In the darkness, I was rolling over and closing my eyes when I heard Micah’s voice.
“Nicky?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry about punching you today.”
“It’s okay. And I’m sorry about knocking over your bike.”
For a moment, there was silence, until Dana chimed in, “Now, don’t you both feel better?”
Night after night, my mom had us name three nice things our siblings had done for us, and each night we were somehow able to come up with something.
And to my surprise, my brother and I began to argue less and less.
Three Weeks With My Brother
Perhaps it was too hard to make up things; after a while, it just seemed easier not only to be kinder, but to notice when another was being kind to you.
We finished out the school year—I completed second grade, Micah third. In June, my grandfather decided to put a new roof on his house, an endeavor he decided Micah and I would help with. Our knowledge of roofing and experience with tools could be summed up in a single word—huh?—but we quickly knew we wouldn’t let that stop us. It was, after all, something new, another adventure, and over the course of a couple of weeks, we learned the art of pounding nails until our hands and fingers blistered.
We worked during one of the nastiest heat waves of our young lives. The temperature was close to a hundred degrees, the humidity unbearable. More than once we grew dizzy, sitting up on the roof of the baking house. My grandfather had no qualms about having us work right near the edge of the roof, and we, of course, had no qualms about it either.
While I escaped unscathed, earning $7 for two weeks’ worth of work, my brother was less fortunate. One afternoon, while taking a break, he decided to move the ladder, since it seemed to be in the way. What he didn’t know was that a shingle cutter (a sharp, heavy, scissorslike tool) had been left on the uppermost rung. As he fumbled with the ladder, the shingle cutter was dislodged and came torpedoing down. It struck him an inch or so above his forehead. Within seconds, blood was gushing out of his head.
He screamed and my grandfather hustled over.
“That looks pretty deep,” he said, his face grim. After a moment, he nodded. “I’d better get the hose.”
Soon, water was pouring through the hose over my brother’s head. That, by the way, was the sum total of his medical treatment that day. He wasn’t taken to the doctor or the hospital. Nor did Micah get the rest of the day off. I remember watching the water turn pink as it flowed over the wound, thankful that Micah had a “thick skull” like me.
By the time school resumed in the fall, I’d finally become used to life in Nebraska. I was doing well in school—to that point, I’d never received a grade lower than an A—and had become friends with a few of the other kids in class. Afternoons were spent playing football, but as summer heat gradually began giving way to autumn chill, our life would be upended once more.
“We’re moving back to California,” my mom informed us over dinner one night. “We’ll be leaving a couple of weeks before Christmas.”
My parents had reconciled (though at the time we weren’t even aware that they’d officially separated) and my dad had taken a job as a professor at California State University at Sacramento, where he would teach classes in management.
Our time in Nebraska came to an end as abruptly as it had begun.
CHAPTER 6
Three Weeks With My Brother
Yaxhá and Tikal, Guatemala
January 24–25
On Friday morning, Micah and I touched down in Guatemala and stepped into a world completely different from the one we had just left.
After passing through customs, the tour group boarded vans and drove toward Petén, passing ramshackle houses and small villages that seemed to have been assembled with random bits and pieces of material. In some ways, it was like stepping back in time, and I tried to imagine what the Spanish conquistadores first thought when they arrived in this area. They were the first to discover the ruins of what was once a flourishing civilization, whose large cities included temples rising as high as 230 feet and silhouetted against the dense jungle foliage.
I’d been interested in the Maya since I first read about them as a child, and knew they’d attained intellectual heights unrivaled in the New World. In their Golden Age, from A.D. 300 to 900, their civilization encompassed the area including the Yucatán Peninsula, southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The culture reached its height amid the jungles and swamps of Petén, Guatemala, where they built the cities of Yaxhá and Tikal.
