Sitting in the back of a truck on a sun-eruption day. Since I’m not in America, I don’t need to hide. Instead, I am close to the cab, sitting up on the edge. I purposely stick a few inches of my butt out over the lip of the truck into the street. I am daring some daring-doer to pass us, roll down the window, and either cop a good feel or make a sweet smack on the buttocks of one sweet-smiling girl with her butt hanging over the edge of a speeding truck.

It is so hot that the 50-miles an hour wind only brings little waves and crests of warmth or cool. I feel the temperatures wrapping around each other likes sheets on an over-sexed afternoon. Crossing and crissing, pockets and ripples, I reach down into my skin and register each sensation. Delicious. My body. The shirt I am wearing raps against my shoulders, each a little mini-thud against some echo chamber I have climbed inside. My hair is tied back, but still I can feel some strands roaming around my face, sliding moment to moment to moment.

Sometimes I am behind my eyes, which are behind a wrap of sheer bluing ray bands. No bugs or dirt can float in, only the drift of hair. Only the images: The campo, miles sprawling out under the nestling arm of tall hills that lift with vertigo out of the flat manglare valley.

Manglares, a word much better than our own. “Man grove,” the orchard of man, is so Not Appropriate I want to laugh. This is much more the place of women, or of death and rebirth, I do not know. Manglar, a word leavened with the idea of contortion, of wraparound, of twisted strangulation. The tight meaty hooks or tentacles of octopi. I want to say the word that way, “el pulpo puede manglarte.” And it fits both with the bundle of me inside here, wrapping around itself—a net brought in from off a reef—and with the visual and spiritual feel of this place. The roots of manglares, the trees (names I don’t know), swirl around themselves. Los manglares look like burn piles, chopped down limbs that suddenly decided to make a resurgence. Something that was killed, but was able to grow up out of itself, directly lifting from salt and fresh water. It looks like alder on a brush pile, like ivy on a log, like a fern from a stump.

Tall tall trees standing up on their pliable roots. I touched these legs when we got close to them. I reached up and took a dangling root like I was shaking its hand. It was soft and flexible, extremely delicate. I accidentally broke one of these 2-inch thick roots, and looked into its center where a ring of water-sap was starting to leak outwards. The tide (marea baja) removes the rivers down to ten/fifteen-feet below the white-dried mud mark along the leaves of these trees. Their limbs drown and re-respire every six hours. I do not have even the beginnings of biology to understand this: the salt, the death, the changes.

Little crabs live along these legs. Red-armed, they climb up along the soothe bark like hardened spiders in the jungle. The silt-mud sand of the low-tide banks seems to writhe with these little creatures.

There are fishermen tucked into many of the tributaries. Tributaries? Or outstretched turns of the river-tide. They stand in their dugouts, smoke wafting up from the special wood they burn in the center of the boat to keep out the chiggers and mosquitoes. Their hands, feet, and legs are caked with mud, and they are twisting fishing line and nets tighter so they might catch their catfish and camerones. Some of the canoes have two men, some only one. Some of the fishermen fish with a large net that they fix on tall poles around a tributary leg of the river-tide. As the water leaves, the earthsilt lifts, and the fish splutter around on the mud to be picked up. The net does not capture them, it simply prevents their escape with the Marea, mother of cycle. Other of the canoes have lines out, fish fighting in. And yet others have huge scoops—like the type we see in aquarium shops, when you ask the owner for that one little goldfish with the twinkling eyes, and he gets out a green mesh scoop and sweeps your fish into a plastic baggy for you. These fishermen swoosh out pink and white wrigglers, scoop and dump, swoosh and dump. Their actions are rhythmic and calm.

There are also fishermen in the manglares that swim to fish. They swim around in these thick muddy waters, and wrap the crabs they catch around their back like a lei of sharp blue-red flowers. They bob along the muddy banks like river seals, their dark hair and eyes looking up at mine like waiting for a song as we float by. These fisherman wear black gloves, and they fish by diving down along the shallow banks and putting their hand into the holes that the large crabs live in. When the crab snaps and bites, these fisherman snap and bite back. It is a war of invasion and reparation.

Los manglares.

