Belize Survivor, part 2

Alexis had been ten years old in 1962 when she'd first heard of the little country then known as British Honduras. At that tender age she never dreamed that she would ever visit Belize, let alone live there for the greater part of her adult life. The least known country in Central America, it had only about 130,000 people nationwide, 30,000 of them in the former capital of Belize City. The official language was English. And for some reason, the nation seemed to have a conspicuous deficiency of common tropical exports such as bananas, rice, corn, or beef. Years later, Alexis would learn that Belize also had the largest area of unspoiled rainforest in Central America, a wealth of wilderness, waterfalls, rare colorful birds, exotic butterflies, and the ruins of countless Mayan temples, as well as the largest and longest living coral reef in the western hemisphere.

During the summer before college, Alexis became influenced by the cultural revolution that would impact all the years that followed. Dressed in a T-shirt and old patched jeans, she rejected the traditional values of her parents, school, and church, abandoning her nice clothes as well as her bra, wearing her hair long with a flower tucked behind her ear.

Countless others embraced the idealism of the dissidents as the rebelliousness of the late sixties resulted in the formation of the radical movement. The message of Dr. Timothy Leary was to "tune in, turn on, and drop out." As fierce anti-capitalists, their purpose was to reject the very society that had spawned them. By demonstrating their supposedly unconventional attitudes and individuality by letting their hair grow and wearing secondhand clothes, the ironic result was that they all looked different in exactly the same way. In retrospect, their attempt to create a new order had developed a culture that was just as standardized within itself as the one from which they were trying to deviate.

Nevertheless, Alexis saw her former high school friends come home from the Vietnam War with broken bodies and twisted minds. She attended marches in which protestors wore arm bands: militants wore red, anarchists wore black, green was for amnesty. Everybody had explicit convictions. Political demonstrations were frequent as were marches, love-ins, and boycotts. The incident at Kent State shocked the world senseless when four college students were killed during a protest turned police action. Tricky Dick Nixon became the arch villain while Joan Baez, Country Joe, Bob Dylan, and Simon and Garfunkel became the conscience of the new crusade.

The classes Alexis was supposed to attend at college were the last thing on her mind. At Christmas she came home and announced to her parents that she was dropping out. A few days later at three o’clock in the morning, her self-appointed hour of departure, they all stood there in the driveway together. Her parents expressed their love and they made their goodbyes. It would be years before she understood their pain.
As the hours of driving passed, Alexis was filled with an exhilaration she had never known. She was seeking her fortune. For the first time she had taken control of her own life and could do whatever she wanted. There were no parents, no teachers, and no peer pressure; she was totally and utterly free.

The scenery was beautiful as she crossed the state line from Kentucky into Tennessee. The sides of the mountains had been cut back and the diagonal strata of exposed rock curved gracefully in tilted disarray. In one spot, a huge outcropping of rock protruded from a jagged mountainside. Looking like a waterfall cast in stone, it appeared to be a tumbling cascade, frozen in time. The rock formation was spectacular. In appreciation of the moment, Alexis pulled over, and considered her assets.
I have a few hundred dollars, she thought. That's enough to get me to southern Florida. I'll need a place to live, and some money to keep my car going. Why is it all about money? Why do we have to pay for insurance and taxes, or have an income and pay rent? Wouldn't it be great just to live somewhere, like on a beach, or in a cave? To enjoy the earth in its natural state and pull fruit from the trees; to live like the Native Americans did? We should be able to live in harmony with the Earth, not at odds with it.

Alexis had always believed she’d been born in the wrong century, preferring that she’d belonged to the era of discovery – of adventurers, explorers, and pirates. Perhaps the lifestyle she sought had disappeared long ago. But there had to be more to life than being locked into what everybody else expected you to do, and she intended to discover what it was. Getting back in her car, she took a last look at the stony cascade of rock and resumed the pleasant euphoria of her new found independence. Hours passed and the mountains of Tennessee gave way to the high plateaus and red clay of Georgia. It was still cold, but something in the air whispered a promise of warmth as she pressed south.

It was just after ten o'clock before Alexis pulled over at a rest area in northern Florida near Jacksonville. She’d been driving for almost nineteen hours straight through. Curling up in the back seat, she was dead to the world in a matter of minutes.
The next day Alexis headed east toward the coast to get a whiff of the ocean air at the earliest possible opportunity. Then she saw her first palm tree on the beach and delighted in the picturesque windy seascape. However, the majestic palms didn't sway gently in the breeze as the poets suggested. Instead, she saw that they defied the harsh winds that battered their leafy crowns and resisted riptides with tenacious roots that clung to the sandy shore. Watching them, Alexis couldn’t have known at the time that it was more than an ambiguous analogy; it was to be an omen of her turbulent destiny.