tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83949882024-03-13T20:24:36.578+07:00District BeginnerI thought that I might possibly have gained their confidence, and have wandered about with them, and learnt their language, and all their strange ways, and then--and then--and a sigh rose from the depth of my breast; for I began to think, “Supposing I <i>had</i> accomplished all this, what would have been the profit of it; and in what would all this wild gypsy dream have terminated?” --George Borrow, <i>the Romany Rye</i>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comBlogger57125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-60022552628409684102009-03-23T00:00:00.002+07:002011-09-23T09:02:31.986+07:00Potential Wildlife<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number 2009/??</div></span><br /><div align="justify">We recently enjoyed a beautiful weekend visiting friends at Cát Tiên Natural Park, located about a hundred fifty kilometers north of Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam. 5,831 words.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br /><b>Cát Tiên</b><br /><br />[HCMC]—It’s Saturday morning, and we are preparing to hike into the Vietnam forest toward Crocodile Lake. The lake is a premier attraction of Cát Tiên National Park, where they release rescued Siamese crocodiles back into natural populations. We were driven ten kilometers to the trailhead in the back of a rustic Isuzu truck with two rickety wooden pews. Connected to this jury-rigged seating contraption are bars to hold onto as the truck pitches headlong over inconsistent dirt tracks. Everything creaks and rattles together, leans as one. We were sitting pretty high on the top of the truck bed, so besides the difficulties of keeping my ass on the plank—and absorbing each new pothole with my legs to keep that plank from actually harming me—we also had to duck a lot of overhanging flora. The track goes from one to another type of non-contiguous jungle canopy. Some hang lower than others. The drive was fun but hardly safe. Now we are at the posted trailhead; the sign says Crocodile Lake 5K. Sunshine has taken a seat on a concrete bench to remove her little green tennis shoes. She is putting on a pair of rented leech socks.<br /><br />We’ve been up for hours already, even though it is still pretty early for me. Our room, catching a good deal of morning sun, was a lot more inviting today than it had been when we checked in last night. The curtains are blue and it gives the concrete cubicle a cool cast that the air conditioner doesn’t quite live up to. We ate breakfast in the cantina down the road from our room. It is being redecorated. Half of the walls are newly painted an earthy burnt-orange color. The other half are crawling with park wildlife. In the back room, a man works on a large green underwater mural featuring crocodiles, turtles, and duckweed. We took the preferred table, right beneath a rotary fan we had to plug in. My egg was pretty damn good, but there weren’t quite enough sub rolls to go around, so I split mine with one of our gracious hosts. Half an egg sandwich is more breakfast than I am used to getting, and I assume it’s enough for a ten kilometer hike. The iced coffee was fabulous.<br /><br />Cát Tiên Natural Park about a hundred fifty kilometers north northeast of Hồ Chí Minh City. It is home to a pretty vast array of plants and animals, many of the latter endangered. Depending on who you ask, the list of fauna to be found at Cát Tiên is somewhat staggering: Javan rhinoceroses, Asiatic elephants and black bears, crab-eating and pig-tailed macaques, golden-cheeked gibbons, several types of langur, Indian muntjacks, sambar, leopards, palm civets, mouse deer, wild pigs, pangolins, fishing cats, guar, shrews, and wild buffalo. Ask some people and they’ll tell you there are Indochinese Tigers in there. It is a remarkable and diverse area of discontinuous bamboo forest tracts, wetlands, thick double-canopy deciduous woods, and other tropical forest lands. The certain wildlife population seems astoundingly dense to me, considering the confined area of the park is only about seven hundred twenty square kilometers. Some of the more breathless reports can be looked on with skepticism: populations of extremely rare clouded leopards and tigers, and even sun and moon bears, are difficult to verify. That’s not to say that these difficulties should be seen as conclusive. One camera trap set up to spot a possible area sun bear recently photographed a binturong by accident. As of this writing, the park’s official website doesn’t yet list binturong as an inhabitant of the park.<br /><br /><br /><b>Public Transportation</b><br /><br />The day before, we’d covered the distance to Cát Tiên Park from Hồ Chí Minh City primarily in a big green city bus with wooden floors. The windows were greasy but open, and while the bus was moving it was actually pretty comfortable. With no air conditioning, the temperature soared immediately every time we’d stop. The trip began with the vehicle at half capacity, a scooter loosely tied in the aisle, blocking off the four back row seats where we were sitting. We’d gotten lucky that our hosts for the weekend, friends who work at the park, were already in town this weekend. They’d been able to return to Cát Tiên with us. It is confusing trip. There are different destinations called Cát Tiên, and multiple ways to reach them. Since we had guides, we were spared much of the confusion and uncertainty here. We’ve never had the opportunity to become habituated to this type of public transportation in Vietnam.<br /><br />And that’s a shame. It was much nicer seeing the landscape gradually trundle along past those open windows than to watch the globe shift anonymously beneath airplane portholes. We traveled through many different villages Friday, but they all muddled together to constitute one nearly consistent urban outskirt along the way. We stopped regularly, both to pick up passengers and to take on freight. Soon the motor-scooter in the aisle was joined by a refrigerator and a couple of dining room chairs. We stopped to load a huge tractor engine into the hold under the wooden floor; then to have a bunch of plastic conduit tied to the roof. Each stop was hot, as I’ve said, but old women in zipped-up hoodies, obscured behind surgical face masks from the cheeks down and leaf hats from the brow up, stepped aboard to sell water and off-brand cola from dripping wicker baskets filled with ice.<br /><br />Near the end of our trip, already hours after dark, we were transferred to another, smaller bus which whisked us on to the Cát Tiên ferry. That last half hour should have taken longer. We were sped madly through the Vietnamese night, over pitch dark village roadways, dodging pedestrians and bicycle traffic as they appeared in the dim pool of our headlights. This was more like watching someone play a particularly intense video game than being a bus passenger. The benefit was that it was over quickly. Once we staggered from the bus there was only one more step to Cát Tiên: taking a small ferry five hundred feet over the slow-moving local neck of the Đồng Nai River. Our hosts are very friendly with the people at the little convenience snack bar cum ferry station. They were friendly with everybody. The ferry crew were lounging around and chatting after dinner, I guess, but didn’t seem to mind carting us across the river. This is the benefit of being guests. Though it is confusing to get there, tourists are welcome at Cát Tiên. Tourism is one of the ways the park raises money and awareness. But tourists face certain peculiar odds. Our bus from Hồ Chí Minh City took five hours to travel a hundred fifty kilometers. The ferry place has a sign saying it doesn’t run after dark, not without reservations. There was nobody in the tourism kiosk on this side of the river. I was glad, one more time, that we had been lucky enough to make this trip in the company of people who knew what they were doing. People who were friendly with the staff.<br /><br />After checking-in at the main information desk we wandered along to our room. While the park encourages a certain amount of tourism, this is not a hotel. A tourist hotel is apparently being built somewhere down the road. Our block of rooms are considered guest quarters, though researches stay in these, too. They are predictably Spartan: a cinderblock square bathed in the lurid greenish fluorescence of its one flickering tube. The bed is pushed into the far corner, and has one nailed-on post for attaching the mosquito net. The other three corners of the net hook onto nails driven into the concrete wall. This was inconvenient, since it meant that the bed could not be pushed across the room to the wall with the air conditioner. No matter. I guess it’s better to be just a little bit hot than to have malaria.<br /><br /><br /><b>Leech Socks</b><br /><br />I see my first leech about halfway to Crocodile Lake. Leeches in the movies are greenish-black and about the size of a cigar butt, they live in and around brackish water and move sluggishly, relying on prey to all but spoon-feed themselves to the lazy bastards. But not these leeches. What I am shown is olive green, a little longer than an inch worm. It sits on a leaf waving its end around in the air to grab hold of passersby. Its mouth is its widest point, about the circumference of a pencil eraser. And it’s fast.<br /><br />We were appraised of the availability of leech socks before we even left Hồ Chí Minh City. I’d had trouble understanding what they were for. It seemed to me that heavy pants and boots were good enough for those movie leeches. Could Vietnamese leeches bite through denim? To be safe, I have worn my combat boots, the old thick leather kind that lace midway up my calf. Sunshine has come hiking in cute brightly-colored trainers that don’t even protect her ankles. That’s okay, because our hosts, old hands at hiking here, are wearing little shoes, too. One is hiking in sandals. I am beginning to feel like my feet are overdressed, maybe. I do not think I need any leech socks. In any event, it’s difficult to take my shoes off and put them on again now that we are on the hike. Everyone else is wearing the socks, of course. They are tall sleeves of nylon that are worn under the shoes but over the pants legs. They protect up to the knees. They are not water-tight or particularly puncture resistant. I get assurances that we aren’t planning on investigating brackish areas, anyway. It has been at least a week since the last rain, and I can’t imagine where any leeches would be.