Shrek Lessons, Mood Swings, and Sprinting Down the Volcano: 3 Weeks in El Salvador

A note: Chronology is the sequencing of time. Chronometry is the measurement of time. (Cosmetology is the lady that does my toes.)

This post is chronologically linear. Chronometrically, it measures two periods, the first being my three weeks in El Salvador and the second being what I learned of the country's history from the late 20th century to the present. My plan is to have those timelines alternate. So a bit about me, then a bit about history. And then me, and then history.

Cosmetologically, my little piggies are currently missing a few nails and covered in volcano dust. So with that, let's get into it.

Arrival

Four days into El Salvador and I was feeling the itch. Not, you know, the itch, but an itch to keep moving. It hit me as I lay shirtless in a hammock, splayed out under a thatch-roof hut on the black sand beach. Surfboards lined the bamboo walls and a mother dog lay nursing last night’s puppies in a sand hollow. A ten year old kid was out catching the sunset waves, the whole scene turning red, purple, then deep blue.

Julian – the German friend who dragged me out of the water in Guatemala – swung in a hammock next to me. We had reunited in San Salvador following holidays away, but the reunion was about to be cut short. “I think I’m going to move on to Nicaragua tomorrow,” he told me. “It just seems like there’s more to do.”

I thought about it. Our first four days in the country had felt, well, a little quiet. We had spent a few days in the big city – the former murder capital of the world now built into modernia – we checked out the spaceship library – a state-of-the-art gift of the Chinese government and a testament to the new administration’s emphasis on childhood education, with enough bells and whistles to trigger a toot out of Ms. Frizzle – and we bussed it to the beach – where we now found ourselves in a peaceful, but growingly uneventful, setting.

“You want to come with?” Julian asked.

There were some highlights of course, in the first few days. There were the first pupusas, the national food of El Salvador, thick corn tortillas stuffed with beans and cheese. There were the chicken busses – repurposed US school busses painted crazy colors and blasting music, which cost about a quarter, break down easily, and get packed until limbs splay out of the windows like an overly nuked Hot Pocket. There was a day doing a waterfall hike, jumping off the cliffs into the narrow channel below. And there were two days at the beach, exercising during the day, exploring towns in the afternoon, and drinking beers on the sand at sunset. 

But El Salvador was starting to feel small. There weren’t many travelers in the capital or at the beach, and all our Googling showed stuff that looked only okay. Julian and I had become fast friends in Guatemala in part because we liked doing stuff, outdoors stuff, adventure stuff, and El Salvador seemed to lack the dramatics of other countries. We could hear Nicaragua calling from the east: “Hey,” it said. “C’mon.” The land of lakes and volcanoes, a country many backpackers had quoted as their favorite, an adventurer’s supposed paradise.

With a sinking feeling, though, I recognized that I couldn’t go.

“I can’t go,” I told Julian.

I had signed up for a trail race in El Salvador at the end of the month, still a full two and a half weeks away. At the time it seemed like a fun idea. But slowly it started to feel like an ankle weight in a six-foot-one-inch pool, a financial decision I didn’t want to stick around for but didn’t want to particularly waste, either. Poor little me, stuck in a cheap beachside paradise. 

"Bummer," he said, and we swung in the hammocks.

So the next day I said a too-early goodbye to my good buddy Julian, who was off to climb bigger volcanoes and dive deeper waters. We made a tentative plan to reunite sometime in Colombia, and when the dust from his bus had settled and the quiet loomed I picked up one of the little puppies. I stared into its still-closed eyes and tiny pink tongue. “What now, magic eight ball?” I asked. I held it up to my ear, hoping for a reply.

“Stuck, pendejo,” I thought I heard.

Photos: beachside digs, mom dog, kid and dog at sunset, Julian at the waterfall, chicken bus concert, pupusas

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I: History - Civil War

Like many countries in the region, the Spanish conquest left El Salvador as essentially one big plantation, with, as plantations tend, few people in control of a lot of land, and very many people under the control of those very few people. In the 1800s the country was generating a good bit of dinero by cultivating cash via cultivating coffee, but, unfortunately, fourteen families dominated the farms and used the wealth to ensure a favorable and militarized government. Through the 1900s, peasant revolts bubbled up, and targeted killings and massacres lanced the bubbles.

Violence percolated throughout the 60's and 70's, eventually leading to an overthrow of the dictator by a group of moderate officials. The right wing, spearheaded by a general nicknamed "Blowtorch Bob" (presumably not nice), played quite dirty against the new moderates.

