The Tracks Left in the Earth

By the time I met him, I already knew what a landmine could do. I had heard the explosion that killed another boy not long before, and for weeks afterward, his mother’s scream followed me everywhere. I thought I understood what war looked like. Then, I met a boy who had survived.

I was about nine years old when my mother sent me to stay with a family in Cantón Joya de Ventura, west of the center of San Jorge. She wanted me to learn how to work the land, as many children in rural El Salvador did during those years. School alone could not prepare us for the lives we were expected to live. We learned by following adults into fields, carrying tools, tending cattle, gathering firewood, and doing whatever work helped our families survive.

Every morning, we led the cattle into open pastures beneath the shadow of Chaparrastique. The volcano stood to the east, watching over the fields just as it watched over San Jorge itself. The grass moved gently whenever the wind descended from its slopes, and for a few hours, it was almost possible to forget that the country was at war.

That was where I met him. He was perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, and he always arrived in a wheelchair. His family’s cattle grazed near the cattle I helped tend, and every afternoon we ended up sitting together on the same dry tree stump while the animals wandered through the pasture. His wheelchair rested beside him, its metal frame already worn from years of use. Someone had donated it; his family could never have afforded one. In those days, very few families could.

The pasture was beautiful, but it was not built for wheels. The earth was soft, especially after rain. Every time he pushed himself forward, the narrow wheels sank into the soil before moving again. Progress came slowly, one difficult push after another. As a child, I watched him struggle across ground that my own feet crossed without thought.

One afternoon, he told us what had happened. He had been working in the countryside, much as everyone else did. Then, there was an explosion. He never saw the mine. He remembered falling, he remembered the confusion, and when he tried to stand, his right leg was gone. He spoke quietly, without anger, and without drama—as though he had repeated the story so many times that it no longer belonged entirely to him. Sometimes he seemed bitter, sometimes only tired, and sometimes simply resigned. He smiled occasionally, but never for very long.

At that age, I could not understand what losing a leg truly meant. I only knew that it should not happen to someone so young. What frightened me most was not his story; it was realizing that I walked the same hills he had walked. I climbed those hills searching for firewood for our cooking fire. I crossed fields gathering fruit with neighbors to sell in town. I followed narrow paths through the countryside almost every day. Nothing separated his life from mine except one unseen step.

That realization stayed with me. Until then, landmines had belonged to stories adults whispered about or to tragedies that happened to other families. Now, one sat beside me every afternoon. Not the mine, but its consequence.

Looking back now, I think the wheelchair taught me something the explosion never could. Explosions last only seconds; their consequences can last a lifetime. The war did not end for him when the dust settled. It continued every morning he climbed into that donated chair, every afternoon he struggled to cross another field, and every evening he returned home knowing there was no prosthetic waiting for him, no rehabilitation center nearby, and no future in which modern medicine would restore what had been taken. In a poor farming community during the final years of El Salvador’s civil war, surviving the explosion was only the beginning.

Years later, as I began encountering Jewish teachings about human dignity, I found language for something I had first learned without words. As a child, I only knew that, after a while, something changed in the way I saw him.

After a while, I stopped noticing the missing leg first. I noticed the boy—the one who watched the cattle with us, the one who sat on the old tree stump, the one who sometimes smiled. I noticed the one who kept coming back, even when every meter of soft earth demanded more effort from him than I could possibly understand.

I no longer remember his name. I do not know what became of him after the war. Perhaps he found work, perhaps he left San Jorge, or perhaps he never left Joya de Ventura. Memory is not always generous enough to answer those questions. But I still remember the narrow tracks his wheelchair left behind in the soft earth of that pasture.

I have come to think that those tracks were more than marks in the soil. They were the path of a boy who refused to disappear after the war had already tried to erase his future.