<br /><br />It’s pretty dry in the forest. It’s more humid here than in the compound area, possibly due to the low light and rotting vegetable matter; but it’s still dry. And beautiful: we are in an area of high foliage, and the woods are open around and above us. It’s all deeply green and brown, the spongy floor of the forest studded with volcanic stones covered in moss. The area around us is very quiet. We are looking out for animals as we go. There is virtually no chance we will see any. I am conscious of how very loudly I am moving through the jungle. I’m also pretty slow. I’d injured my ankle a couple of weeks before and, while it isn’t hurting me, I’m taking no chances on spraining it again on the path’s uneven stones and slick leaves. My loudness and slowness combine to protect park wildlife: anything living in the area will be well-hidden, or long gone, before I’ve gotten there. We do see a number of butterflies, however. They don’t seem to care how loud I am.<br /><br />The path we are hiking is well-tended, and there is very little to duck under or push out of our way. Occasionally, we walk past deer and civet scat, the latter full of seeds and pods. Here and there are piles of figs fallen from tropical trees with buttress roots that form snaky, muscular walls through the porous igneous rock of the jungle floor. One particular <i>Tetrameles nudiflora</i> has a root system taller than me in places, and we sit here for a minute or two enjoying what scattered sunshine is allowed into the forest along its immense trunk. It’s here that I’m eagerly shown, by each of our hosts in turn, a leech. The first will not bite down on our host’s hand because of bug repellant, so he shows it to me up close. It whips around, stretching to find something to bite. I am a little bit impressed with leeches. The second I’m shown waves around in the middle of our trail, where it is nearly invisible in the in the fallen leaves carpeting everything.<br /><br />Shortly before the five kilometer mark, we come across a weathered and possibly faltering structure that has been referred to as a boardwalk. It’s really a bridge. It runs about a hundred yards, maybe a little longer, across a low area I take to be a continuation of Crocodile Lake’s flood plain. We are almost there, assuming we live through crossing this bridge. It’s a little harrowing for me. Looking down, I can see right through the flat untreated wood slats into a weedy thicket thirty feet down. Sometimes I can see through gaps, sometimes through holes. Maybe it just seems like thirty feet. Each slat is attached to beams forming a spine down the length of the bridge by exactly one nail. I try to walk along the nails, which is not a straight line. The whole structure sways whenever two of us get a little too close together. I’m pretty certain I’m the heaviest person here, and so I try to keep ahead of the group, too. I am walking a crooked line, quickly. We reach the ranger station at Crocodile Lake none too soon. It is also on stilts, but it seems very solid. Since people live here, we have to take off our shoes to enter.<br /><br /><br /><b>Blood in My Pants</b><br /><br />Later, when I put my boots back on, I also put on my rented leech socks.<br /><br /><br /><b>Berry Jam</b><br /><br />Earlier that morning, after breakfast, we’d gone to visit the bear sanctuary. The Vietnam Bear Rescue Program’s first operational forest sanctuary is a result of the combined efforts of the Free the Bears fund and Wildlife at Risk, with support from Cát Tiên National Park. It is not yet accessible to tourists, but we are guests. We donate in the form of buying a couple of t-shirts.<br /><br />The new sanctuary enclosure itself is huge, bordered by high chain-link and electrical fencing. The ultimate aim is to get rescued bears acclimated to one another and habituated to living there. The strategy is to confine them in a series of larger cages. Most of the bears there have been rescued from amusement parks or restaurants. Bear bile is a big and illegal business in Vietnam, considered to be medicine taken orally as a detoxifier. There are several ways to harvest bile. Some bears are slaughtered outright, some suffer crude surgeries to have their gall bladders removed. In some horrific cases, they are confined in restrictive cages and implanted with a tap so bile can be captured as the living gall bladder manufactures it. Federal support for conservation in Vietnam, in the form of applying measures enacted to illegalize trade in bile and other endangered animal products, as well as permissions for international wildlife conservation groups, is blossoming. But it’s an uphill battle against a population that reveres these practices as tradition. Even though it is illegal, bile can be found on many menus around the country where the practice is rarely even discouraged. To habituate these restaurant bears, rescuers first keep them in the smallest of the center’s cages, those most resembling their pens in the alleys behind illegal restaurants. They are then steadily introduced to larger and larger accommodation, closer and closer to other bears. Eventually, they are put into cages with others, with the ultimate goal being to release them into the large new enclosure out back. These bears are hopeless cases for ever being released into natural forest populations. Captured as cubs or born into captivity, they will never learn to hunt for food or avoid their predators in the wild.<br /><br />Viewed as a zoo, the rescue center is a little dismal. Most of the bears, especially the bigger ones, have been hobbled in some way. They are missing claws or feet. They are not expected to survive through their natural life-spans due to bad surgery or other abuse. Still, they are happier than they’ve ever been in their lives, better fed, and their good mood is pretty infectious. They tussle with one another. They ferret food out of ingenious contraptions that have been made for them from rotating barrels or nets. As depressing as their stories are, it’s heartening that more and more animals are rescued every year.<br /><br />I was just happy to be seeing bears. The park has both Asiatic black bears, called moon bears, and sun bears. Both have white or cream crescents on their chests. The moon bears are larger, shaggier medium-sized bears similar to black bears found in the USA. Sun bears are the smallest species of ursidae, and have short, soft fur and wide, bug-eyed faces with mildly stubby snouts. Most of the sun bears in the rescue center are little more than cubs, and live in side by side cages in the center’s one concrete building. While we were there they frolicked happily. Sunshine, who had gotten bread and berry jam for breakfast, was feeding her leftovers to the bears: holding each little dollop of preserves between the bars on the end of a stick. Bears like jam. Turns out, bears also like porridge. In a nearby concrete lean-to, several large cauldrons were already boiling away. These contained bear porridge, a concoction of whatever happens to be available: rice, grains, melons, occasionally liver or chicken. The bears like the porridge, we were told; but not the liver, which they pick out. This real-world connection between bears and porridge is my favorite new fact.<br /><br />There are a few other animals in the rescue center besides bears. Two cages near the concrete building each hold a macaque. The pig-tail is nice enough, so we fed him rinds and seed pods through the bars. His neighbor, the long-tail, is a jerk who continuously caught our attention for threat displays. The threat displays were unintuitive, they looked like the macaque was yawning at us. These long-tails have pretty big canines, however, so even a bored-looking macaque seems fairly threatening. The monkeys begrudgingly put up with one another, but there is no love lost between them. Several doors down, past an impromptu garden, is an enclosure for rescued Siamese crocodiles. It is smallish, dominated by a crater-shaped cement pond. The water is mossy. When we walked up to the bars, one of the crocodiles was emerging from the water. Our host said it was the most he’d ever seen one move around. These crocs seem smallish, or perhaps the one we saw was pretty young. It was about four feet from nose to vent, twice that including the tail. Once he was out of the water, he stood absolutely still with his mouth open. He didn’t move again until after we were gone. Was this a threat display? Siamese crocodiles have pretty frightening teeth too. But with that moss all over his nose, he was pretty hard to see just several feet away. Somehow it seems more threatening that he was trying to be invisible. There was no sign of the other crocodile that is supposed to be in that cage.<br /><br />Keeping this in mind, it is not all that surprising we never saw any of the namesakes in Crocodile Lake’s bright green waters. We didn’t exactly go looking for them. Directly below the ranger station there is a wooden plank leading through the marshy lakeside. At the end of this boardwalk two boats are tied. About midway, a rusting yellow sign asks visitors to please keep clear of the crocodiles. We are able to see this from the ranger’s observation deck, where we drink tea and take naps. Later, we walk five more kilometers back to where we are to meet up with the Isuzu. I suffer no more leech bites.<br /><br /><br /><b>Tapetum Lucidum</b><br /><br />Later on, Sunshine and I take a turn night spotting. Now we are tourists. This is another ride on the same wooden pews, but much slower. It’s some kind of night safari. We are driven slowly and quietly down the track, hunting for whatever living things can be seen from the road. To help with this, a guide rides in the front pew swinging a spotlight here and there into the night. He’s looking for eyes or antlers or movement. Meanwhile Sunshine and I, plus four other tourists, keep as quiet as possible. We assume that if the puttering Isuzu or the bright spotlight doesn’t scare wild things off, that our voices might.<br /><br />It has been difficult to get seats on this truck. At some point earlier today, a corporate youth group has arrived. We were informed that two hundred tourists were staying in the park, but it seems more like eighty to me. Either way, these night spotting runs are booked. There’s no way even eighty people can hike to Crocodile Lake together. The boardwalk bridge would never take the weight. So they’ve all piled into a really large truck with maybe forty seats, and these are running every half hour or so till everyone gets to do something in Cát Tiên. We’ve lucked out finding available pews on the little Isuzu, but I’m still pessimistic. With all those scheduled trips, it seems unlikely we’ll get to see much of anything. There was no room left for our hosts for come along. The seats we’ve gotten required some haggling with the woman behind the desk. She still seemed pretty skeptical that we’d be able to get on the truck, even after I’d paid her. Maybe she was mad about the blood.