Roger’s Reality: The Great Copal Caper

By Roger Owens

We decided to go to Belize in 2012; we just had to see the temples before the end of the world, you know. That whole Mayan calendar thing was a huge joke there, with tee-shirts showing cartoon Mayans saying things like “Down tools, everybody, we lost the contract,” to a crew of stonecutters, or one stonecutter to another, “People in 2012 are really gonna freak out over this!” Of course, the world didn’t come to an end, but we sure saw some incredible temples.
    One, at a place called Big Crocodile River, was one hundred sixty feet high, and five levels were exposed. They said as many as four to nine levels had yet to be excavated, and that the entire structure might be over four hundred feet high. It had a crack down the middle, from an earthquake about one thousand years ago. It was still perfectly level. Name the modern building that would be standing, let alone straight up and solid, one thousand years after it was split by an earthquake. I dare you.

    So, Belize is cool, not as cool as Costa Rica, but still, the temples are a big draw, and the money is easy, two BZ to one US. And there is the tubing on a river through a cave, and canoeing into a cave and seeing a skull being turned to stone, drip by drip, from a four-thousand-year-old cave burial. Not to mention dozens of other limestone formations: curtains of stone, jellyfish hanging from the ceiling, angels, waterfalls in still life, and one shadowed figure somehow lit from above through a hole, standing on a bridge of rock, that was Batman to the life.

    This was the kind of trip where our guide hooked his battered work lamp to a car battery under the rear thwart of an old aluminum canoe and we held the light while he paddled. Indiana Jones would have felt right at home.

On the ride back from the cave canoe trip, our driver, in a decrepit, noisy van, introduced us to copal. We had been offered some by an old Guatemalan woman outside the hotel, but hadn’t known what it was, and she seemed insulted we didn’t buy any. He explained that it is a resin produced from the copal palm, which Google tells me is Protium copal, and you burn it like incense. He showed us a fat, smooth lump of translucent whitish stuff that smelled more like pine than any palm tree. He assured us that copal, and the figure of Mother Mary stuck on his dash with a magnet, was all you needed to get along in this life.
    Then he wanted to know what the hell was wrong with us Americans and this gay-marriage stuff? We just shrugged it off, figuring it was no use getting into politics with folks whose Catholicism hadn’t changed in centuries, especially since we supported gay marriage.
    Most of eastern Belize, the home of Billiken (Pelican) Beer and Kuknat (Coconut) Rum, is flat, marshy, and buggy. And hot. Did I say hot? HOT. Here and there are isolated hills, looking odd just sitting out there alone on an otherwise flat landscape. We learned later that these are not hills at all but buildings, or entire towns, covered by the forest. In our travels we went west, to San Ignacio, up in the mountains and near the border with Guatemala. One temple was within sight of a border crossing. Two nice young men with crisp military haircuts, camo BDU’s, and US-issued Colt M4 fully automatic rifles sat at one of the concrete tables in the tourist pavilion eating lunch, dividing their time between flirting with the hot young touristas in their short shorts, and playing games and texting on their phones. I was kind of grumpy about that. I couldn’t get shit on my phone.
    When we asked our current driver about it, he yelled from the front of another ancient Toyota van, over the roar of the engine and the wind through the open windows. Not much AC in Belize, and did I say it’s hot? “Yeah, the Guatemalans come over here to work. The government makes a show of guarding the border at the roads, but there’s a hundred and sixty-five miles of jungle. They just walk across anywhere. We don’t really mind. They work hard. Us, we’re kind of lazy…” I assured him that we were very much the same in the US. The difference is that most Belizianos are of average height, and Guatemalans tend to run about five foot nothing. They stick out like a sore thumb. Nobody cares. “And hey, what is it with you Americans and this gay marriage stuff?” More shrugs, but it was certainly the hot topic for the locals.

We asked the driver, who worked for the San Ignacio Hotel, about copal, and he stopped at a couple places but they didn’t have any. He assured us that nearer the mountains in San Ignacio he would find us some, but we were leaving the next day. He drove us back to the east coast for a trip out to Ambergris Key, and on the way, he got our names and address, saying if he couldn’t find it before we left the country, he would mail it to us in the States.
    The San Ignacio is a four-star joint, noisy vans or not, and it seemed that nothing was too good for us. We had spent our anniversary there and they had really put on the dog, given us dinner on the veranda with champagne and flowers, and rigged a table in the room with snacks, more champagne and flower petals all over the bed. A pair of aracaris, small toucans, regularly looked in on our top-floor windows from the surrounding rain forest.

    San Ignacio has a temple called Cahal Pech under excavation right up the hill by the hotel, and we could walk to it. This was more like the real thing. Grad students from a dozen universities around the world dug with dental picks and toothbrushes in pits marked out with pegs and colored string, each color logged so artifacts recovered would not be mixed up, and numbers on permanent tags for each pit. More students with clipboards nervously logged every tiniest piece of broken pottery or bone, anxious that not the least particle of history be lost.

    Graduate students are the willing slaves of their professors, and in archeology if the boredom doesn’t kill you one of your competitors might, just to get your spot on a dig. Any dig. Pictures on the wall of the reception center showed grad students in outdated clothes doing pretty much the same thing as they were doing right outside in 2012. The site in the photos looked pretty much the same; little had changed over the years. Some of the photos came from the 1950s. You can’t just take a bulldozer to these things. When we visited, the Belize government would not make any estimate of the cities and buildings that were known of and yet untouched. They would only say “thousands.” Here, in the real, painstaking, mind-bogglingly time-consuming world of actual archaeology, Indiana Jones would not be comfortable, not at all.
    Our driver dropped us at the airport outside Belize City, which had once been the capital, but Hurricane Hattie did so much damage to it in 1961 they moved it to Belmopan, some fifty miles inland. He asked where we were staying on Ambergris Key, and he said he knew the place, and would call us there about the copal. We flew out to the island in about fifteen minutes in a little seven-seater, landing on a crushed shell beach with the port wing protruding over the water.

