Semana Santa

We made our way into Antigua Wednesday morning, expecting heavy crowds, perhaps a walk down the mountain just to get into the city, but found nothing of the kind. The city was quietly humming as ever, the sun was on the low rooftops, and Fuego, Agua, and Acatenango, though covered slightly with a dull morning haze, stood hugely over the outer hills.


(volcan Agua)

Sadly, neither the famous alfambras (painted saw dust carpets), nor the Semana Santa (Holy Week) processionals Antigua is so well known for throughout the world, were scheduled to appear or take place on Wednesday. Good Friday and Easter Sunday, according to the schedule an attendant had given us, were the better days to visit. Fortunately, there was to be a kids processional slated to depart from Parque de la Merced at 2:00 p.m. Determined to get a taste of all of the excitement, we decided to wait. Our morning quickly filled up with shopping, a visit to a few of the churches, and lunch.

(la Merced)

Around 1:30, we made our way under the Arco de Santa Catalina—said to be the only structure untouched by the great earthquake of 1773—toward the Parque de la Merced. We could see boys here and there coming quietly of out side doors and from around corners, dressed in royal purple robes making their way, like us, to the church.


(Arco de Santa Catalina)

We arrived in time to find a good place to watch across from the church along Calle del Manchen. Two or three women were already spreading dampened grass, long glistening threads of it, along the cobblestones, and an old woman was dropping flowers down the center in groups of three. The edges were bordered with strung daisies.



The anda emerged from the church around 2:45, fort-five minutes late, or right on time by the Guatemalan clock. Forty or fifty young boys lined each side, anda-bearers as they’re called, with serious looking faces. The float swayed.



The base was made of finely carved wood. In the front was a plain looking cross nailed with spikes, a black bound Bible fixed to its center, with a tiny lamb sitting on top. The figurine of a small Christ in a blood red robe carried a golden cross in the middle, and in the rear, a white altar.



Despite all the anticipation, in truth, the processional emerged and was gone round the corner and out of site within a few minutes. A band struck up a sad tune at its turning, following at a short distance, and the little Christ on the kid’s float got smaller as it swayed down Calle de la Aduana toward the artestian market. I had filled my digital camera’s memory with those minutes, as had a few hundred other observers.

Thinking back on those minutes over this Good Friday, I was a little sad at how my spirit failed to get caught up in the event. Failed, in fact, to feel much of anything at all. I got my pictures, very important. I talked about Guatemala for a while with an older lady from Colorado who’s friend was sick, and couldn’t make it. I made sure the goods we had purchased at the market didn’t get stolen, and that our kids—sticky fingered from ice cream and dead tired—were within hands reach. I kept track of where we had parked, and decided in my mind the easiest way out of the city. We left the scene and the crowd and the little Christ.

The children’s processional with 2,000 boys strong (or so said the brochure) could have been any parade really, considering the way I approached it, considering the lack of reverence I brought to the event. Cultural appreciation? Sure, I had some of that. Spiritual sensitivity, an awareness, a presence, to what was being offered and celebrated? Not a lick. The good Protestant scoffs, of course, at all this Catholic pomp (frivolity?). But the Christian, never good for one, since he is forever humbled by the knowledge of his own sin, should come alive at the celebration of his Christ’s passion, whatever the form—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant. If my heart was in it at all, like they say, it was in it for the photos, sadly.


* * *
Yesterday evening I was coaxed into the street by Mallory to join a game of futbol the neighbor kids had started. The neighbors’ shacks were filled with new faces—the holiday appearance of family and friends, I supposed. After the game, sweat soaked and still catching my breath (the altitude here is a killer!), Alida, the nine-year old neighbor girl, pushed a plate into my hand with a lump of chicken on a tortilla. Her smile made a shape of joy. “Gracias, Alida.” I waved to her mom across the street, who was bending over her tiny fire.

The sound of laughter and a ruckus of kids playing poured through our windows all evening. The fires next door burned late, and the women laughed long and hard. The givenness of it is what strikes me even now, the common communion of family. No party plans, no invitations, no house cleaning, no last minute trips to the grocery for beer and chips. Just faces around a fire, barefoot kids giggling in a metal shack. The breaking of corn tortillas, the sharing of unpurified water in plastic cups. The holy holiday. Love covering a multitude of sins. Maybe even my own.

The Pacific

As a lover of beaches, I was happy to make the drive to Puerto San Jose last week with our guests, Mark and Angie. The currents there are reported to be dangerous, and the sands black.

Puerto San Jose was a filthy beach town with little of interest, just thin crowded streets, bikes, faces, signs, tons of shop and restaurant signs. The hotels along the shore were unkept, cheap. The air was heavy and hot. We talked ourselves into a one-year membership at Aquamagic, the kind of water park that would go under fast in the U.S., but for Guatemala, it was a little paradise. Huge slides, wave pool, pool bar, pirate boat. We ate pizza on the sand under a black mesh canopy. I drank a cold Gallo in a white can at the pool bar. Mallory and I hit all four slides four hundred times. Mark and I swam in the huge black surf. We got a little banged up, got flipped over and thrown. I was reminded of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s description of waves as “all composition and muscle.” Tsvetaeva was comparing waves to lyric poetry in this case, its rhythms, etc. And I was comparing the waves at Puerto San Jose to other waves of other beaches of my life. Beaches, like waves, like poetry, must be approached, entered, touched. I like Whitman’s line:

     Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves…



From the shore, on a postcard, from the air, they are pretty, but they do not come alive until we throw ourselves into them. This is something like what Mark and I did. And I realized how much I love, have always loved, doing it.