<br /><br />One of the leech bites is high on my thigh, just under the front pocket of my jeans. When a leech bites, its saliva anesthetizes the area. Vietnamese leeches make a circular wound the size of a cigarette burn. Then they suck, raising a purple blood blister within the circumference of the bite. I couldn’t feel any of this at the time. I think this leech had to suck extra hard to get capillary blood out of the pretty thin layer of subcutaneous material covering that big muscle. Of all my leech bites, this one took the longest to heal and turned the nastiest black-purple color. A leech also carries an anticoagulant in its saliva. This keeps the blood flowing freely through the tiny holes it’s made. Unlike a tick, who will eat himself to death, a leech will take what he wants and then abandon the host, balling up and dropping to the ground. I never saw any of the leeches that bit me. I detected their presence because of bites that kept bleeding and bleeding all afternoon. The bite on my thigh was the last discovered. Our host noticed the blood when it soaked through my pants. To do this, it had to soak not only through the thick layer of denim, but also through that front pocket. That’s where I’d stashed all the money we’d need for the day. In Vietnam, bigger bills are plastic and easy to wipe clean. But my smaller, paper denominations soaked a lot of that blood up. More blood than seems possible. Blood that would normally have dried into a crust, but now wouldn't coagulate. Later on, when we ate lunch, I was able to pick and choose bills that were minimally affected. But from that point on, I felt increasingly shy about paying for anything with pocket money that got more blood-soaked as the day progressed. The last thing I paid for was the night spotting safari. By then, all my bills were red, stiff, and felt slightly sweaty. But she took them anyway. <br /><br />Since I assumed we’d see little on the safari, this is how I consoled myself: it was a beautiful night for what would amount to a hay ride. The stars were out and it was cool and breezy. Honestly, the bigger part of my excitement was this uncertainty about seeing any animals. It’s what made this more exciting than the zoo, where spotting an animal is expected. Not seeing anything seemed to be what we’d paid for, what would validate the chance we wanted to take.<br /><br />We are driven in a new direction around the park. Here, the forest woodlands we’ve gotten used to give way to grasslands and even some cultivated farms. Soon enough we are under a close canopy of bamboo growing arched over the road. Then the skies are clear again. The four strangers in the car seem to be from New York City. They have never seen so many stars. I can sympathize, there are frequently no stars in the Hồ Chí Minh City skies, either. Tonight it’s clear enough for me to have some trouble identifying constellations. They are just too obscured with extraneous dots, the familiar nearly invisible in all the extra. I recognize Orion and the Big Dipper and Mars. The wind is exhilarating. At one point, passengers in a returning truck, the one thirty minutes ahead of us, point into a field and tell us there are wild pigs. “I’ve got it, I see it” our guide says, focusing his handheld floodlight at a patch of nearby grass. We sit frozen, excited, seeing nothing. “It’s right there,” he tells us. I can tell by the New York whispers around me that nobody else can see anything, either; but we all keep looking. Soon enough a tusk moves in the grass, and a whole damn pig becomes obvious around it. I have no idea how the guide has seen this thing. It’s much bigger than I’d expected. I’d been looking for a little dot out in that field. Later, when the pig begins to move off, the spotlight picks out another and another. It’s like they’re invisible until they move.<br /><br />Throughout the drive we see bats. We see an endless supply of wheeling beetles who cannot seem to dodge the truck. These hit us and stick, so we flick them off again onto each other, the guide, the New Yorkers. The sambar we see is huge. I thought they were the size of little deer but he’s as big as a ram. The sambar stands in grass to his belly, grazing, when the guide spotlights him. Then he freezes with his eyes at the grass line. All I can see at first is the two reflected dots of the <i>tapetum lucidum</i> behind his retinas. But I can’t figure which parts of the surrounding darkness and vegetation go with those dots. Then he cocks his head and starts to shuffle off. At that point I realize everything I can see is part of the same sambar, his antlers looming like trees in the background. But the spotlight is resting only on him. We’ve turned around by now, our trip almost over. We pick up a little speed past landmarks I recognize from earlier. Beetles spang off our heads as we go. The wind has gotten chilly. My favorite moment of the whole night comes here, when we meet with the other truck coming down the road, the truck thirty minutes behind ours. Approaching one another, both vehicles slow down. Then I notice the bright eyes of some little animal in our truck’s headlights, its dark bump silhouetted by the oncoming vehicle. It gazes back and forth for a minute, eye dots flashing, and then scurries on off the road.<br /><br />I have no idea what that little animal was. It seemed to be about raccoon-sized. And it was either stupid or crazy or brave. With all that night at its disposal, it managed to cross the street right front of the only two moving vehicles in the whole park.<br /><br /><br /><b>Invisible Wildlife</b><br /><br />I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep the night before we leave Cát Tiên National Park. It makes the car trip home a little more wearing. The youth group visiting from the city were having a bonfire in the field beside the compound’s reception building, so there as a loud emcee and drumming pretty late into the night. For a while we crashed this party. Musicians and drummers had come from a nearby village to perform traditional dances. They stepped in a snaking line around the fire, rhythmically beating shallow copper drums. They wore interesting traditional-style garments. The youths were dancing in line with them, led around the fire. Anyone could join in. We were welcomed to the table of food, too, welcome to share their booze. Two large vats of young red wine were being heated over orange coals. The vats were also stuffed with leaves and spices, maybe fruit. This worked sort of like a keg, but instead of a tap and plastic cups, people lined up again and again to suck warm herbal wine through long wooden straws. It tasted really complex and interesting the first time, but too sweet, with a cloyingly synthetic honey finish. The second time it wasn’t so good. As the wine was drunk, the vats were filled back up to level with warm water. It was a youth group, after all.<br /><br />Back in our room, I’d laid under the netting trying to read a little bit in the hard glow from the florescent light. I was beginning to get a headache, but whether that was from the light or the weird honey wine I couldn’t know. Sometimes it’s hard for me to lay down with a headache. It’s always hard to read with one. The only room available for fidgeting around was the bathroom. Sunshine was asleep already. It was way too difficult to put on my boots just to pace around outside. The light in the bathroom is too bright also, also too green. Every surface in the bathroom tilts down, including the counter behind the sink. I kept my toothbrush in a plastic bag the ants can’t get into if it rolled off the counter. The toilet sits in the middle of the wall under a window, between the showerhead and its drain. The shower is perplexing, hoses spooling from an electric wall-mounted box with push-button controls. The directions for use are in English, but they are still mystifying. I suspect the box heats the water between the wall and the nozzle. There are pictographs illustrating the dangers of allowing the water from the nozzle to spray onto the box. In the close quarters of the bathroom, I didn’t see how that could be helped. Eventually my headache started to subside. I padded around, barefoot, quiet, turning out the lights, giving up on reading for the night. It was impossible for me to get into the mosquito net without waking Sunshine up.<br /><br />It’s not just me. It’s difficult to get in and out of bed through the net. I was aware of Sunshine coming through the net in the dark, returning from the bathroom a little later. Perhaps with enough practice we would get more nimble about this. Light from the street cast a small glow into the room. I could barely see that the net was closed properly behind her. “Be careful” she told me. “I just killed a scorpion in the bathroom.” She held her fingers up, about two inches apart. <br /><br />It does me no good to be sleepy for this bus ride home. The whole trip is aboard one of the smaller busses, like that second one we rode in on. These are really no more than large vans, with fifteen seats including the driver’s. We’re the first ones aboard, picking the bus up at the ferry quay on the far side of the river. We’ve already left Cát Tiên behind. Oddly, this daylight travel is slower than the travel we did the other night, the driver’s not nearly so reckless. I am concerned it will take us a long time to get home, as we comb the countryside for more and more travelers. But it doesn’t. Over the five-hour drive, the bus stops many times, picking up people, letting them off. It’s very crowded. At one point I am able to see twenty-nine people in the bus, standing, crouching, sitting on laps. There are two dozen green coconuts in the space between our seats and the back doors. There are five people back there too. I am so pressed in that my elbow sticks out the open window into the rain, but it’s the close traffic that worries me. Five hours.