Our long story
One day Richard found himself in the same situation he had judged his human ancestors so harshly for. Richard asked himself as a young man how humans could have killed the last of so many iconic species and allowed them to disappear from the planet forever. How could we as intelligent beings have wiped out the last dodo birds? The last passenger pigeons? The last quagga? The last Tasmanian tiger? The last Caspian tiger? To allow an entire species that took millions of years to evolve to disappear because of human greed for more resources, out of simple carelessness, or worse still out of utter disrespect for life, was utterly reprehensible. Meeting Johnny the spider monkey, living on the Pacific coast of southern Mexico seeing the environmental destruction and widespread poaching, and possessing a broad enough understanding of the species there and their situation countrywide, Richard came to understand the time for action was now. Knowing that spider monkeys, howler monkeys, jaguars, and other species were endangered in his environs, that they and other species could go extinct were proper actions not taken the question was: would he act and save them, or stand by and allow another sad page in the history of human-caused extinctions to be written into history? Now was his time and he knew that he needed to take ownership of this problem and do everything he could to find a solution and preserve life. Otherwise, he would be complicit in the blame-game and apathy that often plague such circumstances. The road here had been a long one.
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Pedaling into the winter wind in 2006, Richard crossed the border from Texas into Mexico on New Year's Day with the intention of cycling through as much of Latin America as possible as slowly as possible. Richard needed to know what life was really like in the vast area that extended south of the United States. At the age of sixteen, he had been invited by Laura Alonso to dance ballet in Cuba. Three weeks in the Cuban capital Havana, in 1992, right at the end of the Cold War and Soviet participation in the Cuban economy, opened Richard's mind and seeded an insatiable desire to see and learn about the world, especially Latin America.
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Two years after Cuba, at the age of eighteen, Richard was awarded a Rotary International scholarship to spend a year as an exchange student in Ecuador. He spent a year living high in the Andes Mountains with two Ecuadorian families. Richard organized a trip with another exchange student, and spent a week in the Amazon, in the part of Ecuador that Ecuadorians call the Oriente. Reaching the eastern range of the Andes and seeing a sea of green below him, as far as the eye could see, Richard was amazed at the enormity of the earth's largest tropical forest. After a full day of bus travel and a second day of hitchhiking to get to Misahuallí on the Río Napo, they took a motor canoe to the lodge in the jungle where they went on daily hikes through the forest. Later that year he fulfilled the dream of traveling to the Galapagos Islands and seeing animals such as Darwin's finches, marine iguanas, and Galapagos tortoises that helped inspire Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Back in Jacaranda, on the outskirts of Quito, he traveled frequently with his host family to the humid, tropical rainforest of the Pacific coast to spend weekends at the family hacienda (big farm) located in the middle of a tropical rainforest with a pristine river running through the middle of it. Richard had chosen Ecuador as his first country choice on the Rotary International scholarship application specifically because of its incredible biodiversity as it ranks 17th, despite its small size among 193 countries in the world, for the total number of species that live there. The hacienda and surrounding area were a nature lover's dream with its lush forests and fish-filled river. Every visit there would be a sighting of a lizard, bird, or mammal he'd never seen before. But, even as Richard gawked at its beauty, he was aware it was under siege: agriculture and ranching were gnawing away at the forest, slowly contaminating the crystalline river water. Four years later he was to return to Ecuador, drive to the hacienda, and be dismayed that the cattle had been replaced with a palm heart plantation, so most of the remaining trees that had been scattered through the pastureland had been cleared and replaced with palm monoculture. Most of the trees along the river's edge had been cleared too, exposing the water to the sun and soil erosion. The fish that had teemed in a river pool shaded by large tropical hardwood trees, over which a small hammock bridge had hung, from which Richard and his host brothers had jumped into the river to swim, were no longer. It was a much more barren and lifeless landscape. To see life so diminished was sad, to know it was for the purpose of producing cans of palm hearts for supermarkets was even sadder. Richard's experiences in Ecuador at the ages of 18 and 19 made him hyperaware of the riches of life on planet Earth and of its fragility in the face of an unsatiable human desire for more and more resources.
Richard's year in Ecuador caught the eye of Westminster College, one of the five colleges he had applied to prior to spending a year in Ecuador as an exchange student. He had the great fortune to be offered a scholarship large enough to allow him to attend Westminster, an expensive private college with small class sizes that were so well suited to bringing him up to par with his writing and reasoning skills after a mediocre high school education at a standard public school.