Things really erupted one Sunday in 1980, as a red car pulled up in front of a small cathedral. Inside, Archbishop Romero, the pride and joy of El Salvador, was preaching a message of peace. As he begged soldiers to listen to the word of God and stop the war, a soldier listening to the word of Captain Blowtorch stepped out the red car.

As the Archbishop pleaded from the pulpit, calling,"Lay down your rifles!" the soldier on the street raised his rifle. He fixed his aim on the man on the stage.

The assassination tipped the civil war into full swing, with divides falling along the same lines as other Cold War conflicts; leftist groups jellied together into the guerilla group FMLN -- supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba -- and the right wing military fought to keep control for the government -- aided, armed, and abetted by the Reagan administration. It was Salvadoran against Salvadoran, and the numbers of war crimes and atrocities -- particularly by the US-sanctioned right wing against peasant farmers, women, and children -- mushroomed.

Finally in 1989, the FMLN launched a final offensive, the US sent a bunch of war crap and squashed it, and everyone looked around thinking, well, this isn't really going anywhere. In 1992 at a UN-sponsored accord, both sides signed a peace treaty, officially bringing an end to the armed violence. A Truth Commission was created to investigate war crimes, and the land previously hoarded by the dragons of wealth was redistributed, with each FMLN member given two plots of countryside and one plot for a house.

Maybe the history stuff is the part that you skim. But it's the stuff that shapes a nation -- and it's within memory of many of the people. Firstly, the land redistribution was a much-needed change. But also, almost 1/5 of the total population was displaced. Now, El Salvador has about 6 million inhabitants, with 1.5 million living abroad. We sit in our air-conditioned SUVs inhaling hotdogs and looking down our sunburnt noses, thinking, Wowee, that place sure is a mess! We wonder how it could get so bad. Knowing things helps.

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Moody!

Saying no to Nicaragua left me a wee bit up-and-down over the next two weeks. I'd just gone home for the holidays, which, although it led to some fun romps in the snow, also kind of reset my brain in a strange format, and I was back in a thinking loop that had lassoed me in Mexico.

The thinking went like this:

What the heck am I doing here?

I had such a good life back home. I had so many good things. (And then I'd think of all those things.)

I'm 27. That's almost dead. I don't have time to be out weenying around the world.

What the heck am I doing out here?

The stuck feeling revved the thinking, and so I looked for ways to pass the time. From the beach I signed up to Couchsurf with a host just outside of Santa Ana, the country’s second biggest city. I'd used Couchsurfing while road tripping around the US before, and had almost exclusively good experiences (the only not-so-good one was a guy in El Paso – I pulled up to his house broke and starving, desperate for a meal and a bed. Come to find out he was on a juice cleanse trying to cure a mysterious illness, and he'd also removed all his furniture in the process. I had an apple juice dinner and slept on his floor, whimpering).

Jessica -- the Couchsurfing host in El Salvador -- was exceedingly nice. We took a bus together to her mom's house outside of Santa Ana. Jessica emphasized that the house was simple, but they were happy to share what they had. She also explained that her mom didn't really understand the whole Couchsurfing thing, and was totally whacked out and terrified by the idea of a stranger staying with them.

The house was comfortable, tucked away into a quiet dirt road neighborhood, and her mom was most certainly whacked out. "Ask him if he wants coffee," she said to Jessica, even though I was sitting right next to her.

Jessica asked me and I said yes please.

"Ask him if he wants bread, too," the mom said, again to Jessica. For the first day and a half, she repeated this pattern, eventually working up to full conversations through her intermediary daughter. At night, I heard her bedroom door lock click shut. I thought I could hear her whispering prayers, asking God to strike down the strange white stringbean, to take him back to the Arctic where he came from, or at least to give him grownup shoes instead of the baby blue Crocs.

Really, though, they were consummately kind people, and I look back at the time now somewhat ashamed about being stuck in my own loony world. Jessica showed me photos one morning of her experiences au-pairing in the US and France, and I kind of dissociated, seeing myself from an overhead view, growing further and further away. Stuck at a breakfast table looking at two hour's worth of pictures of some random French baby, stuck in a dirt-road rural no-town, stuck in a country that I didn't want to be in, stuck, stuck, stuck!!

"I don't give two merdes about that baby!" I yelled, pushing away from the table, bolting out the door in my Crocs.

