The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (5 page)

It took a few tries to start Bernie’s ancient blue Toyota, but eventually we shuddered out of the mechanic’s yard in Uribia and down the road to a bodega, where Sky and I helped load twenty-one cases of impossibly cheap Venezuelan beer. Far from being flush with the profits of illicit smuggling, Uribia was kind of a dump. The town’s dusty streets were littered with ragged plastic bags, so many that it seemed impossible for the tiny desert outpost to have produced them all. On the way in, we passed a dry creek bed filled with bags. They fluttered like prayer flags on the cactus fences and got caught underneath the tanker trucks that supply Uribia with fresh water. Many of the bags had been sun-bleached to pale pastels that bordered on colorlessness. In fact, the most vivid colors in the seemingly all-beige town came from the bright patterned frocks of the Wayuu women, called
mantas guajiras
, which looked a little like burqas but more festive and without the veil. The men, on the other hand, dressed like cowboys in blue jeans and Stetsons. It was a far cry from the borderline savages that Thompson described: Wayuu villagers wearing nothing but neckties as loincloths. “I decided that at the first sign of unpleasantness,” he wrote, “I would begin handing out neckties like Santa Claus—three fine paisleys to the most menacing of the bunch, then start ripping up shirts.”

Within an hour, Bernie, Sky, and I were going full shit through the Guajiran desert, racing along a thoroughly
rutted jeep track with nothing on the skyline but a shimmering blue mirage that I initially mistook for the Caribbean. As Bernie’s Toyota hammered its way across the scrub, Sky and I gave up pretty quickly on trying to drink the beer, concentrating instead on staying grounded in the truck bed. The thunder of Bernie’s engine made it impossible to be heard, and my tailbone rattled with every hummock, but I felt for the first time like we were really traveling in Thompson’s footsteps, and I could see from his grin that Sky did too. In my head, I played back Thompson’s exhilarated description of driving across the peninsula, “roar[ing] through dry river beds and across long veldt-like plains on a dirt track which no conventional car could ever navigate.”

Bernie wanted to make two stops en route to Cabo de la Vela. The first was pure tourism, a trip to the Salinas Manaure salt mines along the coast north of Uribia. You’ll see them in the distance, he said proudly, and sure enough, the desert landscape was flat enough to spot the mines from a couple of miles out—a cluster of glistening piles that swelled on the horizon like bleached dunes. As we drove closer, the desert clay beneath us gave way to a stretch of blinding ivory, crystal flats dotted here and there with dirty white mounds. We parked next to another old pickup near a trickle of a creek, its water the color of skim milk.

Bernie played tour guide as we climbed shakily out of the truck, gesturing grandly and giving us some background on the mines. For centuries, he explained, the Wayuu had worked the Manaure flats, harvesting small amounts of salt by hand and fishing in saltwater lagoons. Then, in the early 1970s, the tribe ceded much of the land to the government in exchange for housing and development programs that most Wayuu agree never materialized. The government industrialized salt production, while a few small Wayuu cooperatives
kept on manually harvesting the outlying plots. For decades, he said, the Wayuu and the government clashed over market prices, vanishing benefits, and ancestral territory. More recently, though, government reps and tribal operators formed a joint company to run the mines, and today the Wayuu own 76 percent of it. They still mine a quarter of the flats the old-fashioned way, using hand tools and wheelbarrows, patience and brawn.

Sky and I walked out across the flats to where half a dozen Wayuu workers were scattered around a fifteen-foot pile of salt, a rust-eaten dump truck and a Bobcat loader parked alongside. Underfoot, the salt crystals were crunchy and jagged, and the sun was nearly blinding, glinting off every imaginable surface. The Wayuu workers were equal numbers men and women, flanked by a yard sale of pickaxes, chisels, and wheelbarrows. They stared at us a bit coolly as we approached.

“Buenos dias,”
I said, and one of the older men offered a hesitant half wave. He was shirtless. A single gold tooth glittered in the sunlight.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Sky said in Spanish. “We were just hoping to see how you worked.”

The crew seemed unmoved, but they warmed up a bit when I pulled a couple of water bottles out of my backpack. Despite the intense heat, they seemed to have no water at all, and they nodded gratefully as we passed the bottles around. Sky asked whether he could take a few photos, and that seemed to be the magic icebreaker. The request sent most of the crew into giggles.