The civilization was a study in contrasts; a sometimes brutal culture that engaged in human sacrifice, the Maya were simultaneously employing the concept of zero a thousand years before the Europeans, and were able to calculate into the hundreds of millions. Their knowledge of mathematics allowed them to chart the stars, accurately predict lunar eclipses, and develop a 365-day calendar, yet legend has it that they never used the wheel.
We arrived at the Maya Biosphere—the vast national park in Petén that was home to the ruins—where we had lunch in an open-air hut along the lake. We continued to acquaint ourselves with our companions, most of whom had traveled far more extensively than either Micah or I. An hour later we were back on the road again for our stop at Yaxhá.
Yaxhá is both the name of a lagoon and the site of a city built more than 1,500 years ago amid the jungle along its banks. Yaxhá was once the third-largest city in the Mayan empire, and approximately twenty miles from Tikal, the largest and most important ceremonial city. When we arrived, however, we saw nothing but trees and dirt pathways winding among the hills. In the background, we could hear howler monkeys, but the foliage above us was so thick it was impossible to see them.
Our guide began talking about the city and Mayan culture while pointing in various directions. I could see nothing. As he continued, I glanced at Micah, who shrugged. When the guide asked if there were any questions, I spoke up.
“When do we actually get there?” I asked. “To Yaxhá, I mean?”
“We’re here, now,” he answered.
“But where are the buildings?” I asked.
He motioned to the hillsides surrounding us. “Everywhere you look,” he answered. “Those are not hills you see. Beneath each and every mound is a building or temple.”
The trees in this part of the jungle, we learned, shed leaves three times a year. Over time, as the leaves decay, they form compost, which eventually turns to dirt. The dirt allows for initial vegetation, then eventually trees. The trees grow, mature, die and new ones grow in their place. The jungle had swallowed the buildings, one by one.
This news didn’t surprise us. The city had been abandoned a thousand years ago—three thousand layers of densely packed leaves and growth—and the jungle had grown unchecked. It made sense that we would see no signs of the city.
But we were wrong. In fact, sections of Yaxhá had been completely restored less than eighty years earlier by archaeologists, in much the same way Tikal has been restored now. The jungle had been cut back, and dozens of buildings and temples had been completely excavated. Yet because the rains were beginning to slowly destroy the newly uncovered temples—and because lack of funds failed to keep the destruction in check—the government had no choice but to allow the jungle to encroach once more on Yaxhá, in favor of Tikal.
Micah began looking around, his expression as wondrous as that of a child.
“Can you believe that all this growth took place in only eighty years?” Micah asked me. “Our grandparents were living then.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“I wonder what it would look like after eight hundred years.”
“Probably about the same, don’t you think?” I speculated. “Except that the hills might be a little bigger.”
“I guess so.” He squinted, trying to peer through the density of the jungle. “How on earth could someone even have discovered this place? I mean, when I see a mound of dirt, I don’t automatically think there’s a pyramid beneath it.”
I put my arm around him. “That’s why you’re not an archaeologist,” I said.
Our guide began leading us along a path, continuing to describe various aspects of the city. Micah and I trailed behind our group, our heads swiveling from side to side. Micah suddenly rubbed his hands together; it was something he always did when excited.
“Nick,” he said, “can you believe we’re here? In a buried Mayan city in the jungles of Guatemala? Six hours ago, we were in Fort Lauderdale eating bagels and cream cheese!”
“It doesn’t seem real, does it?”
“No,” he said. “And I’ll tell you something.” He motioned around him. “I never believed I could get so excited about seeing a pile of dirt.”
A few minutes later, we entered what was once a plaza; before us was one of the only temples that had been fully excavated, and for the first time the reality of what we would see on the trip took hold. Shaped like a black and gray trapezoid, the temple towered a hundred feet in the air. Our guide informed us that it had been abandoned in roughly A.D. 900, some six hundred years before Columbus arrived. It meant that the time between the usage of the temple and Columbus’s arrival, and Columbus’s arrival and the current day, were roughly the same, and the very thought amazed me. In the ebb and flow of history, the rise and fall of civilizations, my own daily concerns suddenly seemed minuscule in comparison.