<br /><br />I sit there thinking about our day today. We got up pretty early this morning, too. We ate the same breakfasts in the same cantina, and fed Sunshine’s jam to the baby sun bears. We watched adolescent sun bears tussle in the crater-shaped cement pool of the large enclosure. After, we went out on a short hike down a trail just behind the compound. I’d put on my leech socks before anyone else had. We were looking for monkeys, but I was never sure what kind. Our hosts study black-shanked doucs in the woods here, but I have the feeling those are usually found somewhat north or our location. According to our hosts, there is a group of pig-tailed macaques nearby. They occasionally visit the friendly caged macaque, coming almost all the way into the rescue center. Maybe it is these macaques we went looking for. We didn’t see any monkeys, which came as no real surprise. I hadn’t gotten any better at walking through the woods since yesterday.<br /><br />The forest just behind the compound was very different from what we’d seen on the first day. Often close and dense bamboo and rattan thickets closed around us, choking out taller plants. These areas were interesting—so much brighter green and yellow, sunnier with far less room to maneuver around in, brighter with less direct sunlight. Just as often, we were in open areas with high ceilings dangling epiphytes and creeper vines with long thorns, darker but dappled with yellow rays. In the distance I was able to hear animals move through the woods, but I never saw anything except birds and butterflies. Some nearby huffing grunts alarmed me for awhile, reminding me of the three wild pigs we’d seen not too far away the night before, but then our hosts told me it was a squirrel. The loud barking we heard in the distance was apparently a deer. Soon we turned around and headed back to the compound again. It was almost time to catch the ferry and the bus.<br /><br />If I learned anything about the jungle over the weekend, it’s about potential. In a zoo there are animals in labeled cages, just where you expect to see them. Mostly, this means that there are no animals to be found elsewhere. But in the jungle there is potential everywhere. Invisible wildlife can be anywhere; apparently they can sound like anything. They leave signs of their existence—dots in the night, some seedy scat, bloody circles—and sometimes they emerge immediately for their surroundings. But mostly they remain potential animals: invisible, everywhere, smaller or larger than reality, in the dark or behind the trees in the green.<br /><br /><br /><i>Related pages of interest include:</i><br /><a href="http://www.namcattien.org/">The official site of Cat Tien National Park </a><br /><a href="http://www.freethebears.org.au/">The official site of the Free the Bears Fund</a><br /><a href="http://www.wildlifeatrisk.org/index.php?lang=en">The official site of Wildlife at Risk</a><br /></div></span><br /><div align="center"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_00SkWv4eRDA/SduZW8OzrPI/AAAAAAAAADA/TQ7AIas4yWw/s1600-h/Cat+Tien+Blog+1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 106px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_00SkWv4eRDA/SduZW8OzrPI/AAAAAAAAADA/TQ7AIas4yWw/s400/Cat+Tien+Blog+1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5322016004072778994" /></a><br/>Photo © the author.</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-69022115766770835402008-07-27T21:00:00.004+07:002008-08-08T21:09:46.805+07:00The Closed Umbrella<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number 2008/??</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Friday we got the next long list of jobs opportunities available for our third international tour. That was the first of many opportunities presented to me in a night characterized by dubious choices. 3,223 words.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />[HCMC]This is the life we lead: the people we meet when we arrive in a new place all leave before we do. Their tours end and they must go somewhere else. Or their spouses get good jobs at prestigious universities and they must relocate. Or, you know, it’s a tough life and they decide to just go home. One of these will apply to each and every one of Sunshine’s coworkers. They’ll be replaced, one by one, by new people while the overall population remains the same. It isn’t all about the job, of course. It’s the whole expatriate life: this cycle also effects the scholars and teachers and NGO aid workers we befriend, along with the reporters and musicians and dignitaries. We must make our new friends fast so we can get as much time as possible with them, knowing that we’ll feel a little sad whenever they, sooner or later, leave us for somewhere else. The replacements are the flip side. These are mostly those coworkers and cultural expatriates who arrive after us. Many of these replacements are the people we will have to leave behind when we go off to our next place. These thoughts were in my head on Friday during one of those little after work parties jauntily referred to as a Happy Hour. This gathering had been organized by a woman who would be leaving at the end of next week. This woman was the first person we met in Hồ Chí Minh City, our sponsor, the coworker who picked us up at the airport. That was over nine months ago now.<br /><br />If this all seems particularly melancholy, well, we’ve gotten pretty used to it. This is just the way things are. Added to this, everyone is so busy doing what they do here that it’s pretty difficult to manage relationship-building things like dinners and double dates. So when I say we have to make friends fast, I should add that we also have to make this happen with little material and brief maturation. By the second time I see someone at a party we’re either already friends or not, and I already know it. There isn’t really enough time for much indecisiveness about this, and that time is ticking away. I know why I was thinking about this: we’d finally received the long list of possible jobs for our next tour. From this list, we will have to select a number of positions to bid on, one of which will end up being our two- or three-year third tour abroad. We were hoping to receive this list at the beginning of the week, right after we returned from watching the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant in Nha Trang, but they strung us along until Friday afternoon. Sunshine emailed me the list as soon as she had it. I’d planned on going to this Happy Hour party—one more chance to hang out with our sponsor—but the job postings drove all that out of my head. It arrived in my inbox as a jumble of unformatted text, pasted from a spreadsheet. At five o’clock I had barely looked over the thing. I’d been concentrating on reformatting it into something legible. I had a brand new plan: I was hoping to get to the point where I could actually read the thing by the time Sunshine came home from work. I got a phone call about the Happy Hour instead. It was frustrating: after waiting all week for this job list, I had to abandon it for the office party I’d also been waiting all week for.<br /><br />I grabbed my favorite umbrella and made my way through the monsoon to Sunshine’s office. Outside it was thick and bright, breezeless and humid at that point perfectly between rainstorms when the water is being sucked back into the air. I never even opened my umbrella, no drop ever fell, but I was still trickling into my damp clothing by the time I arrived at the Happy Hour party. I hadn’t had the kind of weather I’d planned for; I’d had the kind an umbrella could not protect me against.<br /><br />This was another “Hail and Farewell” party. That first friend we made, that woman who rescued us from Tân Sơn Nhất Airport during our first few minutes in town, was not the only coworker slated to depart. A handful people will be leaving over the next two months. That’s the farewell part. As for the hail, I met three new people at this very party. That’s just the way it is. In with the new and out with the old, mostly in that order. One of the women I met will be taking over Sunshine’s job in October oh-nine. How weird is that? And since the theme of this party was to meet new arrivals and catch some last moments with those nearly departed, well, I must apologize: it was a theme mostly preempted by that new list of next tour job positions finally becoming available. We spent a lot of Friday’s party talking to those who were just like us: here for another year and hypnotized by the eleven hundred and twenty job opportunities that had fallen into our laps earlier that afternoon. These new arrivals wouldn’t be bidding on another post for a year, those leaving had already done this bidding long ago. They could not be a part of our Christmas. <br /><br />All of these Happy Hour parties take place in the office. One of the bosses was mixing up Dalat strawberries and rum in a blender. I discovered an almost half-full bottle of Irish whisky among the two dozen or so fifths of imported liquor sitting on a filing cabinet. I was really excited about this. I haven’t actually seen any Irish whisky in Vietnam. The few restaurants listing it on their menus invariably tell us they are out when we try to order it. From this moment on, I ignored the berry rum smoothies from the boss’ blender (and the weird Chinese beer in the office fridge). I concentrated on the Jamieson. It’s pretty strange to be drinking in someone else’s office. Parties seem a little more surreal among the fuzzy maze of movable cubicle walls and photocopiers. It always feels like a birthday or maybe the last day of school. Here and there the identical plastic desks were decorated with photos and vases and cups full of pens, along with whatever else might fend off the otherwise characterless and homogenized anonymity of a cubicle. Whisky went down well here, between those bulletproof interview windows and these perky little workstations. <br /><br />Outside, it had begun to rain like hell: sheets and torrents were falling so loudly we could easily hear it through that thick security glass. It was difficult to imagine leaving. I still had an umbrella, but it just wasn’t that kind of rain. It was the kind that rises over the sewer grates, drops tree limbs along the streets, and blasts right up underneath umbrellas. That Happy Hour party lasted longer than anyone really planned because of the weather. We stayed on and on, cozy in those office spaces well away from the rain. When the weather finally let up and we left, we all felt like we should apologize to the guards on night duty. I had not sucked down the entire under half-full bottle of Irish whisky. And although I made the joke, I did not stuff the over one-fourth full bottle into my pocket.