I look for the river-tide dolphins that are said to live in these waters, and dip my hand over the edge of the boat we are riding in. I ignore the chatter of people, the words both interesting and noise. I dip my hand and work out the fever, let it slide from this sick skin and be digested along the sulphurous banks of decomposing dark debris. I call to the river-tide dolphins, and they come and nibble at my fingers, startling me in my sweet-smile nodding. One grabs my fingers and pulls me over the side, and suddenly I am surrounded by playful river-tide dolphins that are churning around me like the wake of the boat I was dragged from. “Naughty river-tide dolphin, naughty.”

A joke I heard earlier enters my head: “You couldn’t hit water if you fell out of a boat.”

These river-tide dolphins are cheeky. Never let it be said that they aren’t. They spin me around and nibble my legs. They lick the mosquito bites I got earlier when we were walking along the dry-tropical forest into the wet-tropical forest.

I tell them how I saw monkeys earlier, the first monkeys I’ve ever seen in the wild. And they jumped and ate, stared at me and then looked away. How close they were, and yet even too far for my lens to even register. Howler monkeys, not howling. In the distance, I could hear their hoarse laughing, the xhoo-xhoo-xhoo of their angst. But up close, they just stared at me. I also saw a tarantula, massive and purple-backed. Not Something To Run Into On My Own. But it just nestled down into the leaves and willed us away. A snake too, huge, the hugest snake I’ve ever seen—“Culebra Siama” as the guide calls it—(it makes me dream I am swimming with anaconda that night). We loud-walkers make it flee the scene. “Wait,” I asked, with little result.

And then, the last fun frolic I saw on the walk that made me feel like I was actually in a zoo, so average we walked, like something out of a tourist movie. (Our guide seemed a bit of a novice. Not as knowledgeable as my dear E of the Puyo Jungle). But there were frogs, froglets, tadpoles, tadplets, and I was even able to catch one of the little creatures and peer in at it from between a gap in my fingers. I was surprised because instead of seeing the frog, I saw my eye peering in through a gap in my fingers. He gave me my perspective right back at me, and for that, I let him go gently into the water I had wrested him from.

That walk was an experiment in mosquitoes making me a liar. That is, they ignored everyone else, and went for me like I was some great Salt Lick standing out in the middle of a cattle mountain field. Mosquitoes in my hair, on my back, in my ears. They ignored the layers of bug goo I put on (was it sugar water?) and sucked me until I got on my truck and floated crazy-lidded through the campo heat. I wonder about the changes of my body, the marea baja that allows my metabolism and juices to change so profoundly as to suddenly attract mountains of bugs instead of repelling them like I more or less did for most of my life. I wondered if it was my fever, the not-from-walking-fast sweat that saturated my shirt.

Those river-tide dolphins. They just laughed and me and reminded me how I used to say that people never change, that they are the same essence from the moment they enter the world until the moment they leave. Those psychic dolphins know how I worry and wonder and go crazy over the fact that I feel Different. New. Like I don’t even really know myself because everything has changed, manglared around. Leaves growing from a fallen pliable burnpile, sucking salt and then waving in the wind. Shed your skin, swim, shed your skin. The river-tide lifted me back into the boat, sun-burned and drydrenched.

By the time we returned to the launch-point, the tide had dropped so low that it was trouble getting the boat back up to the walkway. In fact, we got stuck. I felt spry and wanted to jump out of the boat and help push. I wanted to feel the mud up to my waist, and felt disappointed that I was not with my friends who would have just jumped out with me, splashed around. (I know who you are!). But I still felt spry, refreshed, happy and naughty. I made jokes. High and dry. Our guide eventually capitulated and jumped out of the boat with the boat-operator and pushed our boat ashore. I decided it was a world irony that left me in the boat, clean and wishing to swim, while a man who didn’t want to even touch the water was out pushing the boat.

Finally we were ashore, but there was no walkway, and so I got to discover that the mud is knee-deep thick. Earlier, I had watched some of the fisherman wade through it and felt jealous. I wanted to do so too…

A, before she left, told me that I was the Dirtiest Girl she has ever known. She meant it, and she didn’t mean it metaphorically. She said this a few times, once even accidentally using the word “disgusting,” but then amending that for “just dirty,” which apparently means both my personal hygiene and my house-cleaning skills. Certain skills, that is. Dishes, bathrooms, and bathroom hairs.

