In 1988, while a junior at Manchester College in Indiana, I took a three-week January Term course to study the Mayan civilization. The class traveled to Mexico along with our instructor, Dr. Adams, an art professor and a renaissance man if I’ve ever known one.

Dr. Adams was the closest real-life Indiana Jones I’ve ever met, as well as an accomplished artist, photographer, designer, videographer, and historian. He talked about building his own vacuum-tube stereo system and speakers once, and that’s still on my bucket list.

I regret that this was the only course that I took with him. His life continues to inspire my own.

My lifelong friend Scott was on this trip with me and can, if needed, corroborate the things I’ll share here. Likely he will remember them differently though. 

Also, I feel quite free to apply artistic license to my life. Stories of my life are always relatively true. When I remember what happened in my youth, or yesterday, I try hard to get concrete facts correct, like the date or my age or the people that were there, but where my memory fails me I fill in the details.

And, as with all of us, my memory always fails me.

For instance, I have no idea what the man who hijacked our VW bus said when he stopped us on the dirt road to the Usumacinta River on the border of Mexico and Guatemala. I don’t think he spoke English, but he might have. He might have had a sense of humor. He might have had a mustache.

But he did have a gun. I remember that.

I also remember that there was a huge dead snake lying across the road. And I think that was how he got us to stop. 

When I tell the story though all of these things are true. 

I sometimes use the word “brandished” for the story, that he brandished the gun in his hand during the ride we gave him. I like that word. It’s a ten-cent word.

In my mind words have a monetary value. Simple words like “the” and “and” and almost every other word are worth one cent. They will never be worth more or less. Inflation will not affect them. In 1988 they were worth one cent. They are still worth one cent. 

Longer words typically are worth more than once cent. They take up more real estate on the paper. They use more ink. You can argue that they literally are worth more than smaller words.

But some longer words are still worth one cent. “Exciting” and “awesome” and “extraordinary” are worth only one cent.

“Ferocity” is worth a nickel. “Pitchpines” is worth twenty cents. 

My friends Casey and Ben once described a rock as a two-man rock. They were placing this two-man rock into another counselor’s bed at our summer camp one night after taps. They knew when he went to bed later that night, when most of the camp would be asleep, he would be unable to take the rock out of his bed, being just one man, after all. 

“Two-man” is a very valuable hyphenated word, a great example of how two one cent words can add up to much more than two cents.

So when I say the hijacker brandished the gun versus the hijacker held the gun there is more there. 

On the other hand, using the word takes away from the power of the image. Sure, it is a valuable word. But simply saying the man held a gun is enough. 

I could add that the gun was menacing. “Menacing” is a five-cent word for sure. In this case though it is redundant. A hijacker with a gun is always menacing. I might as well say that the air was transparent. 

Of course the air was transparent. Air is always transparent.

Which reminds me that the air wasn’t transparent actually, that the man was also smoking, the cigarette smoke crowding the bus, mixing with our sweat, mingling with our fear, the suffocating air growing cold as ashes fell to the floor.  

And there I’ve gone and over-described, telling things that might have been true, but here come across as too dramatic. Way over-done.

And as for being too dramatic, I can’t explain why the hijacker didn’t just flag us down and ask for a ride. We were a friendly bunch from a Christian school. 

And anyway, the most memorable part of that excursion to the Usumacinta River was the ride back, when the shocks on the VW Bus broke and the gas can we carried in the boot started to leak and the headache I can still feel thirty-five years later began.

But my favorite memory of the trip happened two days before when we stayed in the town of Palenque in the state of Chiapas. While there we toured Zona Arqueológica Palenque, the famous ruins of a former Mayan city-state. 

I only have a couple of one-cent words for that tour: awesome and amazing.

Instead it is a visit that a few of us had that night of our stay in Palenque, when we went to a downtown nightclub together.

I can say that we were hoping to party, but that wasn’t true, not for me. 

I wanted to dance.