What can be said about Ambergris Key? Utterly unique. No cars, only golf carts. Even the cops drive carts, but theirs are souped up, with all the usual cop stuff, lights and siren and radios. Sand blows in across the cobbled streets every night, and every morning is swept off by sweeper trucks and citizens who own shops and hotels wielding brooms to the entrances to their establishments.
    And, far from the tight-assed homophobic mainlanders, the first islander we met was Carlos, who took our bags from the plane and could only be described as a complete flamer. In his crisp white uniform, he looked at us with sincere compassion. “What? You don’t have your luggage ticket? Oh, snap!” (He really said this, with the overhead finger snap.) “Let’s just not worry about that little ticket, shall we? You had to have it to get on the plane after all! Follow me please!”

Okeechobee
meets
Key West

    At the local store down the street from our hotel, a tall black person of indeterminate gender hung around and was clearly accepted completely. I commented to the wife it was like “Okeechobee meets Key West.” Okeechobee is Redneck City and Key West is, well, Key West. We had a ball on Ambergris Key, ate great food and drank too much good booze, and sometime while we were out, we got a call at the hotel from the driver at the San Ignacio. The message was that his cousin, Alice, worked at the mainland airport in the gift shop. We could pick up a package of copal incense from her when we flew back from Ambergris, before catching our flight home.
    We get to the airport, go to the gift shop, and I ask the lady if she is Alice. She says no, Alice isn’t working today, but her brother is here. If we are the people looking to pick something up, that’s him right there by the pillar. We go over to him, and he calls us by name, and hands over a fat, padded mailer with our names and address in the US on it. I tip him ten BZ, thank him, he thanks us, I tuck the envelope in my carry-on, and we leave.

I begin
to panic

It’s a quick flight from Belize City to Miami, and it wasn’t until the seatbelt lights came on and the lady on the loudspeaker said “We are now starting our descent to Miami International Airport…” that something began to niggle in my brain. Miami International Airport. In Miami, Florida. Miami, Florida, with the highest rate of drug smuggling in the eastern United States. Maybe the tightest security of any airport in the country. And here I am, carrying a package, of…something. I begin to panic. I didn’t even look in the envelope, it could be anything. Heroin, meth, fentanyl, cocaine, the list starts running through my head. All those warnings from the PA system in every airport start to clang around in there too: don’t accept anything from anyone you don’t know. Never leave your bags unattended. Never take anything on a plane for anyone else. Even if it is just some resin incense, if they don’t know what it is, are they going to believe that? My common sense tells me not only no but hell no. At the least we’re in for the night in a holding cell; at worst we’ll be living the reality of Midnight Express for the next umpteen years. I can’t even claim it’s mine and get my wife off, it has both of our names on it!
    I begin running through the questioning in my fevered mind, envisioning just how it will go. “So, this driver. What was his name?” “I don’t know.” “He didn’t tell you?” “No. I mean, yes. He did tell me, I just don’t remember.” “His cousin Alice, you said? What did Alice look like?” “I don’t know, I never saw Alice. But the gal at the gift shop where Alice works knew her, and she pointed out Alice’s brother, who had the copal.” “What was the gal at the gift shop’s name?” “I don’t know.” “So, she pointed out Alice’s brother. What was Alice’s brother’s name?” “I don’t know…”
    By this time the TSA officers will be looking at each other behind my back, shaking their heads, like a bad cop show. One difference is, there’s no good cop. None of them “just want to help me,” or “just” want to keep the pissed-off one from beating my ass. They all want to beat my ass. It’s like a personal affront. You trying to slip something by us, huh boy? What do you think we are, boy, stupid?
    By now we are in the terminal, our bags on a cart like everyone else’s, waiting to go through Customs. Ahead of us are what I know from their dress and speech are Haitians, an ancient couple with enough baggage for the queen of France. The line moves slowly, and, as always, the culture shock sets in. Miami is hot. Belize is hotter, and their air conditioning sucks. You’re back in America, no more third-world AC or languages or ads or products, everything is just so. Grey fabric walls on grey-carpeted hallways, panels that can open like magic and swallow the errant traveler into one of the rooms where they ask those questions. The ones you can’t answer.

Then,
inevitably,
the inevitable
happens

    Then, inevitably, the inevitable happens. The guy with the drug dog comes down the line. Worse, he’s a brute. Covered in body armor and armed with a pistol. I don’t look up at many people but this guy is big. There is a medical condition of abject terror that I have heard best described as “sweat-balls the size of quarters running down the crack of your ass.” At this point, I am right at that point, if you know what I mean. The big man saunters down the line, touching a piece of luggage here and there. The dog sniffs each bag he touches, not reacting. The man stops in front of us. I think I am going to pee my pants. The man touches the Haitian couple’s bags. I can’t think of a less likely couple of smugglers, but maybe he knows something I don’t. The dog sniffs the luggage. Still no reaction. The big man moves by. The dog ignores us. I breathe for the first time in about fifteen minutes. We go through Customs, get our car, and head to the hotel. I breathe again.

The copal we brought home was wrapped in corn husks

    So, it’s all true, folks, every sordid detail. Despite desperate danger and fickle fate, we successfully smuggled approximately one-third of a kilo of high-quality copal incense into the United States from Belize. And through Miami International no less. These days I simply order it on the internet, but it’s just not the same. The first time was much more fun.

Copyright © 2021 by Roger Owens