One year later, during a semester abroad in Australia, at Bond University in Queensland, he would make forays into the Queensland backcountry in search of wallabies, red-bellied black snakes, galah birds, cockatoos, rainbow lorikeets, lizards, and other animals. Here Richard discovered the field of international studies and finally knew what he wanted to study.
Upon returning to the US, he rather forlornly knew he had to transfer to a different university because as good as Westminster was and as much as it had taken him under his arm, offering him a great scholarship and a very stimulating learning environment, it didn't offer international studies. The next year he transferred to American University in Washington, D.C., to study in their renowned School of International Service as well as their College of Arts and Sciences where he completed a double major in International Studies and Latin American Studies/Spanish.
For half a decade after graduation, Richard worked with undocumented immigrants through business, simultaneous interpretation for the county courts, and teaching. He understood that the social, political, and economic realities of Mexico and the rest of Latin America were complicated and wanted to know what drove so many Latin Americans to make the difficult, challenging, and often very dangerous journey to the US to start a new life. This was a journey that meant living with the threat of deportation and all kinds of uncertainties that being undocumented, far from home, and initially, Spanish-speaking only can impose upon one's life in the US. Richard's Spanish was very fluent by now. In many conversations at work, in the streets, and at dinners at his house, with immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and other countries throughout the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America there were two subjects that raised their gruesome heads over and over again: the subject of poverty and violence. It was poverty, violence, or both that would motivate these immigrants to leave their homes, often alone, to cross unknown lands with few resources and little education to start a new life in a country they really knew nothing about and whose language they didn't speak. Richard would think to himself "How desperate would the situation have to be for me to leave the US by myself with a little pack on my back and almost no money to cross unknown lands to go to a country whose language I don't speak far from all I know?" Often it was violent acts committed by drug cartels that controlled crossings through Mexico into the US, acts of state-sponsored violence against indigenous peoples, large criminal organizations, or small gangs, but no matter the source, it was apparent that there were life-threatening dangers that should be taken seriously. In order to confront the challenge of truly understanding Latin America by going there and living there as a Latin American does, Richard decided that there was a serious gap in his education and skills. If he was going to minimize risk and maximize success: he needed to know how to avoid such dangers and defend himself and others if necessary.
During the US "War on Terror", the US Army reinitiated its 18X program. Known as a non-prior service Special Forces candidate contract, 18X allows enlistees to go right to Special Forces selection after completing basic training, infantry school, airborne school, and special operations preparatory courses at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Richard applied to the Army for admittance into this program, was accepted, and started training. He graduated #1 in his platoon from Infantry School and gained respect from his peers and superiors through his ability to lead, physical strength and endurance, quickness to learn, and maturity. However, Richard knew enough about the Middle East, having gone to college with Kuwaitis and Saudis at American University and taken courses on the region. He also understood the history of conflict in Afghanistan and what happened on September 11th better than most did. Interacting through training and life with soldiers and Marines who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan he concluded through their stories and actions and the reality of US politics that the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were an unfortunate waste of lives and resources that would end very much as Vietnam had. After a year of military service, having by this time successfully completed Special Forces Assessment and Selection and been accepted into the Q Course (Special Forces Qualification Course) at the John F. Kennedy School for Special Warfare, Richard decided that he could not participate in either of the doomed US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and left the military with an other-than-honorable discharge for not having completed his contracted time of service.