<br /><br />Outside it was misty and cool, the new rains had left it breezy. There was a pervasive drizzle, but I never even opened my umbrella. The coolness felt good on my face and hands, and if I arrived damp it was at least something I was used to by now. <br /><br />The rest of my night doesn’t begin to blur until well after dinner. Our friend from the first paragraph invited us over to her house for takeout. It was the first time I had seen a place in her apartment building; it is always a treat exploring the housing pool. She had done a really good job with the decorating. I was surprised that, with just a week left in Vietnam, she still had all her stuff. She was in that stage of moving when it becomes important to give or throw away whatever stuff possible. We got to rummage through her DVDs, her shelves. Open bottles needed to either be drunk or poured out down the sink. Movers will not ship opened bottles. We all decided to order Indian food, which arrived about a half an hour later. A half an hour after that, Sunshine declined to go out on the town. There were interesting things to do, looking over our new list of possible jobs, researching interesting new places on the internet. This was her plan, and had been my own plan before the strawberry smoothies and Jamieson and white wine and whatever that Vietnamese apple flavored stuff was. But my plans had changed with my loss of judgment. I did not decline to go out on the town. Sunshine went home and I went clubbing.<br /><br />My memories are still not too blurry at this point: four of us hailed a cab right outside our sponsor’s apartment. There was some confusion as to where we’d decided to go. Someone asked the cab driver to take us to an Irish bar with a name rather like “Sheraton” while someone else, confused, gave him directions to the actual hotel. Once we’d realized our mistake, we cut our losses and ended up in third place, a trendy curvy wood-and-brick barroom hosting a loud multinational band. The lead singer was French, and sung many French and Spanish ballads at a whole new speed. He also covered the Ramones. The dreadlocked guy was probably a kiwi or a yank, and he covered Oasis and Nirvana and Green Day. Occasionally someone would dance up from the audience and sing a song: a Filipino karaoke star, a African American rapper. It was all too flat and archetypical (or just typical)—sitcom cameos dropping in on the Huxtable family, relying on creative shorthand: an appearance-driven dimensionality based in audience expectation. But the sound thumped, the band was energetic, and the crowd was more or less dancing happily in that restricted hopping and swaying type way fitting, I guess, the closed-in space.<br /><br />The problem with Vietnamese bars really is my own problem: I do not speak Vietnamese. There are always English menus where drinks are helpfully listed. But there is no way a two-sided piece of folded cardstock can possibly be comprehensive. Predicting this, most bars also list their well and shelf liquors on the menu too. If you know how to mix your drink they will make it for you, just so long as you can explain how to do it in Vietnamese. I cannot. If the drink I want isn’t helpfully listed (remember? A manhattan with Irish whisky instead of bourbon, shaken, up), I must make do with what is available. Friday night, after everything else, I ordered a long island iced tea. Everything else was too sweet: mai tais and singapore slings and cuba libres. Since a friend and I had sprung for that first round, I was later treated to a second long island iced tea I hadn’t planned on having. Complicating this, that second round also included a surprise shot, supposedly a lemon drop. Imagine a lemon drop: one hundred proof vodka and lemon juice and sugar, so alcoholic they are frequently served on fire in their little shot glasses. One of the things I really love about Vietnamese bars is their tendency to pour really long drinks. At this loud, sweaty, hip bar they only charge an extra ten thousand đồng (about sixty cents) to keep pouring a whole drink instead of stopping at a little shot. Little, if any, attention is given to the complex system of comparative alcohol-by-volumes which usually dictate the relative sizes of large and small drinks. This is why we all ended up with our regular drinks in our left hands and lemon drops in our right. Everybody else had beers and I had a long island iced tea and we all had these economy-sized lemon drops served without ice in a sugar-encrusted martini glass the size of a goddamn party hat.<br /><br />(At one point, trying to choke this volume of sickly sweet lemon stuff down, I sneezed. This also reminded me of a sitcom. Flammable lemon and sugar flew everywhere in a comical spray. This is about when things started to get sort of blurry.)<br /><br />With both hands full, I had to hook my umbrella in the front of my pants. I should have sent the umbrella home with Sunshine, but I’d forgotten. I knew I wasn’t ever going to get around to opening it. I was actually relishing the thought of walking home in the rain by this point. It’s my favorite umbrella, but carrying the thing around had become sort of a pain in the ass.<br /><br />After another couple of songs, we left. One of our party decided to call it a night right then, reducing our group to three. This had been my plan, too. Walk home in the rain. But it wasn’t raining and out on the sidewalk someone suggested a nearby club and a cab was hailed and fine, whatever, I was having fun. Whatever it was I’d had planned at that point finally gave in completely to the different story I’m telling. It happened right there in the cab on the way to that club. <br /><br />If the last place had been trendy and hip, this new place was slick and tony. They even charged an entry fee which was paid for me. They took away my umbrella and put it in a locker for safekeeping. There was no dance floor, but there was a wide spiral stairway radiating from the circular bar where people danced dizzily. Lights flashed. For a long time we sat in a booth. For a while we stood on the stairs. I remember that I swayed and hopped a little. The colored lights flashed on my hands. Hey, they had manhattans here, but no Irish whisky. Concessions were made. We walked on up to the second floor. We talked about important things. The people above me were in the same light as I had on my hands. It was bouncing back and forth. Dancing is good exercise. The banisters were steel, and I could let go with one hand at a time occasionally. I tlked about voodoo. The people up there would wave back. The music never seemed to change. I was eventually helped, more than I’d really like to admit, outside and into a cab by my friends, one of which was the first person I’d even met in Hồ Chí Minh City. I was slowly becoming shocked over being so drunk. I knew I was failing to hide the fact anymore, but I kept wishing I was invisible, less obvious, alone. I do not know who went home first, but I suspect it was me.<br /><br />By the time I was in our apartment, things were coming back into some focus again. It was probably another hour before I went to bed. In the meantime, I took a little walk upstairs to the roof just to clear my head a little. I checked my email. I drank a lot of water. I tried counting up the number of drinks I’d had throughout the night, tried to figure out what had happened to me as a sobering exercise. There were the small smoothie and Dixie cup whiskies at the office party, a glass of wine at dinner paired with some sips of weird apple aperitif. There were the two long island iced teas and the two manhattans (those were really small if I remember correctly—hell, I drank ‘em fast enough). And oh yeah, there was that goddamn lemon drop thing. I know this sounds like a lot, but I ingested all this, with Indian food, over ten long hours characterized by some low energy hopping and swaying. I do not drink all that often anymore. I was expecting to get drunk, but not as drunk as I got. It seemed unthinkable to me that I had nearly blacked out. That I’d needed help walking down the swank club stairs to the cab. I went to bed embarrassed and perplexed. I just couldn’t understand it.<br /><br />I woke up five hours later, took a number of aspirin with a whole bottle of water, then carried another bottle into the shower with me. It was a very long shower, in which I probably fell asleep, my head resting on a rolled-up, soaking wet bath towel. I didn’t really recover all that day, but that’s okay. I was ready to accept my punishment. At some point during Saturday I realized what the hell had happened to me the night before. I was still counting my drinks, one two three, trying to figure it all out when it occurred to me. I really don’t drink very often here in Vietnam. Not enough to have learned my new limits, that new point in the evening to say when. I had been following old patterns. When drinking, once the judgment goes, I used to count on habits of expenditure and volume of intake to guide me. I used to go out very often, and mostly I’ve handled myself with composure. But right now I’m almost thirty pounds thinner than I was nine months ago. This means that all those old limits and habits must be scaled in comparison. This is the sort of thing I’d never manage to remember after my judgment has gone away and my blood has already gone toxic with last year’s alcohol levels. As hungover as I was, though, I was happy to see it this way: it gave me something to spend the weekend slapping my forehead over, but also maybe even something to pat myself on the back for—what better reason to make an ass out of myself than all this newfound health? But at the same time I still felt awfully humiliated. <br /><br />But what became of the original, intended story of my Friday, those plans I made and kept revising? Did that story slowly corrupt in the same way I did that day? Did it go off and end on its on once my plans for it had irretrievably derailed? Is it waiting to be picked back up at some later point in the weekend? If so, can I still come to the same conclusions and insights I might have on Friday, once I pick that story’s trail back up again? And if not, is this a bad thing? Friday was obviously founded on ignorance and dubious judgment. In a way, I’m glad that we didn’t end up making any career decisions on that day. What about my favorite umbrella? That one I can answer: I accidentally left it in that locker at the club. Frankly, it wasn’t the kind of night that could have been saved by an umbrella in the end, not that I ever opened it at all anyway.</div></span><br /><div align="center"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_00SkWv4eRDA/SJxS5AqYGoI/AAAAAAAAABo/-7Hjpxo-PHQ/s1600-h/Cavin+Club+BLOG.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_00SkWv4eRDA/SJxS5AqYGoI/AAAAAAAAABo/-7Hjpxo-PHQ/s400/Cavin+Club+BLOG.