When I checked into El Zopilote hostel in Ometepe, Nicaragua the conversation went like this:
Front desk lady: You will need to give us your passport.
Me: No, I need to keep it.
Front desk lady: It is our policy that we take your passport.
Me: It is my policy that I keep it.
Front desk lady: Then you will be responsible if it is stolen from your locker!
A passport is the MOST important item to hold onto during a trip, even more important than your jar of peanut butter. So I keep mine outside of my backpack tucked away in a heap of dirty underwear and socks, because, come on, who but an underwear bandit is going to steal those?
I went back and forth with the lady until she finally relented, warning me that I would not be able to run a tab but would have to pay as I went. I was rolling with a massive jar of peanut butter, so I purchased a loaf of bread made from wheat grown on the hostel’s farm and headed to my room.
The Zopilote Hostel is an organic farm, restaurant and yoga retreat tucked away in the twittering jungles of Ometepe. It’s a kilometer from the fresh water surf of playa Santo Domingo and a choice staging ground to enjoy the island’s offerings—hiking, yoga, farming, volcano climbing, biking, swimming, and relaxing. They grew their own tobacco, and this was a time to smoke rollies. I was going to turn 29 in a few days, and the traveler in the book I reading was smoking cigarettes and writing beautiful prose about them, so I picked up the habit for my weeklong stay. I would like to say that, now, two months later there is not a pack of top tobacco on the table with me in Minneapolis, but . . .
Look guys!, every morning is a victory, because every morning when I awake, I quit smoking again. I will never quit quitting. Maybe I’m not so attached to the cigarettes. Maybe I’m addicted to breathing in the sweet smoke of victory when I see the resolve of the man brushing his teeth in the mirror.
Yoga in El Zopilote
After I arranged my stuff and hid my passport in my dirty underwear in the locker of my jungle cabin’s split floor dorm, I returned to the reception area where I joined the yoga class that was commencing. Our instructor asked us to visualize a peaceful beach, and asked us to imagine the sound of crashing waves. They call it yoga class, but you are not really allowed to raise your hand and ask questions. Instead of visualizing the waves, my mind wandered, and I imagined myself raising my hand and asking why we did not just walk to the beach, where we would not need to visualize any of this.
Once the instructor was satisfied that we were all on the same beach, he began to teach us breathing techniques that he said once we mastered would allow us to make an orgasm last for hours. Like a belly dancer giving birth, he had us moving our diaphragms in and out. Yoga lasted an hour and as soon as I was released, I went to the beach for a swim where I would not need to visualize anything. I could submerse myself the tepid temperatures of Playa Santo Domingo and raise my hand and shout my questions to the freshwater waves and the caiman that scared the peanut butter out of me.
Over the next few days, life on the island of Ometepe settled into a routine of exploration, swimming, eating sandwiches, hammock reading and guitar playing. I planned to stay through the week and then return to my laptop and workload waiting for me in Antigua, Guatemala. But plans on the road are always tentative. All it takes is a raccoon attack, a bout of dysentery, a stolen passport, or someone new checking into your hostel to change those plans.
My third day in Ometepe, I felt the previous day’s activity of biking 45 kilometers around the Volcano Madera entitled me to a day of sandwich eating and guitar playing in a hammock.
I’d met Amanda—an Australian taking a break from her last life as an environmentalist to travel on an open-ended trip—a few days before. We hadn’t talked much, but enough that when I passed her on the path to our dorm, I felt comfortable sharing with her the struggles of my day. I had been trying to tie a silk scarf around my water bottle so that I could wear it as a sling. But it was all in vain. Whatever knot I used met an eventual falling of my bottle. “It’s a good thing it’s a bottle and not a baby,” I observed to Amanda.
Amanda waited for me like a patient mother listens to a child detailing his adventures in outer space. When I’d finally closed my mouth, she told me, “so . . . my passports been stolen!”
I thought about my dirty underwear and I asked her how this could be since they make everyone lock their passports behind the front desk. Someone had broken into the reception area early that morning. They’d taken all the guest’s valuables, the money and Amanda’s passport. There were two dozen passports locked away, and weirdly enough, only Amanda’s had been stolen.
I told Amanda that she had likely been cursed for refusing to go to Yoga class, and then walked with her to show her where the Internet was available at Hotel Santa Cruz. It was almost noon, and passport theft justifies morning beers, is actually one of those occasions when morning beers taste best. So we ordered two toñas. You can really tell what sort of person you are dealing with when they are dealing with being an undocumented foreigner trapped in a country, and Amanda was the sort of person who laughed about the strange plight that the wind sometimes blows you.
We got ahold of the Australian embassy, and by the second toña beer Amanda was equipped with what she needed to do to get a new passport. It carried a ten-day wait, she had been planning to leave Nicaragua sooner, but sometimes you leave when you can.
When we returned there were new arrivals at the hostel reception area. It being that sort of day, Amanda and I decided to keep the beers coming. One of the new arrivals was at the table beside us. She had an identical bag of rolling tobacco, and a braid in her hair. She looked like, and this will sound strange, will sound like a fabrication of my imagination, but the truth is sometimes reality is strange. She looked exactly like the character Stella that I had created in the novel I spent four years writing between 2008-2012, How One Guitar Will Save The World I. The person I had envisioned for this character, had spent four years developing and getting to know in the process of fiction, had the same vibe as her, also had a single braind in a mane of unkept blonde hair and the more I got to know her, the more uncanny the resemblance became.