Kidding. I did my best. I asked Jessica's mom questions through Jessica and we shared meals and watched a movie and explored the nearby city, and I bought everyone french fries in the park at the end to say thank you. By my last night the mom was finally convinced that I wasn't some Reagan-era assassin, and she insisted that I sleep in the one bedroom with her and Jessica. I tried to say no, that the couch was just ok (better, even!) but it seemed like it meant something to her, and so I spent the evening staring at the ceiling and holding in french fry farts. The next morning, I said many thank yous, got an awkward side hug from mom, and took my disastrous brain circus elsewhere, hoping that more movement would calm the mental clowns.

The Santa Ana Cathedral, fruit stall, and municipal building

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II: History - Gangland

Okie dokie, back to the big picture. Remember all those people that fled El Salvador from the Civil War in the 80s? Well, some of those people ended up in the US, and some of those people in the US ended up in the southern California region, and some of those people ended up getting involved in the L.A. gang scene. And the L.A. gang scene, to my understanding, was like getting recruited to a Big 4 consulting firm. You show up as a bright-eyed naive young boy or girl, and after boozing it up and orientation and a light splatter of hazing which you'll never talk about ever, you leave with all the company secrets and a network of connections who you've sworn to protect. The biggest change: you've gone from ignorance to knowledge; you know how to organize a (criminal) network, how to extort, how to make money -- in short, how to run a successful consultancy/gang.

Eventually the US altered their official policy, declaring, Hey, no más. They deported 4,000 stamped and certified gang members back to El Salvador. They also forgot to mention to El Salvador that they were gang members. So those hombres came back to an already fractured country, looked around at the political and social mess, and saw an opportunity. They did what they were taught at Deloitte -- oops, L.A. prison. They networked, they pumped their numbers, they "consulted" (whatever that means). After a few years, MS13 and Barrio 18 controlled the country, terrorizing the general population and waging war on the streets. In 2015, 103 homicides per 100,000 people. 60 percent of youth living under the subjugation of a gang. Jessica -- the Couchsurfing host -- told me it was common for her to see bodies with cranial bullet holes while she walked back from school.

No wonder, then, the exodus of young people, desperate to get out.

___

Ups and Downs

I busted out of the Couchsurfing place like a loony bin patient crawling through the shit pipe to freedom. But as they say, where ever you go that's where you are -- so my pubescent mood swings stuck with me. It was like being thirteen again, except now without the urge to make love to the upholstery. Up and down, up and down went my tenor. Like fat kids on a seesaw, a nuclear powered elevator.

One of the big "ups" from the stint was the Santa Ana Volcano hike. On the bus I got to talking to my new buddy Cedric, a Canadian fella who worked as a tank gunner. Predictably, he liked adventure, and we ended up doing the hike together and then planning some more excursions. The hike, also, was great, with a view of a blue lagoon in the sunken volcano crater, emitting sulfurous wisps against the black rock. Neat-o. Up, mood, up!

And then down, mood, down. Solo at the hostel, out for a run, hotter than a fresh turd out of those worms that live in deep sea vents, and four perritos lining the dirt road. I slowed to a walk. "Easy, dogs," I said, which must have gotten lost in translation, because they all got up to their feet. I did what any terrified child would do and took off at a full sprint, and they took off at a full sprint after me, with the intention, I think, of murder. I let out a scream, something like the whistle on a pink toy train, and I could feel them biting at the back of my heels. Dogs: fast. Thankfully, a Salvadoran guy was riding his bicycle in the other direction, and he held his feet out like airplane wings and rode right at me, and that scattered the dogs enough for me to dive into the hostel, tracking the faint odor of my own urine. Not my favorite day.

And then up! Cedric the tanker and I made our way to Juayua, a little town in the mountains, for the whispered-about Seven Waterfalls Hike. We took a tuktuk out into the middle of the woods and found our sixteen-year-old guide, who asked us if we wanted to go fast or slow, and we said fast, and we took our shoes off and completed a circuit of ten waterfalls, which was slightly confusing given the name, but the hike had us crossing rivers barefoot and ducking under falls and climbing up rock walls, all without a rope or helmet or signing a waiver. It was a great day romping around and playing adventurer, and the views were truly beautiful. One of my favorite experiences of the trip so far.

