I’ve kept a journal for most of my adult life. On the shelves to the left of my computer, below an indoor beehive, I have many volumes of binders. Each volume begins with a prologue, addressed to my family.
I’ve not tried to couch in gentle language the events or emotions that I’ve experienced. Rather I’ve written about them as they occurred, expressing both joy and pain of the moment.
The ratio of joy to pain changes from year to year. During my first stint in college, at Stanford, there was an abundance of pain and less joy. Back then I wrote in many notebooks, poems and love letters and stray thoughts and momentary rages. I still have the logbook from the first Mexico road trip with Will and Rob. There are pictures inspired by our travels, and there are entries in which we berate the world, often in jest, because we were suffering from bug bites and stomachaches and heat.
Fuck you, log, you piece of shit.
Do you have to eat rice and beans until it’s coming out of your ears?
Do you have to drive a heavy motorcycle over some of the worst roads in creation—at night, in the rain?
Do you have to take your malaria pills without water?
Do you get devoured by insects?
We’ll see who makes it to Tierra del Fuego.
There are thousands of pictures from Rapa Nui in my journals, adding color to the hundreds of pages documenting my island life. Not long ago, I opened one of these notebooks and turned to one of the last entries I made. I came across the phrase my heart is weeping. I wrote that because my friend had passed away. Maria. She was part of Vera’s extended family, the one who introduced me to a new community on Easter Island. She was the whole reason I got to go there, and she died on March 22, 1973, from tuberculosis. We had so little language between us, a great cultural distance, and yet she was someone for whom I felt great love, uncomplicated by any awareness of difference. What did I do for her? I know I appreciated her. Was it enough?
I kept a journal when I worked on the ejido in Tomendán, even more extensive than my scribblings from Rapa Nui. Much of my writing was about the life and the atmosphere of that place. I wrote about how the breeze tugged on the curtains of Raoul’s home in Tomendán.
The two brothers I met in Tomendán, Raoul and Emmanuel, had families with three and eight children. They cooked over wood-fire hearths. Life without running water or electricity made for long days of gathering firewood, collecting water, and sweeping the earthen floors with ash from the fire to sanitize them. And the ejido faced many obstacles. Raoul once told me, “We are like slaves of the government,” because the local administrators endeavored to trap them in debts they could never get out of, no matter how much sugar cane they refined.
An early page from my Tomendán journals alludes to an undercurrent of violence in that community:
I accompanied the family to a little movie theater in the town. It was like a wooden barn, with a crowd of people gathered around waiting for the shows to start. While we milled about, eating and drinking, we talked about a man who was shot a few days ago.
It had been a drunken argument, and the police didn’t apprehend the murderer, who ran into the countryside. Later I learned about the volume of political killings in the area. If a low-level campesino got too involved in politics, there was a good probability that the local power brokers would put a hit out on him. Walking to the fields in the early morning by the free-flowing stream through that town, feeling the wind before the heat of the day came, I found it difficult to imagine such violence. To my eyes, Tomendán was another paradise: good work, good food, a banana and mango tree here and there. Comparing my notes from that time with my notes from Rapa Nui, I ask myself if I was attempting to re-create one experience in another.
I have tried not to see Tomendán and its people through my often romantic and naive viewpoint. I am unsure if I’ve fulfilled this or not.
In the ensuing decades I would return to Tomendán every four years. First, I brought my friends Will and Kate. Later, I brought my young sons, Graham and Sean. We helped Emmanuel build a greenhouse to grow cucumbers. I felt grateful that my boys got to suck the sweet juice from sugar cane that they harvested with machetes, enjoy fresh tamales, pick mangoes and let the juice run down their chins, ride burros, and live without running water and electricity—all as I had done while living with Emmanuel and Lola long before the boys were born.
Many years later, on a mild March afternoon in 1997, I got a phone call. An unfamiliar voice introduced himself in Spanish. This person—I’ll call him Pedro—said that he was from Taretan, a town I knew well just a few kilometers from Tomendán. He told me that he had fallen in love with Lupe, the daughter of Juan, a friend of mine from the village with whom I’d worked hoeing sugar cane. The couple had decided to elope and travel to El Norte.
I first met Lupe when she was only three years old. Searching my memories, I recalled our hikes to the cascadas, the waterfalls, where she’d run behind her brothers on the dusty path leading up to the three falls. She had enormous and lovely brown eyes.
On the phone, Pedro told me that he had paid a coyote to get them across the border. They were in a sleepy cantina now on the US side. From the jukebox in the background, I could hear one of my favorite rancheras melodically describing Mexican life. Meanwhile Pedro explained that he had worked very hard over a two-year period to raise $1,200, which they had given to the coyote. Now that they had crossed the border, he said, the coyote was demanding $1,500 more.
I took a deep breath. I told Pedro that I needed to make a call to Tomendán to verify the story. I knew the owner of the panadería, the bread shop, where the town phone was located. I called up the bakery owner, Dona Luisa. I asked her in Spanish if she could possibly run up to the shop and put my friend Juan on the line.