While Sky turned on the charm, expertly cajoling the workers into posing, I tried to strike it up with one of the women standing on top of the pile. She wore a deep red
manta guajira
that stood out against the landscape like a
splash of spilled wine. I asked how she could possibly work the flats all day without wearing sunglasses, and she just laughed.

“Tengo mucha resistencia,”
she said quietly, pointing to and then averting her dark eyes. Her name was Ana Maria, and we shared my water bottle while we watched Sky lining up shots of her coworkers against the endless plane of the flats.

“So why do you not use the big machines?” I asked in my clunky Spanish.

Ana Maria shrugged and explained, slowly, that it was important for her family to use traditional methods for salt harvesting, never mind the seeming inefficiency. Artisan salt production at Manaure yields about 60,000 tons of salt each year, compared with 350,000 tons from industrial production. According to her, though, the manually harvested plots kept hundreds of Wayuu employed, while the labor force required to run the mechanical harvesters was minimal. As the seawater filled and then evaporated in one salt lagoon, the Wayuu workers moved over to harvest another. Following this pattern, most Wayuu salt miners could expect to bring home about $200 a month. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it kept her people employed until the community could figure out how to use the profits from their newly formed company to create more jobs. And besides, Ana Maria shrugged again, this was their tradition.

As I stood there in that alien landscape, watching Ana Maria’s robe flap in the breeze, it really did feel like we were witnessing a vanishing traditional lifestyle, something exotic and segregated from the outside world. If you looked at it one way, a scene of stereotypical aboriginal poverty was playing out all around us, with grim Wayuu laborers pushing wheelbarrows beneath an unrelenting sun. Clutching their
pickaxes and dressed only in shorts, the men around the salt pile could almost have been the loincloth-clad primitives that Thompson had sketched in the
Observer
.

So it was a welcome reality check when Ana Maria asked if we’d send her copies of Sky’s photos.

“How can we do that?” Sky asked. “Is there a post office in Manaure?”

She stared at us blankly.

“You guys aren’t on Facebook?” she asked. Then she reached out for my notebook and scribbled her e-mail address.

Our second stop on the road to Cabo felt a little more Third World. After leaving the salt flats, Sky and I squished in alongside Bernie in the truck’s front seat. His accent was hard to understand, and I relied on Sky for a lot of translating, but Bernie struck me as a genuinely kind and cheerful guy. He seemed not the least bit put off by my frequent questioning, and he smiled easily—a Cheshire-cat grin that said he was enjoying our company, if not taking our Q&A all that seriously. Most of the villagers in Cabo were related to him somehow, he said, although he didn’t always know just how. Wayuu families are grouped into vast matrilineal clans, and family ties could get pretty tangled. Bernie lived part-time in Riohacha with one of his wives and part-time on the peninsula with another. When I asked how many kids he had, he just grinned playfully and stared straight ahead. “A lot,” he said, and shrugged.

As we drove, Bernie explained a few Wayuu traditions, talking about the creator god Mareywa, who was said to live near Cabo de la Vela, and about the tribe’s reparations-based justice system, which employs “Wayuu lawyers” called
putchipuutos
to negotiate monetary settlements between
victims and offenders. He took great pleasure in teaching us a couple of words in Guajiro, including the declarative “
Ho!
”—evidently, the Wayuu equivalent of
“Vamos!”
or “Let’s go!” When I told Bernie about efforts in the United States to preserve dying indigenous languages, he just smiled in puzzlement and shook his head, like he couldn’t understand why anybody would stop speaking their own tongue.

After another suspension-busting hour, we pulled up to a thatched-roof shack so small and dilapidated, I wondered at first whether someone hadn’t erected an outhouse in the middle of the desert. Bernie killed the engine.
“La casa de mi novia,”
he said, calling his second wife by the less formal “girlfriend.” Goats and small children wandered the dusty yard, and a few of the latter stopped to stare at us as we stepped out of the truck. Underneath a tattered awning, three men seemed to be napping in a triangle of woven hammocks, threadbare ball caps pulled down over their eyes. I scanned the horizon. In any direction, the shack was the only visible manmade structure. It felt a little like pulling up to Ben Kenobi’s hut on Tatooine, the barren desert planet in
Star Wars
—except that Obi-Wan, by comparison, had a much nicer pad.