Coffee in Suchitoto

And then, yeah, the pattern. Down: I was alone at the hostel and feeling sort of burnt out, my social battery spluttering like an emphysemic in a steam room. Up: I went to Suchitoto, where I really enjoyed a hike/tour of a guerilla camp from the civil war, which included crawling into the cliffside holes the rebels would use to hide from the advancing army (plus feeling bats brush against my face as they flew out). Down: at night my brain felt like a lizard chewing on it's own toes. Up: discovering a nighttime basketball league -- in a town of 3,000 in rural El Salvador, there were 55 children and adults who formed 5 teams of 11 and hooped under the lights at a cement court twice weekly. My basketball ability, I discovered, is roughly one deviation above than that of 55 children and adults living in rural El Salvador, so I left the court feeling like Clifford at the chihuahua park.

Down: back to the quiet room, the dark hole of a Netflix binge, peanut butter out of the jar. The swings were getting exhausting. Fat boy was going to spew off the see-saw. The race couldn't come fast enough.

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III: History - Nuevas Ideas

In 2018 Nayib Bukele burst onto the Salvadoran political scene like a watermelon shot out of a tank. A former mayor, he created his own political party, talked a big game for the future, and swept the presidential elections, then went to work cleaning house of opposition so that he could start doing some truly radical shit. His biggest project was tackling the gang violence that wracked the country; in 2022 he announced a state of emergency and a stay-at-home order, then organized a coordinated police sweep of every city and town. The army and the police went door to door, questioning every family, instantly arresting any person suspected of gang activity. 80,000 arrests were made and the suspected criminals herded into newly constructed mega prisons.

As if overnight, the country changed. People emerged from their houses, realizing it was safe to sit in the park again. Now the pupusa lady pat pat pats her pupusas, the public works crew expands the roads, and the people sit in the sun in the town squares, enjoying the simple pleasure previously denied to them. Honestly, it was the safest place I've felt on this trip, and the people were truly kind, welcoming, and proud of their country.

Dancing in the park, a bad photo of the library, the San Salvador cathedral

And that's just the beginning.

Bukele's vision, it seems, is for a sort of Singapore of Central America: a highly modernized, touristed country with safety as the principal prerequisite. He's perhaps most famous for implementing Bitcoin as a national currency and investing large funds of the country's wealth into the digital money (every El Salvadoran was also given $30 worth of Bitcoin, which led to the creation of a savings account for a large chunk of the previously unbanked population). Other efforts of his government include revitalizing San Salvador through public works, the development of "Surf City" on the Pacific coast as a tourist hub, and investing in education, giving a tablet to every elementary and middle school student and a laptop to every high schooler. Now in the works is "Bitcoin City," a projected development in the east of the country that will use geothermal energy captured by a volcano to power the electricity-guzzling Bitcoin mining. The city is slated to be a tax-free digital currency hub for wealthy nomads from all over the globe.

The change seems to be for real, too. "Surf City" hosted a major international surfing competition last year, garnering global attention. The 2023 Miss Universe contest was held in San Salvador at a brand new events venue (Miss Puerto Rico got robbed -- not that I was watching). The soccer stadium hosted the Central American Cup, tourism is rising, and the New York Times even listed El Salvador as one of its "52 Places to Visit in 2024."

(It's worth noting that Bukele's administration isn't without critics. Human rights groups from around the world have decried his lockdown, citing the innocents held without trial. The state of emergency continues with no end in sight, limiting constitutional rights of citizens. He also amended the constitution last year, allowing himself to run for a previously prohibited second term.)

Bukele also opened the nation to foreign investment, offering a "Golden Visa" to anyone with a million dollars they're willing to invest, and building ties with China to support a growing infrastructure. The Chinese government, in turn, has offered quite a bit of support, building the spaceship library (which has a big red sign on the front in Mandarin), the new soccer stadium, and a port in La Libertad on the coast.

And that all poses the question: why?

I donned my wire frame spectacles and set to investigate. After a six minute deep dive on Wikipedia, I can claim complete and total knowledge of global events:

China's Belt and Road Initiative is an international infrastructure plan. The outline is that the government invests huge sums of money into global development, and in doing so secures a wider trade route and political allies. So, China builds you a port, and then they get to use the port. On a scale of 155 participating countries, though, from Southeast Asia to Africa to now Latin America, the initiative paves the way for China to dominate the global economy. There are complaints, too, of the Chinese government using debt-trapping as a way of manipulating the governments of developing nations. So, for example, if you can't afford to pay China back for the nice new port, you silly ingrate, they might have to take it back (this happened in Sri Lanka).

