patrick Culbert, The Lost Civilization, The Story of the Classic Maya (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 108. 
10. From a paper presented by David Stuart and Stephen Houston, 1989; quoted in David Roberts, “The Decipherment of Ancient Maya,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1991, pp. 87-100.
11. Quoted in David Roberts, “The Decipherment of Ancient Maya,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1991, p. 90.
12.  J.E.S. Thompson, The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), p. 4, 14.
13. T. Patrick Culbert, The Lost Civilization, The Story of the Classic Maya (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), page 116. Culbert's theory is based on the results of a conference held in Santa Fe in October 1970, where eleven scholars met to “reconsider the question of the collapse.” During discussions, they moved away from the debate about single causes and the tendency among theorists “to move from single–cause theories to theories of a domino sort, in which a starting cause (leads) to a whole series of reactions that together resulted in the collapse.” Instead, they embraced a concept derived from systems theory that suggests that “The reasons for the Maya collapse are inherent in the system and are the same reasons that for many centuries led to growth and success.” All cultures, Culbert says, are complex systems: some are stable and contain elements that counteract variations and keep values on a steady keel; some are growth systems in which changes in one part of the system amplify changes in another. At some point, a growth system (like the classic Maya culture) can stabilize and reach equilibrium, or it can go into overshoot mode and outstrip its resources. Culbert believes that the “Maya collapse is an exemplary case of overshoot by a culture that had expanded too rapidly and had used its resources too recklessly in an environment that demanded careful techniques of conservation....”  It is, he muses, an experience similar to the future simulated by the Club of Rome in The Limits to Growth. 
14. Tompkins, This Tree Grows out of Hell, pp. 25-28. Tompkins offers the speculative theory that as Maya civilization grew from village to metropolis, the subtle rituals curated by shamans were gradually re–cast for the purposes of an authoritarian elite and used in crude, theatrical displays that demoralized rather than invigorated the human psyche. Tompkins notes that to suggest that village–scale Maya society was more benign than the later pyramid culture is not to say the villages were primal paradises. Such projections are aptly described as “modern myths, thinly disguised as nonfiction accounts,” and are ironic since the myths of early peoples typically reveal their own vigorous search for a paradisal place. What can be said is that ancient Amerindian spiritual experience revolved around an encounter with death and divinities that was considered essential to the process of becoming fully alive. It was these insights that may have degenerated in the Maya metropolis. Instead of returning from their travels more alive than ever, no one returned from a trip up the pyramid steps. If the peasants revolted, it may have been because the thresholds of their culture had become obstacles to life. It could be that the Mayas felt they had discovered the limits of one way of life, and returned to village order, not as a retreat, but as a step forward.
15. from The Chilam Balam of Chumayel, the Maya collection of sacred books, as quoted in Irene Nicholson, Mexican and Central American mythology, rev. ed. (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1985), p.19.
16. Thompson, The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 13.
17. Typical are the events of 1618 when Fathers Bartolome de Fuensalida and Juan de Orbita visited the village of Tipu on what is now the Belize River, a town of about five hundred Maya inhabitants who had, in the missionaries' view, undergone earlier conversion. When the priests discovered Maya sacred emblems mingled with Christian crosses in the newly built church, they declared the local worship of Jesu Christo to be a sham, ordered the people flogged and their old articles of worship burned. When the missionaries left town, Tipu villagers set fire to the church, and soon afterwards, another Spanish Father on his way through Tipu had the village chief and eighty others put to death in retribution. At a high cost, the Tipu villagers had made a strong statement were gradually left alone. Other Mayas in nearby villages simply fled deeper into the forest to escape such unwelcome attentions. In Belize, the Maya never ceased resisting European attempts to conquer them. As late as 1872, Maya villagers were engaged in armed conflict with British raiders. 
