El Salvador: The Life and Times of Mamacita Rita
By Joey Jetson

On a whim I decide to ride a bicycle across El Salvador.  Heck, I reason, when I look at a world map El Salvador is only about the size of my pinkie fingernail.  It’ll be a piece of cake.

Mamacita Rita, my newly purchased, heavily-used mountain bike has eighteen available gears, but, even with serious effort, I can only make use of five.  The front brakes don´t work, there are extra wires that enjoy poking me in the calf, and most of the seat cover is torn, revealing pink plastic my ass can´t stand.

The fact that Mamacita Rita’s job is to move forty pounds of packs and me from the Guatemalan border to Honduran border through El Salvador makes me more nervous than the time in third grade when Mrs. Edwards said it was desk cleaning day, which meant I’d have to flip my desk and expose the six months worth of boogers I’d been storing. 

A chicken bus drops me off at the border, as the intimidating black cloud that’d been looming above decides to open.
   
I have three hours before dark, and my goal is to ride to Parque Nacional El Imposible, fifteen miles and a mountain from the border.  I decide to begin my journey in the pouring rain after successfully strapping my pack to my bike rack with the cord I bought in Guatemala.  I think it was meant for an electrician.  It was all I could find.

After forty-five minutes of riding in the storm and contemplating what the hell I was doing, I came to a small town named Cara Sucia (English translation:  Dirty Face).  I’d like to meet the person who was in charge of naming the town. 

A man under a canopy shouts, in English, "Come here."   I do. He tells me he knows English.  He doesn’t know much.  He says he’ll help me find a place to stay.  We cross the street.  We’re drenched.  We switch to Spanish when we (I) realize my Spanish is better than his English.  He’s drunk.  He tells me he lived in Los Angeles, and George Bush sent him home.

"Deportes," he says.  I think he’s switching the subject to sports.  I ask who his favorite soccer team is.  He tells me he likes beer. I ask how much the hotel will be.  He says George Bush deported him.  I understand now.  I thank him for helping me.  With that, he cracks a wide smile, looks me in the eye, and says, "You said that in Spanish."  We’d been speaking in Spanish for over five minutes.

And Parque Nacional El Impossible lived up to its name.

The next morning I’m pedaling along, la-di-da, when the pedaling becomes more strenuous.  I downshift.  Click....click.  Thud.  Thud.  I look down.

My rear tire is flat. 
  
I have no tools or spare parts.  I can't waste any time – I know I have at least fifty more miles to my day’s destination - so I start walking.  I realize that if my goal would've been to walk across El Salvador, I should have hypothetically bought a bike for that trip because my current one is serving as a nice cart for my packs.

After a about a mile I come upon a small tin home near the road.  An elderly woman is picking vegetables in the garden, and her husband walks out of a nearby cornfield when I approach the barbed-wire fence that separates their home from the road.

Apparently, the region of my brain that accepts and delivers sentences in Spanish called in sick to work that day and didn't tell me.  All I understand from the sunken-faced, toothless, overall-wearing farmer after at least three attempts are the words school, tire, and walk.

We walk for about a mile in silence, he with his bike, me with mine, make a few turns and, bam, a real bike shop--and Doritos store.

Four teenage boys come out into the sunlight and examine us up and down.  I do the same to them.  I note they all have interesting choices of apparel: the obese one decided to go shirtless, the second one wears a shirt that says, in Spanish, "Jesus Is My Friend," the third a shirt in English with a picture of a hand that says, "Talk To The Hand," and the fourth, a shirt that says, again in English, "I Got Hammered At Victor's Graduation Party—1994".  I note that he was likely in diapers in 1994.

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