Anthony Wright
Dada Rides Zen
"I am tortured with an everlasting itch for things remote."
--Herman Melville
Céline wrote at the start of Journey to the End of the Night: "Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's just a novel, just a fictitious narrative." Inasmuch as our lives are novels, many would seek a clean and seamless tour; while the world's wanderers carve sprawling, untidy narratives fused with the ineffable strands of journeys that end, mostly, in failure -- its authors as unknown as those too timid to harness an ephemeral daydream.Strange souls inhabit the pages of old Sampson Low tramp narratives called Sixpennies, published in the early 20th century and now gathering dust in secondhand bookstores across the shrinking planet. The titles speak for themselves: Runaway; I Didn't Stay Honest; Underworld of the East; Congo Jake; 'Twixt Hell and Allah ... They speak of lonesome travelers searching for sartori, and earning six pennies of immortality -- catalogued somewhere on a vagabond's shelf but intrinsically forgotten. Would they have had it any other way? I think not ... Yank in Yucatan (Adventures and Guide through Eastern Mexico) by Rolfe F. Schell is a related shade -- if of a more recent vintage. I found this 1963 Island Press edition a few years ago; it was also gathering dust, at the back of an old shop in Mexico City.
Schell was an American travel writer/photographer, evidently of no enduring note. He produced several titles: Desota Didn't Land at Tampa; One Thousand Years on Mound Key -- few if any are still in print. Yet the words of another obscure scribe, H.M. Tomlinson (who penned the masterpiece of travel prose, The Sea and The Jungle) ring resoundingly true, when the enigmatic Englishman ascribed the appeal of a text called South Atlantic Sailing Directions: "I do not think this noble volume is included in the best hundred books, but I know it can release the mind from the body."
There's something similarly transcendental about the way Schell narrates his journey. He arrived in eastern Mexico in 1958 and promptly went about experiencing all kinds of fantastic adventures, any one of which would suffice for a lifetime of boasting by us mere mortals. He encountered Cuban rebels of Fidel Castro's famous "26th" unit training for the overthrow of Batista in the shrub lands of the Yucatan. He uncovered baffling, miniature stone dwellings said to be the ancient habitations of the mythical Alux people -- Mexico's version of leprechauns. A dwarf called Cebero led the way to the mysterious site, and poses, towering, next to temple doorways in the photographs Rolfe took with his trusty Exakta.
He toured an uninhabited Isla Mujeres and located a pirate's grave, one Fermin Mundaca de Marechaja, whose inscription reads: "As you are, I was. As I am, you will be." He shot 16mm movies in the Maya pottery-filled caves of Calcohtok; traveled by horse-drawn tranvias to the ruins of Mayapan; went jaguar-hunting along the banks of the Candelaria River; drove jeeps along jungle roads under the canopies of 40 meter-tall trees; collected spray orchids "growing like weeds;" and ate braised armadillo for breakfast.
To this list I will add in an appropriate tone of envy that Rolfe Schell sailed to the ruins of the ancient Maya city of Tulum, perched on the jagged cliffs of Quintana Roo. From the sea, by boat -- that was the only way one visited much of Mexico's southern coastal domain in 1958. What a sight those ruins must have presented -- deserted, rising above the turquoise Caribbean, baking under a fierce sun and cobalt sky. Further south, today's resort city of Cancun constituted a remote sand spit home to nary a soul. It was a little over 40 years ago. It may as well have been 40 centuries. As Schell himself dryly noted: "Unless I miss my bet, this place will be overrun by tourists in 10 years."
Cancun now glitters like a tropical Las Vegas, pulsating with Gringo dollar-driven opulence. Tulum is easily visited by paved road -- and by hundreds of tourists at that, arriving by coach tours daily, by the hour. The region constitutes the jewel in Mexican tourism's crown. Yet travels through Schell's old stomping ground can offer the essence of magic. Indeed, Tulum's strength is precisely embodied by such ambience as the individual can inject into its antiquated architecture by imaging the life the city once breathed. Meaning "City of the Dawn" in Maya, it was built around 546 A.D. and first sighted by Spanish seafarers in 1518. Witness Juan Diaz wrote: "Seville would not have seemed more considerable, nor better." Today, the temples of descending gods still face the Caribbean on their cliffs, ramparts and watchtower flank the zone. Yet a quixotic faculty is required to summon Tulum's spirits, since almost every tourist here has another agenda: to come, see, conquer with a camcorder, and get the hell out in time for lunch. The Mexican critic Cuauhtemoc Medina once acidly observed that "tourism ... is largely the result of ... familiarity. One travels merely to verify that which has already been seen."
It inspires dubious mirth to see a trolley service transporting tourists the mere kilometer from the Tulum car park to the Tulum ruins, since it is evident that a piddling hike over the flat terrain might present too great an exertion for the explorer of that which has already been seen. Of course, it gets you there faster. As Red Sea Smuggler Henry de Monfried wrote in what now seems like another magical era -- 1973 -- "the journey itself is now a thing of the past, for man, as the price of his slavery to time, has conquered space. Time, that unrelenting master, not only scorns all that is done without him, but alone gives meaning and validity to the voyage."
We must concur with this lament, as might Rolfe Schell, well into his 90s but still giving the journey a good shake -- perhaps. I last heard of him in 1999, when a Virginian lodge owner contacted me to say that a remarkable man of travels had passed the night under his roof. He was so taken by the ancient mariner that, after he'd left, he spent some time trolling through several Internet search engines to see if there as anything about Schell, and turned up a piece I'd once written about him. He wished to inform me that Rolfe Schell "was alive and kicking." The hardy nonagenarian had departed the lodge to set off on a three-week solo hike, aided by his walking stick, along the Appalachian Trail.
I can imagine Rolfe rhapsodizing his trek on the well-trodden path to its beatific ends, uncovering states of magic, and I assume he didn't forget to pack a good book. Meanwhile, his novel conveyed its obeisance to Time. There is a glorious anonymity to the man, anonymity the vagabond also owns. The vagabond traverses a Zen universe. The vagabond does not lust for his fifteen minutes of fame, because it is irrelevant.
