Beach Reading

I did an informal poll around the pool and beach last week, to see what other people were reading. I spotted multiple copies of the DaVinci Code, with, what, its fifth or sixth cover now? Multiple copies of A Million Little Pieces, and many copies of Reader's Digest. Oh boy! And a regular assortment of what I call "airport books" - mystery and thriller stuff. I was chagrined to find not one literary novel.

My idea of beach reading is something that I can really sink my teeth, or my brain, into, while my body is totally slothing about. I can't zone out both physically and mentally. And when I'm home, overwhelmed with the multiple jobs of teaching, working, organizing, momming and daughtering, it just seems a bit much to pick up a book like this just when I need some rest. So when my husband offered me up his copy of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel at the beach, I picked it up. It weighs about as much as a roast chicken. It's a heavy book, and it's also a heavy book, if you know what I mean. The basic premise is an attempt to answer the question, "Why do some (few) people in the world have all the goodies, and most of the people have almost nothing?"

The answers are pretty breathtaking, especially given the context of reading the book while at a resort populated with about 95% European Americans, while being waited on hand and foot by about 99% people of Mayan descent. It's right there. One day I was sitting on our lovely balcony, looking out at the pretty turquoise sea, and I saw this man working in the adjacent dried out, hurricane-ravaged, endless looking jungle. I knew it was absolutely sweltering out there. I couldn't even bear to sit in the sun on a lounge chair, let alone hacking away at gnarly brances with a machete. And yet there he was, and there was I.

Why? How did this all happen? Jared Diamond takes it back to prehistoric times, to the early humans, some of whom had the good luck to figure out stone tools and then progress to things like metal tools and writing. Some of them had the tough, survival-driven life of hunter-gatherers, based on what kinds of vegetation and animals they lived near, and others had the relative luxury of becoming farmers. For so many millions of people, it came down to the luck of being born in a good place or a hard place. And so it continues.

And I'm still wracking my little pea brain trying to figure out how to help, or how not to hurt. I'm trying to do good work.

This was the first vacation I've ever taken like this, the fancy kind. The kind I'm more used to, and the kind I feel more comfortable with, is camping, or taking a bunch of middle schoolers to Guatemala to learn Spanish and do community service, or taking a bunch of health care workers to Nicaragua to share their experiences and learn a bunch themselves, or wandering around Nepal or Burma and really talking to people. Reaching out a little bit. Or else just going and hanging out with friends and family in the places where they live.

Maybe I read Guns, Germs and Steel at the beach because I just couldn't stand being that comfortable in a place like that. And I wasn't.