Upon leaving the military Richard decided to complete his goal of truly understanding Latin America by living there. He thought it was best to do so by bicycling through and working in the vast region. On January 1st, 2006 Richard crossed the US-Mexico border at Brownsville-Matamoros, pedaling into the Mexican state of Tamaulipas on his 12-year-old Cannondale M-400 mountain bike with rear panniers and makeshift storage for the journey. If some of the world's best military training had been a test of resilience, little did he realize at this moment how much more challenging the coming years in Mexico and Latin America were going to be. The strictly controlled and self-sustaining military environment, with its medical system, meals, housing, and reliable pay was gone. The enlistment-to-contract-completion care or enlistment-to-retirement or grave care was now far away in the rearview mirror and had been replaced by one certainty: uncertainty! To face the unknown on a daily basis, with almost no system to back you up, takes a certain frame of mind. Little did Richard know, but from day one he was to become an undocumented immigrant, just like so many of the Mexicans, Guatemalans, and others he had gotten to know back in the US. When he crossed the border that day, on January 1st, 2006, it being New Year's Day and Mexico, there were no Mexican officials manning the border crossing. So, after stopping briefly and seeing nobody, he pedaled through and began the journey south. About twenty kilometers in there was an official at an immigration checkpoint who asked Richard for his tourist card. Not having been issued one Richard simply said in Spanish "There was no one there when I went through...." and trailed off, waiting anxiously to see if he'd have to pedal the 20K back with one hundred pounds of gear, something he was dreading as it was his first day and he was already tired. The officer just said, "Don't worry about it, go on, happy new year". Richard gave a thumbs up, wished him a VERY happy new year, and pedaled up to the metal detector. Ah, yes, a metal detector..... Being so uncertain as to what lay ahead and having grown up hunting in the forests of southwestern Pennsylvania for whitetail deer and turkey Richard had carefully taken apart his .22 and .3006 hunting rifles in Texas, wrapped them in Saran wrap, and camouflaged them in the back of the Dana pack he carried on his back as best he could with other gear and bullets. He was going to do whatever he had to do to make it and if that meant hunting to survive, so be it. A metal detector....Richard's brain raced...now what does he do? He quickly thought that there was so much metal on him and around him with the bicycle that why should they think anything of the detector going off? He was right. The soldiers just waved him through. With a mental sigh of relief he pushed the right foot down, then the left and over and over again to begin his new life in Latin America as an officially sanctioned illegal immigrant with 600 rounds of ammunition and two hunting rifles in a country where it turned out by looking at the sign by the detector, all firearms were banned.
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Richard had every intention of simply cycling the length of Mexico from the US down to Guatemala and then onward through Central America. There is a breathtaking road that winds its way up from the flatlands along the Gulf of Mexico in Veracruz to the City of Oaxaca, the capital of the state of Oaxaca. You pass through lush tropical forest with large ferns and spectacular vistas travelling about 150 kilometers from just above sea level to a mile high, about 1.6 kilometers. It is A LOT of work pedaling a bicycle, but well worth the effort. At least once, anyway! Here, about halfway through Mexico, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, Richard discovered the pyramids of Monte Albán, the archeological site of Mitla, the Zapotec town of Teotitlán del Valle, and the surrounding mountains with refreshing pine forests. He fell in love with Oaxaca City, its mountainous geography, its well-preserved archeological history, its friendly people, and the cool low-humidity climate. It was in Oaxaca, at this midpoint in Mexico, that Richard realized there was an awful lot about Mexico he didn’t know and that was well worth experiencing.
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Richard had always loved mountains. Mexico, apart from the Yucatan Peninsula, is basically one conglomeration of mountains. The mountains further north which are called the Canadian Rockies and then the US Rockies, continue down through Mexico, change names, and merge with the mountains formed by the uplifting caused by the meeting of the North American Plate with the Pacific and Cocos plates. Richard says he has often wondered how many square kilometers or miles Mexico is if you were to calculate the entirety of the area of its hill and mountain slopes not just multiply its width by its length to find total area. Because the mountains forced people to make roads that twist and turn and rise and fall over and over again it is often the case that you can travel for a full day by car in Mexico and realize at the end of the day that as the bird flies you barely covered a few hundred kilometers. Mexico is a big country regardless of its topography. It is the 13th largest of 195 countries in the world. However, because it is so mountainous, it seems even larger when you travel by land. To put things into perspective about 70% of Mexico is covered in mountains while about 25% of Canada and the US and about 35% of Europe are. Mexico’s extreme topography makes transportation more difficult which isolates areas. Isolation has allowed different cultures to arise and be preserved contributing to Mexico’s cultural diversity.
