Up from Matagalpa

If Anna Lee Dunn hadn't caught hepatitis in the jungles of Nicaragua I would have never had the opportunity to get to know her. I had seen her around town many times before she went to Central America and she was at every demonstration I ever went to. And I had even once taken a Care package from her folks to her on my first trip to Managua and before I came back that time we accidentally ran into one another on a street beside the pyramid-shaped Hotel Intercontinental. But till she came back to Tucson to recuperate I never really got to know her.

It was some kind of picnic/rally attended by a fair representation of all the local progressive groups. The U.S. Out of Central America group with which I was peripherally involved was there, as were some members of the local CP (always a very small group) and, of course, there was a contingent of local religious folk - good people but more moderately progressive, certainly, than the leftists. I had come that day to pass out a crazed newsletter I had produced called Con Plomo, which was nothing more than eight to ten pages of screed and built up bile from a large well of frustrated, unexpressed political anger. When you have been angry for years at a political system and you have no satisfactory outlet for that anger, then you do silly things like create your own newsletter. Luckily for me, no one, including Anna Lee, seemed to hold my stupidity against me.

In fact, Anna Lee - and everybody else probably - didn't even notice Con Plomo, which was fine but she and I did visit briefly. I was in line beside her under an open air ramada in the park waiting to fill my plate with whatever edibles I could find on the well laden tables before us. It must have looked like a feast to her after being in Nicaragua so long. Nicaragua was the poorest country I'd personally ever been in and even food and drink, which I had to come to associate with the essence of all Latin-based cultures, was really hard to come by. I thought these things but didn't say so to Anna Lee; I just said hello. "Hello," she replied, glancing briefly at me.

Up close she was even taller than I remembered and definitely thinner - courtesy of the hepatitis. She had shoulder length brown hair that she clearly didn't feel like worrying about. It was sort of tousled and covered the sides of her plain, unadorned face. When she looked right at you, you could see that her left eye was slightly lazy and her features, while still showing some of their natural ruddiness, were not what you would describe as traditionally pretty. She was pleasant to talk to and there was a certain sparkle in her eyes and a slight curl to her lips that made her seem intelligent, alert, and rather ironically bemused by life in general. Overall, she was a very appealing woman.

"I'm sorry you had to come back this way," I groped for some way of keeping her attention aimed at me. The sparkle and the curl were clearly there when she answered.

"I'm just glad to get some good food to tell you the truth. It's hard to get a lot of stuff down there. But you know that. You've been down twice, right?"

"Right," I said, actually knowing what she meant but feeling like the worst kind of political dilettante compared to her natural, deep commitment. I had been to Nicaragua twice, for three weeks each time, and although I learned quite a bit, I had accomplished nothing of use to anyone. We were quiet for a moment, and then I blurted out: "Remember that time I saw you on the road by the Hotel Intercontinental in Managua?"

"Of course," she said evenly, her eyes crinkling at the corners. I looked down at my feet. "Are you going to the Calero demo next Saturday?" she asked, letting me off the hook onto which I had been trying to impale myself.

"S...sure," I muttered. "I guess I was sort of going to be in it."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. Are you going to be there?"

"I guess I'm sort of in it, too."

"Cool. I didn't know that."

"Well," she said, waving to some of her friends beyond the ramada and signaling the imminent end of our conversation, "I better go visit Jimmy and Kay."

"It was nice seeing you again," I said as she began to move away.

"Me, too," she said without any hint of irony. "See you later."

"Later," I said. She walked away. I called after her: "Hope you get to feeling better."

She waved with the fingers of her left hand and smiled. I stood in the ramada and watched her cross slowly through the park and join her friends.

