The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America Page 4

  Bernie wanted to make two stops en route to Cabo de la Vela. The first was pure tourism, a trip to the Salinas Manaure salt mines along the coast north of Uribia. You’ll see them in the distance, he said proudly, and sure enough, the desert landscape was flat enough to spot the mines from a couple of miles out—a cluster of glistening piles that swelled on the horizon like bleached dunes. As we drove closer, the desert clay beneath us gave way to a stretch of blinding ivory, crystal flats dotted here and there with dirty white mounds. We parked next to another old pickup near a trickle of a creek, its water the color of skim milk.

  Bernie played tour guide as we climbed shakily out of the truck, gesturing grandly and giving us some background on the mines. For centuries, he explained, the Wayuu had worked the Manaure flats, harvesting small amounts of salt by hand and fishing in saltwater lagoons. Then, in the early 1970s, the tribe ceded much of the land to the government in exchange for housing and development programs that most Wayuu agree never materialized. The government industrialized salt production, while a few small Wayuu cooperatives kept on manually harvesting the outlying plots. For decades, he said, the Wayuu and the government clashed over market prices, vanishing benefits, and ancestral territory. More recently, though, government reps and tribal operators formed a joint company to run the mines, and today the Wayuu own 76 percent of it. They still mine a quarter of the flats the old-fashioned way, using hand tools and wheelbarrows, patience and brawn.

  Sky and I walked out across the flats to where half a dozen Wayuu workers were scattered around a fifteen-foot pile of salt, a rust-eaten dump truck and a Bobcat loader parked alongside. Underfoot, the salt crystals were crunchy and jagged, and the sun was nearly blinding, glinting off every imaginable surface. The Wayuu workers were equal numbers men and women, flanked by a yard sale of pickaxes, chisels, and wheelbarrows. They stared at us a bit coolly as we approached.

  “Buenos dias,” I said, and one of the older men offered a hesitant half wave. He was shirtless. A single gold tooth glittered in the sunlight.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Sky said in Spanish. “We were just hoping to see how you worked.”

  The crew seemed unmoved, but they warmed up a bit when I pulled a couple of water bottles out of my backpack. Despite the intense heat, they seemed to have no water at all, and they nodded gratefully as we passed the bottles around. Sky asked whether he could take a few photos, and that seemed to be the magic icebreaker. The request sent most of the crew into giggles.

  While Sky turned on the charm, expertly cajoling the workers into posing, I tried to strike it up with one of the women standing on top of the pile. She wore a deep red manta guajira that stood out against the landscape like a splash of spilled wine. I asked how she could possibly work the flats all day without wearing sunglasses, and she just laughed.

  “Tengo mucha resistencia,” she said quietly, pointing to and then averting her dark eyes. Her name was Ana Maria, and we shared my water bottle while we watched Sky lining up shots of her coworkers against the endless plane of the flats.

  “So why do you not use the big machines?” I asked in my clunky Spanish.

  Ana Maria shrugged and explained, slowly, that it was important for her family to use traditional methods for salt harvesting, never mind the seeming inefficiency. Artisan salt production at Manaure yields about 60,000 tons of salt each year, compared with 350,000 tons from industrial production. According to her, though, the manually harvested plots kept hundreds of Wayuu employed, while the labor force required to run the mechanical harvesters was minimal. As the seawater filled and then evaporated in one salt lagoon, the Wayuu workers moved over to harvest another. Following this pattern, most Wayuu salt miners could expect to bring home about $200 a month. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it kept her people employed until the community could figure out how to use the profits from their newly formed company to create more jobs. And besides, Ana Maria shrugged again, this was their tradition.

  As I stood there in that alien landscape, watching Ana Maria’s robe flap in the breeze, it really did feel like we were witnessing a vanishing traditional lifestyle, something exotic and segregated from the outside world. If you looked at it one way, a scene of stereotypical aboriginal poverty was playing out all around us, with grim Wayuu laborers pushing wheelbarrows beneath an unrelenting sun. Clutching their pickaxes and dressed only in shorts, the men around the salt pile could almost have been the loincloth-clad primitives that Thompson had sketched in the Observer.

