The Wandering Kind: BONUS POST

"Lucky," by Holly Starley, fellow nomad and friend (with audio)

This is the last segment of a special three-part report from the collective road. (You can read the first two parts here.) But pause what you’re doing and take a moment with “Lucky,” a gorgeous and important essay by Holly Starley, my friend, fellow nomad, and co-founder of the Caravan Writers Collective with myself, Paul Corman-Roberts, and Matt Smythe.

I had the pleasure of recording new audio of this essay, which is just below; the text, reprinted in full with permission, follows. Read more of Holly’s work and subscribe to Holly Starley’s Rolling Desk, and come find out about the good trouble we’re getting into over at the Caravan Writers Collective. Join us!

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Holly Starley, Ecuador, 2012

Lucky

by Holly Starley

Originally published on April 27 on Holly Starley’s Rolling Desk

Listen to this piece read (with Holly’s permission) by Marya here:

“Do you ever have to use your” (a pause to glance at my small frame) “wit to, you know, get away?”

Some version of this question, along with how often I’m scared and whether I carry a weapon, frequently follows the revelation that I travel and nomad largely solo.

Over the years, I’ve played around with various answers. “I’ve been lucky,” was once a go-to. Now, I might say, winking, “I’m smart,” or, “I’m aware of my surroundings,” or, “I have wit coming out of my ears.” All true.

So is the luck piece, but it’s complicated. I once, after all, dined on trout pulled from the gateway to the Amazon on the deck of a house so intimate with its surroundings the forest might have birthed it. I once, after all, found myself momentarily stunned, sand roughing my cheek, knees against my thighs, hands pinning my wrists.

Which is to say the world, after all, brims with kindness, with new friends who invite you to their mother’s home deep in a rainforest or fix your seven-pin hitch plug in the middle of the night or give you their own scooter when they see yours has a wobbly tire. The world, after all, contains men who hear you say no on an empty beach and let you know they don’t need permission, with men who send fathers to torture prisons and imprison students for speech, bomb far-off apartment buildings and emoji cheer about it, investigate women for miscarriages, systematically remove human rights from and records of trans people and people of color and women, manipulate global markets to line their own pockets at the expense of, well, everyone else—who take, take, take because they can, and still some of us seem—and seem is key here—to slip away from the repercussions.

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It was in Baños de Agua Santa on the edge of the Ecuadorian Amazon that I found myself under starlight, writing notebook propped on bent knees, back against the arm of a bench. I was well into my second month exploring the country. Baños, with its cobblestone and warm baths of holy water and welcoming cafés, felt like ease after a bustling metropolis and the surftown that never slept, just the spot to get back to the practice I deemed most holy, this liquid, immersive practice that could carve worlds.

A group of street musicians stopped nearby. Brought instruments to hand or lips. Here, a pan flute soloed, a haunting tune swirling in the night air. Here, the bright, Puckish rhythm of la clave tugged at my hips.

When the group took a break, I tucked wrinkled bills into the open guitar case and soon found myself in conversation, accompanying the buskers to their next stop to write as they played.

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I’m going to tell you right now there’s a part of the Baños story I usually leave out in the telling. I’m not going to leave it out now. Do you get that I’m protecting you? By the stuff I leave out, I mean.

The Montañita story I just don’t tell. Period. Not often. But I will now. I get now that it’s the taking, taking, taking that actually gets protected in the not telling.

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Known for consistent swells, diverse breaks, and nightlife, Montañita had a pulse that never stopped beating. It was one of the towns I wasn’t visiting strictly solo. My off-and-on partner had been surfing here since youth and was visiting when I arrived. We’d spent a beautiful New Year’s with his family farther south before parting ways a few days back. It was his birthday. I’d come to surprise him.

Telling you I didn’t leave when his reaction to spotting me on the beach was lukewarm is like giving you a photograph, isn’t it?

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Was it the night of my initial connection with the musicians when I first ended up back at one of their apartments? We drank cold-ish beers from plastic cups, played a miniature billiards game, and exchanged stories, me in my broken Spanish, till dawn neared.

Was it three of them who were cousins, two of the men and the one woman? I wish I could recall for certain who played which instrument. I remember her hair, thick and glistening, and her smile, wide and reassuring. I think she kept the rhythm with the clave and a big drum with a shoulder strap. Was it her mom who built the house without walls next to the roaring river?

