The title of travel writer Lyn Fuchs’ first book Sacred Ground & Holy Water: Travel Tales of Enlightenment misleads the reader somewhat. For despite some visits to holy sites, the collection of travel essays succeeds most by Fuchs’ humor, linguistic play and iconoclastic take on people, places and hot-button issues.
At times hilarious and/or profound, Fuchs takes us places we likely wouldn’t go on our own and asks questions we probably would not dare ask. As when he is investigating the sexual abuse of children near the Mexico-Guatemala border, where they arrive penniless and exploitable. There he interviews a Señor Coutier, who claims to own the town.
“You can buy a child’s innocence for a hundred pesos. If I were a pervert, I would live here.” He hoisted his shot glass. “I am a Frenchman by blood and a Mexican by birth and I hate all gringos.”
“There are no French men. Only French women.”
“Su madre” (screw your mother).
“Let’s make peace and drink…” (we cautiously raised our glasses as I changed my mind) “to your sister.” The rest of this enlightened exchange I cannot recall.
His facility with language, wry wit and worldly ways combine at times into pleasing tidbits, as when he is enjoying a swine feast at Boss Hawg’s Barbecue in Clarksdale, Mississippi: “Of all the things that damage the heart, I regret pulled pork and torrid love the least.”
While the essays are uneven in quality they are worth wading through to discover some nuggets, as his profound thoughts on globalization and international labor. And we get to visit places we likely would not venture on our own, such as a Kyoto fencing academy, where he studied kendo, and a dead-end town in Belize peopled in large part by those on the lam.
But ultimately it is his high spirits and low humor that win us over. As when, in remote Canada, Fuchs smokes a mixture of tobacco, cedar, fungi and leaves in a Haida sweat lodge:
“The elders told me that a pipe stem represents man, a pipe bowl represents woman, and a sweat lodge represents the womb of life. (So, I wondered, what the hell were we doin’ suckin’ on the pipe stem?)”
I look forward to and expect more and better things from Fuchs.