  So it was a welcome reality check when Ana Maria asked if we’d send her copies of Sky’s photos.

  “How can we do that?” Sky asked. “Is there a post office in Manaure?”

  She stared at us blankly.

  “You guys aren’t on Facebook?” she asked. Then she reached out for my notebook and scribbled her e-mail address.

  Our second stop on the road to Cabo felt a little more Third World. After leaving the salt flats, Sky and I squished in alongside Bernie in the truck’s front seat. His accent was hard to understand, and I relied on Sky for a lot of translating, but Bernie struck me as a genuinely kind and cheerful guy. He seemed not the least bit put off by my frequent questioning, and he smiled easily—a Cheshire-cat grin that said he was enjoying our company, if not taking our Q&A all that seriously. Most of the villagers in Cabo were related to him somehow, he said, although he didn’t always know just how. Wayuu families are grouped into vast matrilineal clans, and family ties could get pretty tangled. Bernie lived part-time in Riohacha with one of his wives and part-time on the peninsula with another. When I asked how many kids he had, he just grinned playfully and stared straight ahead. “A lot,” he said, and shrugged.

  As we drove, Bernie explained a few Wayuu traditions, talking about the creator god Mareywa, who was said to live near Cabo de la Vela, and about the tribe’s reparations-based justice system, which employs “Wayuu lawyers” called putchipuutos to negotiate monetary settlements between victims and offenders. He took great pleasure in teaching us a couple of words in Guajiro, including the declarative “Ho!”—evidently, the Wayuu equivalent of “Vamos!” or “Let’s go!” When I told Bernie about efforts in the United States to preserve dying indigenous languages, he just smiled in puzzlement and shook his head, like he couldn’t understand why anybody would stop speaking their own tongue.

  After another suspension-busting hour, we pulled up to a thatched-roof shack so small and dilapidated, I wondered at first whether someone hadn’t erected an outhouse in the middle of the desert. Bernie killed the engine. “La casa de mi novia,” he said, calling his second wife by the less formal “girlfriend.” Goats and small children wandered the dusty yard, and a few of the latter stopped to stare at us as we stepped out of the truck. Underneath a tattered awning, three men seemed to be napping in a triangle of woven hammocks, threadbare ball caps pulled down over their eyes. I scanned the horizon. In any direction, the shack was the only visible manmade structure. It felt a little like pulling up to Ben Kenobi’s hut on Tatooine, the barren desert planet in Star Wars—except that Obi-Wan, by comparison, had a much nicer pad.

  Bernie called out, and a girl in her mid-teens appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a blue patterned frock with a matching cloth tied around her hair. On her feet, she wore a pair of plastic flip-flops that accentuated her adolescent appearance. “Mi novia,” Bernie said again, and the girl smiled bashfully before lowering her eyes. He didn’t introduce us, but walked over and embraced her, speaking affectionately in Guajiro. She stood barely to his shoulders. If she’d have been clutching a teddy bear, I thought, it wouldn’t have looked out of place. She turned to walk back inside and Bernie followed, asking us in Spanish to please wait out in the yard.

  Whatever look I gave Sky must have betrayed my ethnocentric chagrin, because he raised his eyebrows at me and shrugged. “The age of consent in Colombia is fourteen, dude,” he said, already adjusting his light meter to shoot in the dying desert sun. Indeed, some months after I return
ed to the States, newspapers reported that a Wayuu girl of ten had become one of the youngest living mothers on record.

  As the kids in the yard gathered around us, I wondered which, if any, of them were Bernie’s. Two of the boys looked as old as ten, but a third boy and a grinning girl were only toddlers. The older pair spoke mostly Guajiro, so Sky and I did our best to communicate with gestures, passing out some of the candy we’d picked up in Barranquilla. They smiled shyly at first for Sky’s camera, then gradually cut loose and started mugging, posing like Pelé with a half-deflated soccer ball.

  Eventually, their laughter roused the men in the hammocks, who one at a time lifted their ball caps to gaze in our direction. The oldest one looked like he was in his sixties, leather-faced and graying, while the others were no older than me and Sky. We nodded hello, and the old one extended a callused hand, motioning for us to come over. As we walked toward him, I smelled the sweet stench of the liquor before I even noticed the unmarked bottles beneath the hammocks. All three men smiled groggily. The oldest muttered something I couldn’t understand, either in Guajiro or a heavily accented Spanish, and I turned to Sky for a translation.

