My trips to El Salvador changed my life not by directing or inflecting its course, but rather by permeating it, or weaving many new strands into it that I have worn since those days. El Salvador was nothing more than a name to me -- it wasn't even a distinct spot on a map -- when my advisor told me one of his ex-students was looking for someone to do a bit of environmental consulting down there. I was existentially exhausted from several years of work on my dissertation, and going to Central America to finally practice something that I'd been studying forever was just perfect. That it was known to have fantastic surf and the gig was to $300/day made the decision to go just unquestionable. What I had accepted as a series of brief work trips turned into years of revisiting, friends gained and lost, development of professional interest, an expanded understanding of otherness, cultures, poverty, indigneous history, human rights, the ability to speak broken Spanish fluidly, and visions of black sand, afternoon downpours, empty highways and 15 cent bus rides.
My arrival was just as if it was staged by a set designer: I walked off the plane at night into a large rectangular baggage area, which was cavernous and empty like the rest of the small airport. I saw nothing through the 2-story windows except pitch black night, and just then thunder exploded and rang like it came out of speakers, and in the momentary illumination I saw palm trees bending and throngs of people waiting outside in the humid night.
I fell in love while I was in El Salvador. On my first weekend there I asked the company driver to take me to a surfspot that I'd read about. I paddled out into overhead waves by myself, and some time later was joined by a friendly young guy, who pointed at a cinder-block shack on the beach. Hotel Kilimanjaro, $2/night. I was told it was dangerous to walk across the beach at night to the nearest restaurant so I asked to eat dinner with the caretaker family, who gave me a plateful of whatever they were having that night, for $1. I stayed there every time I went to El Salvador, until one day the hotel was sold to a wealthy businessman who razed it to build a $100/night hotel, and the caretaker family had to move away. I met beautiful Canadian volunteers who worked for environmental groups, surfed and travelled with them, took photographs of them as they swung lazily in hammocks, and wished I could be their boyfriend. I met Americans wandering the region, Americans who drove ambulances there, shared meals with hippy South African surfers travelling from San Francisco to Panama, and David ("Dah-veed"), a cool friendly Frenchman from Toulouse who I last ran into again in Madrid. Many sunsets from the half-built wall of Hotel Kilimanjaro, splitting a beer or an
anona cluster with Saul, the young guy who pointed out the hotel from the water, who was the caretaker's son. During the week I worked in the capital, and I always went with the native technicians, instead of the foreign consultants, to local restaurants. At work I would get long, innocent and passionate emails from a girl I had just gotten to know back in Amherst, and at night the phone would ring with her desperate calls. Eventually I fell in love with her and we were together for many years.