Prehispanic Mexico, that is to say, Mexico before the Spanish invasion, had a history of advanced civilizations, among them the Aztecs, Maya, and Olmec. Richard had the preconceived notion that Mexico had A FEW amazing archeological sites. It turns out there are MANY impressive and often very large archeological sites the length and width of the country. If you were to do just an archeological tour of Mexico hitting only the most impressive sites and spending a day or two at each site, it would take you months to see them all! These sites have names such as Teotihuacán, Tasco de Alarcón, Cholula, Guachimontones, Sierra de San Francisco, Monte Albán, Mitla, Toniná, Bonampak, Yaxchilán, Palenque, Uxmal, Chichen Itzá, Calakmul, Cobá, Tulum and many others! After travelling enough you come to understand the magnitude and sophistication of pre-Hispanic civilizations! One of the theories as to why some of these civilizations collapsed is that the human population grew so much and deforested on a massive scale for crop production that there was an environmental cataclysm that caused less rainfall and massive crop failures which led to famine and collapse. After walking through dozens of archaeological sites and realizing that for the most part, you are only walking through a small excavated part of the total area you come to the incredible realization that these ancient peoples had truly massive civilizations with many cities, elaborate trade routes, and complex political systems and religious cultures. In the past decade or so archaeologists have been able to look at lidar mapping of the region shot with airplanes and helicopters that technologically make it possible to see through the vegetation and to discern structures that on foot would be very difficult to identify. As you walk on trails and look “out” of the archeological site you are in, into the forest or hills, with a better-trained eye you realize that the “hill” is actually an overgrown pyramid, temple, or building. The forest overgrows everything, hewing rock and covering stone. The tree roots gnaw away and intertwine, organic material covering almost all signs of the work done over centuries or millenniums by thousands of people from these mysterious civilizations. There aren’t dozens of archeological sites in Mexico, there are thousands and most of them have not been explored or excavated.
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On an excursion out from Oaxaca City, Richard met Samuel and Celestino and their parents Nora and Mario, an indigenous Zapotec family that lives in Teotitlán del Valle, a Zapotec town. A few months after completing his cycling trip to the border of Guatemala he had the good fortune to be invited back to live on their property where he set his tent up in an unfinished room and started guiding tourists around southern Mexico, the Yucatán Peninsula, Guatemala, and Belize.
In the US, where he is from, there are many fewer cultural differences than what he was experiencing in Mexico. There are 69 indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, each with its own culture and unique history. It is almost always the case in the US that if you go to someone’s house and they speak a different language, it’s because they immigrated to the US and are speaking the language of their country of origin or they are the children of immigrants. And, that language is usually Spanish due to so many people from Mexico and the rest of Latin America immigrating north. In Mexico, it’s usually the case that if you go to someone’s house and they speak a different language, it is one of the many native indigenous languages that were spoken in the region long before Spaniards brought Spanish to the Americas. Census statistics in Mexico show that over 7 million people in Mexico still speak an indigenous language while in the US it’s less than 400,000. The US has a population of 330 million and Mexico 130 million. We can see that the number of indigenous-language-speaking peoples in Mexico is far greater both in total number and as a percentage of the population than in the US. About 5% of Mexicans speak an indigenous language while just 0.001% of the US population does.
Indigenous groups in Mexico and Latin America are minorities in their country and they guard against the mainstream culture and population. They have fought hard to stay alive culturally and not be assimilated into mainstream society so they have necessarily created certain boundaries. The Spanish violently conquered the indigenous peoples of Mexico in the early 1600s and ruthlessly exploited them for centuries. The Spanish ruled with one objective: to be as wealthy and powerful as possible. With this one maniacal goal, they slaughtered, enslaved, raped, cheated, coerced, intimidated and pillaged the length of what is modern-day Mexico and most of Latin America. Millions of indigenous people died through outright genocide, enslavement, and oppression. Yet millions more perished not long after the Spanish came to the New World because of the European diseases that came over with them on the ships that crossed the Atlantic. The indigenous people of the Americas had no immune defense against these diseases that were completely new to the hemisphere and scientists and historians now believe that between 80-95% of the indigenous population was wiped out. It is easy enough to spout out such statistics but take a moment to consider the profundity of such a tragedy. Imagine you surviving and 9 out of every 10 people you know, on average, are now dead, and that these deaths occurred over weeks or months, not decades. Being that there were very few Spanish in the beginning and their means of transportation were walking, horseback and wind-propelled boats, it took years or decades to fully colonize the Americas. Disease spread much faster from indigenous village to village and city to city than the Spanish spread colonizing the continent. Imagine having your community decimated by disease only to have the conquering Spanish arrive long before it has recovered. Death caused by the new diseases also caused infighting among the indigenous peoples as often it was not clear who was the clear successor to positions of power. If 9/10ths of the hierarchy is wiped out, who is supposed to replace them? Who has the right and the ability? Such questions caused chaos and conflict, often war. So, not only were the indigenous populations at a huge disadvantage technologically to defend themselves against the Spanish, they were also greatly reduced in population. So reduced were many of the native populations by the time the conquering Spanish arrived the Spanish often thought that the New World was mostly virgin lands, sparsely inhabited. Much of the land that was cultivated by indigenous peoples had grown back into forests after the death by disease of so many of the indigenous people. By the time the Spanish made it further inland over the course of years, decades, or even centuries, the forests had reclaimed most of these fields making it appear that much of the land had never been inhabited. Additionally, the Spanish had steel swords, muskets, canons, horses, and a written language they could use to communicate precisely over distances. The indigenous people had none of these things and no other warring technology that was superior to that of the invaders. In the long run, the only indigenous communities that were able to govern themselves completely and not be conquered were those that were so far from the rest of civilization that their isolation protected them.
