If you were to walk down the Pacific coast of Alaska, through British Columbia and Washington, Oregon, California, and into Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, you would end up on the Pacific coast of Honduras.

And if you were to walk south, say, from Nunavut, all the way down the Atlantic Seaboard, looping around Florida, taking the curve of the gulf through Mexico and Belize, you would end up on Honduras' Caribbean coast.
 
If, during this walk, you paid particular attention to the rocks, and the plants, the people and the animals along the way, you very will probably make out relationships between the succession of species, the evolving accents. And relationships in the stories told by the rocks.

So much of North America seems to converge right into Honduras.  And so, while riding just briefly on that train, I realized that I could name the trees in the distance, and that I recognized the ethnicity of the man in the canoe, and that I knew details of the dark history of these plantations. 

It's not that I know so much about Honduras itself.  Only that the mysteries of these eastern frontier-lands have conspired to lure me on nearly every single path of discovery I've sought for ten years, and now, I have been able to peer into the very edge of a wilderness that has mingled in the recesses of my mind for a decade of my life.

Elmer and I continue up a path, into a valley. 

I ask him about his life growing up near La Ceiba, and about the apocalyptic days after Hurricane Mitch.  We crush a plant and spread it on our skin.  "In town, we have bunches of this in our homes," he explains of the mosquito deterring plant.  But I realize it will be no use against the jungle chiggers – tomorrow my legs will be red with two hundred bites.  Now I know why Elmer wears rubber rain boots.

Off the path, I see a giant orchid plant affixed to a giant tree.  Several stalks dangle hundreds of flowers.  There are few things in the world quite like finding a wild orchid.  In Pico Bonito, over a thousand species have been identified – an incomprehensible number.  But orchids are even more elusive than birds and lizards.  You see the plants sometimes high up in treetops, or hidden in inconspicuous places, but so rarely in bloom. 

What fascinates me about this orchid isn't so much its beauty.  Not so much its peculiarities.  But the very fact that it is representative of a thousand other orchid species which lie deeper in this jungle.  That is the thrill of the orchid – the mystery that it represents.

In my early teens, I spent a week every summer in Northern Minnesota with an out-of-state family that summered there.  They were a family of astronomers, educators and architects.  I vacationed with them at a spartan resort  on a lake.  All day, the extended family would talk about books they were reading, and when the light of day was completely gone, family members would collect on the dock under a full night sky, and the astronomers would ruminate, for the benefit of the rest of us, over theories about the existence of the universe, over the history of constellations, and over strange galaxy phenomena.  What a strange way to live, finding joy in the mysteries of our world.