Belize's Heart of Darkness

The interior of Belize is an enchanted place, covered with impenetrable jungle, split by raging rivers with towering falls, filled with oddities like the black poisonwood tree that will make your hand swell up like a catcher’s mitt if you touch it. There in the dark, dense tangle roam the jaguar, fer-de-lance, and other feral creatures.
Not surprisingly, most of the population tends to favor the coast, cramming into the few cities and towns there. Jungle-dwellers are broadly regarded with suspicion.
Such a person was our guide, the celebrated Jackie Vasquez. For Belizeans of a certain age, he was the boogyman parents threatened them with if they didn’t do their chores, pick up their grades, or stop teasing their little sister. In one oft-told story, he was jailed on suspicion of murder but turned into a bat and flew to freedom through the bars on the window.
But Jackie’s biggest crime was that he spent a lot of time back in the “bush,” at first guiding the rich and famous on jaguar hunts, later gathering rare orchids and bromeliads for the market. Nothing good ever came out of that jungle, was the consensus.
Don’t ask what we were doing in there. Ostensibly we were hunting the elusive white-lipped peccary, a larger and reputedly more dangerous cousin to our south Texas javelina. But it was deeper than that, each of us (there were four, all from Houston) feeling the tickle of his personal wild hair.
Jackie took us up into Orange Walk District and set us up in a village from which we would roam the surrounding wilderness, hunting out of a four-wheel-drive Jeep Wagoneer.
The first day out, the Jeep became high-centered in a set of deep ruts made in the narrow dirt road by a tractor back during the rainy season. Jackie and his assistant, a 30-something Creole named Bernard Flowers, fell to the task of cutting brush and erecting a ramp under the Jeep’s dangling tires.
We were stranded for nearly three days. All we had to live on were sacks of coconuts and limes, a jar of peanut butter, and a case of rum. We did all right.
Jackie was probably in his late 60s then, creased and white but still robust. He had a lot of stories, which he told with good humor. But he had wary eyes, always darting around. I did not see this, but I’m guessing at some point he cast his wary eyes on us and decided if these guys get any drunker, they’ll be a danger to themselves. Hunkered down under the Jeep, he must’ve passed on his concerns to Bernard, who, while attending to some mundane task in our midst, suddenly stiffened and looked into the wall of green foliage.
“Listen!” he said. “The anni-mahls are feeding!”
He proposed that we set down our coco locos and go hunting. We stumbled through the undergrowth in Bernard’s footsteps for several miles until we came to a freshly cut path marked with orange flagging. Even with our numbed acuities, we could tell by Bernard’s reaction that this was out of the ordinary.
We followed the path until it split into two, chose one side and followed it until it dead-ended, went back, found another spit, another dead end. You’d have thought we were stalking tyrannosaurus rex the way Bernard was creeping along, crouched low and sweating double-ought buck.
Finally we picked a path that broke into a huge bare field – and Bernard breathed a sigh that was as loud as a groan.
“They’re gone!” he said.
“Who’s gone?”
“The marijuana growers. They’re from El Salvador. Bad, bad people.”
In the center of the field was a long open structure made entirely of natural materials. It had a thatch roof and the “attic” was strung with vines, from which hung a few desiccated marijuana plants – sinsemilla, Jackie explained later. Marijuana plants rigorously tended by a large crew of probably Salvadorans. They had cut the labyrinthine paths to confound intruders and were probably responsible for the big tractor ruts in the road.
Also, Jackie said sadly, they had probably shot or run off all the game in the area. As a hunting party, we were blowed up.
It didn’t seem to matter. There was like an unspoken agreement between us that whatever it was we had gone down there for, we had gotten it in spades.
Of course this was the same trip when we came within a millimeter of all going to jail for smuggling endangered bromeliads. But that’s another story.