Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (3 page)

A week before Christmas, landing at the airport in the capital of Honduras, I was struck by a twinge of nostalgia. The plane came careening down, barely avoiding the mountains beneath us, and made a bumpy landing on a runway much too short, which was compensated for by the pilot who frantically slammed down on the brakes and swerved to the left, skillfully avoiding the airport in front of us. Ah, Latin America. It hadn't changed a bit in the past twenty years.

One of my father's mining engineering jobs had taken us to Peru when I was four years old, and as a kid for a while I really had believed I was a Latina. I switched between English and Spanish without effort, wandered about in an alpaca poncho, and hung out with our maid, Ana, who taught me words in Quechua and took me up into the Andes where we ate beef-heart shish kabob (called
anticuchos)
surrounded by a herd of llamas.

Needless to say, I returned to the States a pretty weird kid. I was the only third-grader in my class who had never tasted a Big Mac, had no idea who this Grover guy was (was it true that he was blue?), and was completely baffled by the machine that you put a quarter into (which coin was the quarter?) and got a soda can out of. In Peru, soda did not come from machines, and it definitely didn't come in a can.

Eventually, my images of Peru faded to that dreamlike state reserved for childhood memories. I learned how to play Atari and I realized that American girls got a lot more mileage begging for ponies instead of pet llamas. But there was always a part of me that longed to return, to see that mysterious country that had given me the ability to pronounce strange-sounding words in an accent that always made my friends in Tennessee laugh, the place where my daily happiness had been as certain as the fact that summer arrived each December.

I walked down the stairs that they had rolled out to the plane, feeling strangely like a kid again. The scent of dust in the air triggered images of my childhood and all around me were the familiar sounds of a language I could nearly make out but not quite understand. It was eerie—I could imitate the words I heard with the flawless accent of a native speaker, but I had no idea how to string them together to make a coherent sentence.

In a slight daze, I crossed the dry pavement and entered the dilapidated airport filled with cigarette smoke, wondering where I would meet up with my parents. Looking around the tiny building, I realized there weren't too many possibilities: first, the entire building consisted of one gate, which left very little room for confusion, and second, while standing in line at immigration, I heard the familiar, high-pitched voice of my mother, indistinguishable even in Spanish, saying, “
Permiso. Perdón. Permiso.
” Before I had time to count to
tres,
the entire room turned to view a lively, loud, platinum-blond woman completely ignoring the Do Not Enter sign, climbing over a rope, waving past a security guard, and joining me at my side, welcoming me to the country with an emotional scream and a bear hug.

This was a typical Cathie Dale maneuver. Years ago, after discovering that the Rosarito Beach Hotel in Baja California was all booked up, she'd tried to sneak us into the pool anyway, which she had assured us would be as simple as lying about the room number on the sign-in sheet at the entrance. Unfortunately, the number she wrote down belonged to a single, and since it was unlikely that a family of six was going to be sharing a double bed, the manager had come over to politely ask us to take our lying asses to another establishment. “But I don't want to leave!” my eight-year-old brother shouted as my parents dragged him out of the pool.

At the Tegucigalpa airport, this behavior was repeating itself. Smothered in her embrace, I couldn't help but comment, “You know, no one else's mother met them at immigration.”

“Yeah, but only because it's not allowed.”

“But you—”

“I have connections,” she proudly announced. “My Embassy Friend is outside.”

Apparently those connections were not enough to ensure that everything would run smoothly at the airport. At baggage claim, the roped-off area into which suitcases were tossed by a man into the center of the room, we failed to find my maroon Samsonite. While I had arrived safe and sound in Tegucigalpa, it seemed that my suitcase was enjoying a three-day stay in Houston, courtesy of Continental Airlines.

“I'm sorry, but there has been a problem with the luggage,” the airline representative at the counter informed us.

“What kind of problem?” I asked.

“It will remain in Houston until we have space available on the plane to retrieve it.”

“You mean, my clean underwear, my deodorant, my toothbrush, my socks, and all my other personal belongings are going to be delayed indefinitely?”

“I'm afraid so.”

Unintentionally, I let out a small yelp of joy. For the first time in my life, I had had the foresight to purchase a traveler's insurance policy. It had been a simple financial decision really: A month's health coverage had turned out to be cheaper than getting the recommended hepatitis, cholera, and yellow-fever shots. And unlike spending a day in a vaccination clinic after which I would have nothing to show for myself other than a few track marks, my traveler's insurance policy came with a delayed luggage clause. They would reimburse me up to two hundred dollars for necessary expenses. And here I was, in need of a couple hundred dollars worth of personal-care items.

“So what's the first thing you want to see in Honduras?” my mother asked me, excitedly rushing toward the more restrained half of my parental unit who was patiently waiting outside the airport.

“The Estée Lauder counter!” I shouted.

For me, travel was the real-world version of falling down a rabbit hole. In a foreign country, everything was slightly off: the smell, the sounds, the view. Now I knew why everyone made such a big deal when it came to the phrase “treading on foreign soil”—on the other side of an international border even walking across the ground felt new. It was like a drug-induced high, only better—with travel, the next morning when you woke up, you were still there.

On the ride to my parents' house, chauffeured by the woman I still knew only as “Mother's Embassy Friend,” I stared out the window of the car, struck by the strangeness of the place. The vehicles racing alongside us were familiar to me in that they had four wheels, a steering column, and were covered in metal, but here they seemed to operate on a different set of principles. Vehicles that long ago would have been relegated to the junkyard in the United States tentatively puttered along here, held together with bungee cords and electrician's tape, as if no one had bothered to inform them of Newton's laws of motion. And the cows and pigs we passed by were different too. Personally not an expert when it comes to farm animals (to this day my father's greatest disappointment has been raising four children, none of whom shares his enthusiasm for livestock), I am not competent to describe the exact nature of their dissimilarity, but they felt foreign to me. They were unmistakably Honduran.

