DUMMERSTON-Joyce Marcel lounges in her red recliner, surrounded by opulent colors.
Vibrant paintings cover the walls of the living room in her Dummerston home. Collections of green and blue glass jars line the kitchen shelves. Books and magazines fill the coffee table, while her cat Belle snoozes on the back of the couch. Her husband, Randy Holhut, types on his computer at a nearby table.
People familiar with Marcel know her as a journalist. For 37 years, her articles have filled the pages of news outlets such as The Boston Globe, the Brattleboro Reformer, Vermont Business Magazine, and The Commons.
“Very few people are paid to study human nature, and that’s what reporting is. I don’t have any imagination, and I don’t have any gift for poetry. But I can take reality and turn it into language,” she said.
She does so most recently in her new memoir, Joyriding: Sex, Drugs, and Adventure on the 1970s Gringo Trail, which launches with a book signing at Brooks Memorial Library on Wednesday, Sept. 9.
In Joyriding, Marcel recounts her 1974 journey through South America along the backpacking trail stretching from Mexico to Argentina, a path that loosely followed the mostly unpaved Pan-American Highway.
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The journey begins as Marcel, then 32 years old, debated whether to board one bus, to Colorado’s Naropa Institute, a Buddhist-inspired, nonsectarian liberal arts university, or another bus, to Miami, the first leg of a trip that would take her to the Galápagos Islands.
With minutes to spare, Marcel boarded the bus to Miami.
The decision became the first step in a journey that took her from a shy girl who believed she had no right to exist to being the “Queen of the Gringo Trail.”
During Marcel’s first year on the trail she experienced the warmth of fellow travelers; she rode a former racehorse up Tungurahua, an active volcano; and she embarked on a sex life that would make romance authors envious. Her story doesn’t shy away from the raw and painful, as she perseveres through hepatitis, rape, and a boat accident that left her with only the clothes on her back.
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The Latin culture, whatever constraints or rules of behavior there were, and there were many — well, I didn’t know what they were. I didn’t have to conform to anything. In a way, I had found a perfect freedom, a way to be perfectly myself, a way to invent my life from the ground up. Before you can march to a different drummer, you have to hear the beat. I was finally hearing the beat of my own life.
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To understand the radicalness of Marcel’s decision, remember that traveling the Gringo Trail meant leaving behind her cultural comfort zone and the expectations for a 32-year-old woman in the early 1970s.
“By 32, you were supposed to have two kids and a doctor for a husband,” Marcel said. “I didn’t have any of that.”
But she had read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. She knew in her core that the road was where she wanted to live. She wanted to be a female Kerouac.
However, the way women travel through the world differs from how men do, even when they’re walking the same path.
“Guys? They could get away with it, but the women, they didn’t do stuff like that, or if they went abroad, it was with a guy,” Marcel said. “In my head, that was what you did — you went on the road by yourself, and you had adventures.”
Magnificent, raw, and always frank, Joyriding overflows with stories of sex, drugs, and 1970s Central and South America. Part origin story, part homecoming, it traces Marcel’s journey as she sheds her family’s and society’s expectations to return as her true self.
She said she is proud of all the experiences in the book. More than 50 years after her travels, she said, capturing these stories in print was really the only way to tell them.
“When I started living in Brattleboro, you couldn’t work a story about the Atacama Shit House, for example, into dinner conversation without completely stalling the entire party,” she said. “These stories just did not fly in the American world that I had moved to.”
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The nonfiction book is stitched together by stories of the people Marcel met on the trail. Like Mama Rosa, owner of the boarding house Hotel Americano, and her husband Enrique in Baños de Agua Santa, Ecuador.
“She would hide your dope from the police,” Marcel recalls. “She was making pancakes, and Enrique was in the basement making sugar cane alcohol, and they were running every scam they could to get the money out of the gringos, and they were wonderful.”
Sheila Rose, a former British Airways stewardess, quickly became Marcel’s close friend. Together, they traveled from Ecuador to Colombia to buy marijuana and finance their journey. Marcel’s return to Ecuador was a nail-biting trek through multiple border stops, pot strapped around her waist.
Fortunately, she wasn’t the only smuggler — seemingly every passenger carried contraband, from toilet paper to floral nightgowns.
“Whenever I went back, they all knew me, and I had friendships there,” Marcel said. “And I felt very much that I, for a long time, I belonged. I was [called] “Queen of the Gringo Trail” — although I never used that word myself.”
Marcel’s first love on the trail, a charismatic musician from Quebec (also named Marcel), shared the 200-foot Agoyán Falls with her and introduced her to a mescaline called San Pedro.
