The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (6 page)

“You have to drink it, man,” he admonished me.

“I know,” I said. And smiling through my teeth, I poured the syrupy
chirrinchi
down.

The hard-drinking culture of Guajira was something that Thompson had described, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself thrust into it. In Puerto Estrella, Scotch had been the liquor of choice. “It continued all that day and all the next,” Thompson wrote, recalling one village drinking binge:

Even at twenty-four, Thompson was a pretty accomplished drinker, having come up as a young hooligan running with pals from Louisville’s liquor-soaked country-club scene. A year in the Air Force hadn’t hurt his tolerance any, and before coming south, he’d spent a few months swilling straight rum beneath a Puerto Rican sun. I was no slouch myself, raised in a sudsy Wisconsin drinking culture, but on the day we sat down for our impromptu
chirrinchi
session, my shot-pounding college years were a decade behind me.

By the time that Bernie finally emerged from the shack, we’d traded some half dozen shots of the stuff. The old man was mumbling in rudimentary Spanish about kicking the Colombian government out of the Guajiran Peninsula, and I was holding my liquor well enough to nod at what seemed like appropriate times. For reasons he was too drunk to articulate, he held the state responsible for Wayuu poverty. Meanwhile, the guy next to me kept showing me the soles of his shoe, staring at me expectantly, then laughing coarsely and slapping me on the back. He was, I think, trying to ask for money.

When Bernie stepped out and cried
“Ho!”
we were quick to jump up from the hammocks. We exchanged quick handshakes with our unsought drinking buddies and piled into the truck’s front seat. Bernie threw it into reverse, waving to the kids in the yard and ignoring altogether the drunks beneath the awning. Just another frosty relationship with the in-laws, I thought. As we pulled onto the rutted jeep track, Bernie paused for a moment to sniff at the air in the cab.
“Chirrinchi?”
he asked. Then he shook his head at us and laughed, and we headed out into the desert once more.

For the next two days, we roamed across Guajira like vacationers, rumbling in Bernie’s Toyota from one destination to the next, from a local hill with views of the sea to a sheltered harbor where rickety skiffs bobbed like flotsam on the tide. Cabo de la Vela was one long street of wood-and-concrete structures, a village of a few hundred overlooking a calm Caribbean bay. Like the rest of town, Bernie’s place had dirt floors and no utilities, but he cooked fresh lobster on a propane stove and strung hammocks for us in a palm gazebo overlooking the beach. There used to be palm trees out back, he explained, but a decade of rising sea levels had killed them off. Maybe, I thought, or maybe it was the village’s many gazebos. All the same, the ocean view was arresting, and we sipped Scotch outside in the evenings, feeling as pampered as at any seaside resort.

After dinner on the second day, swinging in our hammocks and watching pelicans swoop for fish offshore, I daydreamed out loud about hanging my own hammock someplace like Cabo and simply letting the sea provide. The lack of electricity and running water actually made the place feel less isolated and disadvantaged than self-sufficient and resilient.

“We could just stick around out here and live the simple life,” I suggested, reaching down to give my hammock a lazy shove.

“You think so?” Sky asked. “It’s pretty quiet up here, Mr. Journalist. You think it’d be gonzo enough for you?”

I snorted. “I am not that gonzo of a guy,” I said.

“Yeah? You could have fooled me, dude,” Sky joked. “I saw you putting back the
chirrinchi
yesterday.” We laughed
and watched a tiny sand whirl meander its way along the waterline.

“Seriously, though,” he asked. “Why all the Hunter Thompson stuff, then? What’s the appeal of all this for a non-gonzo guy?”

It was a fair question. My admiration for Thompson had never had much to do with his Berettas-and-blow hijinks, or with the counterculture caricature he became later in life. I like his early bestsellers, 1966’s
Hell’s Angels
and 1973’s
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
—lurid snapshots of the biker gangs, student marches, and turbulent political movements that shaped my parents’ generation. I came to Thompson for the cultural criticism and stayed for the acid trips, as it were.