But the strangest sight of all were the signs that appeared along the road. Even after I painstakingly translated one of them with the help of a Spanish dictionary, its meaning still eluded me: “Don't leave your rocks on the highway.” This kind of warning just didn't appear along the California freeways. There were Slippery when Wet, Dangerous Curves Ahead, even the occasional Falling Rocks signs, but never before had I come across any request to kindly leave my stones elsewhere.

I turned to my father who was seated next to me in the backseat, figuring that after having lived in the country for nearly a year, he'd be able to help me make sense of the signs, but my mother was quick to interrupt.

“Honey, they put them up because so many people have been leaving their rocks on the highway,” she explained. I waited for my mother to complete her explanation, but clarity was not her strong point.

“Dad,” I said, turning to my Mensan parent, “Why is everyone going around carrying rocks and leaving them on the highway?”

“When their cars break down, which they do a lot, instead of using triangles or flares to divert other cars, they pile rocks in the road so that traffic swerves out of the path of their vehicle. But a lot of people get their cars fixed and leave the rocks. Hence the request—”

“Please don't leave your rocks on the highway.”

“Exactly.”

Twenty minutes later, successfully having avoided all the rocks in our path, we arrived in my parents' neighborhood, the ritziest area in town, where a two-story, three-bedroom Spanish colonial-style house ran my parents four hundred dollars a month, a price way out of reach of all but the wealthiest Hondurans. My younger sisters ran out to greet me, and after a round of gleeful screams and boisterous hugs my father insisted on having us all go inside so that he could show me around the place. Heather and Catherine, who had already taken this tour upon their separate arrivals, had found it so amusing they insisted on going one more time.

“Wait till he explains about the toilet,” Heather whispered to me as we huddled around the amenity, the first time I could remember that four Dales had entered the bathroom at the same time.

Other than being forest green, it looked like any normal toilet to me. “Toilet paper is the great enemy of Honduran plumbing,” my father explained, launching into a lengthy description of the septic system of the house. This was like poetry to my dad, and when it came to explaining any scientific process, he could ramble on for hours and hours. As children, he had inculcated us in the finer details of plate tectonics, ensured we could spot fake trilobite fossils at a glance, and trained us never to leave home without our emergency bottle of hydrochloric acid, in the event that an innocent bike ride would result in the immediate need to determine the chemical composition of a mineral sample picked up along the way.

His motto was that if you understood, you'd never have to memorize. You didn't learn the periodic table by rote; you comprehended it. Ag stood for silver because argentum meant silver in Latin, which was where Argentina got its name. Ask him to pass the sugar at the breakfast table and he'd end up explaining the entire fermentation process for you.

As a consequence, our “why phase” as children lasted only a matter of days. Other kids got the pleasure of watching their parents roll their eyes, throw up their hands, and plead, “Just quit asking questions!” But by the time we were three, we actually knew why grass was green (a result of the chlorophyll), how come the sky was blue (the cones in our retina respond most strongly to the short blue wavelength of the color spectrum), and the reasons birds flew (a column of decreased air pressure created by the movement of their wings).

This tutelage continued even as adults, and today we weren't going to get out of the bathroom until we learned the workings of the entire plumbing system in the house. By the time he'd finished and we all knew how to fix the sink in the event that a meteorite came crashing down on it, I couldn't quite remember what the point was.

“Don't throw any paper in the toilet,” Catherine summed up. Instead, we were supposed to dispose of our used bits of tissue in the wastebasket, a rule in force in the bathrooms throughout Central America.

Now that we were on the subject of strange Latin American habits, there was one other issue I needed clearing up immediately.

“Do they ever switch their soda from bottles to cans?” I asked anxiously, wondering if anything had changed in the two decades I'd been gone.

“No,” my father said, happy to continue today's lesson. “They drink it out of plastic bags.”

This was something even my sisters had a hard time buying. “What—you go to the store and buy yourself a little baggie of Coke?” Heather asked.

“Or Pepsi,” my dad added, launching into a lengthy explanation of the raw materials of Honduras that might have been titled:

“The Scarcity of Raw Materials Combined with a Limited Economy and
the Resulting Cultural Anomalies Among the Honduran Population”

Author's note:
For reasons of length, the full text has been omitted. See abstract below.

Abstract:
In Honduras, it's cheaper to drink soda out of a bag.

To get a sense of what Honduras was like, you have to know a little bit about its history, which has had a lot more to do with bananas than any sane country is likely to consider prudent. Beginning in the early 1900s, this yellow innocuous-looking fruit has been the source of civil unrest, military occupation, strategic alliances, and, of course, potassium.

In the early twentieth century, Honduras became the epitome of a banana republic—and not the kind selling high-quality cotton shirts at the mall. This was a poor nation that relinquished its national hold on its own interests in the pursuance of a higher good: money. Like a poor kid who invites his unpleasant rich neighbor to his birthday party in the hopes of scoring a Game Boy, Honduras welcomed U.S. investment in the region and in return offered to sing the tune “Happy Birthday” in English.
²
In exchange for the construction of roads and railroads, Honduras handed over its fertile farmland to American banana companies, which in the end turned out to be like getting the cartridges for free while having to rent the Game Boy.

For the next sixty years, the United States exerted its imperialist hold on the region, doing everything from applying stern diplomatic pressure to financing government overthrows, while Honduras went through the normal phases of development for a Latin American country: the oral stage, in which it paid lip service to U.S. demands; the anal stage, in which it became obsessive and detail-oriented in complying with these demands; the phallic stage, in which it realized that the United States was a lot bigger than it was; and the genital stage, which led the country to the conclusion that it was completely screwed.