Of course, the US sees the Belt and Road growing and feels a bead of sweat running down its crack. Economic dominance could lead to political dominance, and suit-and-ties in Washington might view it as a threat to Capital-D-Democracy (I don't really know. I don't know any suit-and-ties). Some argue also that "allowing" countries like El Salvador to fall into the Belt and Road is a failure of US international strategy -- the thinking being that we should be the ones helping these countries develop, securing partnerships and promoting democratic governments.

In the 1980s, global powers dumped money and guns into El Salvador to fuel the civil war, each hoping to win political and economic alliance. Forty years later and the chess piece idea still has its traces. And look, yes, most of the above is copy-and-pasted from smarter minds than me. But everyone I talked to, from taxi drivers to tour guides to park-bench-sitters, has expressed extreme satisfaction and happiness with the current government. Before, they couldn't sit outdoors without fear of extortion and violence. And now, for the first time ever for a lot of people, they're free to enjoy their own country. That's enough for me to run with.

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The Big Up: Volcano Race

And then it was run time.

I hung my thumb out over the asphalt on RN-10, hitchhiking the two lane road winding up into the mountains to the start of Cerro Verde National Park. Go time.

I waited about five minutes, and two out of the five cars that passed stopped. One wasn't going to the park, and the second, a little sedan stuffed full of a six person family, said they would get me closer. I clambered in the back seat, squishing in close to grandma.

The family was super kind, and they drove me the 40 minutes to the park even though it was out of their way. At one point they stopped for snacks and insisted that I accept the food they bought me, and me and abuela snuggled up and split the bag of chips, talking about cold weather and hot weather and the like.

Buzz -- that was the sound of my alarm at 4:00 the next morning. Race day! I slapped on the $3 headlamp I'd bought, scarfed three peanut butter sandwiches, guzzled cold instant coffee, and made my way to the start line. At 5:30, pitch black, I started my gringo shuffle.

I'll write a whole thing on the race elsewhere, but I'll briefly note that it was a crazy cool event. Trail Runners El Salvador -- a local running group -- had organized a multi-distance mountain run, and I was doing the 25K. The 100 other participants and I started off bushwhacking down through a coffee plantation by headlamp, wound our way up to the foot of the volcano as the sun rose, power-hiked up the backside of the Santa Ana volcano, ran a half-loop of the caldera as the wind threatened to blow us off, and then flew down the other side. It is, to my knowledge, the most kickass route you could plan for a 25K. The view from the top of the crater was completely socked in, the wind strong enough to move our feet when we lifted them to run, and the volunteers held a rope taught so we could sort of rappel down against the wind. I had a pocket full of Snickers and no liquid, pushed it hard on the downhills, nabbed a solid 5th place finish, and spent the afternoon hanging around the line. I had sweat so much that my belly button was rubbed raw against my wet shirt. I miscalculated 25K in miles and gunned it too early, then felt lightheaded for the last 3 miles. I ran out of pocket Snickers. I was the only US entrant and had no way to get back to the city, an hour and a half away. I was happy as a mud clam in some good thick mud.

I spent the afternoon chumming it up with the other participants. I chatted with the 16-year-old from a little village who spent his days running up and down volcanos and waterfalls -- he won the 25K. He and his running club (the 4 people who finished ahead of me) invited me out to train with them some time. I shared a Gatorade with the sixth-place-guy, who had split his head open at kilometer 2 on a coffee branch. It made for some pretty hardcore photos. And Alejandro and Melissa, Trail Runners El Salvador members and race organizers, gave me a ride back into the city, and they gave me the scoop on running culture in El Salvador. I had lunch with them and two of their friends who ran, too, and we exchanged info, promising to stay in touch, hoping to link up in the future for another event. I got back to the hostel covered in dried sweat with two raw nipples. I was mucho contento.

I spent the evening with Cedric at a country club we wormed an invite to (and to which I showed up caked in mud), which is maybe another story. But that night, buzzed from drinking beers on a dehydrated belly, legs aching and toes still crusted in volcano dirt, I crawled into bed at the same hostel I started at three weeks ago. I thought about all the people I had met, the new friends and shared food and laughs and kindnesses. My last thought, as my cherubic little cranium sank into the top bunk pillow: I could stay in El Salvador a little longer.

