A creative nonfiction memoir by author Mark Plimsoll
22,000 people died for his sin,
the night he went to bed in Guatemala,
and woke up in Guatepeor.
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The main character, as the 21 year-old Author,
studies a couple of years in college and works the early morning shift
in a bread factory which leaves him with a couple of hours each night
to party. He reads in the Encyclopedia Brittanica about a country with
a per capita income of a dollar a day, so he decides to hitchhike south
and visit Guatemala. He visits quaint and primitive tourists towns: lives
in an Indian Village nestled among volcanoes, on the Pacific coast in
a new settlement where criminals and Government Officials come to play,
he gets 'adopted' by rich Guatemalans as they set him up to marry, he
visits Mayan ruins, plantations, lakes where pirates once snuck past a
Spanish Castle. But he keeps running into a French girl, and their first
night together the earth moves- the great earthquake of February 4th,
1976 that killed 22,000 people. The rich carried guns to protect what
remained uncrushed, waiting for the epidemics to start.
Amid this chaos of exotic splendor- of colorful indigenous
cultures, the world's most beautiful lake under its trinity of three smoking
volcanoes, verdant landscapes of tropical lowlands and cloud-shrouded
rainforest- the world shook and trembled for days. Plimsoll weaves
together distinct realities of language and culture to show the cracks
between the strata of economic class, race, and human necessity. Pursued
by guilt and his feelings of powerlessness in the face of such temendous
tragedy, his overland return journey through Mexico seems traced on TV
news broadcasts by a series of earthquakes, which he feels are the stamping
footfalls of a capricious God.