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The beach in Montañita was a thing of dreams. Water so warm you could linger on a surfboard under moonlight. Breaks so gentle even a beginning surfer like me could catch a wave. Others big enough to host surfing competitions. Men who pulled fish from the sea to make ceviche, selling heaping bowls from wheeled carts for $4 at dawn. Sand like gold.

Where town met playa stood a wall of rocks. Every sunset, locals sat atop the wall, passing a joint, as the belly of our globe spun toward sun. Sky watercolored. Ocean slid up to meet glowing ball of fire slowly disappearing into it. A chorus would erupt: “10 … 9 … 8 …” At “3 … 2 … 1,” only glistening opal remained where sun had been. A cheer rose into dusk.

Though the raucous after nightfall made me think of Montañita as eternal Burning Man with nature as artist, I knew without being told to never venture solo onto the velvety stretch of empty beach in moonlight or onto the streets that led in and out of town. It wasn’t just whispered warnings or the naked body of a tourist found near my hostel at a beach farther north. It was the blood in my animal body.

During my first week, I stayed at a hostel outside of town and didn’t join the sunset show, instead nestled behind locked door before dusk.

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“Deberías venir.” (You should come.) Which of the musicians suggested it?

And who assured me the one who’d grown increasingly bristly over my repeated no—the pan flute player?—wouldn’t be there?

The flutist, grin from ear to ear, fawning, had been the one to draw me in. I think I’d be more likely now to predict the simmering rage, just below the surface, that, though not new to me then, still took me by surprise in men who seemed slightly “put on” in early encounters.

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By the night of the barbecue, I’d moved hostels to the center of Montañita. The aroma of grilling fish, which we’d selected earlier from a bustling fishmongery, wafted from the street corner. Six or so of us, facing each other, pedaled a bicycle contraption like an escaped carnival ride—bright yellow metal frame, grinning, spinning faces. Aguardiente, a distilled spirit made from fermented sugarcane molasses, flowed. I soon lost track of the pop-ins to various corner marts for another bottle or a couple cans of beer. We danced at a club, me angry I hadn’t yet learned to salsa, pretending to follow.

Was it late that night? The next? I found myself seated on a curb with a man from the festivities. Alcohol had loosened my worries over poor grammar, stilted vocabulary. When I realized we were exploring “deep” subjects—life philosophies, family, travel—I swooned. This—to connect with people from disparate worlds, to speak and think and dream in another tongue—was among my most cherished whys.

“Gracias,” I said, breathing in the pungent mix of tobacco and marijuana when he offered me a freshly rolled spliff.

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That thing I usually leave out? The flutist’s attempt to enter my hostel. Was I sleeping? Out? Was it the night I Skyped with my on-again-off-again, he now returned to the United States?

Why do I have an image I’m certain isn’t my own of the flutist halfway through a window? I’m fairly sure the hostelier told me, maybe had even been the one to prevent his entrance. Or maybe the window thing didn’t happen. Maybe it was that he tried to gain entry to one of the commons areas after having been told no. I suspect I know why my mind has refused to file these details.

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Not until we were on the precipice of that beach I avoided at night did I take note of my surroundings as my new friend and I talked and wandered and passed the spliff. I hesitated for the briefest of moments before stepping onto sand. But this man knew who I was here with. He’d made zero indication of intentions beyond conversation. And I adore sea lapping shore under soft light of moon.

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We drove through the forest most of the morning, a turn here, another there along roads of ebony soil that looked the same to me, roads lined by towering trunks and, so far away it seemed a world of its own, a lush, interwoven canopy. The conversation was light, the energy bright, and the flutist absent as promised.

Our hostess was a force that belied her tiny frame. Soon after we arrived, she led us by foot into the forest near the home she and her once-lawyer-from-Philly-now-bearded-man-of-the-forest husband had built by hand, stopping at a partially cleared field. Here, they’d soon build a guesthouse. Everyone who visited played a role in its construction.

She hefted the machete hanging from her waistband and, with a swift swing, effortlessly felled a swathe of the chest-high, bamboo-like thicket. Then, eyes dancing, she handed me the machete come scythe and pointed her lips to the thicket.

