TRAVEL FEATURE - USA GUILLERMO MACLEAN
LONG RIDE BIKER ?
I
set out from Monterrey , Mexico and crossed the border through Laredo , Tamaulipas , one of the most violent cities in the world . Drug cartels vie for control of the bridges where drugs pass over in some of the 15,000 trucks that cross daily to the United States of America .
There were no major events after crossing the border , Texas roads are terribly boring . I slept in Winnie , Texas .
Travelling from Winnie to Canton , Mississippi , a distance of 685 kilometres , one of the most beautiful scenic roads in the United States , the Natchez Trail Parkway . I couldn ' t stop laughing , talking to myself , singing , shouting all the time : How wonderful , how beautiful !
A few Harley Davidson ’ s rolling in front of me ran over an American white-headed eagle that was in the middle of the road and left it for dead . I stopped and there was nothing I could do , as it passed away .
I decided to give it a dignified burial , but first , I cut off one of its legs , as a souvenir . When I was a boy , I had a similar one dissected in my room , which is why I was tempted to commit this act of mutilation .
A butterfly landed beside me as I finished burying the eagle , it was beautiful and unperturbed . I watched it with curiosity . I remembered an anthropologist of the Baluba and the Tulua of the Kasai ( Central Congo ) who said that the soul takes the image of a butterfly , observing a symbolic parallelism between the life of the butterfly and the life cycle of … an eagle ? In infancy it ’ s a small caterpillar that grows as it reaches maturity , and becomes a chrysalis in old age , its tomb is a cocoon from which its soul emerges and flies in the form of a butterfly , the laying of this butterfly being the expression of reincarnation .
I kept the leg hanging under the
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