There was a smallish window in my life when I loved to dance, perhaps all of six years, looking back. I went to prom and homecoming in high school and was at least able to go onto the dance floor. Considering how shy I felt growing up this was a huge accomplishment.

Once in college something changed. I desperately wanted to dance. I bought a small sound mixing board so that my friend Paul and I could become DJs and I could control the music that was played at the dances. 

I make no claim to being a good dancer. Maybe I was. I took a modern dance class in college and got an A.

So, there you go. Objective proof.

Dancing was a time of enchantment for me. I felt a sense of peace and wonderment and thrill and expression. 

That smallish window closed at some point and I didn’t even notice. I can’t speak at all to the moment or the mental change I went through. I simply can’t dance in public any more. 

It feels a lot like being able to swim in lakes with confidence and then suddenly having a wave of panic at the mere thought. In both cases my life began with such overwhelming fear that being able to do them, and even love to do them, was miraculous.

And there I was, in that six-ish year window of dancing, a junior in college, in a foreign country having no idea how to speak Spanish, and I wanted to go dance. I had to go dance. So I convinced Scott and a few others to go.

We got a booth and drank Mexican beer. The dance floor was set below the tables, a rectangular recess with two stairway entrances. 

We sat there for an hour waiting for the music to begin. Nothing. We sat for another hour. Nothing. In fact, there was almost no one in the nightclub at all. 

I have since discovered that there are local traditions that govern the time that dancing and eating and drinking happen across the world. In my quest to become more worldly, more like Dr. Adams, I’ve made a bit of progress.

That night though we were all exhausted. “I’m heading back,” Scott said. “Who knows when the music will start?”

“Come on,” I said. “Just wait a bit more.” 

Another half hour of waiting a bit more and they got up to leave.

“I’m not going,” I said. “I want to dance.”

“Suit yourself,” Scott said.

And there I was, alone in a Mexican nightclub. Sitting by myself. Not speaking the language.

At 11:00 pm, the music started. A single spotlight came on above the dance floor. I expected people to flood the floor, but nothing happened. 

Then I got up, walked to the stairs and climbed down to the dance floor.

I danced alone for fifteen minutes. 

I don’t remember the music nor whatever cool dance moves I made. I just know that I danced.

And then people started coming to the dance floor. I kept dancing, almost indifferent.

People began circling around me and watching me. I made eye contact with a couple of them and I realized that they were not laughing at me. That I was a person of interest. 

They smiled at me, danced near me and encouraged me. 

And so, I danced in Mexico. 

Eventually, I walked back to the hotel, exhausted, an unbelievable story carried with me. Two days later we were hijacked.

Thirty-five years later I am terrified to dance in public. When I go to weddings I will dance a bit, try to fit in with the crowd. Nothing more. Nothing expressive.

It is the equivalent of treading water, of being panicked to put my head in, to try and swim, to simply be confident and unconcerned that I might drown, that I might go under, that others might notice me and not approve.

Somehow on my journey to becoming a renaissance man I have been hijacked. 

Sometimes the bullies in our lives are obvious. They smoke cigarettes and hold guns and force us to the side of the road with giant dead snakes. They are obvious threats. Obviously dangerous. Everyone can see them. You can take pictures of them. 

Other times bullies are just shadows, memories of fears, ghosts without weapons, invisible. 

I have been so busy driving I didn’t notice the trespasser, the shadow bully in the back seat. The bully doesn’t have a gun to brandish though. They don’t smoke.  They don’t even have a mustache. 

There is no evidence the bully is there, save my fear of dancing and swimming in lakes.

So why do I feel like my life is in real danger?

I’m taking a deep breath and pulling over to the side of the road. 

“Get off the bus,” I say, sliding open the door, waiting patiently. Got to give it to the bully–they were wearing their seatbelt.

I’ve just shut the door and gotten back into the driver’s seat. I’m putting the clutch down and shifting into first gear as I put the cassette tape into the player.

I’m tapping my hands on the steering wheel as I start singing, “When there’s no one else in sight, in the crowded lonely night . . .”