PicoBlog

This week I published one of my favorite stories yet. I joined an expedition into one of the most remote parts of Mexico to search for Sac Balam, a real-life lost Maya city. It was one of the wildest, hardest, and most special things I’ve ever done. Every second I didn’t feel like I was about to die, I was so grateful and amazed to be there. Over the course of six days, we kayaked up rivers no one had traveled in a decade or more, bushwhacked for hours through thickets of spiny plants, and found—well, you’ll have to read the story for that.

Sac Balam was the last capital of the Lacandon Maya, who resisted Spanish conquest until 1695. That’s almost 60 years after Harvard was founded, if you’re counting. And they weren’t even the last independent Maya city standing! I’ve lived in Mexico for a long time, and I had never heard about any of that history. As I learned more, both from research at home and jungle adventure time, I realized that we think about the conquest all wrong. There’s this idea that it happened from one day to the next and then it was over, with everyone—especially the Indigenous societies targeted for invasion and violence—immediately transformed in its wake. But in reality, colonialism was never fast or evenly distributed, in Mexico or anywhere else. The Maya had complex political, social, and economic relationships with each other when the Spanish arrived, and those relationships continued long after the invasion. Some of them continue today. The conquest was never inevitable, and it isn’t even over. 

I could go on and on about the complexities of the conquest and the misunderstood colonial period, and I will—I can’t wait to write more about it. But for now, I thought I’d give you a glimpse and what writing a feature like this takes. I first heard about the independent Maya capitals about 18 months ago, when I was reporting a completely different story about a completely different time period that happened to involve some of the archaeologists who study the colonial period in the Petén, in northern Guatemala. That was the home of the Itzas, who remained independent until 1697. I was really stunned to hear about them and their capital, Nojpeten, and I filed the topic away as something I wanted to write about one day, once I found the right story.

The right story came along in December 2018, when I interviewed Brent Woodfill, also about something else entirely. (In this case, it was an NSF grant he got to excavate a huge Maya figurine workshop in Guatemala, which I eventually wrote about as well.) We were chatting about his other projects and he said, oh yeah, next summer I’m going to try to find a lost city. He told me a little about Sac Balam, and I got this rush of adrenaline writers will recognize, when your brain and body and everything around you screams, this is a story. So, minutes after learning about the trip and never having met anyone involved, I asked if I could come. And Brent said, sure! In the weeks after, I went back and and listened to that part of the interview several times to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood or made it up entirely.

The trip was scheduled for early June, before the rainy season would make the rivers of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve dangerous to navigate. I pitched it to Science in January, and it got accepted in February. On Brent’s recommendation, I got a preventative rabies vaccine, in case we went into any caves with bats in them. (We didn’t—but we did see a lot of cute bats hanging from fallen tree trunks over the rivers we kayaked. They were too scared of us to get close enough to bite.) The last time I had been full-on camping was during my trip to Peru in 2015, to write about the evolution of the Amazon’s biodiversity. But that trip had culminated at a long-established scientific research station, not a random patch of flat ground hours upriver into undisturbed jungle. I needed some practice, and I needed some supplies.

So in May I flew to California, spent hundreds of dollars at three different REIs over the course of a week, and went backpacking with my dad. It helped, and it didn’t. It reassured me that I could still set up a tent and sleep on the ground. It showed me what gear I was actually going to use (a huge water bladder, an inflatable pillow, camp shoes). It instilled in me an appreciation for bringing the right snacks (beef jerky, dried mango) and a flask of tequila to share. But, as I wrote about in my very first newsletter, camping in a U.S. national park could never have prepared me for the vines, the heat, the bugs, and the sense of total isolation the jungle brought.

In the end I spent two weeks in Chiapas, terrifyingly and blissfuly cut off from the rest of the world. My phone got wet and died during one of the several times our kayak tipped over, so even when we came back to the ecolodge and then to San Cristobal, I couldn’t go online. (It was glorious.) Each night, I wrote up the day’s events in a waterproof notebook in as much detail as I could. I recorded a few interviews and took photos with my surviving camera. (Sadly I lost others with my phone.) When I got back, I had to turn those notes, and the interviews and research I’d done before the trip, into a story.

My first draft, as usual, wasn’t very good. I got swept up in everything I wanted to say about colonial Maya history, so it had a complicated structure only I could make sense of. My wise and brilliant editor Martin Enserink read it and said, why don’t you just write down what happened on your trip, in the order it happened? And of course he was right. (Editors are always right. It’s annoying, frankly.) The story has been tightened and polished since that second draft, of course, but its bones are the same. 

From that first interview with Brent to publication, this story took 9 months. I have seven drafts of it saved on my computer. Aside from the wild jungle adventure, that’s a pretty typical timeline for a long piece that involved such intense travel. Fast, even. Writers are doomed to see only the published versions of other writers’ work, with no sense of how long the idea took to come together or how much the piece changed from first to final draft—which is a recipe for anxiety and intimidation. I hope lifting the curtain on my own process is at least a little bit illuminating.

My writing

My OTHER favorite story of all time is “The Believer,” about the surprising scientific legacy of Mormon archaeology in Mexico. I found out this week that it was chosen as a notable selection for the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019. Speaking of how long feature stories take—this one, from the first spark of an idea to publication—took four years. You can preorder the book here. (It is no doubt filled with amazing writing but won’t include my full article, just the title. To read it now, click the link above!)

And that’s as far as I got when I was writing this en route to my dear friends’ wedding, so no recommendations this week. Congratulations Maia and Wes! It was amazing!

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