Central America, on foot

The rule I set for myself was simple and, in hindsight, a little masochistic: no flights until Panama. Everything overland — buses, shared vans, the backs of trucks when nothing else was going my way, my own feet more than I expected. Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, in that order, over about seven months. I wanted to feel the distance, not skip over it at 30,000 feet.

Mexico, early on. The sunburn didn't fully fade until Panama.

Being Deaf on the road changes what "overland" actually means. I couldn't hear a bus driver announce a stop, couldn't hear an argument breaking out two rows back, couldn't hear the alarm clock I didn't have room to pack — for a while my actual system for waking up on time was drinking two full glasses of water before bed and trusting my bladder more than any phone alarm. There were some close calls.

The scariest moment of the whole leg happened in Guatemala, and I still don't fully know what I avoided. A bus I was on stopped in the middle of nowhere and everyone started getting off. I couldn't hear why — no announcement was ever going to reach me anyway — so I did what you do: I followed the crowd. I came around a corner into a pickup truck surrounded by armed men. I don't know who they were or what was happening. I know I got back on that bus faster than I have ever moved before or since, and I didn't ask questions.

Most of the road wasn't like the bus. Most of it looked like this.

Most of it, honestly, looked nothing like that.

A hostel lounge in Guatemala. Nobody could ever tell me the full story behind the mural.

It looked like that — string lights, a rainbow mural nobody could fully explain, a hammock nobody was in a hurry to get out of. It looked like a stranger in Zacatecas walking me to a hostel door and giving me a thumbs up like we'd known each other for years. It looked like renting a scooter in Nicaragua and riding toward a volcano wearing a helmet that was doing more for my conscience than my skull.

Nicaragua. The volcano stayed shrouded the whole ride.

San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. Some evenings didn't need anything to happen in them.

Costa Rica gave me the kind of afternoon you don't plan for: feet up on a seawall, watching a small green island offshore, and being told — I don't remember by who anymore — that it was the same island where Christopher Columbus dropped anchor 513 years before I got there. I sat with that longer than the fact probably deserved. Some tiny piece of land, indifferent to which century of travelers washed up near it.

The island where Columbus anchored, five centuries before I did.

By the time I reached Panama City, seven months of dust and bus exhaust behind me, I stood at a seawall looking at a skyline that could have been Miami or Dubai — glass towers, cranes, money — a few hundred miles from villages that had none of it. I didn't have a tidy thought about what that meant. I just stood there a long time.

Seven months of overland travel, and a skyline that looked like it belonged somewhere else entirely.

There's a photo from around then of me shirtless at a jungle waterfall, arms thrown open, laughing — and if you want the one image that actually captures how that leg of the trip felt, more than the fear or the fatigue, it's that one. Something about seven months of moving under your own power does that to you.

Seven months of moving under my own power, and it finally caught up with me — in the good way.

So did a beach afternoon spent leaning against a fishing boat somebody had painted the colors of a parrot — no itinerary, no ruins to see, just sand and salt water and nowhere to be. I've seen people compare a photo like that to Chris McCandless leaning against his bus in Into the Wild, and I get the instinct, even if the actual scene had nothing to do with a bus. It's the same vagabond posture. The difference is I always meant to come back.

No itinerary that day. Just the boat, the sand, and nowhere to be.

I flew out of Panama in the first week of October 2015 — the first flight I'd taken since Laredo — and went home to Texas for a few months. Not because I was done. Because Europe was next, and I wanted to see my kids before I left again.