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5232148006481435266" /></a><br/>Primary photos © an unnamed source; collaged by the author.</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-54040800764878787212008-05-30T23:59:00.003+07:002008-12-09T18:50:01.726+07:00Fatal Vanities<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number 2008/??</div></span><br /><div align="justify">This is a story about ironic serendipity, or the misreading of self-selecting data, or possibly prescience. It is a confession of my baser vanities, or an accurate analysis of besotted failings, or perhaps just some run of the mill tongue-in-cheek aggrandizing cast in arch fatalism. It is also the story of one beautiful pair of sunglasses. It is not cautionary. 2,932 words.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br /><b>Thursday Night at the Bar</b><br /><br />[HCMC]—On the first Thursday in May, less than one week into a month-long international visit home to North Carolina, I found myself in my favorite bar in the world. It was the third time I’d found myself there in those first four days. We were all seated at the wooden standalone bar in the dining area. Thursdays have traditionally been my favorite night to go out drinking, a scheme I try to revive among the old crowd whenever I return. The crowd is less predictable than it used to be, however: so many of the usual suspects now have Friday morning work schedules. Because of that—and because this whole month of Thursdays have somewhat blurred together—I can’t remember precisely who was in the glasses conversation with me that night. Certainly there were several people listening when I started, for whatever reason, talking about my eyewear.<br /><br />I wear glasses every day, I explained to anyone listing; but I do not, by the standard expectation, need to wear them. I have fairly sensitive eyes, that’s all. It can become very uncomfortable for me on sunny days or in brightly lit rooms. Because of my life-long tendency to compensate with sunglasses, this discomfort has never had a chance to grow less acute. Speaking of life-long tendencies, I continued, two more come into play here. The first is that I have always been the sort of person to get caught up in whatever I am doing, thus I lose things—hats, pens, telephones, keys, sunglasses—by leaving them laying around behind me. I remember them eventually, later on, but by then it’s often way too late to recover what I’ve left behind. I’ve developed a dopy lag whenever I do anything because of this; whenever I stand up to leave, I check my pockets several times. I look around. I drop my train of thought and conversation lapses. It’s a slow, nearly doddering, example of some absent-minded cliché. But it always takes a minute to surmount my constant suspicion that there’s one last thing I’m forgetting. Eventually, I can get on with my life. Mostly this process works, however awkward it feels. Mostly, I feel I’ve managed to limit the number of random things I’ve lost over my lifetime. But I have yet another loss prevention tactic related especially to sunglasses.<br /><br />Why so careful with the glasses? I didn’t get into this at the bar that night. Obviously losing anything sucks. Everybody at a bar knows that already. Still, and this brings me to the second life-long mitigating factor mentioned above, for whatever reason sunglasses are special to me. I would rather lose my wallet than my glasses. Heck, the glasses are probably worth more. For whatever reason, I like pretty expensive sunglasses. It would be easy to say this is because I saw a pair I really loved in a movie one day, and I had to buy them. This is only partially true because, even by then, I’d already been indulging in costlier and costlier eyewear. But these movie glasses, the pair of Matusda model 2809s Linda Hamilton wore in <i>Terminator 2</i>, with detachable glass side-guards (in burnished gold instead of the antique silver color Sarah Connors’ wore—one doesn’t want to come over too terribly geeky), definitely represented a break from the midrange. When I finally located a pair of these things they turned out to be very expensive. But being young and saddled with few important bills, I bought them anyway. I lost them eventually, or course. But the damage was already done: I’d started a long-term relationship with the Matsuda label. I never bought another pair in that particular model again, out-of-print collectibles that they were. And while no other model ever aspired to the same price tag as my originals, all have ultimately fallen victim to that fatal sentence above: I lost them eventually, of course.<br /><br />Instead of giving up on nice sunglasses altogether, I enacted this second loss-prevention tactic. I assumed the eventual loss of these possessions was due to fact that I needed to take the things off every time the sun sank or I walked indoors. To change this, I started purchasing regular frames instead of sunglasses, replacing their clear glass panes with non-prescription transition lenses. Presto: I had a pair of shades when I was out in the sun, and a pair of natural enough looking regular glasses indoors. I had eyewear I never had to take off until I was back home where it was perfectly safe to forget them now and again. And if I could be accused of indulging some affected silly poser vanity by wearing unnecessary glasses, well, no one would really know if I didn’t tell them, right?<br /><br />Only I frequently told everyone. That’s what I was doing in the bar that night, I was telling whoever was listening all about how the cute pair of Matsudas I was wearing were really only sunglasses. “Because I never have to take them off, I don’t lose them” I said, or something to that effect. But then this sentence just hung in the air, dripped with fateful jinxy foreshadowing; so I went on to say something along the lines of “watch, now that I’ve said that, I’ll have lost them the next time I see you” just to cover my karmic ass. A sop to superstition engineered to defuse whatever accidental and ironic black magic my ill-conceived words might have instigated. Maybe I said it to be funny, but maybe I needed it to unjinx me, too. It wasn’t and it didn’t. <br /><br /><br /><b>Election Night Under a Backhoe</b><br /><br />Tuesday was the North Carolina Primary and the eighth day of my vacation home. I spent that evening at an election party in nearby Hillsboro. The event was engineered to make sure everyone had plenty of margaritas after the polls closed. We chewed over the various returns. This is what happens when a state plans its Primary for the day after Cinco de Mayo: parties get shuffled around and later I’m happy to report I had a pretty margarita-soaked week. Since it was a weekday night, we made the hour-long drive back to Greensboro fairly early. I was still wide awake, and since only fifty-odd percent of the polls were reporting, I decided to park it in a nearby bar for another hour or two just to see how things played out. One, Senator Obama won North Carolina handily. Two, I had about three more drinks. Wary of the typically cloying margaritas found in most US bars, I ordered manhattans. I ask for these to be made with Irish whisky because it is less sweet. I have them shaken and served “up” in a martini glass. I drink these pretending they’re actually in those deep and stocky glasses I only ever see in French noir. I don’t know what that model would be called. But my drinks are only every served in regular US martini glasses. The sad result is a good drink that looks just as pink and trendy as a candy appletini.<br /><br />To my credit, I left the bar before it closed; but then I spent a couple hours hanging out on a friend’s couch, drinking his beers and watching his television. Sometime around four am I decided it was time to stagger back to my home base, a forty-minute walk along the cross street up at the light. Of course, it would only be thirty-five minutes if I were to cut through the UNCG campus. Saying my slurry goodbyes, I headed off down college hill on my shortcut.<br /><br />I have a shameful history of drinking and trespassing. With the notable exception of the fraternity houses that dot the neighborhoods where I used to live, this has typically meant that I break into construction sites. It is hard for me to imagine myself clambering up vertiginous scaffolding, jamming myself into plywood crawlspaces, or combing gravelly rooftops for their trapdoors when I’m totally sober. But these things frequently happen when I’m left alone after drinking. This rarely requires me to go out of my way, either, as there always seems to be some major renovating going on nearby. On Tuesday night, it was only a matter of taking a shortcut home and thereby happening past the empty two-story hulk of the Forney building, surrounded by a chain link fence interwoven with green netting and running unfortunately adjacent to a convenient dumpster. I was up over that fence before sparing much of a thought about it, dodging off around shadowy construction equipment looking for an open window into the building. This was easy because the windows didn’t have any glass in them anymore.<br /><br />The Forney building was originally the Carnegie Library, a thick two-story brick edifice crafted in a staid Italianate architecture commensurate, but less flamboyant, than the stone Romanesque of the older Foust Building around the corner. Nearly four-square, the façade juts into a false portico enclosed with decorative square columns up a few marble steps from the front walk. It was built 1905, the first library to grace the State Normal and Industrial College (for girls) just fifteen years after that institution’s beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. But things progress; the girls school joined the State University system in North Carolina, the library moved into a much larger pad across the street, and the old Carnegie building was renamed after Edward J. Forney, school treasurer and head of the commercial department. In the last decade it seems to have been used primarily by UNCGs School of Education, a graceful latter-day designation for one of the oldest buildings on campus, education being the initial mission of the Normal College way back when. Sometime during the last few months, Forney building was closed, more recently it had been gutted, its roof removed, and a trench dug around its foundations. Most recently, by five o’clock that morning, it had me crawling on my hands and knees through its sub-basement, over clods of fresh dirt lit by those hanging bulbs, in their handy little yellow mesh cages, that car mechanics use.