My brother, too, was examining the temple before us with great interest, though his thoughts were slightly different from mine.
“Look how high it is! I’ve got to climb that thing!”
So, with our guide’s permission, we did. Running up the far side of the temple was a rickety set of rotting boards, spaced irregularly and laced together with frayed rope. My brother and I were the first to reach the top, and for the first few minutes we had the place to ourselves.
The sky was overcast with black clouds hovering at the distant horizon. Beyond us, we could see the lagoon and the utter density of the jungle spreading thirty miles in every direction. It was impossible to see through the canopy of trees, but we saw the tops of three or four pyramids poking through, as if trying to reach the heavens. And with the exception of the sound of our breathing—slightly labored from the climb—it was utterly, completely silent. The sides of the pyramid seemed to plunge straight down, and standing near the edge gave me a sense of vertigo. Yet neither Micah nor I could wipe the smiles off our faces. We had begun the trip of our lives a few hours earlier; now we were standing on what seemed to be the top of the world, in a place we’d always dreamed of seeing.
“Take my picture,” Micah suddenly said. “Christine’s going to love this.”
“If she were here, do you think she would have come up?”
“No way. She hates heights. She would have been one of those people way down there,” he said, pointing to where we’d been standing. “How about Cathy?”
“She doesn’t like heights either, but she’d be up here. She wouldn’t get too close to the edge, though.”
I took his picture and he took mine. We took another, then still more. And we continued to gaze in wonder, even as I retrieved the satellite phone from my backpack.
“I’ve got to call Cat,” I said, feeling the need to share this with her. I dialed the number and I heard the phone begin to ring. This amazed me. I was making a phone call from the middle of nowhere. When she answered, the first words out of my mouth were, “I’m standing on top of a Mayan temple in the jungle!” and I heard Cathy whoop with the same excitement I was feeling.
“Is it great?” she asked.
I stared around me in wonder. “It’s incredible,” I said. “The only way it could be any better was if you were here beside me.”
“Aw,” she said. “I miss you, too.”
Later, when I hung up, Micah asked for the phone to call Christine. Unfortunately, she was out, and, disappointed, he hung up after leaving a message on the answering machine.
A minute later, our moment of solitude ended with the arrival of the rest of the crowd.
That night at the hotel, there was a cocktail party followed by dinner. Dinner was a buffet, and despite the warnings about eating salads and vegetables, we saw many people eating them anyway. And just as the doctor predicted, more than a dozen would become ill within days; some would remain sick throughout the rest of the trip.
We dined that night with Bob and Kate Devlin, who split their time between Connecticut and New York City, and with whom we formed an immediate connection. They had two sons approximately our age and they said we reminded them of their kids. For us, the connection seemed just as personal.
“Doesn’t Kate remind you of mom?” Micah asked, as we were heading back to our room.
“Yeah, she does,” I answered, amazed that he’d been thinking exactly the same thing as I.
Lost in thought, we didn’t say much else the rest of the night.
Because it was the hub of Mayan life, Tikal has been declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. Discovery, excavation, and repairs have been ongoing for decades, and despite the number of visitors, it takes a small army to keep the jungle at bay.
At one time, the area surrounding Tikal was home to a hundred thousand people, all of whom depended on the city for protection and trade. By the end of the tenth century, however, the civilization began to disintegrate. A number of theories abound as to the reason—overpopulation, wars, an overthrow of the ruling class, drought, famine, dwindling nutrient capacity of the soil, or simple discontent of the people that led them to find opportunities with other invading tribes. But within a few generations, the city had been completely abandoned and the people dispersed back into the countryside. The rise and sudden fall of the Maya is still considered one of the world’s great mysteries, and I was thinking about it as we made our way to the ancient city.