The way to Nueva Vida: in the Yucatan, where jaguars lurk and pyramids poke out of the forests, human are learning to live peaceably with nature

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Barbara Kingsolver

The stalwart tropical day had slipped away into evening as we were talking, and we now stepped outside Carmen's cool thatched house to watch the full moon rise. Orchids planted in tin cans bloomed pale and fragrant in the dusk. Normally they grow in the forest canopy, unseen by human eyes; Carmen called these her huerfanas pobrecitas, or "poor little orphan girls," because she'd salvaged them from trees that the men of a neighboring ejido had felled for lumber. Every collective includes arable fields and a parcel of forestland extending into the Calakmul reserve, to be used as the cooperative sees fit. Some are cutting their trees, sustainably, in a managed forestry program, but increasingly, others are not cutting at all. Carmen's group of women voted against clearing their 62 acres for a cornfield, deciding that the parcel would be more valuable to them as it stood, since it provides flowers year-round for beekeeping as well as an inexhaustible apothecary. It's also a balm for the spirit. Carmen made us pause in our conversation to look at the moon, a perfect orange lantern cradled in the arms of a cecropia tree.

"Listen!" she commanded, her eyes bright. From the forest's edge a warm wind carried the scent of wild spices and the sweet call of a pygmy owl. Somewhere within the jungle nearby a jaguar crouched, searching the wind for signs of its age-old forest companion, the human animal.

MANY KILOMETERS FROM THE bordering ring of villages, deep in the very heart of the reserve, the giant pyramids of the Calakmul ruins rest in permanent peace. This is literally the end of the road--the very edge of North America, beyond which no human residence or enterprise is to be found for a far cry. Our new friends from the ejido had roused us in the early-morning darkness from the small thatched house on stilts where we'd spent the night, guiding us down the long, bumpy dirt road into the forest's heart with promises of the most dramatic sunrise of our lives. Now we groped our way by flashlight up deeply weathered steps to the top of the tallest pyramid. Mayan glyphs silently held their accounts beneath the industry of foraging ants. As the limestone softly crumbles, the forest retrieves it.

On a small platform atop the pyramid, our little group waited for the sunrise. I stood up, dizzy from the height--we were way above the treetops--and out of breath from the steep climb. I put my hand on my belly, where I carried the laughter whose name and gender 1 didn't yet know, and I whispered: Remember this with me. Once upon a time we were here, at the center of the world. As far as I could see, a dark green sea of untouched forest rolled out to the whole encircling horizon. In a lifetime--mine, anyway--one is given this blessing only rarely: the chance to stand on high ground, turn in every direction, and see absolutely not one single sign of humanity. This is how the world once was, without our outsize dreams and dominion. Nothing surrounded us but the dark embrace of trees, except where the predawn light touched the eroded stone face of another pyramid rising above the canopy. Our friends pointed out a bump on the southern horizon that they said was the pyramid of Mirador, on the Guatemalan border. From here to there, when the sun was just right, a person could flash signals with a mirror; and from Mirador, someone else could signal farther south to Tikal, and so on, to the edge of the Mayan world. We stood at its very center. Then, between one held breath and the next, the sun appeared to us, scarlet and full-skirted on the horizon.