A walk in the fog

Trees and houses emerge in front and disappear behind.
The air is heavy and wet.
A vail hanging over the whole world,
revealing its secrets gradually, in its own time.

Life is a walk in the fog.

Roadkill

Red Fox was trailing behind his mate as she stalked a rabbit, when it happened. The rabbit hopped across the black ribbon of asphalt separating one part of the forest from another and the female fox followed. Usually she looked for approaching beasts, but this time she was focused solely on her prey, and failed to see the shiny four-wheeled beast approaching at an impossibly fast speed.

The beast struck her squarely, sending her flying through the air to land on her back in the gravel beside the ribbon of asphalt. Red Fox came to her side and waited for her to rise to her feet again. Perhaps she had just been stunned by the blow from the beast which had continued on its way with no perceptible change in speed or direction.

But there was no movement. The life spirit was gone from his mate, the love of his life. He stood over her body protectively as another of the four-wheeled beasts whizzed by on the asphalt.

They had raised five litters of pups together, all of them healthy. Once they left the den he had only seen one once. It was a male who came into his territory. He gave him a look of recognition, then the obligatory growl to make it clear he would defend his territory. The pup walked away, looking back only once. The pup knew him too, and would not challenge his father.

What would he do next? He had never imagined being without the love of his life. Since they first met and mated they had been partners and parents, always sharing their kills between themselves and with their young. Prey had been plentiful in the woods they chose as their territory. They had lived a good life. What should he do now?

He grabbed her lifeless body by the nape of her neck with his teeth, and dragged it to the center of the black ribbon of asphalt. Releasing her, he stood over her body, as if guarding the remains of his mate, and waited patiently for another of the shiny four-wheeled beasts to come to strike him and send his life spirit to join hers in whatever came after.

Cuscatlán

I wrote this poem June 22, 1977, while I was living in Costa Rica as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV). It is my only attempt to write a poem in Spanish. I wrote it to express my anger and frustration over the killing of a number of campesinos (peasant farmers) during a demonstration in Parque de la Libertad, San Salvador, El Salvador. I was a PCV in El Salvador from October 1974 until November 1976. Prior to the Spanish conquest, the region which is now the country of El Salvador was known as Cuscatlán.

nahuatl? ya no!
Tierra de la Infancia? ya no!
The country with a heart? YA NO!
(pero, sí, tiene corazón.)

Sí, tiene corazón, SÍ TIENE!
Como no va a tener, pues?
Echó sangre en el parque, no es asi?
En ... el ... parque ... de ... la ... LIBERTAD ...

Y en Santa Tecla, en Aguilares, en San Miguel ...
En Tacuba, en ’32,
una generación de hombres ...
(se perdió!)

Se perdió?
Dicen que fueron comunistas,
bajo influencia extranjera,
inflamados en contra sus patrones ...

Se sacrificó
una generación de hombres
fue sacrificada
PERO PARA QUE?

Para la lucha anticomunista?
Pues, por un lado, sí, tal vez,
porque resulta que desde entonces
los militares tomaron el mando acá.
(y son unos fuertes anticomunistas ... según dicen.)

Miren! es que yo fui anticomunista ... vaya!
Así nos enseñaron, pues!
Que el comunismo era la esclavitud.

Pero, Ustedes saben que se ha ido metiendo aquí.
La oposición politica a los militares, pues,
siempre era obra del comunismo
La organización syndical, también!

La Universidad, los intelectuales, los estudiantes (nuestros hijos!)
se han ido infestandose con ideas comunistas de tal manera que ...
han tenido que ...
sacrificarse (perderse)

Se sacrifica
una generación de estudiantes y intelectuales
es sacrificada
PARA QUE?

Para la lucha anticomunista?
Para mantener el orden en la sociedad?
Pues, tal vez, les digo yo
porque es que hasta los sacerdotes son comunistas hoy!
(varios, la mayor parte)

Para mantener el orden más que todo.
Digo yo, pues ...
el ... orden ... economico.
el café, el algodón, el azucar, la ganadería

La gente?
Es que gente siempre se consigue,
y barata!
La mano de obra es el gran recurso que tiene este país.

El gran recurso que tiene el país!
EL GRAN RECURSO!
Es que, patrón, ya no somos anticomunistas
YA NO!

Mire! es que en el parque ... mataron a madres y a niños!
EN ... EL ... PARQUE .. DE ... LA ... LIBERTAD!

Es que ya, todo lo que vale lo llaman comunista!
Seamos comunistas, pero lucharemos
PARA QUE?

