The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [59]
Michael Shapiro is the author of A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration, and wrote the text for the pictorial book Guatemala: A Journey Through the Land of the Maya. His article on Jan Morris’s Wales was a cover story for National Geographic Traveler and won the prestigious Bedford Pace award. He also writes for such publications as Islands, Hemispheres, American Way, Mariner, The Sun, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. He works as a freelance editor and has helped his clients get published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Huffington Post.
Shapiro volunteers as a guide for Environmental Traveling Companions, an outfitter that takes disabled people on whitewater rafting and sea kayak adventures. He lives with his wife and cat in Sonoma County, California, and can be reached through www.michaelshapiro.net or by email at shapiro@sonic.net.
MARY JO MCCONAHAY
It’s the Sauce
In life you never know where the spice is going to come from.
THE SMALL RESTAURANT ON THE ISLAND IN LAKE PETÉN was so dark I thought it was empty. As my eyes adjusted, I saw the Drafter, the only diner, sketching on lined paper with a pencil bearing chew marks, beneath the unblinking stare of an antlered deer’s head. The waitress, a young, dark-haired woman wearing a light cotton dress, stood at his table holding a menu glued to a tablet of wood. The Drafter did not look up. He gently waved away the plank, all the time shading something on the paper with the side of the graphite point.
“Armadillo,” he said.
“Si, señor,” said the young woman.
She turned to me and indicated a place a couple of tables away. I sat beneath another antlered head. She approached with the oversized menu.
Behind her in the dimness, high on the opposite wall, I saw a jaguar’s face taking shape. His body sliced away, the head and broad neck came out of the wood paneling like a creature emerging from dark foliage. He roared silently, tongue rich pink, amber eyes open forever. Waiting next to my table, the waitress seemed small and waif-like among the jungle animals.
“Uh, give me a moment,” I said, taking the plank off her hands. “Por favor.”
“Take all the time you need,” she said.
The great Mesoamerican rainforest once called Gran Petén has never been known as a gourmet’s paradise. On the other hand, the continuous tropical land that spreads across parts of three countries was a gastronomical democracy. Whatever might be plucked from trees or picked from the jungle floor, or brought down with gun or bow, is what landed on all plates from southern Mexico’s Chiapas across Guatemala’s northern Petén region to Belize. Beans and rice might accompany the deer, rodent, nuts, or bird, but roughly the same meals appeared on the laps of indigenous Maya, and after the sixteenth century, the plates of conquering Europeans. By the 1990s, things had not changed much.
“Tepesquintle,” I said when the waitress returned.
From the corner of my eye I saw the blond Drafter lift his head and regard me. He seemed to be in his mid-thirties, younger than I, but not too young. I figured he knew I had been staring at him, so I did not return his full-on look. He flipped a page of his notebook and began to draw anew.
The waitress served our meals. Mine looked like pot roast in thick, red-brown sauce, but the light was so poor anything might have looked like stew. Tepesquintle is a forty-pound rat that roams the jungle at night. I knew it was edible. Old books about Petén wrote