<br /><br />It is not a big building, and since all of the stuff had been scraped from its interior, including walls and windows and elevators, it was easy to get around in. Most of the incoming materials were still stacked and coiled outside waiting to be installed. There was very little left to see inside. I don’t know how I managed to play around in those remaining open spaces for so long that morning. By the time I was thinking about finding a convenient place to hop back over the green fence, the sky had already perceptibly lightened into that deeply bluish purple that passes for black in a painting. The stars were dimming. I knew dawn was not far off. I was a little spooked by a police cruiser that had just rolled slowly down the road. College Avenue is one way, and it had been going the other. I ducked quietly out of the building through one of the large window holes facing what used to be the quad opposite the one way street. I tiptoed around the corner away from the cruiser toward a cluster of construction stuff under a large tree.<br /><br />I was almost there when I realized the fence was standing open where I’d come through it, beside my dumpster, and cars were beginning to park in the large grassy area adjacent to the gate. People were coming to work on Wednesday morning! They were maybe sixty feet away, between me and fence, getting out of their cars and unlocking doors and chatting. I hit the ground and rolled underneath the nearest cover I could find, a large yellow Caterpillar model 430E Backhoe Loader sunken into the wet dirt. If anything, the people seemed a lot closer and louder when I could no longer see them, so I crawled along beneath the vehicle’s axle to squat behind the large clawed bucket where I could keep watch. Headlights were swinging along the nearby wall of Forney building, casting my backhoe’s shadow behind me. It was all just amazingly adrenal. I was wearing a black leather jacket and now-muddy jeans, so I felt that I’d probably managed to fade pretty completely into the shadows. My face is still a pretty pale reflector, though, but probably unpredictable enough, stock-still near the ground beneath the large back wheels of that backhoe, to go unnoticed. I was very concerned about the reflection of those sweeping headlights glinting off my glasses though, so I took them off and shoved them in the hand-warmer pocket of my hoodie.<br /><br />And that’s the last time I ever saw them.<br /><br />It wasn’t too many seconds later when I made my move, though it seemed like longer. The sky was still dark. I decided to head for cover behind that tree, where a low six-foot brick wall led down a dark alley near the building. I imagine this wall originally served to obscure a service entrance into the first floor, but now that the yard had been excavated in a four-foot wide trench around the subbasement, the wall was perched on top a steep muddy slope running parallel to the wall. The remaining edge of ground along the wall was strewn with pipes and coiled cables. This seemed to be my best chance out: I knew I could climb the wall and I knew the workers wouldn’t be able to see me once I was around the corner of the building. I tried not to think about the cop I’d seen the last time I looked out at the street. Was that just a minute ago? With the noise of the morning crew close enough for me to eavesdrop on their conversations, I rose into a crouch and carefully loped off toward the slope at the corner. There was no way I could run—the ground was so dark I couldn’t see where I was putting my foot. The coils and pipes would rattle if I wasn’t pretty careful; the black eight-foot ditch at the perimeter would claim me if I slipped. I kept slowing myself down as I moved along the periphery of that little muddy ledge, just to be safer. I tried to keep the bulk of that backhoe between me and the first shift.<br /><br />I practiced my excuse for whenever I finally got caught. All I’d done was trespass, right? I hadn’t broken or damaged anything. I’d seen a pair of keys had been left in that backhoe, and yet I’d just let it go. How mad could they really be at me? Eventually I was around that corner, in the pitch black space between the building and the wall, and I could pause for a minute. In that darkness, the sky had started looking really bright, but no one could see me anymore and I knew then that I’d somehow made it out.<br /><br />That’s when I reached into my pocket for the Matsuda glasses that were no longer there. It certainly hadn’t been more than a hundred seconds since I’d taken them off, and I hadn’t covered more than sixty feet. If it had been a half hour earlier, I would have combed that dark litter-strewn alley for them and; but by then it was way too late. Popping over the brick wall was easy—the cop had disappeared—and the walk on home really did only take another thirty-five minutes. It was stark daylight when I reached the front porch of the house where I’d been staying. I was in a pretty fantastic mood: just elated that I’d had my very closest call ever, and by then more hung-over from the adrenalin than the booze. But it was too bright outside for sure, even at six fifteen in the morning.<br /><br /><br /><b>Group Discussion and Epitaph</b><br /><br />Did I lose my beloved sunglasses because I’d bragged about them in a bar one night? Did it happen because I tempted fate by explaining how rarely I lose things like sunglasses anymore? Did I simply lose them because I said I would? Perhaps I was paying the price for some egregious fault or moral slip-up? Maybe it is none of the above: it’s quite possible to imagine that these two events merely coincided, within five days, and are connected only by the fact that I have forced them together here. It is probably even easier to imagine that I happen to talk about my glasses all the time, incessantly, just waiting for that terrible day when their ultimate loss will constitute a punch line to the fact. This is the one final benefit they can provide me, then. One last protection against the specter of that unlucky jinx. This account is probably not very meaningful, but it does offer me something in exchange for my Matsudas.<br /><br />On Monday, May twelfth, I ordered the replacements. The man at the little State Street optometrist’s remembered me from the last time I’d been there, in 2003, when I was buying the sunglasses I lost in the story above. He informed me that Matsuda, a Japanese optical design company, had abruptly gone out of business at the end of 2007. The twenty-odd models he had in his store might be my last opportunity to ever own a pair. I selected, with his help, the staid model number 10225 and the more flamboyant model number 10324, both of which were remaindered and going for deep discounts. I wonder what kind of story I will have when they are finally lost to me?<br /></div></span><br /><div align="center"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_00SkWv4eRDA/SFqRlG0LcUI/AAAAAAAAABA/lwvXrLFVPTQ/s1600-h/Matsuda.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_00SkWv4eRDA/SFqRlG0LcUI/AAAAAAAAABA/lwvXrLFVPTQ/s400/Matsuda.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5213639585305424194" /></a><br/>Linda Hamilton takes a hard look in <i>Terminator 2</i>.<br/>What beautiful eyes you have.</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-79618818316640654462007-10-20T11:00:00.000+07:002008-12-09T18:50:01.958+07:00Relativity<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number 01/2007</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Before light dawned on the morning of October seventeenth, 2007, we began the relatively long and equally comfortable journey around the globe to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam via San Francisco and Hong Kong. 2,972 words.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br /><b>Washington to San Francisco</b><br /><br />[HCMC]—We arrived at Dulles shortly before four thirty in the morning. There were hardly any lines at the ticketing booth, which is just as well because we were too inexperienced to manage the automated machine: where was the keyboard? the passport reader? where could we tell the machine that international business-class passengers are allotted two checked bags apiece, and that those bags were allowed to be heavier? This was the first time either one of us had ever flown in a class better than economy, and the newness was immediate, a learning curve that started at the very front of the building. Automated ticketing kiosks are also a learning curve, of course. They are intended to assist experienced flyers streamline the otherwise predictable tediousness of routine travel management. But they are as varied as gasoline pumps, hotel shower fixtures, or snowflakes; these squat grey robots were science fiction compared to the old kiosks in Monterrey, México, and we stood for a few minutes with a finger on the touch screen, the helpful robot telling us to “swipe your passport now,” before a ticket agent saved us by moving us to a full service line. The business class line. It still took a few minutes to explain to her about how we did not have too many, too weighty bags.<br /><br />Minutes later we were already processed, however. By then, our parents had parked the airport caravan in the short-term parking, and we all said goodbye to one another—one last hurtle after weeks of other goodbyes.<br /><br />Then we were walking down the long, wide hallway to the checkpoint alongside the large crowd of a Taiwanese tour group we were allowed to pass at the executive rope stands. From here, we made our way through the priority express x-ray machines. We were carted from concourse to concourse by giant, crawling passenger transports akin to a doublewide trailer grafted onto a flatbed semi—a long way from the short red busses that drove us over the Monterrey airport’s tarmac. We walked down the C concourse past news sellers and full-on restaurants already open at five thirty in the morning. We had an hour to kill before our plane began boarding business class passengers first.<br /><br />I had no idea what to expect, but it was nice. The seats were big and plush, with adjustable headrests, individual armrests, lumbar support. A flight attendant offered me orange juice, water, a mimosa as I stepped through a the cabin. The aisle was large enough to navigate around passengers who had stopped to stow their baggage. Sunshine had been unable to get us seats together on this leg, and she set in the row directly in front of me. It was very quiet in the cabin. I never expected an airplane to be more comfortable than a first-class Mexican bus. About the time we were supposed to be taking off, the standard safety instructions played on the retractable overhead televisions. The captain revved an engine. The plane taxied away from the gate. Soon, the captain announced the rather alarming new that half of the plane’s engines were not working. So we taxied back to the gate again.