Para que nuestros descendientes
tengan los derechos
de seres humanos.
Para la dignidad del pueblo Cuscatleco

El pueblo, sí, tiene corazón!
SÍ TIENE!
Y con su sangre ganará la libertad y la dignidad!

Don Pedrito

When I first arrived in San Isidro, El Salvador in 1975, it was the dry season and the area bore an uncanny resemblance to a scene from a movie western depicting the southwestern U.S. There were men on horseback with cowboy hats and spurs, and others driving teams of oxen pulling two-wheeled carts. A layer of dust coated everything. As I dismounted my motorcycle, a man in a straw cowboy hat approached me and said, “Don Pedrito was your brother, wasn’t he?”

First, I should explain that, in El Salvador, Don is a title of respect commonly used by rural people, and that Pedrito is an affectionate form of the name Pedro (Spanish version of Peter) such as might be used for a child or young person. So you might translate Don Pedrito as “young Mr. Peter”.

I, of course, had no idea who Don Pedrito was, but during the six months I lived in San Isidro I would learn his story, which I recount here.

Don Pedrito, whose real name was Floyd Miller, arrived in El Salvador on May 4, 1965 as a Mennonite missionary. Ten years later, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer (PCV) there, it was still common practice to assign us foreigners nicknames that were easier to pronounce in Spanish than our original ones. My first name, Dean, was replaced with the nickname Dino. Floyd studied Spanish for six weeks in a town named Sitio Del Niño, and was given Pedro as his Salvadoran nickname. Don Pedrito arrived in San Isidro in mid June of 1965 to teach carpentry to the locals, and presumably save souls. His volunteer service was part of a land reform project in which peasant farmers were given 2 manzana (about 3.5 acre) plots of public land, from the government purchased former hacienda San Juan. With the training of Don Pedrito and others, the farmers built nice solid one-story houses of concrete blocks with wooden framing and corrugated steel roofs.

In November Don Pedrito took a trip to a beach near Metalío on the Pacific coast. Unfortunately, he took a swim at a place where the undertow is especially strong, and drowned in the ocean on November 25, 1965, just a month shy of his twenty-first birthday. The people of San Isidro, and his former students in particular, were distraught over the news of his death. One of his students, a young man, committed suicide.

A single-sheet flyer was printed for Don Pedrito’s funeral. Somebody gave me a copy. They thought I should have it, and I am forever grateful. At the top is a black and white photo of him. Beneath it is printed his real name, age at death and three paragraphs of text in Spanish. Information from the flyer that I haven’t already mentioned here includes the fact that he was born near Hutchinson, Kansas. His parents’ names are Enos and Mary, and he had four brothers and a sister. He belonged to the Center Amish Mennonite Church.

Don Pedrito is buried in San Isidro’s graveyard. Apparently the church and his parents made the decision to leave his remains where he had been working at the time of his death. We can only speculate whether their decision was primarily philosophical or financial. A young boy took me to see the grave. It was the most elaborate one in the small graveyard. The tombstone reads: Floyd "Pedro" Miller, Born: December 25, 1944, Died: November 25, 1965

That would be the end of my story, and I probably would not feel as strongly linked to Don Pedrito as I do, except that in late July of 1975 I completed my study of the peasant farmers of the San Isidro area and was reassigned to work at a demonstration and training farm near Metalío. Another PCV and I lived in a beach house for the ten months I worked there.

That means I was near Metalío, at the beach, on November 25, 1975, the ten-year anniversary of the day Don Pedrito drown. So, of course, I had to tempt fate by going swimming in the Pacific Ocean that day. Actually it was stormy, and the surf was rough, so I didn’t spend a lot of time in the water. On another occasion though, my housemate and I were taken pretty far out by a rip tide on the same beach. We were just strong enough swimmers to make it back to shore, but I doubt that either of us would have had the strength to go back in and save somebody who couldn’t make it on their own! I guess that is what happened to Don Pedrito, a rip tide took him out and there was nobody there to save him.

In Hutchinson, Kansas I doubt that anybody besides his surviving family remembers Floyd Miller. But in San Isidro, El Salvador, the story of Don Pedrito is a legend that will live on for generations. The people in San Isidro who asked me about Don Pedrito were right. He is my brother in every way that is important, and though I never met him, I’ll certainly never forget him!

Ode to a Rabbit

I found a dead rabbit by the curb. He didn't quite make it across the road. Sorry to see you leave this world so soon. None of us ever knows when we will get clipped by a truck, or felled by cancer.

The morning birds are singing as I dig a hole and place your body in it. A glorious sendoff from this life. I can only hope that my own will be likewise.