Soon, I heard his voice. “Roberto, como estas?”
Craig is difficult to pronounce in Spanish, so I am known as Roberto to my friends in Tomendán.
After asking about Juan’s wife, their children, and the sugar-cane harvest, I asked if it was true that Lupe had eloped. With a sigh, he said, “Si.”
That was all I needed to know. I thanked him and said that I would call back later. With some trepidation, I dialed the number of the border cantina again. The phone was passed to Pedro, and the rest of the story unfolded quickly. The coyote had threatened to rape Lupe and kill Pedro if they didn’t pay up immediately.
I could feel tightness in my throat, and I sensed Pedro’s fear. He continued to talk, but I interrupted him and asked to speak to the coyote. This man was just as I had imagined: threatening, full of machismo, wicked, and mean. He demanded his pago. My fingers gripped the receiver tightly, pressing it closer to my ear. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I screamed into the phone in Spanish, “Shut up, you lazy son of a bitch.” I told him that if he touched them, I’d string him up by his balls for the real coyotes to feast on.
After a few minutes of yelling at each other, he told me that if I wired him the money via Western Union, he would let them go. Without hesitation, I jumped into my pickup truck and drove to our local Town and Country Market. I’d never sent a Western Union wire before. But many of my farm employees used this service, because most of them had families in Mexico, in towns like Tomendán and Taretan.
I sent the money. By the time I returned to my office, Pedro and Lupe were back on the road again, away from the coyote. Later I was able to call Juan and let him know that the situation had been resolved. I know that the couple eventually made it to California.
It was a horrifying event, but I knew it happened all the time because of America’s broken immigration system. I asked myself if I was doing enough to run a fair-farming business, and if there was more I could do, at least on the local level, to address the unfairness of the overall system. On the other hand, I realized that my actions could have unintended consequences. Helping undocumented immigrants cross the border might preclude me from certain leadership opportunities. Certainly I could never serve as secretary of agriculture after that; somebody would find out. Couldn’t I do more to help by having a position with influence?
These thoughts came from Dad. I suppose my fantasies about serving in a cabinet also related to him. I’m glad that I sent that money. I would have done the same thing to help my own kids, or Will’s kids. It concerned my friends.
While I’ve thought of myself as a political radical, I had a friend on Rapa Nui who was a true radical. I wrote about her in my journal—ten days into my island life.
Her name was Louisa. I don’t remember how we met. In my journal, I wrote:
Her homeland is Austria. Her life has been the struggle of the proletariat. She is a Jew, a Russian, and a German, and she is in Chile to support Allende and make revolution.
She was visiting Rapa Nui to take a break from her organizing work in Santiago. By this time, I was well known as the local milkman.
Louisa told me stories, fabulous tales, some invented, some real, and all magical. They seemed to me like fantasies of far-off lands. Europe, where she’d come from, seemed as exotic as the Pacific island I’d been calling home. She had stories about traveling with Jimi Hendrix. There were too many stories to list.
Her real focus was work. After ten days, she left Rapa Nui as mysteriously as she had arrived, and we never saw each other again. For years, we stayed in touch through letters. Hers were typed on rice paper. Often she would add cursive in the margins of her long, typed sentences. The letters told of the dystopia that Santiago was becoming.
Yesterday a member of the communist party here in the village told me: We recognize you as a revolutionary. We will defend you, whatever is going to happen.
Much later, after I returned to the States, Louisa’s correspondence continued to arrive at 2412 Tracy Place in Washington. One letter, dated November 10, 1973—exactly sixty days after the assassination of Allende—reads as follows:
Dear Craig,
Thanks for your letter from the 12th of September. Don’t send stuff like that to me anymore. Censorship. I’ll leave for Europe at the end of November, not sure, maybe later.
We have got some plans and we need your help. We need contacts and unfortunately bread. We need technical equipment, for example that tiny Japanese camera in order to shoot pictures without arousing suspicion. We are creating an underground information center. That is all I can tell you. Don’t use the correo.
See you—L
When I read that letter now, I see the irony in the fact that it arrived at the home of the former US secretary of defense, whose son sent money to the person who wrote that letter so she could buy bread. The father in that house designed a war against Communism in Vietnam, and the son supported a person fighting a war on the side of socialism in Chile.
A year later, Louisa was back in Europe, where she helped Chilean refugees who had fled the Pinochet regime. She still wrote to me, and I still have her letters. They’re tucked into my journals, loose and toward the back.
One of the letters I wrote to Louisa contained a story about my father: he used to walk the length of the Vietnam Memorial at night, a shadow in the dark, somehow going unrecognized. Like that image, which comes from a place I can’t remember, Louisa’s words exist in a place beyond conversation, deeper than happiness, less tangible than the soil of my orchards but even more a part of the soil in which I grow.
Am I a revolutionary? Do I really fulfill my duties, my responsibilities? Do I work hard enough? Am I doing enough?
My eyes are tired. So long, be good. Venceremos.