I’m tired of a world of women squeamish at the thought of Hair. Hair is the next Spider/Mouse of the female world. I haven’t dated, hung out, or known a woman for about ten years now who doesn’t stand on a stool screaming and waving a big broom at the thought of shower-drain hair. It’s just hair, goddamn it. It comes from our own bodies. It is like dust or soil or anything natural in this world. Something from the living. Something decomposing that will aid the growth of something new. Something that you don’t want to eat, sure, or something that you don’t want to walk around on for days, but also not something that you have to have paroxysms of pain over either.

So, I admit, I am probably the Dirtiest Girl around. Although, I also have to admit I was slightly offended. I would absolutely submit to the title of the Worst Dish-Washer on the face of the planet, but I consider myself reasonably tidy, although not Anal, about everything else. I like an organized area. I like clean countertops. I religiously shower every other day, but do not consider it a Mandate From Heaven that I shower every day unless I feel overly sticky, icky, muddy, yucky, sweaty, sandy, smelly, etc. I like the smell of human beings and don’t bow down to the smell of Febreeze, Comet, Lysol, Gasoline, Tidy-Bowl, etc. I like the earth. I like being clean, but don’t like feeling sterilized…

So, I wanted to roll in the mud along the manglare banks. I wanted to jump out of the boat and get wet and squeal and then screeeee-weeeeee into the mud, rolling and mucking, weeeeeee-weeeeee, like a little rolling piglet, sliding around under the manglare roots, jumping off the hard blue clay of the under-mud and mucking & washing, mucking & washing. Weeeeeee-weeeeee.

Unfortunately and amusingly both, there was a line of men chopping down tree-branches and laying them out across the mud in a little gringo-trail. I sat down on the boat and silently laughed to myself for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes with five white tourists looking out across a 12-foot mud flat, rolling up their jeans, wondering aloud whether to take off their shoes, and telling each other that they don’t want to get muddy, while five dark-skinned tourist-workers with machetes walked knee-deep through the mud, dragging scraggly little tree-branches for us to Balance Upon. The only only reason I didn’t jump out of the boat at that moment is that it seemed too beautiful. Too sweet. Those men were working so hard so we wouldn’t get Dirty. I couldn’t spoil all their hard work. I couldn’t crush their image. I knew somewhere inside me that it would probably be a good thing if they understood us Americans differently, but I also knew that for five-sixths of us, they were right. And they meant so well.

Instead, I made it a game. Who can balance the best. Unlike in the metaphor world, I have a fair sense of balance from fishing (although it is weaker than most fishermen), and so eventually scampered across the limbs quite quickly. In a world of ironies, I arrived at the other end the least Dirty and Muddied of all of us.

Arrived into happiness at one of the most beautiful structures I’ve ever seen. I wanted to live here. I wanted to swim here. I don’t know what I wanted, but something was breathing here. It was frustrating to have only ten minutes to look.

the shrimp farm:

And so, I finished up my day climbing back into the truck, and feeling the fever had left me completely. As we drove, I tucked the powerwind down into me, let it wash me completely over. The images: Houses built on stilts standing cranelike in the manglares. A welter of people following donkeys down to corner markets. People standing on the curves of roads. Tall hills and low trees. White ibis and cranes ducking their bills into the mud that squeezes between their talons. Blue sky mostly leaking through a few low clouds.

But more than that, the heat, the skin on my back, the changes inside me. I smell the world flapping around—first, hot earthy water, then the chicken-truck as it passes us by. The smell of hundreds of chicken butts riding out over the edges. Then the banana plantations—not the smell of bananas, but of trees, of trees. The quick smell of a brushpile bonfire. The smell of fertilizer in a field. My sunscreen (which worked inadequately, by the way)—Hawaiian tropical. Chicken legs roasting on a barbeque. Heat, smell, wind, no fever, brushing the insides clean away from the city that makes me so angry and furious, so wound up and tight and marea alta. The sensation of plastic waving and reflecting. These changes, these changes.

I do not ask myself who I am while riding—big-smiled, burned, soft-skinned, and breathing something ininin through my nose and out through my mouth—on the back of a truck.