18. Ralph Roys, The Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1933).
19. Mayas have arrived in Belize from the Yucatan (Yucatec Maya), from the Peten forest of Guatemala (Mopan Maya), and from the Verapez in Guatemala (Kekchi Maya). More recently, Maya refugees from the Guatemalan highlands have come into Belize to escape an oppressive political regime. 
20. Elaine Elisabetsky, “Folklore, Tradition, or Know-How?,” in Cultural Survival, (Summer 1991, p.10). In this volume, Steven R. King writes in “The Source of Our Cures” that by his estimate 74% percent of the 121 plant compounds “currently used in the global pharmacopoeia have been discovered through research based on ethnobotanical information on the use of plants by indigenous people.” And yet, until recently, such knowledge was taken without compensation; global companies declared that indigenous peoples’ knowledge belonged to all humankind. However, the medicines and commodities derived from, and based on, indigenous knowledge were then defined as the profit–generating property of a few; the hypocrisy has been compounded by the fact that science–based medicines and products are rarely available to the people from whose source knowledge they arise. In his analysis, Jack Kloppenburg, author of First the Seed, says that “Indigenous people have in effect been engaged in a massive program of foreign aid to the urban populations of the industrialized North.” (“No Hunting! Biodiversity, Indigenous Rights, and Scientific Poaching” in Cultural Survival, Summer 1991), pp.14-18. Adapted from an article in Z Magazine, September 1990
21. Gregg, p. 86. Gregg's view is that fourth and fifth century Maya farmers sheared away whatever the existing vegetation was in order to plaint maize and a mix of trees useful to their society, among them breadnuts for food, sapodillas for fruit and gum, cohune palms for oil and thatch material. As the ceremonial centers grew, these farmers had ceased the shifting–field style milpa agriculture in favor of a new, high–yield, terrace style agriculture that could feed an increasing, and permanently located population.  To reuse the same land from year to year, the farmers fertilized soils with fish bones and seaweeds; to keep tropical soils cool enough to absorb nutrients, they shaded the terrace plots, using the mahogany as the tree of choice. When the ceremonial centers began to be abandoned in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the farmers apparently returned to milpa agriculture, leaving stands of mahogany to be surrounded by other woodland vegetation. 
22. Norman Ashcraft, Colonialism and Underdevelopment: Processes of Political Economic Change in British Honduras (Teachers College Press, Columbia University, New York, 1973, p. 33.)
23. Anne Sutherland, Caye Caulker (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1986), p. 8. Sutherland's anthropological study of the Caye Caulker fishing cooperative is a thorough account of the techniques of lobster fishing, the history of the cooperative, the kinship structures of the islanders, and the effects of tourism on the island. Of the islander's independence Sutherland comments that because Belize “is a political backwater, a variety of cultural groups have flourished in the absence of a strong central government. Caye Caulker, for example, has a history of ignoring power hierarchies outside its boundaries and guarding its local independence. Within this context of political autonomy, Caye Caulker has also developed a society with relatively little social hierarchy. The cooperative, with its egalitarian membership and local control of production and distribution, reflects the society in which it developed.”
24. Quoted in Sutherland, ibid., p. 89.
25. “Belize Breeze” is the name for a locally grown marijuana.
26. Eugene H. Kaplan, Coral Reefs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982), pp.101-4.
27. Caroline Miller, “A Home for Howlers,” Sanctuary Magazine, September 1988, p. 9.