When he understood how much I loved the sound of his guitar, he told me to get on my knees on the bed, next to his shoulder. He showed me how to take the tip of the guitar inside my mouth and clench my teeth around it. Then he played, and the strings resonated inside my head as if I was the rosewood belly of the guitar itself, and the sound filled the hollows of my soul.
Mama Nati, the community healer, frightened and fascinated Marcel. Mama Nati’s treatment for hepatitis included wrapping a cow spleen around Marcel’s abdomen.
Laying her wrinkled brown face on my smooth white belly, she [Mama Nati] listened to my liver. It probably screamed, “Help me!” In her ear. She spoke to it in Quechua. It must have answered her, because she smiled. Then she shook her head sadly and looked straight into my eyes.
“It’s your liver,” she said in fractured Spanish. “It’s very hurt. It will take a long time to cure you. I can do it.”
Marcel experienced some of her greatest moments of love and heartbreak with Ron. Originally from Texas, Marcel first met Ron on a staircase in the hotel called the “Grand Casino.”
Their relationship began with long afternoons of intimacy but was tested by a journey into the Amazon and Ron’s unresolved promise to a woman in Texas.
“I’m not ashamed of the men, and I’m not ashamed of the drugs, and I was a drug addict, and I know that, and I’m not ashamed of that, either,” she said. “I mean, the grave robbing was. I would not do that now. And I, the people I met — native people — I’m not sure that I was respectful enough. Although the people I wrote about, I loved, and I think — I hope — that comes through.
“But if I were doing it again, I’d probably want to go down there and ask them if I could write about them, and I didn’t do that.”
Not everything — or everyone — on the Gringo Trail was beautiful.
Marcel and Ron scrambled from a sinking boat as water grabbed at their ankles. The disaster stranded them in Peru without passports, money, or belongings.
She also experienced two rapes.
Rather than “caving in” or “come crawling home,” she found the adversity and violence hardened and strengthened her.
“Why didn’t I wither up and die right there?” she said. “It’s not something I would recommend, of course, but it’s not the end of the world. Some people are cruel. You have to learn how to identify those people and learn how to protect yourself. You can’t do that unless bad things happen to you.”
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Marcel decided to self-publish Joyriding after she got no traction from agents and publishers.
“I’ve got 70 rejection letters downstairs. They all say the same thing: ‘Great stories, great writing. We won’t touch it,’” she said. “A woman having sex, doing drugs in the middle of the jungle. Good god, horror! I could now be arrested in Arkansas for what I’ve written.”
She feels gratitude for the local writers and editors who surrounded her with support and advice. Thanks to Peter Gould, Jessie Haas, Heather Taylor, Deb Luskin, Lee Stookey, Lynn Levine, and Cheryl Wilfong, Joyriding is now in physical form.
Above all, she credits the publication of Joyriding to book designer Jim Brisson of Williamsville, whom she calls the book’s godfather.
According to Marcel, Brisson sent a design for the book cover. The moment she saw it, she said, she realized Joyriding could be real.
“That’s a big thing in working in a small town or in a small community: you get supported. Your work gets supported,” she said.
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Joyce Marcel will host a book launch for Joyriding on Wednesday, Sept. 9, from 6:30 to 8 p.m., at Brooks Memorial Library’s Main Reading Room. Randy Holhut, her husband and the news editor at The Commons, will interview her about the book. Light refreshments will be served, and books will be available for purchase and signing.
Joyriding: Sex, Drugs, and Adventure on the 1970s Gringo Trail is available at ByWay Books and Everyone’s Books in Brattleboro, Bartleby’s Books in Wilmington, Village Square Booksellers in Bellows Falls, and at The Toadstool Bookstore in Keene, New Hampshire. It is also available at joycemarcel.com, where you can also learn more about Marcel and her writings.
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Editor’s note: Joyce Marcel is our longtime colleague and friend and has contributed to The Commons regularly since 2010. Heather Taylor, Deb Luskin, and Lee Stookey, whom Marcel praised for helping make Joyriding a reality, have also long been affiliated with our newspaper as freelancers, contributors, or volunteers.
Whenever we write about our colleagues in these pages, we try to do so as if they were strangers to us, while at the same time doing our best to offer complete transparency about our connections and conflicts.
Olga Peters, a longtime staff reporter at this newspaper, is a freelance writer who contributes to a number of publications, including The Commons and The Deerfield Valley News. She is the host of The Montpelier Happy Hour, a state government and public affairs podcast that also appears in video form courtesy of Brattleboro Community Television.
This Arts column by Olga Peters was written for The Commons.