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Marcos” from a guy in Salina Cruz, but I don’t plan on taking up arms. In any case, people love the revolution here. Next stop is either Guatemala or back up the Caribbean coast.
    Great! Comandante Casey . What could be more appealing to a boy fed up with middle-class Toronto? I review the available options: either he will join the Zapatistas or he will bicycle alone through Guatemala, where the Canadian Embassy is now posting daily warnings for tourists.
    His email goes on to say that he plans to meet up with the cycle dude after a few weeks, in Guatemala, near Lake Atitlan. They’ll rendezvous in a town called Panajachel.
    Panajachel! This time I know exactly what is in store for him, and at last I have a legitimate reason to worry. As it happens—I don’t think Casey even knows or remembers this about his mother— I rode a bicycle through Guatemala when I was in my twenties. And it was the road leading up from Panajachel that almost did me in. You climb 2,000 vertical feet on a grade that would cause a donkey to tip over. It’s stupid. But it’s just a vague plan, I thought, and maybe it will fall through. He doesn’t like to plan.
    I leave the hotel and head back to my casita, where I pour a giant glass of Vinho Verde and ponder the ironies of my situation. Now I know—exactly—how my parents must have felt when I told them that I was going to bike my way down into South America with Tom (“The one with the motorcycle?” my father asked). I remember the day I took the commuter train home to Burlington to break the news.
    It was late November. The first flakes of snow were whirling around in a dither, as if to say, “Where the hell are we—isn’t there some place nicer we can land?”The air had that stony cold that arrives just in time for the Santa Claus parade.
    I stepped off the train to my father’s waiting car. The front seat of the big Buick was covered in a woolly sheepskin, and so was the steering wheel; the circulation in his fingers was poor, and his hands got cold. We drove home,where my mother was still in her blue bathrobe, sitting in the den. This was unheard of in the middle of the afternoon. She didn’t get up to greet me, she just swivelled in my direction, looking filmy-eyed and distant—the Valium look. She was sitting in her usual spot, an upholstered chair (everything in our house was upholstered, including the placemats) that rocked and pivoted. She liked to sit there and watch the kids walk home from my old school, a few blocks away.
    Earlier that fall, after several days of feeling flu-ish and weak, she had slowly walked the two blocks to Dr. Bodkin’s office.
    â€œI think I’m having a heart attack,” she politely informed the receptionist.
    She spent about a week in the hospital and then came home to recover. I’m not even sure my father informed me of the details; in those days, a woman’s heart attack didn’t have the drama of a masculine cardiac event. Years later, I wondered if it might not have been an episode of depression, or a bit of both; it hadn’t been a good year for my mother. My 20-year-old sister had just married, had a baby, and moved to Toronto, out from under her wing. My brother’s first marriage was rocky. The whole family was unravelling, and now I was heading off too, on some cockamamie trip with boyfriend C,or D,when I should be signing up for teachers’ college.
    None of the usual dips and zero-fat snacks awaited me in the kitchen. I made a pot of tea and gave them both a spirited pitch about the value and legitimacy of this new adventure of mine. Tom and I would be part of a group, a National Geographic expedition, I pointed out. (Briefly. We decided to fly over the impenetrable Darien Gap and make our own way down through South America.) I would learn Spanish (the words for “inner tube” and “severe diarrhea”). Using my mother’s