0 kilometers [the beginning]
The only road in Pueblo Nuevo has no name. It has no driveways, no street lamps, and no mailboxes. Its houses have no addresses. When you write letters home, it’s a game of description on the envelope. My home is about two kilometers from the center of town. It’s the “last house before the whitewater rapids, across from the blue whale mural, and beside the stable for the white horse.”
0.2 kilometers [coexistence]
The houses don’t have ceilings—just peaked tin roofs that sit elevated off the top of each wall. During the daytime, townspeople leave their doors wide open. Pueblo Nuevo is rural and secluded enough to escape the worst crimes, but the menacing dogs chained to every door act as a deterrent anyway.
0.5 kilometers [life]
In several bushes by the road, a few hundred butterflies emerge from their chrysalides. I watch quietly as brown and orange wings wrestle themselves out of confinement—wet, quivering, and curious. I watch one butterfly’s proboscis extend for the first time. It touches a leaf, then quickly curls in surprise. Two huge grasshoppers watch too. They’re black and red, with a massive muscular crest running down their backs. When one jumps, the entire leaf shakes. When one lands, the stem rebounds violently.
0.8 kilometers [left and right]
At the top of a hill, a developer has built a stunning ranch house with three satellite television dishes. There’s a small guard dog tied to the house’s barbed wire perimeter. It growls when you get close. At the top of the hill, I can see two mango trees, drooping under the load of ripe fruit. After a week of neglect, dozens of mangoes slowly decompose under each trunk. If you’re lucky, a fallen mango will roll down the hill, through a gap in the fence, and into the ditch. You can yank it out of the thick mud, wash it, and eat it. But the mangoes are otherwise closed off from the neighborhood. Jagged boulders under the first layer of barbed wire send a clear message—keep out.
0.8 kilometers [right and left]
Directly across the street and down the slope, there’s a small lean-to house built from wooden planks, mud, and old shirts stuffed into the cracks. A one-eyed, three-legged dog stands watch, while a young child plays with a deflated soccer ball. Each kick seems to make the ball smaller. Through unpatched spaces in the walls, there’s faint light coming from a soccer game on a small square television. From a corner of the house, shower water flows into a muddy hand-dug reservoir below a sagging clothesline. The boy looks at my shoes, then at my shirt, and then at me.
1.3 kilometers [death]
A black-haired boy lobs a handful of rocks at a faded pink house on the right. After the rocks hit the thin tin roof, I hear a thunderous explosion, then echoes off of smooth concrete floors. He says no one lives there anymore. There’s a huge termite colony metastasizing on a second-story window, slowly eating away at the wooden walls. Weeds erupt through the stone walkway, and trees and vines begin to creep up the exterior. Soon, the jungle will swallow the home—concrete and all.
2.1 kilometers [the end?]
It’s the rainy season here, and the gravel road swells with water, bleeding into the surrounding ditches. The whitewater rapids rage red from sediment churned up by the storm. The river licks up over the road and sucks in chunks of gravel. After the rain subsides, a man walks out to the end of the road with a shovel. He quietly rebuilds what washed away.