I joined her conversation with another hosteller when she was trying to remember the name of the volcano she had climbed (Volcano Concepción), and finally decided it was called Volcan Contraception.
During our beers Amanda and I had hatched a plan of ordering a bottle of wine and taking it and my guitar, a hosteller named Rowdy and her ukulele, to the Santo Domingo beach. It was late afternoon, and the day that that had stolen a passport was about to give us a jam session. “Stella,” whom we shall dub this new blonde Australian pointed out a new arrival in the corner, “Let’s invite him, he doesn’t know anyone yet.” John was his name; he was a fireman from Toronto built like a gladiator.
Happily, we marched to the beach. When we began jamming, an Israeli backpacker named Door, chiseled like Greek god, emerged from the beach and joined our circle and man could he play the bongos. When “Stella” and I later retold the story of meeting him, we both remembered that he emerged from the waters like a merman with 1980s hair, and came to our circle to steal Amanda’s heart for a few days.
Sunset on A Nicaraguan Beach
The wine went down. The music began. Everyone sang along to covers. We created new songs. This is where I never want to stop being—on a beach, beneath a sunset, music on everyone’s lips, guitar in hand. On this night Stella’s gravity stole my glances. There was something about the her, beyond the fact that she was gorgeous, that cause me to pause my conversation and catch her gaze.
We sang Tom Petty’s Free Falling and Rowdy told us a story of a time when a monkey was walking down the street. Soon we were singing about a monkey walking down the street: “Saw a monkey walking down the same old street / And went up to this monkey to greet / He had a wild, wild face / And a bowtie / And he could dance the Charleston like a boss.”
We had finished all the wine and a mantra began to migrate from lip to lip—Wouldn’t it be great if we had a sandwich, to pass around the circle? Wouldn’t it be nice, mused Rowdy. Wouldn’t it be nice, said Stella. That’s all we need, sighed Amanda and Door.
Everyone looked at me somewhat skeptically. How did I intend to do that? When you’ve spent the better part of your life on an active mission to see people as deeply as you can in passing glances, you start to notice who people are in some grander scheme. You have a pretty good idea about who you can walk up to on the street and ask about their willingness to hook you up with what is foolishly a controlled substance. So I walked up to Sergio, who was hanging out on his bicycle. He wanted money in advance, but I explained to him that after buying horse shit in Granada, I preferred not to go that route.
Sergio came and brought Walter. Walter was an older gentleman with an open smile. Sergio was in his twenties, and after some initial reluctance, began to free style rap to the music in Spanish.
Rowdy rapped in a way that Cain might rap to Abel, were both involved in a rap battle. At first Rowdy had been reluctant, was worried that if she rapped, the rhyme would inevitably would lead toward dirty subjects. The circle started chanting Rowdy! Rowdy! in rhythm and she unleashed her impromptu rhymes on the world. After Rowdy, who was from Canada rapped, I turned to Carlos and said, “Ella es una rapper de los estados”
Then the sunset. We looked upon it with the proper longing reserved for it. We watched as the horizon turned a neon fox color and the peak of the Volcano Conceptción faced to black. Then we packed up and headed back to the hostel for dinner. When the night ended, Stella and I shared a rollie on the doorstep to our dorm. She brought out a sketchpad of her water colors. There was something about her paintings, her quiet grace, her open ended trip, her dedication to seeking higher understandings that… what? I told myself that I did not have a crush on her.
The year had been going really well for me and I’d make a conscious decision to stay focused on the things I found important. This bet on not getting a job, but making a living out of doing what I loved seemed to be paying off. I was traveling, writing music, eking a living out of my writing, had big plans for the year, and had decided to take myself out of the dating/hooking up/falling in love game until I found my balance in these areas of life. I recognized that where I was in life, not staying in any place very long, dating in all of its manifestations was not a good fit for me. Stella was free. She was traveling without any plans to cease. By next year she planned do be where I planned to be, Asia, where she hoped to do what I hoped to do, live in a monastery.
I told myself the usual things that you tell yourself, that I had only known her for two hours. In my journal a few days later I wrote, “If she didn’t have to be so gorgeous, so Australian (I have a soft spot for our Aussie mates), so wearing flowers and feathers in her hair, so wonderful in her interactions with everyone, so my conception of the perfect person. . . She’s awoken that part of me, and I know that, but I also know better than to try to capture the moon or tame a lion.”
Billiards at Little Morgans In Ometepe, Nicaragua
I told myself the next day that this was just a crush, that it was because she was beautiful, that I was confused, that I couldn’t claim to know someone just because she reminded me of a character in my novel. The next night our group of hostellers went to the Hostel Little Morgans and drank Raptor Energy drinks with Rum.
We played pool until a macaw landed on the table and began to disrupt the position of the billiard balls. My sandals had broken and Stella cut off the bottom of her shirt and made me genie slippers.Our conversation drifted away from the group and towards each other.
I lectured my heart, told it to be still, and reminded it that I had only known her for two days. But on the speaker’s Ellie Gouldings song “Anything could happen” blared through the beachside bar. As she sang the refrain, “Anything could happen / Anything could happen / Anything could happen” over and over again, I believed in this uncertainty, believed that in this life, on an Island in Lake Nicaragua, anywhere, at anytime, anything, can happen, love, heartbreak, things you planned not to have happen, “anything can happen.”
