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sound one of them was making at me.
    â€œ
Estoy buscando El Delegado
,” I announced to the group. The man who stepped forward had a thick mustache and his eyes glittered at me with what I hoped was just amusement.
    â€œÂ¿
En que puedo servirle
?” the official asked in a voice that suggested he did not serve anyone for free.
    â€œ
Señor
,” I began, glancing at our armed-and-armored audience. I touched my almost-blond hair. Then I let loose the story in one much interrupted garble of unconjugated Spanish. My family. Of the U.S.—where in the U.S.?—Nueva York. They sit on the bus. There is exit stamp from Guatemala and no entrance to El Salvador—same place, same immigration, one stamp and not the other—when I go for a trip to Tikal—Yes, pretty ruins. I like Central America very much—I am a teacher—today I take my family to show Guatemala—For truth? I be illegal in the country? I must to spend Christmas in handcuffs?
    I smiled up at El Delegado, and he beamed before his subordinates, drawing out the show with great flourishes. My father, eager to please, nodded and grinned as if he too understood the joke. Which, of course, was me.
    At last El Delegado finished toying with us and pointed out the cashier’s office where we paid a ten-dollar fine. With receipt in hand, my father and I set off on foot for Guatemala (the
toritos
go downhill only), waving goodbye to El Delegado’s posse as they shouted their good wishes for our travels.
    After our little dance with this border policeman, the urgency of our project fizzled out. No doubt, the bus had left or would leave soon, but my father and I strolled across the bridge and then stopped to look over the rail. Below us, slow brown water flowed. The air was warm and smelled like urine baking on the concrete, like overripe fruit, like dust and diesel, like
pupusas
frying in the distance under some blue plastic tarp roof by one of the two immigration stations. There were children playing in the river. From the looks of it they were supposed to be sifting sand from stones through screens but had abandoned their work, along with their clothing, on the rocky shore. Their voices chimed upward, mixed with the sounds of water splashing.
    On that bridge over the Rio Paz, the place that my little-girl finger once covered came alive, my father’s Kodak slides turned 3-D, green and vivid and ripe-smelling all around us. Even the Spanish language words on tape had turned silvery and sensible. Suddenly, hitchhiking to Guatemala City sounded fun. We’d ride in the back of a pickup truck, our faces to the wind, just my dad and me. We could do anything.
    Eventually, my father and I would hike up the hill to the Guatemalan border station. I would kick rocks and my father would whistle. We would cross into Guatemala, my passport properly stamped, and a Christmas miracle would be awaiting us with KING QUALITY BUS emblazoned across its side and my mother standing in its open doorway, one foot on the ground and one on the step. Later that night, my mother would hear the Christmas Eve service in a yellow church, which was close enough, and see
santeros
parade through the street. Then Guatemala would set her straight with an all-night, tooth-rattling fireworks extravaganza.
    But in that moment, resting above the Rio Paz, I was leading my father in his own footsteps, bridging a farm in New York and a country too tiny to see clearly on a globe, my father’s past and my present, like a not-so-little girl connecting dots. But it was really the stillness that mattered, not the disastrous history or the potential disasters ahead, not where we were from or where we were going, but where we were, right at that moment.

    Molly Beer is a terrible traveler. She reads books about Africa while camping in Tibet, cooks Italian food in her Mexican kitchen, or writes obsessively about El Salvador while living on a rooftop in Ecuador. Worse