  “I think he wants us to sit down,” he said.

  The younger men sat up in their hammocks and scooted to the side. Awkwardly, we climbed in next to them. As I settled into the woven cot, a little off-balance, I set it to swinging, and all three of the men laughed out loud. My hammock buddy put his arm around me and leaned in close, muttering what I assumed to be “hello” in Guajiro. The smell of the booze coming off his breath was overpowering, and his thousand-mile stare suggested that the three of them were a good deal more than tipsy. He said something else, with a leering grin, but I couldn’t understand him, and Sky only shrugged.

  “Gracias, amigo, gracias,” I said, thanking him feebly for hammock space, and this too touched off a chorus of addled guffaws and backslapping. Behind the laughter, though, I heard a slight note of menace and, exchanging glances with Sky, I could tell that he heard it too. “We should probably be careful here,” he said in English, smiling and trying to sound chipper. I nodded and smiled back.

  The oldest man grabbed his bottle and started sloppily pouring into a fistful of plastic medicine cups. He passed them out and then pantomimed a toast. Together, we drank. The clear, thin liquor tasted like an awful combination of Karo syrup and rubbing alcohol. It burned terribly going down, as much from the sweetness as from the obviously high alcohol content. I tasted it up in my sinuses—rotten, terrible stuff. But as I handed the cup back to the old man, I managed an approving smile.

  “Gracias,” I said again, pathetically, and asked him slowly in Spanish what the drink was called.

  “Chirrinchi,” he muttered, already pouring another round. “Chirrinchi, chirrinchi, chirrinchi.”

  As Bernie would later explain, chirrinchi is Guajira’s trademark moonshine, a fermented sugarcane drink distilled in handmade stills and sold at prices rivaling even the plentiful bottles of bootlegged Scotch. The second shot burned as badly as the first, and I barely had it down before the old man was waving for my cup to pour a third. My hammock mate put his arm around me again and swayed unsteadily. No one spoke. I thought of the Afghans and what little I could remember about their allegedly customary three cups of tea. Perhaps this was some kind of time-honored friendship ritual? Something about it didn’t seem cordial, though, just tense and a little bit sinister, like a too-friendly stranger on a dark and deserted road. As the next round was dispersed, Sky caught me glancing apprehensively at my cup.

  “You have to drink it, man,” he admonished me.

  “I know,” I said. And smiling through my teeth, I poured the syrupy chirrinchi down.

  The hard-drinking culture of Guajira was something that Thompson had described, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself thrust into it. In Puerto Estrella, Scotch had been the liquor of choice. “It continued all that day and all the next,” Thompson wrote, recalling one village drinking binge:

  They tossed it off straight in jiggers, solemnly at first and then with mounting abandon. Now and then one of them would fall asleep in a hammock, only to return a few hours later with new thirst and vigor. At the end of one bottle, they would proudly produce another, each one beautifully wrapped in cellophane.… It is bad enough to drink Scotch all day in any climate, but to come to the tropics and start belting it down for three hours each morning before breakfast can bring on a general failure of health. In the mornings we had Scotch and arm-wrestling; in the afternoon, Scotch and dominoes.

  Even at twenty-four, Thompson was a pretty accomplished drinker, having come up as a young hooligan running with pals from Louisville’s liquor-soaked country-club scene. A year in the Air Force hadn’t hurt his tolerance any, and before coming south, he’d spent a few months swilling straight rum beneath a Puerto Rican sun. I was no slouch myself, raised in a sudsy Wisconsin drinking culture, but on the day we sat down for our impromptu chirrinchi session, my shot-pounding college years were a decade behind me.

  By the time that Bernie finally emerged from the shack, we’d traded some half dozen shots of the stuff. The old man was mumbling in rudimentary Spanish about kicking the Colombian government out of the Guajiran Peninsula, and I was holding my liquor well enough to nod at what seemed like appropriate times. For reasons he was too drunk to articulate, he held the state responsible for Wayuu poverty. Meanwhile, the guy next to me kept showing me the soles of his shoe, staring at me expectantly, then laughing coarsely and slapping me on the back. He was, I think, trying to ask for money.