The Saturday demonstration turned out pretty well. Something like four or five hundred people showed up, as many as I had ever seen at any protest in my time in Tucson. Everyone was there, from hard core lefties to well off liberal democrats. We put on an amateurish piece of street theatre in which Anna Lee played a sleazy government official channeling illegal funds to contra chief Calero. I was Calero, even though I had gray hair and a gray beard and was a scrawny representation of the obese would-be Nicaraguan political boss. I jammed the play money Anna Lee offered me into all my pockets, letting lots of it fall out onto the ground. The crowd seemed to like our little show.

When the demo was over - there hadn't been too many hitches in it and we hadn't had the typical counter protest - Anna Lee and I and a couple of our mutual friends crossed Broadway to where our cars sat in a dying strip mall parking lot.

"Which one of these is yours?" Anna Lee asked with a wry smile. There was a nice new brown Honda Accord near us, a sporty late model red Mustang, and an old, sun-baked, gray Toyota Corolla.

"That's mine," I said, pointing to the Toyota. Anna Lee's wry smile turned into a laugh.

"I thought all you IBMers drove BMWs," she said. "Beamers for Beamers."

"Not everybody," I smiled back at her. "I ain't into that shit."

Our friends suggested going somewhere nearby for an early meal and I said that sounded good to me.

"I'll need a ride," Anna Lee said. "I don't have a car."

"You could ride with me," I offered quickly. I was already basking in the glow of being seen with maybe our best and most well known activist and I didn't want it to end just yet. I was also discovering that I really liked Anna Lee, for more than just her local hero status.

"Alright," she said.

"Great," I said. "We'll meet you down at the Sonorita," I told our friends, referring to a small veggie Mexican restaurant at Speedway and Wilmot. I opened the rider's side for Anna Lee and we climbed into my little gray car and headed out west on Broadway.

The details of our post-demonstration meal mostly escape me now, but I remember listening intently to Anna Lee's down to earth personal and political perspective. I remember thinking that a lot of us, including myself, postured our radicalism loudly but that Anna Lee, who was a true activist living a radical life, had a quiet confidence about her. Her ideas were always expressed firmly but the volume was turned down at least a good two notches. She was living her politics and therefore didn't have to shout them from the rooftops.

Watching the side of her face as she told about living in the mountainous countryside above Matagalpa where she worked on a coffee cooperative - one I had visited, though not when she was there - I remembered seeing Anna Lee for the first time. It was at some sort of pre-demonstration meeting at a local church and there were speakers just back from Central America.

Anna Lee was there with a girlfriend, a really pretty girl, and both of them were probably not that far out of their teens at the time. I remember, despite the other girl's good looks, being attracted to and impressed by Anna Lee. She was a good sized girl, with a noticeable physical presence, but I was just as interested in her behavior.

While the speakers droned on, Anna Lee and her friend - both of whom seemed completely relaxed and somewhat detached from the proceedings - would whisper to each other, shake their heads, and roll their eyes at particularly boring, pretentious, or stodgy moments in the presentation. They didn't disrupt the proceedings in any way but I found their irreverence, especially Anna Lee's, to be amusing and refreshing.

Lefty and religious gatherings always seemed to be too dense, too heavy, too lacking in humor, and to see a bright young woman poking holes in the process where it needed them was just fine with me. Somewhere in the middle of some lame discussion of "violence on the right and violence on the left," I saw Anna Lee shake her head in disgust, roll her eyes dramatically at her friend and then stand up and walk out, the friend in tow. I could barely keep myself from laughing out loud.

Not long after the Calero demonstration, a group came through town with a film and presentation about the death of Ben Linder. Ben Linder had gone to Nicaragua to work much as Anna Lee had, and in fact they had known each other, meeting at occasional gatherings of internacionalistas - international workers - in lovely, hilly Matagalpa in the north of the country. Linder had been working out in the countryside near the combat zone, an area so dangerous the workers required armed Sandinista troops to protect them from the Washington-supported contras or counter-revolutionaries.

