10

The most unexpected thing about meeting Ben and rediscovering surfing was that it corresponded with a breakthrough in my Peace Corps work. The water project—which had spun its wheels through months of bureaucratic limbo—finally took off. Materials arrived by the truckload. Cara Sucia’s men gathered each morning with picks and shovels.

My first six months in that village had been spent ticking away the hot hours reading books, painting my little house, and asking questions for a useless health census. Almost overnight, I switched to twelve- or fourteen-hour days, walking through the jungles and coffee fields in jeans and boots, checking elevations, making work schedules, measuring the depth of ditches, and asking landowners for permission to lay pipe.

I became a hero in Cara Sucia. The villagers had all been suspicious of me at first. With the start of the project, I won them over. Even the old boys of the council took my opinions seriously. They called me ingeniera—“engineer.” I was offered food and invited into homes. If I complained of any problems with my house or my cistern, a man would arrive to fix them. I had to invent excuses for not being godmother to several local children.

All the while, my surfing life was in full swing. Though I never lied about where I went on the weekends, rumors spread that I was off advising on other aqueduct projects. It didn’t matter much; there was no need for me to supervise every second of the construction. What counted most were the results, and I was producing those in spades. Nobody questioned what I did with my own time.

And it wasn’t only the villagers who were enthusiastic. The Peace Corps office heard great things about me. I was asked to speak to incoming trainees. Suddenly, all of those bizarre courses I’d taken in college—building concrete cubes in the lab, or tiny models of suspension bridges—finally made sense. I was an engineer after all.

I called home frequently and spoke of my work with pride. My father had been against my Peace Corps service in the first place. He’d seen it as an indulgence, a waste of time. But with the news of the project, everything changed. He was rapt, asking detailed questions, always wanting to know how I learned to do this or that.

My father loved to work with his hands—to build things—but he never had a chance to attend college. The landscaping business was something he inherited—and grew—but his heart wasn’t fully in it. His favorite part, I believe, was tinkering with the broken lawn mowers. He’s the one who pushed me to study engineering.

To my surprise, he decided to fly to El Salvador early in the second year of my service. I was shocked when I heard. In fact, I had to call off a weekend in La Lib with Ben.

The three of us had an awkward dinner in San Salvador the night my father arrived. I don’t think he understood who Ben was, or why they should meet. There was no room for socializing or boyfriends in my father’s vision of my life here. Ben rolled with it well enough.

The next morning, my father and I rode a rattling chicken bus out to Cara Sucia. It was a Sunday; nobody was working. I took him to see the spring boxes—the most complete part of the project. Soon into our walk, he slipped on the trail and muddied his pants and golf shirt.

At the river’s edge, I showed him the two concrete boxes we’d built, and lifted the cover so he could watch the water gushing inside. He asked how we worked in the river and I explained that we made a wall out of red clay—the kind used to make cookware and roofing tiles—to divert the water’s flow while we poured the first layers of concrete.

“Amazing,” my father said over and over, as if I’d invented these techniques, not learned them from the locals.

It was a beautiful day along the riverbed. Butterflies clung to wet rocks. We followed the four-inch galvanized pipes downward on their way. I showed him the suspension bridge we’d constructed to span a wide and rocky ravine, told him about the Salvadoran teenagers who’d worked up there, while the pipe was supported by only a series of machete-hewn tree limbs. I pointed out the forked mango tree where we bent the galvanized pipes, with eight guys pushing on either end, whenever the aqueduct needed to turn corners.

My father listened with a brand of awe that I’d never before seen in him. On that day, I realized that raising me alone had been his life’s work. This project must’ve meant a certain measure of secondhand achievement for him.

We had a look at the beginnings of the tanks, where the work was currently going on. Along the road, I pointed out where the distribution lines would run to the houses. A couple of families had already planted taps beside their cisterns, in anticipation of the water.

My father was less interested in getting to know the community. He didn’t enjoy being studied by the Salvadoran villagers, dragged around and introduced in a language he couldn’t understand. Little kids pulled at the sides of their eyes and demonstrated kung fu moves they’d seen on television. I’d ceased to notice such things long ago. But my father looked bothered by it all. Even at Niña Tere’s house, he remained quiet and withdrawn. He passed a silent judgment on the village, as though it wasn’t deserving of the water project that had so pleased him.

By the time we went to the airport for his departing flight, I was exhausted. Playing the tour guide had worn me out. He bought us a dinner of fried chicken at the terminal’s Pollo Campero. For the last five minutes or so of his trip, with fast food and soda spread across the table, I felt like a child once again. In fact, once the boarding calls began, I had to remind myself that I was staying here. Having won my dad’s approval for this project, it felt like a finish line of sorts.

Once back in Hawai‘i, he continued to follow the progress of the aqueduct. He bought the first computer he’d ever owned. Through frequent e-mails, he continued to offer me his pride, an emotion I’d not quite figured out what to do with.

We spoke on the day of the earthquake, of course, but not since. I haven’t managed to tell him about quitting the Peace Corps, or about the Jeep and South America. I suppose I thought it better to wait until we’re actually on the road—until there’s no chance he might talk me out of it.