Not that I have anything against recreational drugs or flying one’s freak flag. I’ve done my share of both. But the Thompson I identified with was the gung-ho freelancer of those early letters. I was in a similar boat when I first read them, just out of college and hustling magazine articles to make the rent. I related to the Thompson on those pages. His letters were thoughtful and funny, a series of brash little manifestos on art, sex, youth culture, and the social and political changes that defined the era. Put simply, I geek out on that stuff. I wanted to understand my own increasingly chaotic and divided country in the way that Thompson seemed to understand his. He wrote that he’d acquired his understanding by traveling in South America, and I wanted some of that seemingly mystical insight. And so there I was.

It seemed like a simple enough explanation, but I had a hard time articulating it to Sky.

“I’m in it for the history and culture,” I said finally, and I sounded to myself like a sightseer on a tour bus. I tried again. “I want to put America in some kind of context, I
think, to be able to draw some informed comparisons with the rest of the world. Hunter Thompson just makes a convenient guide.”

“What kind of comparisons?”

“Social comparisons, political comparisons, economic comparisons. I’m just kind of a wonk for all that.”

“A what?” Sky asked.

“A wonk.”

He paused. “I have never heard that word before, dude.”

“Somebody who obsesses over some field or another,” I explained. “A nerd for facts and details.”

“I see,” he said, and we were quiet awhile longer. The breeze blew more tiny sandstorms down the shore. The cries of the gulls came in and out with the waves. History and politics and economics all seemed very far away.

“Yep,” Sky said eventually. “The rest of the world could end out there, and these guys would just carry on.”

Before the weekend was over, we were reminded twice that what struck us as Guajira’s Edenic seclusion from the outside world was a bit less romantic for its full-time inhabitants. First, Bernie drove us to a barren hillside about ten miles outside of town, where several dozen wind turbines stretched their gleaming blades across the sky. The wind farm had sprouted a few years earlier, he explained, a joint project of Colombia’s government-owned energy utility and a German company (which Bernie simply called “gringo”). Initially, many of the Wayuu were skeptical, since other attempts at resource development—like the Cerrejón coal mine to the south—had resulted in multinational companies displacing Wayuu villages. But in a region where most of the population has only sporadic access to electricity, the prospect of cheap power was appealing. So the tribe sold the
land, and afterward, the mayor of Cabo erected a stretch of utility poles between the town and the newly built transfer station.

Sky, Bernie, and I picked our way through the rocks that littered the base of the giant towers, serenaded by the eerie whoosh of the turbines and the bleating of obliviously wandering goats. Near a fenced-in jungle of transformers, a crude wooden mast was the last in the long line of utility poles, reaching like a row of thin dominoes back in the direction of Cabo. There were no lines hanging from the poles, however. A public-private Wayuu utility company had been slow to get off the ground, and while villages in La Guajira carried on without power, the electricity from the new project was all being sent in the opposite direction, to the grid in Medellín. Those empty poles were a testament to the Wayuu’s frustrated efforts at altering the very circumstances that Sky and I found so idyllic.

That evening, in the truck bed again, we jostled back toward the paved road in Uribia. We were taking a detour to visit a coastal lagoon, a place where Bernie said great flocks of flamingos sometimes gathered in the summer. Without the beer cases, Sky and I leaned up against our backpacks, our bandanas pressed to our faces to keep out the dust. Up front, Bernie was characteristically chipper, blasting a
vallenato
tape with his windows down and occasionally singing along.

“Esta bien?”
he yelled back, and we waved.

We hadn’t seen another vehicle all day when a red pickup suddenly materialized behind us, emerging from the scrub in its own cloud of dust. It was closing in fast, and Bernie pulled off the rut we’d been following to let it pass. Except that it didn’t pass. The truck was a smallish Toyota with
three men in the bed and two riding in the cab, and as it pulled up alongside us, it slowed to an idle.

The other driver was dressed like the Marlboro Man and had the cigarette to match. He motioned for Bernie to roll down his passenger-side window, and from the driver’s seat, Bernie leaned over to comply. The man said something laconic in Guajiro, unsmiling, and over the drum of the engines, we couldn’t hear Bernie’s response. A few feet away, the men in the truck bed were all young Wayuu. One of them had a machete at his side, and all three slouched in various stages of recline around a large and indistinct mound, covered by a blue plastic tarp.

Contrabandistas
, I thought. Probably moving goods to Maicao from some illicit port up the coast. Sky and I nodded a respectful hello.