Race photos: finish line, sunrise, coffee whacking, foggy summit, local trail, hootin'/hollerin'

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Reflections: What I learned in Shrek School

There's this principle in fiction that characters have to become their opposites. They start one way, and at some point, they have to undergo 180 degrees of transformation. Take Shrek -- we're introduced to a curmudgeonly recluse who doesn't want anyone else in his swamp (kind of like my good pal Kristian). But, along his hero's journey, he (Shrek) changes. We're given an ending scene of a happy, sociable ogre, surrounded by all the friends he met along the way. Other 180s are in just about every story ever. The coward becomes the hero, the player settles down, the morally questionable becomes the voice of reason.

I've been thinking about my own 180s.

The first flip is the simplest: I went from not knowing anything about El Salvador to having a tentative grasp on the country's recent history.

And look, I know my degree in creative writing doesn't exactly qualify me to discuss geopolitics. Until 2022 I thought that people debating "euthanasia" were saying "youth-in Asia." When a museum curator asked me what I knew about international affairs my first thought was, "Damn, he's cheating while on vacation?"

But from various walking tours around the city -- from the Santa Ana history tour on the gang crackdown, to the Suchitoto Civil War tour -- and bolstered by hearing people's first-hand experience with violence and change, I've had a real opportunity for good old fashioned learning. Learning is best, I think, when its in situ. It's been a feet-on-the-ground, teeth-on-the-meat type of experience. Call me a nerd, but it's even a little bit fun.

So, yeah, I may not be the sharpest set of toe clippers at the cosmetologists (callback!). But trying my best to fit the pieces together and splewing all the info back up in this blog -- it's made me feel connected to the country, invested in what's to come, and more sympathetic to the people I've run in to. To really consider the lived experience of another person is maybe the biggest mental achievement we can muster, and I think to learn something that way is to learn something once, forever.

_

The second shift requires a bit of a digression.

I found myself on long El Salvadoran chicken bus ride, a lone cauliflower floret in a bag of broccoli, so to speak, stewing on a memory from Chelsea, Massachusetts. My boss, who for some unfathomable reason always encouraged me to be a better teacher, pushed me to try some more tactile activities in the classroom. She suggested a fashion show, and I was at first hesitant because MC-ing an English as a Second Language runway for fourteen year olds seemed kind of antithetical to the stoic, upstanding personality I was playing at. Thankfully I convinced myself it wasn't about me, and the students planned outfits with the task of correctly ordering adjectives in descriptions of their partners ("She has a blue shirt," -- instead of "shirt blue,"). One Friday we dimmed the lights and made a mock runway and some other teachers came to watch the kids strut their stuff. And they ordered their adjectives, and they fricken' strutted their dang stuff.

So why the rose-tinted memory lane? Why did my pink electric folds decide that now, that moment, was the time for this curious connection? Mysterious ways, the workings of the mind. I did a deep self-therapizing (since I refuse to let anyone else do it). Here's what I came up with.

A big part of my job was helping others. All of a sudden, I was being helped quite a bit. Rides, food, connections, places to stay. 180. So my brain fed me a spoonful of how good it felt to be the helper, to give and not just take-take-take.

Maybe it's the part of being an Americanized male that equates asking for help with something like cholera. It's not very Wild West after all, not very lumberjack, to accept Doritos from someone's grandma. But I'd like to keep doing it, with the caveat of also finding more ways to contribute. Give and take, take and give. The karmic see-saw.

_

Here's the third transformation: El Salvador grew on me. By day 4 I was ready to leave. By the time it was time to go, I wanted to stay a longer. And I think I know why.

Community. Enjoying simple kindnesses, the fast, close connections of hanging with the running crew after the race, I started to feel that I had found an in-group. Maybe not that I was in with them exactly, but that, if I were to stay, I would be part of something. It's simple stuff -- laughing over meals, talking about who ate shit on the crater, sharing snacks and coffee. I felt all of a sudden like there was a direction for me to go. It's a basic idea, community. Non-revelatory. But really feeling it -- or even the idea of it -- gave me some fat to chew on, and it stilled the rollercoaster ups and downs.

Wherever you go, that's where you are. And that's where other people are, too.

_

The other part of the flips in fiction is that characters tend to reach a sort of stasis. Shrek, after all, probably still goes for swamp walks on his own every now and again. So as I move on to the bigger volcanos and lakes and adventures of Nicaragua, I'll keep looking for some sense of balance, managing being present with being excited for the future, ways I can even out the karmic see-saw, searching for community and being okay with being alone.

We're all just little bird feeders after all, blowing in the breeze. We blow one way and back the other.

Until the next one,

El Salvador Fan