Bernie called out, and a girl in her mid-teens appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a blue patterned frock with a matching cloth tied around her hair. On her feet, she wore a pair of plastic flip-flops that accentuated her adolescent appearance.
“Mi novia,”
Bernie said again, and the girl smiled bashfully before lowering her eyes. He didn’t introduce us, but walked over and embraced her, speaking affectionately in Guajiro. She stood barely to his shoulders. If she’d have been clutching a teddy bear, I thought, it wouldn’t have looked out of place. She turned to walk back inside and Bernie followed, asking us in Spanish to please wait out in the yard.

Whatever look I gave Sky must have betrayed my ethnocentric chagrin, because he raised his eyebrows at me and shrugged. “The age of consent in Colombia is fourteen, dude,” he said, already adjusting his light meter to shoot in the dying desert sun. Indeed, some months after I returned to the States, newspapers reported that a Wayuu girl of ten had become one of the youngest living mothers on record.

As the kids in the yard gathered around us, I wondered which, if any, of them were Bernie’s. Two of the boys looked as old as ten, but a third boy and a grinning girl were only toddlers. The older pair spoke mostly Guajiro, so Sky and I did our best to communicate with gestures, passing out some of the candy we’d picked up in Barranquilla. They smiled shyly at first for Sky’s camera, then gradually cut loose and started mugging, posing like Pelé with a half-deflated soccer ball.

Eventually, their laughter roused the men in the hammocks, who one at a time lifted their ball caps to gaze in our direction. The oldest one looked like he was in his sixties, leather-faced and graying, while the others were no older than me and Sky. We nodded hello, and the old one extended a callused hand, motioning for us to come over. As we walked toward him, I smelled the sweet stench of the liquor before I even noticed the unmarked bottles beneath the hammocks. All three men smiled groggily. The oldest muttered something I couldn’t understand, either in Guajiro or a heavily accented Spanish, and I turned to Sky for a translation.

“I think he wants us to sit down,” he said.

The younger men sat up in their hammocks and scooted to the side. Awkwardly, we climbed in next to them. As I settled into the woven cot, a little off-balance, I set it to swinging, and all three of the men laughed out loud. My hammock
buddy put his arm around me and leaned in close, muttering what I assumed to be “hello” in Guajiro. The smell of the booze coming off his breath was overpowering, and his thousand-mile stare suggested that the three of them were a good deal more than tipsy. He said something else, with a leering grin, but I couldn’t understand him, and Sky only shrugged.

“Gracias, amigo, gracias,”
I said, thanking him feebly for hammock space, and this too touched off a chorus of addled guffaws and backslapping. Behind the laughter, though, I heard a slight note of menace and, exchanging glances with Sky, I could tell that he heard it too. “We should probably be careful here,” he said in English, smiling and trying to sound chipper. I nodded and smiled back.

The oldest man grabbed his bottle and started sloppily pouring into a fistful of plastic medicine cups. He passed them out and then pantomimed a toast. Together, we drank. The clear, thin liquor tasted like an awful combination of Karo syrup and rubbing alcohol. It burned terribly going down, as much from the sweetness as from the obviously high alcohol content. I tasted it up in my sinuses—rotten, terrible stuff. But as I handed the cup back to the old man, I managed an approving smile.

“Gracias,”
I said again, pathetically, and asked him slowly in Spanish what the drink was called.

“Chirrinchi,”
he muttered, already pouring another round.
“Chirrinchi, chirrinchi, chirrinchi.”

As Bernie would later explain,
chirrinchi
is Guajira’s trademark moonshine, a fermented sugarcane drink distilled in handmade stills and sold at prices rivaling even the plentiful bottles of bootlegged Scotch. The second shot burned as badly as the first, and I barely had it down before the old man was waving for my cup to pour a third. My hammock
mate put his arm around me again and swayed unsteadily. No one spoke. I thought of the Afghans and what little I could remember about their allegedly customary three cups of tea. Perhaps this was some kind of time-honored friendship ritual? Something about it didn’t seem cordial, though, just tense and a little bit sinister, like a too-friendly stranger on a dark and deserted road. As the next round was dispersed, Sky caught me glancing apprehensively at my cup.