Were the smugglers dangerous? I had never thought to ask. In Thompson’s story, mainland Colombians described Guajira as “known to be populated by killers and thieves and men given over to lives of crime and violence.” I assumed this was hyperbole, but suddenly I found myself wondering whether we were seeing anything on the flats that we weren’t supposed to. In 2004, a nearby Wayuu village was massacred by paramilitary forces intent on wiping out witnesses to a narcotrafficking operation. Some victims were beheaded, while others were burned alive. The paras were disbanded now, but just the week before, a half dozen customs agents were injured by petrol bombs during a skirmish with gasoline smugglers on the road to Maicao. But surely, I figured, most
contrabandistas
were happy to let bystanders look the other way, right?

Other than the machete, the men seemed to be unarmed, although for all I knew they were former paras, with assault rifles hidden beneath that tarp. Even if Bernie hit the gas,
I thought, his beater could never outrun them. The men in the back of the truck nodded back at us impassively. Exhaust from the two engines left a gauzy haze in the air between us.

Sky said nothing. I said nothing. Bernie and the other driver chatted tensely. High above us, some kind of bird of prey was making lazy circles in the cloudless sky, and one of the men tilted his head back to stare, squinting hard against the sunlight. When he looked down again, he caught my gaze and smiled thinly, adjusting his lean body against the truck bed’s steel rim.

I noticed then that the men in the back of the truck were ankle-deep in muddy water, which sloshed around their feet as the vehicle idled and shook. The smiling one nodded at me conspiratorially and slid back the tarp just a little, and immediately I realized that these were smugglers of a different kind. Concealed underneath was a giant sea turtle, probably a loggerhead, dead or very close to it. These men were poachers.

I breathed a sigh that was one part relief and one part disappointment. After a few minutes of chitchat with Bernie, the other driver hit the gas, and the Toyota drove off harmlessly. Later, as the three of us gazed at a flock of flamingos preening in the lagoon, Bernie said that the driver was his cousin. He and his fellow poachers were likely on their way to somebody’s kitchen, where the turtle could be butchered while still fresh, then packaged for sale in the markets of Uribia and Maicao. Bernie explained this nonchalantly, and it was clear he saw little difference between the sea turtle and the lobsters we’d purchased from some Wayuu fisherman two nights before. A pound or two of meat from an endangered loggerhead fetches around five American dollars in Guajira, and a single animal can yield more than a hundred pounds of meat. The market for turtle meat
in the cities was robust, Bernie said, and the Wayuu fishermen poor. With the high price tag, it’s easy to understand why they wouldn’t be deterred by Colombia’s endangered-species laws, which, after all, have next to no enforcement on the remote peninsula. In a place like Guajira, everything is a commodity.

The flamingos staggered by on their twiggy legs, and I asked Bernie whether the Wayuu ever hunted or ate the birds. He shook his head vigorously.

“No, no,”
he said,
“está prohibido.”

But wasn’t it also
prohibido
, I asked, to capture and kill the sea turtles? He thought about that for a while. As we stood there, a family of the gangly, blushing birds tucked their legs underneath them and took off. Finally, Bernie smiled in resignation. I guess so, he said, but the flamingos don’t taste as good.

As we drove on into Uribia, it occurred to me that Guajira probably illustrates the complex give-and-take between traditional lifestyles and modern consumer culture as well as any place I’d ever been. It’s a relationship that’s often oversimplified, presented merely as a clash or a co-opting, a scenario in which a proud and isolated population is tragically infiltrated by the trappings of the industrialized West. The reality, of course, is less neat. In Maicao, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single indigenous Wayuu household with a flat-screen TV, and yet the city’s economy depends largely on a black market supplying the country with these and other luxury items. In Manaure, the Wayuu cling to their traditional methods of salt harvesting in the name of preserving jobs, even while crossing their fingers for the kind of economic growth that accompanies industrialization. And while ecotourism is starting to bring the region
some welcome economic development, few Wayuu would think twice about poaching an endangered sea turtle to sell for meat in the villages. In Guajira, as around the world, the relationship between traditional and dominant cultures is a messy and not-always-logical mixture of adoption and rejection, adaptation and exploitation.