One spring day in 1987, no doubt a typically humid tropical one with light puffy cumulus clouds floating overhead, Linder's group - working in the countryside - was ambushed by M-16 carrying contras whose indiscriminate firing left the young U.S. worker and several of his protectors dead or dying. When word of the American's death leaked out, the Reagan administration - working from what evidence no one ever knew - declared Linder a combatant for the Sandinista enemy and therefore deserving of his fate. The group bringing Linder's story around the U.S. had, of course, a very different story.

The small auditorium on the University of Arizona campus where the film and discussion were presented was nearly full - at least one hundred or so people attended - and I got there with the main crowd. By chance, Anna Lee was coming up the aisle I was going down and we stopped to visit. She told me about knowing Ben Linder and I told her about visiting his grave on my last trip to Nicaragua just a few months before. When the presentation began a few moments later, we found seats together on a row near the front of the auditorium. I sat on the aisle, Anna Lee in the seat next to me on my left.

The evening was much as you might expect. A lot of righteous indignation, a number of predictable platitudes, some genuine sorrow. For me, as it usually was in those days, it was anger that rose to the fore. A species of inside out self-pity borne of the sense that under different circumstances I, or anyone else traveling or working down there, could have easily been where Linder was. On my first trip we had journeyed into contra territory and our bus and a later gathering of foreign visitors at a remote ranch area had been guarded by AK-47 wielding Sandinista soldiers.

Towards the end of the presentation, at a time when my internal musings had run their course and I became aware again of the exterior world, I looked over at Anna Lee. I had tried not to look at her too often, hoping that by concentrating on the film and speakers I would seem appropriately serious, someone who deserved to be sitting with someone as decent as she was.

What I saw when I looked over drove the remainder of my pathetic self-absorption from me. Anna Lee, possibly the only person in the room who understood Linder, where he had been and what he had done, was silently crying. I was profoundly affected by the sight. Tears ran down her ruddy cheeks and her tall body shook ever so slightly. I looked at the tears welling still in her reddened eyes and a powerful feeling swept over me.

Through Anna Lee's real, quiet sorrow I realized, understood the profound loss of a fellow human being. While most of us understood the loss on an intellectual level, even to some degree emotionally, its true depth could only be understood by someone for whom the loss was truly personal. Finally, after several moments more, I forced myself to look away, to let Anna Lee grieve without intrusion. I turned back to the presentation, tried to concentrate on it, but I could only think of Anna Lee and of Ben Linder himself, the once living, breathing human being. I thought of Anna Lee's loss, her grief, of Ben's life, his death, of his other friends' grief and that of his family.

After the presentation, I spoke with Anna Lee and a few other friends briefly, but now felt as if I were an interloper in some drama I had no right to be part of. Shortly I excused myself, left the auditorium and went on home alone.

About three or four months after I sat with Anna Lee at the Ben Linder memorial, I reached my saturation point for working in the spirit-numbing world of computers. I gave a month's notice, worked up until a Thursday night, left Tucson Friday morning and later that night was sitting on the patio of the Papagayo Hotel in Cuernavaca, state of Morelos, Mexico sipping on a cold Corona beer.

I stayed down south for about five months and in a letter from a friend heard that Anna Lee had gone back to Nicaragua to continue her tireless work in the farm co-op. When I came back to the states, I learned she had married some local Nica guy, a farm worker like herself.

A couple of years later, while I was living in Colorado, my same friend sent me a newspaper story from a Tucson paper, a nice piece with an interview and photos of Anna Lee showing her life in Nicaragua. About that same time there was a celebrated novel by a well known Tucson novelist that used the outline and some details of Anna Lee's life for one of its protagonists - without, interestingly enough, listing her name in the front matter credits where other local progressives of note found theirs.

When I left Colorado a year or two later to come back again to Tucson, I ran into my old letter writing friend, a long time local progressive and activist and he told me that Anna Lee was still living in Nicaragua and was still married. I was glad to hear about her and hoped she was doing well. But I only had the Ben Linder experience to really remember her by, because after that I never saw her again.