Pass the Butterworms by Tim Cahill

Author:Tim Cahill [Cahill, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77840-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

The Lone Ranger

The highest, the most remote mountains on the mainland of Honduras form the nucleus of several national parks. We were driving along a network of bad dirt roads, looking for a way to enter the newly established Santa Barbara Park. It was steep country, very green, and the mountains were closely spaced. The land, to my eye, possessed the logic of a sheet of paper crumpled in the hand and dropped on a table.

There were cattle grazing in vertical pastures, moving under Strange knobby green peaks. Pineapples grew in adjacent fields, and clear-cuts wound their way up the slopes of the higher mountains, which marched off into the distance, purple against the rising smoke of the agricultural fires burning everywhere.

The roads lacked signage of any sort and branched off to various tiny villages, where we saw horses, saddled Western-style, laden with bananas or pineapples and tied to hitching posts in front of the cantinas. Men in straw cowboy hats and Western-cut shirts pointed off in several different directions at once when we inquired about a route into the mountains above.

The road dropped back down to the country’s major north-south highway, which fronted the west side of Lake Yajoa, a hundred square miles of clear waters, fringed with coffee plantations, a few resorts, and dozens of prosperous-looking farms. The lake, a seriously picturesque affair, was stocked with large and apparently exceedingly dumb bass. There were at least thirty restaurants lining the highway, each of them selling bass and only bass. We stopped at one of the upscale places, redundantly named Only Bass. They served bass with devil sauce, with tartar sauce, with garlic butter; we could have our bass fried, grilled, or baked. Everything was delicious except for the only beer on the menu, a sour imported American brand whose uniquely honest sales pitch is “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Later that night, we stopped in the town of Santa Barbara and tried to get a fix on the national park rising all around in the darkness. Since the directions given in the town square all smacked of misinformation and Casablanca, we counted ourselves fortunate to run into a man named Martine Rodriguez, of the Green Heart Ecological Association, who trotted us off to his nearby office, showed us some maps, and told us that we could get into the park via the village of San José de Los Andes. The village was set about a mile high and was one of the highest settlements in Honduras. Could we get up there in a two-wheel-drive car without much clearance? Not in the rainy season, Martine said, but since it had been pretty dry lately, hey, no problem.

Which is how, the next day, we came to be irremediably stuck on a cruel boulder-strewn joke of a road at an elevation of about five thousand feet and two miles short of San José. Men from the village, returning from work in the fields, stopped and gave us a hand, as a matter of course.

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