  When Bernie stepped out and cried “Ho!” we were quick to jump up from the hammocks. We exchanged quick handshakes with our unsought drinking buddies and piled into the truck’s front seat. Bernie threw it into reverse, waving to the kids in the yard and ignoring altogether the drunks beneath the awning. Just another frosty relationship with the in-laws, I thought. As we pulled onto the rutted jeep track, Bernie paused for a moment to sniff at the air in the cab. “Chirrinchi?” he asked. Then he shook his head at us and laughed, and we headed out into the desert once more.

  III

  For the next two days, we roamed across Guajira like vacationers, rumbling in Bernie’s Toyota from one destination to the next, from a local hill with views of the sea to a sheltered harbor where rickety skiffs bobbed like flotsam on the tide. Cabo de la Vela was one long street of wood-and-concrete structures, a village of a few hundred overlooking a calm Caribbean bay. Like the rest of town, Bernie’s place had dirt floors and no utilities, but he cooked fresh lobster on a propane stove and strung hammocks for us in a palm gazebo overlooking the beach. There used to be palm trees out back, he explained, but a decade of rising sea levels had killed them off. Maybe, I thought, or maybe it was the village’s many gazebos. All the same, the ocean view was arresting, and we sipped Scotch outside in the evenings, feeling as pampered as at any seaside resort.

  After dinner on the second day, swinging in our hammocks and watching pelicans swoop for fish offshore, I daydreamed out loud about hanging my own hammock someplace like Cabo and simply letting the sea provide. The lack of electricity and running water actually made the place feel less isolated and disadvantaged than self-sufficient and resilient.

  “We could just stick around out here and live the simple life,” I suggested, reaching down to give my hammock a lazy shove.

  “You think so?” Sky asked. “It’s pretty quiet up here, Mr. Journalist. You think it’d be gonzo enough for you?”

  I snorted. “I am not that gonzo of a guy,” I said.

  “Yeah? You could have fooled me, dude,” Sky joked. “I saw you putting back the chirrinchi yesterday.” We laughed and watched a tiny sand whirl meander its way along the waterline.

  “Seriously, though,” he asked. “Why all the Hunter Thompson stuff, then? What’s the appeal of all this for a non-gonzo guy?”

  It was a fair question. My admiration for Thompson had never had much to do with his Ber
ettas-and-blow hijinks, or with the counterculture caricature he became later in life. I like his early bestsellers, 1966’s Hell’s Angels and 1973’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72—lurid snapshots of the biker gangs, student marches, and turbulent political movements that shaped my parents’ generation. I came to Thompson for the cultural criticism and stayed for the acid trips, as it were.

  Not that I have anything against recreational drugs or flying one’s freak flag. I’ve done my share of both. But the Thompson I identified with was the gung-ho freelancer of those early letters. I was in a similar boat when I first read them, just out of college and hustling magazine articles to make the rent. I related to the Thompson on those pages. His letters were thoughtful and funny, a series of brash little manifestos on art, sex, youth culture, and the social and political changes that defined the era. Put simply, I geek out on that stuff. I wanted to understand my own increasingly chaotic and divided country in the way that Thompson seemed to understand his. He wrote that he’d acquired his understanding by traveling in South America, and I wanted some of that seemingly mystical insight. And so there I was.

  It seemed like a simple enough explanation, but I had a hard time articulating it to Sky.

  “I’m in it for the history and culture,” I said finally, and I sounded to myself like a sightseer on a tour bus. I tried again. “I want to put America in some kind of context, I think, to be able to draw some informed comparisons with the rest of the world. Hunter Thompson just makes a convenient guide.”

  “What kind of comparisons?”

  “Social comparisons, political comparisons, economic comparisons. I’m just kind of a wonk for all that.”

  “A what?” Sky asked.

  “A wonk.”

  He paused. “I have never heard that word before, dude.”

  “Somebody who obsesses over some field or another,” I explained. “A nerd for facts and details.”