Salsipuedes

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One dark, unblinking eye stares out at me, with a cold look of appraisal that reminds me of its reptilian ancestry. With a movement of its head, it shakes the serpent hanging limp from its beak, perhaps to make sure that the snake is in fact dead. For a moment, the bird grows in my mind’s eye to engulf me, that cold staring eye sucking me in, hypnotizing me. The shake of its head seems defiant, as though daring me to try and take its prize, and although it is silent all around, in my imagination I hear the harsh deafening cry of some prehistoric creature. While there is certainly no physical menace from this small heron, the scene itself seems to convey some primal threat, a powerful omen and symbolic warning. The violence of the vision sends a shiver down my spine.
We had set out fifteen minutes before from a dock on a coastal lagoon to explore the delta/marsh where this river meets the Caribbean ocean. Our guide, Beto, led the way in one kayak while Vanessa and I followed in another. The heron, the macabre portent, was our first close encounter with wildlife on a tour that would lead us into a dark maze of narrow overhung waterways as we glided slowly up river.
Civilization was left behind quickly, as we paddled past a large and luxurious estate, a number of large houses built on the stretch of land by the coast where the lagoon turns inland to meet the river. The estate apparently belongs to a wealthy Honduras businessman who managed to buy this land just before the whole area was turned into a national park. The negotiated containment of violence that civilization requires, the boundaries established between legitimate and illegitimate violence, was alluded to here by the presence of dozens of labourers forced to toil in this artificial paradise, carrying out construction projects in the absence of the lord of the manor.
The heron appeared on the bank of the river shortly thereafter, a sentinel perhaps, marking the border between where man presumes to shape the world to his own ends and where the world no longer permits such pretension. The river was still broad at this point, and we crept slowly up one bank, peering into the trees and brush for further apparitions.
Gradually, however, the far bank moved in on us, and the trees closed over us. Then both banks seemed to dissolve until we were floating through a vast bayou of more or less encroached passageways. Beto seems to be able to tell one way from the other, and leads us through the gloom, picking our way through low hanging branches and around decades-dead logs poking up through the muck. He stops occasionally to point out various birds, spider monkeys, and one lonely sleeping howler monkey. Pounding on the side of his kayak, Beto coaxes a half-hearted warning out of the monkey. The monkey rouses itself just enough to emit the rasping deep-throated roar he is named for, which reverberates throughout the jungle and sounds for all the world like some creature from Jurassic Park.
Later, the entire surface of the water is covered with tiny green leaves, and appears as if we are paddling along the forest floor. Our wakes part a narrow corridor in the leaves, marking our passage, but looking back I see that even this small alteration in the environment is not to be abided for very long, as the leaves are slowly floating back to cover the entire surface.
After perhaps an hour of paddling upriver, the passages becoming increasingly narrower and the trees rising gradually and becoming thicker, we come all of a sudden upon a hill rising out of the water, the first real land since the banks disappeared. Later examination of maps would reveal that this is an island in the midst of a vast swamp, but all that was clear for the moment was that we were not welcome here. Large bright signs informed us that this was private property, strange in the midst of a national park, and perhaps to add weight to the implicit threat, the signs indicated that it was the private property of a Marine Corps sergeant. Scattered on the banks and up the hill, through the jungle, I could see palm leave thatched huts, and this together with the jungle and marsh setting suggested that our Marine Corps vet was living some kind of Vietnam fantasy, so when Beto informed us that this was as far as we could go I was content to return. The path does go on from there, though, apparently skirting the edge of the island through a trackless maze of overgrown waterways, to end at an Indian village called Salsipuedes, which translates pretty much as: Get out if you can.

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