Jungle Book

Mary Jo McConahay fell in love with the native people of the rainforest straddling the border of Mexico and Guatemala through an exhibit at Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology. It was 1973 and many descendents of the Maya, the great lost civilization of Central America, still lived in the forest relatively untouched by outside influences. For her, it was a hippy dream came truethe ultimate offroad backpacking expedition. She set off to find a particular tribe in the remote jungle.

As McConahay recounts in her beautifully written travelogue, Maya Roads: One Woman' Journey Among the People of the Rainforest (Chicago Review Press), her time in the jungle represented a fascinating contact with an alien yet not inhospitable people who lived in acute awareness of their environment, adorned themselves with the bright plumes of tropical birds and worshipped the old gods while drinking the consciousness-altering nectar of the forest. Most of Maya Roads, however, concerns the recent past and the ever-morphing present as it lurches toward an uncertain future.

The region has changed since 1973, torn apart by insurgencies and counterinsurgencies and confrontations between indigenous people and landowners razing the forest for cattle grazing. The discoveries of archeologists have encouraged developers to imagine resort hotels for wealthy tourists. Under the guise of aiding Mexico's ill-fated "war on drugs," the first President Bush and Bill Clinton supplied the firepower used by the military to fight local Zapatista rebels, who nonetheless have established autonomous zones. And yes, in the midst of confusion, narco traffickers have busily transformed the jungle into a supply line for an America hungry for the anesthetic of illegal drugs. An elegiac tone is inevitable.