Taking a deep breath, I swung. One or two shoots fell; another few hung askew. I whacked again and then again, till a small patch was more or less cleared. Behind me, a chorus of giggles erupted.

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We hadn’t been sitting on the beach long when my new friend moved in for a kiss.

“No,” I said sharply, instantly embarrassed, instantly chastising myself for my miscalculation. “Lo siento,” I added, apologizing. Had I misled him? I was aware, wasn’t I, even a smile could be taken as promise?

He cocked his head and took me in. I made to stand.

The quickness with which he had me pinned below him was stunning. Cheek against sand, I gasped. I peered to my right, calculating the distance between his hot breath and the lights of the town that never slept, mind stilling in that way it does when everything rides on your next move.

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Late afternoon, we dined on fish pulled from the nearby river, wrapped in leaves the size of my head, and cooked in the stone oven on a part of the house that was mostly open deck and steaming piles of fried yucca and rice.

Shortly after we ate, the heavens opened. Our hosts led us to another deck, this one covered. Hammocks stretched from hooks on large beams. Tucked into mine, I swayed slightly, the drumbeat of the planet’s lifeblood on the wooden roof guiding me in and out of dreams.

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If I used words, I don’t remember. I’m pretty sure I met his eyes, instinct telling me it was important he see me not as a small frightened body below his but, rather, as the person he’d just swapped life stories with. The moment I felt his grip on my wrists loosen, I rolled toward the lights, jumped to my feet, and ran. Glancing back, I saw he’d pursued but halfheartedly.

Behind the door of my hostel, I sank to the floor and wept, hot with my foolishness, heart rate slowing.

I’d later learn this man wasn’t part of the inner circle. He’d long been a hanger-on.

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I don’t know what to make of all this “luck.” I want to tell you about the Bañoses (minus the flutist) but not about the Montañitas. Why? So you won’t worry? So we’ll believe only in the bounty of strangers, the joy of good fortune? So I can dismiss the dangers of living as a woman—the infuriating addition foisted on the math of my travels, my life?

So we don’t have to figure the calculations for those who don’t have the luck I stumbled into by birth—low melanin levels, cis identification, a gender that matches that assigned at birth, relative lack of disability, relative wealth?

Consider two statements, both true: I’m a woman who creates luck in my travels by situational awareness, kindness, willingness to engage warmly with strangers, calmness in the face of danger, and taking only calculated risks. I’m a woman who’s often stumbled into dumb luck, boosted by the luck she was born into.

It’s hard to fathom the amount of luck—be it inherited, generated, or chance—it will take to get through what’s happening in the world, in the United States, right now unscathed or relatively so. Some certainly won’t. Some haven’t already.

Remember how I said some of us “seem” to slip away from repercussions? That’s only if we suppose there’s no cost to the need to slip away, out from under a body, to be ever vigilant of locks. No cost to living in a world where sliding to the ground, back to a closed door to still your racing heart, is considered luck. Here’s the calculation now: What will it take to spread awareness that your fortune is my fortune is our fortune? Your due process is my due process is our due process? Your bodily autonomy is my bodily autonomy is our bodily autonomy? Your cost is my cost is our cost?

I don’t know for sure why the man on the beach let me go. I do know many like him don’t let many like me leave. I could tell you stories with different endings. He’s both a representation and a product of a system built on “there’s not enough to go around,” and power means taking. The same system has drilled into me message after message that all boil down to one: Shhhhhhh.

You know what to do if you don’t have something nice to say. Talking about what happens in the dark, when you drank too much, smiled too convincingly, adventured or dressed too boldly, comes at a price. However it’s said, it has one purpose: Let the taking go unchecked.

I’m pretty sure the man on the beach was doing his own calculation. He knew the people I was connected to in town. What repercussions might he face if I didn’t walk away “unscathed?” I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t figured there’d be consequences.

As for the flutist, let’s not forget the interveners—the other musicians and the hostel owner. Let’s not forget his presence shortened my time and ease in a place and town that had felt restful.

Here’s the calculation now: What will it take to be each others’ “luck?” What do we risk to intervene on behalf of those with less inherited luck? To show those who keep taking, with way too little pushback, they will be held to account? To tell all the parts? To not be silenced?

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Near Truckee, California, 2023.