The ruins of Palenque look just like what you'd expect ancient ruins to look like if someone had designed them as a movie set. In the morning the mist hangs low and softens the greys of the stones, deepens the greens of the jungle, mutes the call of the macaws that fly between the tree tops and settles on the grass blades to wet your feet as you walk among the crumbling temples. Stones are off-kilter and lean against one another for support, stained red and orange with moss. The jungle encroaches and looks barely kept at bay, ready to reclaim the temples in a moment of relaxed vigilance. Grass grows on the stony steps up the Templo Doble Cruces, and scrubby vegetation overuns the Temple De la Sol at its base. Everywhere carvings and engravings where you could see the hand of some long gone artist wishing probably like any artist to create something beautiful that would last beyond his short life.

During the middle part of the day the place in nearly overrun with tourists who arrive in big buses, and if it annoys you to see a fat German woman sitting on what was once a sacred offering block or a bored American child chipping away at a carved stellae with his pocket knife, then it is best to arrive early and stay late, when it is possible to find a few hours of quiet, and spend the meat of the day wandering the dark narrow jungles paths, which is what I did on this day.

Near dusk I returned to the ruins and found them mostly deserted and I climbed to the top of the Templo de la Luna where I could look out over the yellow and brown patchwork fields of the Rio Usumacinta floodplain and watch the Sun set behind the Templo de los Inscripciones, just as the Mayan builders had intended. It was during these quiet times in the morning and evening when I felt what I can only describe as an energy. Not a New Age, crystals, space aliens and power vortexes kind of energy. More like a discreet hum like the blood rushing through the veins of your ears, just below the surface of my skin, almost in my veins. Someone told me that they had done tests and found higher levels of static energy there than the surrounding areas, and the Mayans sensed that innately and that is why they built here. Another person told me that Palenque was one of the only places they didn't practice human sacrifice. Whatever the cause, I felt something there that I hadn't felt anywhere else. I would often catch myself coming out of a daydream and listening to the sound of my own breathing, and at night I had strange dreams in washed out colors that I could never remember the next day. It was my last day here and I did not want to leave this place.

After the sun set the guards shooed me out with the other stragglers and I walked back to my campsite. Camiones, VW buses used as taxis the shuttle tourists back and forth, zoomed passed me on the narrow road. The sky turned pink and then orange and then red and cows ruminated in clear cuts fields of tall grass. Everthing smelled strongly of compost and moist decay. In one of the fields a lonely tree was left standing and it made a perfect tree shaped silhouete against the darkening sky, and for some reason made me think of Africa, though I've never been there, it made me think it all the same.

I was staying at this campsite about a half kilometer from the ruins. It was just a bunch of palapa huts where you could hang your hammock around a grassy field and surrounded by jungle. My hut-mate was a hippie from Mexico City. I gathered there was a permanent community of hippies here. Mexicans, Italians, Americans, Australians, Germans. Some of them paid their way selling little trinkets in Palenque Town but I think most of them were trustafiarians, or whatever the European or Latin American version of that would be and they seemed to look down on the transient guests of this place. They never invited me or anyone else to join in their big potluck meals every night or to smoke pot with them at their bonfires. Not that I cared so much about the pot. There was enough energy flowing around here as it was but just the same it didn't seem very hippie-like to be so insular.

At dusk every night the Howler monkeys roared, a sound that is kind of a cross between the eeee-aawhh of a donkey and the deep throaty bellow of a lion. I swayed in my hammock and listened to the Howler's and searched the sky for the Evening Star. I'm no good at astronomy so I don't know if the reason I never noticed it before is because Chicago is too far North to see it or if the city's bright lights make it invisible. But I had first noticed it in Guatemala, while I was standing on my friend's porch and listening to the sounds of the village below and the second I saw the blue diamond light in the sky I knew who she was and since then Venus and I had become good friends and I had come to think of her as my travelling companion. No day was complete until I had stood for awhile at the sunset and offered up my silent thoughts to her. Out here it was so dark too that you could see all the stars and constellations and even the Milky Way like a band of lace across the sky. And I felt like the first person to look up at the Stars and see shapes and patterns. Orion, Taurus and all the others. It was easy to see how they named them. It was so obvious. Some people might see different shapes of course but it was impossible to look up there and not see the poetry of it all.

That night there was a full Moon and the hippies built a big bonfire and sat around with drums chanting and playing and blowing on conch shells. There were no lights except for the bonfire and some people had candles and out on the grass I could see the black shapes of peoples and the orange tip glow of joints and a thousand fireflies dancing and blinking like stars fallen from the sky. A Christian Missionary group had reserved the one big communal building and I could someone strumming an accoustic guitar for a sing- a-long. "Hotel California." "Under the Bridge" All the campfire standards. I could hear some American-sounding girls talking and laughing a few huts down and I thought for a moment to go talk to them but I was comfortable there in my hammock with my thoughts rocking myself slowly with my foot and listening to the monkeys and the hippies bellowing at the Moon and the Christians singing and the girls talking and underneath it all the white noise background of crickets who are like the sound of waves to the land-locked and altogether it was a strange and beautiful symphony I fell asleep to. . .

I was sinking. I couldn't see anything around me but blue. I couldn't breathe. I was holding on to something. I had my arms wrapped around it and didn't want to let go. It was just a hunk of something, a big rock maybe, and I didnt' want to let go of it. Some part of me was telling me that it was what was making me sink and to let go but I said no, I wouldn't let go, because I had always had this rock and this rock was mine and if I let it go I would lose it and then I wouldn't have anything and for all I know I would still be sinking, since sinking was all I had ever known and I couldn't remember anything before there was me and my rock and this suffocation. So I held on and my lungs felt like they were about to burst and finally I let go not so much willingly as through attrition. And I started to float. Soon my head broke the surface and I breathed deeply of the salty air. I rose and fell with the waves, one minute the exhiliration of being lifted up and being able to see for miles around, the next the queasy stomach sensation of falling into the trough between waves. I tried to swim, I just picked a direction in the hope that I would hit something in the midst of this voidness, but I got tired and stopped and just floated and rode the current, drifting, rising falling. I lay on my back. The sun was warm and bright and low on the horizon. The clouds were white and pink smears across the sky, like the underside of a seashell plucked wet from the surf. I lifted my head and looked around. In the glare of the Sun I could see other heads bobbing on the surface. Some were trying to swim as I had earlier. Sometimes a new head popped up, sometimes one sunk back below the surface. Rising and falling, we would wave to each other, but nothing more. We already knew the folly of trying to swim, we could do nothing more than steer ourselves a little as the tides carried us. We tried to shout back and forth, but it was hard to hear each other over the white noise of the surf. Sometimes you drifted close enough to speak, and I even saw some people who had gotten close enough that they were able to grab hold of each other, but even then a big wave could crash over them or a riptide pull them apart at any moment. I felt incredibly scared and happy and free all at once. All I could do was float and let the waves carry me while the sun warmed my face.

Something woke me up. I looked around and a black shape about the size of a dog trundled passed my hammock. It stopped and looked at me. Its eyes glowed yellow in the blackness. We stared at each other for a minute. I was too stunned to be alarmed, and the thing just stared back at me, like it was considering me, making unfathomable assements behind those glowing eyes, deciding whether or not to let me in on a secret. Then a dog chained to a camper nearby barked, and the thing turned and plodded off into the trees. I thought I should write this all down but I didnt' have a candle so I just lay in the hammock, rocking myself with my foot and staring through the leaves at the sky.