With much of this understanding of the history of indigenous peoples in mind, Richard felt privileged to be invited to stay with the Zapotec family in Teotitlán del Valle. While he knew no Zapotec the family very kindly mostly spoke in Spanish when he was present. Most of the townspeople would speak to one another in Zapotec. Richard came to see that it was their language that truly bound them together. Without Zapotec, only remnants of their culture would remain as their language held most of the cultural characteristics that made the Zapotec people unique from the Spanish-speaking culture surrounding them. r
Richard got a little white Chevy Pop, a little fuel-efficient, two-door, 4-cylinder car with no extras similar to a Geo Metro. During his time in Teotilán del Valle Richard would wake up at 6:00 am and ride his bicycle the 26 kilometers into Oaxaca City to Casa Arnel, a pretty little hotel, where he would have a coffee at the breakfast table and wait for other guests to come down to breakfast to see if any of them were interested in having a Spanish speaking tour guide and driver. Usually, someone was interested so he'd bicycle the 26K back to Teotitlán del Valle, pick up the car, and drive back into the hotel. Sometimes the clients would want just a day tour around the area, others were interested in going much farther. In this way, Richard was able to see a lot more of Mexico, traveling extensively throughout the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo, than he'd been able to on the bicycles. He was also able to travel through Guatemala and Belize. It was during these eight months of constant travel that it became very clear that the wild animals in Mexico were in trouble. It was only in a few very protected or the remotest places that any wildlife could be seen other than birds or the occasional squirrel or iguana. Richard would frequently see whitetail deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, opossums, snakes, chipmunks, groundhogs, raccoons, foxes, and other animals in the US. Sometimes in just one day, he'd see multiple species, and often in high numbers, like a herd of 30 deer and a flock of 25 wild turkeys. But, in Mexico, driving to remote regions with low human populations, even hiking high into the mountains and deep into the forests, and actively seeking out animals all the time, there were few to be found.
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After eight months of working as a self-employed tour guide, Richard moved to Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state. He wanted to know what it was like to survive in Latin America without having access to foreigners and dollars or euros. Life turned out to extremely challenging in Mexico's southernmost state. Years later he would say that if he had known how much of a challenge life was going to be in Latin America he might not have had the courage to start on his journey. In the beginning his income started off at $2,500 (US dollars) per year (adjusted for 2023 dollars). In the years prior to coming to Latiin America his salary had been between $65-97,000 per year adjusted for inflation in 2023. While the cost of living is much lower in Mexico than the US and you can live on $2,500 a year it is subsistence living. There are many privileges we take for granted in many of the developed countries: using a car as much as you please, having air conditioning, buying things you don't absolutely NEED, taking vacations outside of your immediate area, having access to high speed internet, knowing your food has been properly handled to avoid spreading pathogens, being able to drink water from the tap, having enough disposable income to eat a greater variety of foods, having the security of being part of a system that provides a safety net in the event of hardtimes, access to fast responder emergency services and reliable law enforcement, et cetera. Richard would think about how we as humans saw earth for the first time with the Apollo missions to the moon in the 60s and 70s. The way in which people came to best understand the planet we live on was to leave it and experience the hostile environment of space. In the same way Richard came to understand the US best by leaving it and experiencing another country that is a very close neighbor geographically, it is a very distant neighbor economically, politically and culturally.
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