UPDATES AND LINKS

Belizean Creole: More than a Language

Belize Audubon Society / Meet the Birds of Belize

Mass Audubon Society: Remembering James Baird 1925-2023
Oxford Academic: In Memoriam, James Baird

The Nature Conservancy: Where we work in Belize + Transforming the Caribbean

Oceana: On the Value of Protected Marine Areas of Belize

World Bank: Belize prepares for current and future emergencies

Rosita Arvigo: website
Sastun, My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer, by Rosita Arvigo (Harper, 1993)

The Ix Chel Farms and the Don Eligio Panti Medicinal Trail
Ix Chel Tropical Research Center
The New York Times: In Memoriam, Don Eligio Panti

In Memoriam, John Anthony Jex (1935-1997)
Guide in the Crooked Tree Sanctuary, Belize

Notes on Belize Agriculture

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ashcraft, Norman, Colonialism and Underdevelopment: Processes of Political Economic Change in British Honduras. New York: Teachers College Press, 1973.
Bollard, O. Nigel, The Formation of a Colonial Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. 
Clancy, Flora S. and Harrison, Peter D. editors, Vision & Revision in Maya Studies . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. 
Coe, Michael D., The Maya, rev. ed.. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1966 and 1980.
Culbert, T. Patrick, The Lost Civilization. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. 
Cultural Survival Quarterly, Summer 1991, 53A Church Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Evernden, Neil, The Natural Alien, Humankind and Environment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. 
Goetz, Delia and Morley, Sylvanus G., from the translation of Recinos, Adrain. Popol Vuh, The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya. Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1950.
Gregg, A.R., British Honduras. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1968. 
Kaplan, Eugene H., Coral Reefs, Peterson Field Guides. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.
Kohák, Erazim, The Embers and The Stars , a philosophical inquiry into the moral sense of nature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. 
Lewis, Norman, “A Letter from Belize,” in A View Of The World, Selected Journalism. London: Eland, 1986. Lizhi, Fang, “Form and Physics,” Partisan Review, 1991, Volume LVIII, Number 4.
Mahler, Richard and Wotkyns, Steele, Belize, A Natural Destination. Santa Fe: John Muir Publications,1991.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1962.
Nicholson, Irene, Mexican and Central American Mythology. New York:  Peter Bedrick Books, 1985. 
Pendergast, D.M., Excavation at Altun Ha, Belize, 1964-1970, vol. 1,  Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1979.
Sanctuary, The Journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, vol. 27, no.9 (September 1988) Sutherland, Anne, Caye Caulker,Economic Success in a Belizean Fishing Village. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1986. 
Thompson, J. Eric S., The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. 
Walcott, Derek, The Star–Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. 

A SELECTED GAZATEER OF PLACE NAMES IN BELIZE

Aguacaliente Swamp, Almond Hill Lagoon, Bakers Rendevouz, Baking Pot, Betty Creek, Big Eddy, Bight Swamp, Boatman, Bobs Creek, Boom Town, Bound–To–Shine, Cabbage Haul Creek, Carib Reserve, Catfish Bight, Chequbul, Rio Chiquibul, Churchyard, Cobweb Swamp, Cocoa Plum Cay, Colonel English Creek, Cool Shade, Cowboy Camp, Curlew Cay, Cut and Throw Away Creek, Dancing Pool, Darknight Cave, Egypt, Eldorado, El Tigre, Esperanza, FFlour Camp, Forest Home, Gallon Jug, Gladden Spirit, Good Living Camp, Go–To–Hell Creek, Grace Bank, Gracias A Dios Fall, Rio Hondo, Iguana Creek Forest Reserve, Indian Church, Isabella, Jacinto Landing, La Milpa, Lands of Goshen, Lucky Strike Camp, Macaroni Creek, Machaca Indian Reservation, Manatee Bar, Mosquito Caye, Punta Mother, New Boston, New Egypt, New Home, New River, New Town, New Windsor, Never Delay, Oak Burn, Old Harry, One Man Caye, Orange Walk, Otoxha, Pachacan, Paraiso, Placencia Point, Plantation Creek, Plenty, Quebrada de Oro Camp, San Felipe, San Heron, San Pablo, Santa Maria Creek, Santa Teresa Creek, Savanna Bank, Scotland, Shipstern, Shipyard, Silk Grass Camp, Skiff Sand, Spanish Lookout, Tiger run, Tobacco Reef, Trinidad, Tum Tum Creek, Tulec, Uncle Sam, Usbentun, Vaqueros, Victoria, Ciejo De Belice Rio, Wild Cane Caye, Xcanha, Xpicilha Village, Yalbac, Yo Chen, Zuniga Creek

Travel Stories & Essays | Poems