The same water—a different wave.
What matters is that it is a wave.
What matters is that the wave will return.
What matters is that it will always return different.
What matters most of all: however different the returning wave,
     It will always return as a wave of the sea.

(Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Poets with History and Poets without History”)


(Cristian Diego with rake)


(Favorite photo of the week: Mark “Cookie” Miklautsch in the zone)

Climbing Pacaya

Kristin’s brother Mark and I headed an hour East of Guatemala City yesterday morning to climb Volcan Pacaya, one of the more popular volcanoes in Guatemala. We went despite a recent U.S. Embassy warning against climbing Pacaya due to heavy activity. But I’ve found that the U.S. Embassy will issue a warning for American’s if they spot a gardener peeing in the road, so I wasn’t too concerned. On clear nights, even from a great distance, you can see the flash of explosions over Pacaya’s nipple-like cone, so I was more than a little tipsy with anticipation.

The road up the mountain was newly paved with a grand view of the landscape East of the city, with Volcan Agua for a backdrop. The days have been more hazy lately due mostly, I think, to the burning/clearing of vacant lots (I’m guessing here, I haven’t really confirmed this with anyone), so the view was a little obscured, but we got enough of it to shake our heads at such beauty.

A little over an hour and we pulled into the “park,” paid our 25Q apiece, and found a guide named Alturo who charged 50Q to take us up the volcano. He had a legitimate looking badge and a machete. We were set. It was his second trip of the day, and he would likely take another before supper. Since his hair was still cleanly feathered, and I could detect no wear or worry on his face—in fact, he looked spritely—I figured the hike couldn’t be that bad.

The walk to the base was a good hour uphill on a wooded trail, nothing too exciting. Alturo pointed out various trees and vegetation of note, but I understood very little. There were times it could have been Michigan woods, to be honest. The altitude is what made it a little strange, hitting us almost immediately, and forcing stops every fifteen minutes.

The base was a huge sprawling awkward plain of yellow grass and a scattering of low trees. Rising out of its center, the smoking cone of Pacaya was enough to make us shudder not only at the distance still ahead—horribly steep—but also its huge and strangely live presence, which was compounded by the noise of the explosions within. Alturo told us that Pacaya was speaking, saying, “Welcome, welcome, come to me, yes, come to me,” and laughed.


(view from the base of Volcan Pacaya)

As we came to where the trail got steepest, we could see the hardened magma from the last serious explosion (2000), which sent lava over the side and down, though heavy winds, our guide told us, helped harden things relatively quickly, leaving a strange, cracked yet amazingly smooth black surface that trailed out of our sight around the cone and further down.


(remains of the 2000 explosion)

We ascended up a trail of soft, gravely black magma we found our feet sinking into at least six inches with every step. It was slow going. The rocks were warm and smoking. Smoke was blowing up the cone and circling above. After climbing a good two hundred meters, we could no longer see the base below. To our right, literally a step away, the drop could kill a man, though the fall would be a long, long sliding and tumbling over rock.



I was struck by how similar the terrain near the top of the volcano was to Peter Jackson’s rendering of Mount Doom in the LOTR trilogy. There was something spooky about seeing nothing but white smoke over the long ledge to our right and behind us. We were over 2,500 meters according to our guide, and breathing was not easy.



Someone told me that there was a new, smaller cone inside the main cone, and it was this smaller cone that was spewing rocks. When we reached the top, I realized there were actually two smaller cones rising out of the middle, another 30 meters or so high, and they were both shooting rocks and belching their bienvenidos to us, a thundering welcome.



Like good tourists, we caught our breath and snapped our pictures. We were both half expecting a bowling ball sized rock to land at our feet if not on our heads. The guide seemed calm though, which is a tourist’s best and sometimes only solace. Still, the cone felt alive, and I can’t say I have ever felt such a thing in all my life.



The descent was all heel sliding and boyish lunges. Toward the bottom, we ran, laughing hugely at the body’s ability to negotiate all that angle and surface and speed. I was reminded of the Devil’s Logslide at Grand Marais in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where my folks would take us occasionally to descend a massive dune that was once used to roll logs to the Lake Superior shore.


(Mark booking it down)

Near the bottom, after a more rapid hike, our guide cut a stretch of vine from the trail and slipped up the bank and out of site. I caught something about watering his horse. Several minutes and a couple hundred meters later, we heard the clop of horses coming down the trail, four in all, with Alturo leading the first by his cut vine. He bid Mark hop on the first, bareback, which he did. I got my turn soon after. It was a surprising and happy finish to a long day’s climb.



At the park entrance we bought ourselves and our guide a Gallo, and took a seat. I thought about how Guatemala’s notorious attractions continue to astonish me, but more than that, and more importantly, I thought about how good it was to sit with my brother-in-law in the shade in such a wild place among strange people. The greatest surprise of the day I think was the subtle realization of how extraordinary it was to be sitting in this very place together, of all the places we might be in the world. We exchanged knowing smiles at the Lord's providence which had led us both up and down even wilder and stranger paths than the one we had just taken to bring us there.