reason to add my Minolta 4F strobe meter to the pack, which is good, I’ve found through years of jerry-rigging in the jungle, for measuring ambient light.
Light was actually going to be the biggest problem. One of the few things Jan let slip was that a lot of the shooting would be in the dark, either night shots of carved inscriptions, where raking lights could be used to bring the glyphs into sharper relief, or inside the pyramids themselves. I’d done some of this during a project involving Thai temples, my one major credit and a plum that would probably not fall out of the tree again, thanks to the precipitous end of my relationship with Robert, professional adventurer, poetic genius, photographer extraordinaire, and, as it turned out, major jerk.
One thing was clear: this gig with Jan and company was not going to be a big National Geographic–style operation like only Robert or someone of his ilk has the clout to command, with porters along to carry light stands and strobe lights and generators. We couldn’t even take Jan’s truck all the way in to where we were going. Three big packs was all we could handle. For a minute, I allowed myself to muse wistfully: a Norman 200 strobe setup would be just about perfect—we’d used them in Thailand—but then we’d have to have electricity, which last time I checked, didn’t exist inside most crumbling Guatemalan temples. Instead, Jan could provide me with a single rickety light stand, some quantum battery packs for off-camera flashes, and a couple of big lanterns. That would have to do.
In my obsessive little way, I also checked over my art supplies, though it was doubtful they could be replenished in Flores or even in nearby San Benito if something were missing. There were plenty of good drawing pencils, a graphite stick, and fine-tip pens, plus extra ink. Hauling loose drawing paper in a backpack is a recipe for disaster; I had found that out the hard way years ago. So I’d decided on a couple of ringed sketchbooks with 90 lb paper in them, which I put inside plastic bags to protect them from molding. On a whim, I’d also brought along rice paper and Conté crayons, though rubbings would no doubt be tough, given the depth of the carvings.
At 3:30 sharp, we drove the loaded truck off the island and onto the earthen causeway that crosses the lapping lake water, bouncing past the Santa Elena airport and onto the highway to Tikal, the only asphalt, Rikki informed me, in the whole Petén. I’d already noticed that Rikki did at least 85 percent of the talking.
Riding around in remote places with strange men was something I was used to, and in spite of the big question mark concerning my brother, I could feel myself getting primed for a new adventure. I knew a dog once who ran like a racehorse, tongue streaming back, black ears flying, and could run like that for hours and then go unconscious for half a day in the sun, twitching and dreaming, and wake up and start running again. There was nothing this dog was running toward, nothing it was trying to catch. Running was it, pure and simple. That was me at the start of something new.
We drove for perhaps an hour. A big stretch of scenery was taken up by a sluggish-looking military outpost, the jumping-off point, Rikki said, for raids against Tikal-based guerrillas during the eighties. My ears pricked up. Though I’d been in Guatemala during those days, I hadn’t been in this part of the country. Guerrillas were of vital importance to the Stefan question. I wanted to ask Rikki more, specifically if he knew what was happening on the Chiapan guerrilla front, but thought it prudent to shelve the interrogation about southern Mexico until his father was out of earshot. In fact, Jan was probably an empty well anyway. Men like him tended to avoid politics completely. In every messed-up country I’ve ever been there are the Jans—foreigners not connected with the government or business or humanitarian projects, scholarly oddballs who meander right through the middle of battlefields and whose sole reason for being is tied up in what has become of the pink river dolphins or whether Australopithecines ate more meat or vegetables.
We stopped briefly at the entrance to the park while Jan checked in at a guardhouse, then took a narrow dirt road that veered away from the groups of straggling tourists heading toward the Great Plaza of Tikal and went straight into heavy forest where we clattered along for some time seeing nothing but trees. Rikki explained that this was a guard road that would get us a couple of miles closer to where we were going, but that the last part would be a hike. Ahead on both sides was nothing but green.
After a while, the ribbon of brown ahead of us began to narrow and then, abruptly, vanished. Jan nosed the truck between two magnificent ceiba trees and turned off the engine. The windows of the truck were open to the screechings and strange cries and hollow boomings of the jungle, noises that reminded me of lush and deadly Burundi. Above everything else was the crashing in the trees that signaled monkeys were moving in. Something orange and yellow flashed in front of the windshield and landed on a branch not far off the ground—a black toucan with his brilliant beak. Jan opened the truck door.
The pack was heavy but all right. Once upon a time, I’d been lost in a rainforest and was not hot to repeat the experience, so on the trail I stuck close to Rikki. It was strange to think that several hundred tourists were climbing pyramids only a mile or two away and we could neither hear nor see them. In spite of the weird airlessness you get in jungles, the climate wasn’t so bad. I’d expected to sweat—I remembered sweating a lot when I’d been in Guatemala before, though maybe that had just been nerves—but instead there was a pleasant balminess I was immediately grateful for. Jan handed me a water bottle. As I was upending it into my mouth, it began to rain, just a dripping at first, as though it were coming straight from the trees, and then a more serious thrumming that signaled a downpour on its way. He motioned, and the three of us huddled together beneath a tall shrub with six-foot brilliant green leaves that ended in fringes.
“Look,” said Rikki, crouching. I squatted beside him and in the dim, rainy light saw a weaving line of leaves marching steadily off into the forest. Leafcutter ants, large but dwarfed by the pieces of leaves they carried, which were at least five times their size.
Jan was not interested in the ants. He said in his prim Nederlander way, “There is a small temple where we are going. If it keeps raining, we can sleep inside.”
“So put on the ponchos?” said Rikki.
“Yes.”
We each dug into our packs and draped ourselves in khaki rain gear, then hoisted everything back on our shoulders and went out onto the trail. Ten minutes later the sun broke through and steam began rising from the forest floor, and after another ten minutes Rikki said, “Can we stop? I’m dying inside this poncho,” which of course I was also, but not about to admit it. Jan looked back at the two of us and just then a shaft of weak sunlight caught him right across his Dutch face, and I saw him old in the way you sometimes see people on film when you are developing it and realize you have seen the future. There’s an age one has to be for this to happen and it’s not my age, not yet, but sometime within the next six years.
In spite of what my extensive preparations for this trip might suggest, I was not actually terribly worried about Stefan yet. We’d been out of touch more than we’d been in it—my fault, mostly—and for a long time, if we communicated at all, we went through Jonah. Jonah, no doubt voted “least likely to become a monk” in his high school yearbook, was indeed a monk, based at a Camaldolese Benedictine hermitage in California (“Camaldolese” equaling “reasonable hermits who live under a rule,” he once told me, laughing). This was where Stefan in his late twenties, no longer seeking enlightenment in Nepal, no longer hammering away in grad school, spent three apparently fruitful Big Sur years. Fruitful, in the sense that he seemed to have finally figured out what he was going to do with his life and why he was going to do it, though I couldn’t in a million years grasp his logic. As a monk, Jonah was unable to change addresses whenever he felt like it. Thus, he provided us a convenient mailbox.
Over the past several years Stefan had sent a series of slightly disturbing letters to Jonah, intermixed with a couple of red herring versions of the same thing to me, then several somewhat more disturbing ones to Jonah, and then silence. This
