El Cielo means both sky and heaven.
The Boy Who Walks to the Sky (Copyright 2014)
He scoots to the edge of his chair at
the desk that he shares with Manuela the girl who lives in the town of the
small cement school that is painted green.
Maestra asks them to recite once more the number facts they have learned this week. He is anxious to leave, to be home in the clouds in the sky with his people. He wants the facts to finish soon so he can make his journey before the wet mist blocks the sun.
He bolts across the plaza like a puma, past the bandstand and the ancient ceiba tree. He stops at a store on the edge of town where
his Tia works—the little store with
the cot in the room in the back where he sleeps all week while he goes to
school but it’s not the same—it’s not his home.
The road leaving town is lined with
canvass-topped camiones and tourists
who come from far away to see his mountains, to watch the trees with binoculars
on their eyes searching for military macaws and azure crowned hummingbirds. A truck passes him on the road and
the dust gets on his tongue and in his nose and eyes. He pulls out the bottle
of limonada his Tia had shoved in his sack as he darted out of the store yelling “Hasta
lunes!” The limonada washes his dry throat with tart lime and sweet sugar his Tia added after squeezing the limes from
the tree behind the store.
The tourists smile and wave as the
dust billows around the big tires that pass so close he has to step into the monte (brush) to avoid getting hit.
The rocky red ruts in the road are
deep and hard from the rain that fell the week before. His sandals and toes are
covered in red dust as he walks, mile after mile surrounded by a thick brush of
thorny trees banana leaves and wild pineapple plants (bromelia pinguin).
With time the trees open up to a bed
of amaryllis flowers and Christmas cactus. Ahead he spots a familiar large green
plastic water jug on the side of the road. It is cut out and inside are
carefully arranged dried flowers, a statue of Mother Mary and candles. He crosses
himself and touches the shrine, remembering the souls departed including his
Abuela Consuelo and his little primo Joaquin who died in the hospital in Ciudad
Victoria last year.
Onward he walks to the grove of giant
Montezuma cypress trees that remind him of ghosts with their shadowy branches like
long fingers blowing in the wind. Another hour passes and as the sky grows grayer
he ascends into the clouds and mist that cool his head that was hot and wet
with sweat from the steamy tropics below.
He reaches the half-way point home, a clearing
of ancient rocks called “Elephants” for the shapes they resemble. He leans for
a moment against the giant moss covered stone and opens his sack to eat cold
pieces of gordita with pork rinds leftover
from the lunch his Tia packed him for
school. He feels small and alone and cold and so he walks on hoping to reach
home before the cloudy mist descends to block the sun. A white crowned parrot
lands on a branch across the road—his Abuelo
would say this is a lucky sign.
His pace picks up remembering Abuelo’s stories of jaguars in the
forest. A coyote howls and he feels a chill, knowing he is not alone after all with
the breeze and the forest and the cloudy mist. Cyprus and oak trees give way to
tall pines and the humid air is cooler than below. As he comes to the last turn
in the road he sees the smoke from his mother’s kitchen where she cooks outside
on a clay stove with lena and pine
cones gathered by his little sister and brother from the forest behind their
house.
He runs the last stretch of rocky
path past his uncle’s braying burro
and through the trees blanketed with ferns that his father gathers to sell to
the man from Texas who comes in the truck to take them to florist shops en “el otro lado”.
Here at the top of the mountain in a clearing in the clouds in the sky he is home.
His mother doesn’t smile or say a word
to greet him. She is always quiet but he knows she is happy because she brings
him a warm bowl of asado de puerco and corn bread, his very favorite, to fill
his empty tummy and she lets him sit in his papa’s chair by the fire to rest his
dusty feet that are sore from his walk to his home in the sky.
I have not been back to visit El Cielo for several years due to the cartel violence and unrest centered particularly in this region of Tamaulipas, Mexico. El Cielo is just a short 5 hour drive south of our home in Brownsville, Texas, about the same distance as driving to San Antonio--past Ciudad Victoria, Macaw Canyon, past the graffiti covered metal ball that marks the Tropic of Cancer and through winding hills blanketed with wild nochebuena (poinsettia), you reach a turn off to the small town of Gomez Farias. The cloud forest is just a few miles up the mountain, but because of the rugged road and steep shift in altitude, it is an isolated, unique and beautiful place now even more cut off in a region experiencing a relentless war. Thanks to years of effort by Mexican naturalists and advocates from Texas, 360,000 acres of it are somewhat protected from development and lumber exploitation by the El Cielo Biosphere Reserve, but locals often struggle to eke out a living causing a tension common in this type of setting.
The last time I was there we drove up the bumpy, dusty road in the back of an open camion for hours to reach the cabins at Alta Cima, a cool pine forest that provided a lovely respite from our steamy gulf coast home in Brownsville. My children scampered through the misty cloud forest, climbed the giant rocks, explored the caves and gathered orchids that fell from the trees. A lovely family shared delicious meals with us, cooked on an outdoor fire at their home higher up the mountain in a very isolated area where they harvested the fern from the forest to sell to florists in the U.S. I remember passing a young boy walking down the road and stopping to pick him up. He explained that the only way for the kids living up the mountain to go to school was to walk the rugged road, hours and hours back and forth each weekend, and stay during the week in Gomez Farias where the closest school is located. He inspired me to write about one fictional boy’s reverse journey from town up the long, rutted, dusty road to his cloudy forest home, passing through the incredible biodiversity, geography and humanity that is El Cielo.
