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The weblog of Andy Ihnatko! Possibly not the least-beloved technology pundit in the land! |
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Top Of The (Mayan) World, Ma!Friday, November 03, 2006 • 10:55:31 AM ESTSo once again I'm taking up my blogging quill. Firstly, of course, to reconnect with you, dear readers; I understand that many of you are shut-ins who thrill to tales of life in the Big Room outside. But I also have a simple morbid curiosity about the ship's Internet service: is it a worthless steaming pile of useless horsecrap, or merely a big heap of fetid uselessness? It's one of the other, certainly. I had two columns to file by today. On the previous two cruises, the Internet was slow, but reliable, so I wasn't concerned. Well, it was completely off on Sunday and spotty on Monday. And last night, after I returned from my Excursion, the Internet service was trending towards desperate need of either an exorcism or a vigorous enema. I found myself rummaging through the various bottles behind the bar next to the ship's library here. If I could lay my hands on a bottle of Jim Beam with a wide enough neck, I was going to copy my column onto a USB flash drive, drop it inside, seal it up, and then chuck it into the Caribbean and simply trust to luck. "Yes, but what would you have done with all the whiskey?" you ask. Foolish boy. Re-read the preceding paragraph. I'm having Internet trouble. When you're spending several hours wrestling with balky technology, a surplus of hard grain alcohol is never a problem wanting for a solution. Some websites and services are accessible, but not others. I can get onto Fark, but not Flickr. I can sort of get onto my webmail client, but when I finally managed to keep the connection going long enough to submit my column, Safari took me to the ship's central Internet directory instead of the confirmation page that says "The email was successfully sent; all hail Jambi." So let's see if my blogger will work. I'm happy and unbothered, because my expectations aren't high. Tuesday, the ship docked in Belize. There I struck one of the Action Items off of my cruise agenda: check out a nice, meaty Ruin or two. Belize seemed to be just the ticket for this; they had Ruins long before cruise ships started docking here, which shows remarkable vision on the part of its urban planners. A two and a half-hour bus ride deposited me to the outskirts of a Mayan city that was abandoned more than a thousand years ago. Apparently, it was up and running for a few thousand years before the Mayans decided to call it a day and put the whole empire up on eBay. It was my first Ruin (not counting the Boston Garden before its 1990 renovation) and honestly, it was a terrific place to start. The site was pleasantly like a state park rather than either a tourist attraction or a working archaeological site. It featured all of the best elements of such an attraction (eg, a small and informative museum at the entrance that allowed you to load some background information into your cognitive cache, and a snack shack with cold drinks and affordably-priced tee shirts), and none of the worst ones. Such as arriving there and discovering Disney's Great MayanWorld AdventureLand (Sponsored by ClearChannel), or being expected to put in a few hours felling trees and washing dishes at the research camp. If my big personal theory about enjoyable tourism can be crystallized into one fixture, it would be the flush toilet. I think your adventures should be ambitious enough that you can't absolutely count on encountering a clean modern bathroom at every location, or even necessarily every day. At the same time, if at any point during the week you find yourself wandering into the woods carrying a shovel and a newspaper that you have no intention of reading, well, that really doesn't count as a vacation, does it? I broke away from the tour early on and made a brisk beeline for the huge temple in the center of town. The thing was straight out of Indiana Jones: platformed terraces separated by a punitive quantity of limestone steps ranging in height from just under a foot to nearly eighteen inches, and just to mix things up a little, every now and then you'd encounter a step that had cracked into a funky angle. My eyes kept nervously scanning their edges for bits of hair and blood...you know, evidence of previous tourists who had Discovered The Fast Route Back Down. But I climbed the pyramid with the same attitude with which one eats an elephant: tackle the job in small bites, and don't be a hero. The reward was twenty minutes standing alone at the top of a Mayan pyramid. I looked down, and surveyed a nearly empty village square beneath. I took in a 360 of the horizon and viewed miles and miles of trees and hills and farmland, doted with the occasional spires of smoke and the inevitable communication towers.  For tens of thousands of people -- dead for millenia -- this had been the highest spot in the center of town: their World Trade Center or Sears Tower. It was a site of worship and ritual, and incidentally served both as a calling card and a warning to all neighboring regions. That's what I remembered from the museum displays. But for all I know, this was just the place where villagers came to get the permits to put in a new septic tank back at the house. If so: it was the most awesome and inspiring bureaucratic office building ever. If we had one of these in my county I'd be deliberately getting parking tickets all the time, just so I could make a special trip in to pay 'em off. Yes: the thought "Dude…it's Halloween, and you're at the site of ancient ritual sacrifices" did cross my mind. And sure, I held my camera out at arms' length and shot a picture of myself standing over the plaza, tongue out, right hand clearly Hailing Satan. That's just common sense. But silence and solitude — the two things I desperately wanted to find in that place and the reason why I broke from the tour — have a tendency to amplify the natural resonance of a place. After many giddy minutes savoring the simple beauty of the site (and marveling once again at the utterly-improbable benefits of having cultivated a knack for writing odd things about technology), I found myself wanting to do something that I've done a few times before in my travels. In this world, there are the things that you Know, the things that you Believe, and then there are the things that you merely Suspect: those ideas that occur to you and you toss them from hand to hand. You like the feel and the weight of them even though you know you can't prove it one way or another. They're interesting little curios that have a certain personal value, even if you wouldn't consider running back into a burning house to save them. Framed in that fashion, I do Suspect that certain locations hold a certain special power, solely due to the enduring and oftentimes intense relationship that people have had with the place as they've passed through it...in untold number and over untold years. Hundreds, and then thousands, and then millions of people step through a certain place and each one of them scuffs away an infinitely-slim layer of mineral from the stone, such a trivial amount that the wear only becomes measurable after hundreds of years, when it's been shaped into a rounded bowl that collects the rain. Hundreds, and then thousands, then millions of people step through a certain place and their thoughts and their emotions rub against the walls a little, building into progressively denser and denser layers over time. The cumulative effect on that location is that as you stand there, alone with your thoughts, you become subtly and inarticulately aware that you're merely the latest link in a continuity that yawns backward far beyond the point when your family had a name...one which will also continue forward for centuries after your bloodline has served its purpose and disappears from the planet forever. You stand in these places and you find yourself entering almost a meditative state. The funny, sarcastic thoughts drain away. You let the camera hang. You're no longer thinking about how much time you have before the next bus departs. The weight of your backpack, the reminder on the sides of your tongue that you need to drink some water…really, every connection you have to this specific moment steps into the background. It's replaced by a larger, broader awareness of all of Humanity sharing the same one place, the same one moment in time, the same thought. Why do certain sites of intense and ongoing human connection have such an affect on its visitors? Well, I don't know. They just do. Ask a dog why he starts barking before a natural disaster is about to happen and he'll just shrug and ask if you brought any cookies. And so, as the wind picked up a bit on the top of that temple, I did the same thing I did after two hours inside Westminster Abbey. There was no coin box and no candle to light, but nonetheless, I lowered my head and gave a silent prayer for the health, safety, and happiness of my family and friends, and I offered my thanks to whatever inexplicable forces or proven scientific processes that had brought me here. I couldn't even tell you to whom I might have been praying and giving thanks. But it was a mojo well-worth working, it pleased me to do it, and I think my thoughts left my own little scuffmark up there.
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