I must have met a thousand folks in the course of the last 14 months since I left the central coast of California. That thousand includes some real gems, and some real interesting, unique people living really interesting and unique lives across Latin America. It includes Mexican off-the-gridders, Belizean beach dwellers, Guatemalan old-school urbanites, Costa Rican Techies, Panamanian fisherman, Puerto Rican cowboys, Andean farmers, and indigenous Amazonian rivermen, to name a handful. The stories are expansive and the lives near unfathomable to a young man like me fledged from a suburban Chicago nest. But despite this all, this deep exposure to the broader world, something about the friends I left back home is clearly irreplaceable. On the road, after a thousand folks and ten-thousand handshakes, I’ve come nowhere near replacing them with latin versions. My friends have rather, in my mind, been distilled down into archetypes of sorts——essential forms of the human spirit, irreplaceable by anything I’ve stumbled across in the rich flow of time and sensation over the last year. Maybe it’s because we grew up together in that metamorphic San Luis period of our lives. We all met at 18 or so, pseudo-adults, and then flocked into strange herds, threw strange, wild art-shows, backpacked deep into the backcountry, and intoxicated ourselves together in the heat of the party or in the quiet forest or on the cliffs above the ocean——as if hell bent on a sort of collective self-discovery. Whatever that process was, and however we knew how to perform it (it was as if unconsciously directed), it was beautiful and you all became my angels, godsends into a life whose first 18 years were spent in a sort of solitary headspace.

Point is, I haven’t met a single Beats on this journey——no latin version of that wonderful guy, nor a single Brian, Gurney, Dan, Eric, Emma, Jamie, Stone, etc. And of course no latin version of Dave (thank god——one being plenty). I think when I left I already knew the irreplaceability of the pack, and that was why the tears had flowed that day (and a few nights since) so profusely. Something as yet undefined pulled me away, but the pack already felt then, and even more so now, as having been set in stone by the random course of life, the Cheerio Effect of like-spirits flocking together in the great milk bowl. To attempt to reinvent that elsewhere would be sacrilege——sin, as far as I use that term in my life.

How did I get so damn lucky?