<br /><br />Other travelers are crazy. Since whenever, I have a gradually eroding fear of flying. When I was younger, the only part of air travel that spooked me was the landing, when the ground came closer and closer and the plane made quick, sharp maneuvers to line up properly with the tiny rushing knife of asphalt. Now, and for some time, flying frightens me by default, and my favorite part is the landing: soon this will all be over. This is a digression meant to illustrate the tedium of waiting in the plane for an hour while they ascertained the problem. This is by way of explaining the incredulity I feel when I hear other travelers bitching that we hadn’t left already in a plane that can only fly in rapid, deadly circles.<br /><br />As soon as the mechanic discovered the problem we were all ordered off the plane. We were asked to leave our luggage where it was. We waited for thirty minutes for them to make a decision about whether to cancel our flight. I couldn’t say what I hoped for, really. Maybe for someone to spontaneously invent a teleporter right there in concourse C. At eight forty or so the decision to go ahead and—why the heck not?—get on with the flight was announced to me, to Sunshine, to the large Taiwanese tour group, and we all shuffled back onto the plane, business class first. I was offered a mimosa, water, orange juice, we watched a safety movie, the pilot was apologetic. I crossed my fingers and it worked: the plane made it all the way into the sky and back out again on the other side of the country. <br /><br />The stranger sitting beside me was polite, pleasant, and all about travel etiquette: he never spoke to me until breakfast was served, as the attendant spread a tablecloth over my telescoping tray table and poured coffee into my porcelain cup. Then we had a refined chat over our meal—some sausage something for him, fruit plate and cereal for me. He’s a CPA, he wore a nice suit. After breakfast, we both returned to reading and giving each other space. I fell asleep for almost two hours, my only sleep since Tuesday morning. I woke up on approach. I wasn’t very nervous anymore; this was almost over. We touched down in San Francisco only two hours into our three-hour layover.<br /><br /><b>San Francisco to Hong Kong</b><br /><br />San Francisco International, at nine, was a lot more crowded than Dulles had been at seven. I changed my watch to local time while we double-timed it through the airport to the international gate. The gates here are numbered, but the concourses are not designated with a letter. We were at forty-something and needed to make it to somewhere in the hundreds, someplace labeled G. San Francisco’s airport is remarkably ramshackle, old, inconsistently signed. The sporadic maps indicated gates only up into the nineties. On the map, San Francisco International looks just like a stink bug. The departures board said our plane was on time. Our layover, which was to be so long before our breakdown in DC changed all that, was ticking away, almost over. Sunshine was our hero here. She somehow noticed the paper sign stuck to a wooden podium directing us down a flight of concrete stairs to the international gate. The man at the gate was wearing a maintenance uniform. The doorway looked like it would open onto a janitor’s closet, and was decorated with Do Not Enter Employees Only written beneath a steady red hand. But paper signs were taped to the cinder block walls, and these depicted a diagonal arrow and read International in an unsteady hand. We seemed to be the only people following this arrow, but okay. It led one floor down to a glassed-in hallway just off a mechanic’s bay in a crook of the tarmac. Towering above us was the right engine of a 727, some of its shell removed. The hallway terminated at an elevator where we were directed to press Floor Two International by another shaky paper sign. By this time we were surrounded by Japanese flight attendants who maxed-out the first elevator car. They had cute plush animals and stickers on their luggage, they had pop haircuts. There were no other passengers but us.<br /><br />We eventually arrived on the second floor, just beside the sign directing us to our gate, for which we had to ride down one floor on an escalator. Back to floor one. While we were on the escalator, they called for the business and first class passengers to begin boarding. We walked right to the gate and got on the plane. I spent all of twenty-eight minutes on my feet in California.<br /><br />Once on the plane, this one much bigger than the last, we were directed up the stairs to the business class cabin. Back to the second floor. This was a 777, and it had separate spaces for first, business, and economy class. I never even had to glimpse the latter, but the forward cabin of the first class passengers was eye-opening: instead of seats, they had kitty-corner pods which transformed into full single beds with dashing gimcrack headboard-desks consoles. Upstairs, the business class area was no less pleasant for all its unintimidating convention. We had the very same lounge chairs as the last flight, only they were positioned very far apart. Each had a television in the armrest. Each had a full keypad of control options. I was surprised to learn that my leather carry-on duffel was too round to fit in the overhead compartment, and had already given it to the prompt and businesslike attendant when I realized that there was a whole row of roomy trunks along the floor of the plane. I gladly received my fresh orange juice as I took my seat. I tried to touch the back of the chair in front of me with my toes and I could not.<br /><br />The plane took off on schedule around one pm San Francisco time, the captain telling us that headwinds had convinced the controllers to dictate a longer, more southerly route than had been the plan. I changed my watch just after takeoff: fifteen hours forward to Hong Kong, even though we were going backwards over the Pacific. Our flight from California to Hong Kong lasted about seventeen hours, but we arrived twenty-nine hours later, eleven time zones and one adjustment for Daylight Saving Time later. Beneath the plane, it got earlier relative to our flight speed as we crossed the longitudes, then jumped forward a day relative to our departure hemisphere. After the sun had risen on us on the Dulles tarmac, it never set again until Hong Kong approach, making for one long day. Within the plane, things were as nice as they could be: glass glasses, silver silverware, champagne and delicate smoked salmon salad with challenging greens. I had a good but academically difficult book and crossword puzzles that were a little too easy for me. I had had almost two hours of sleep in the previous twenty-seven, and after the first hour, our well-mannered neighbors in the business class cabin shut all windows making it cozy and dark like a campsite. There was nothing but the sun-blasted ocean below us, anyway. I had a drink or two, I readied myself for sleep.<br /><br />But that never came. It was a smooth enough flight. I didn’t get very nervous about it because the plane was so big, the bottom so far away, that I couldn’t really feel much of the flying. I am not scared of riding the elevator. I don’t know why I was unable to sleep. Maybe because I was in public. Maybe the noise. Maybe the jet lag. I tuned into the flight on TV. The little blue map flashes through practical information over a little GPS mock-up of the plane and the blue water below it. The view changes often, and the widest angle showed some land mass. We were going 579 miles per hour. Eventually there was nothing but a black cross over blue. I was too tired to read my book. We were 39,000 feet into the sky. The screen frequently repeated its information in Cantonese. Before long, I know what the fields meant, even in Hanzi. We’ve elapsed this much time, we have this many meters remaining. The opiate of the half light, the weary tiredness, the drinks and coffees and whispers, the crosshair focus of that achingly slow blue map, these cast an otherworldly aspect over the elongated day, I could do nothing but watch, haunted, as it progressed at half-speed but without changing. We crossed the date line shortly before eleven am somewhere, pm somewhere else. I am pretty sure I lived through every hour of that flight, even the ones that merely exist as the conjecture of relativity. Outside it was forty degrees below zero according to the map. Later in Chinese it was still forty below. This is neatly reveled: minus forty is the same in Celsius as it is in Fahrenheit: cold.<br /><br /><b>(Veracruz to Greensboro)</b><br /><br />The longest bus ride I’ve taken in my life was from Veracruz, México to Greensboro, North Carolina, beginning the eighteenth of December just about twelve years ago. The entire trip, including layovers in Huston and New Orleans, took me fifty-two hours from start to finish. I crossed two time zones moving forward. There was a vast discrepancy between the charm and comfort of the Mexican busses versus the ones I had to use over the US border. I thought there was nothing more comfortable than these smooth, highly cooled land liners. They had more legroom than an airplane and cost less than a train. They were clean, their drivers were full of personality, they played movies. I thought that my fortunes would have been much improved had I been allowed to remain in Mexican busses the entire way across the US, too. But it wouldn’t have mattered: fifty-two hours is just too long to sit on any bus. <br /><br /><b>Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City</b><br /><br />My spell broke over the Pacific Ocean, about ninety minutes before arriving in Hong Kong. A large lunch was served and the mood of the cabin seemed to wake along with me. Oddly, this virtual morning coincided with nightfall outside the plane, the opened windows finally and thoroughly lit the cabin with steadily deepening twilight. Soon, it was stone nighttime outside, and the plane was banking over the distinctive skyline of Hong Kong Island and landing at Chek Lap Kok Airport just off the north shore of Lantau. Here we gathered our carry-on bags and made our way through a thoroughly modern airport to board another plane just like the one we’d landed in. This walk did not pass through customs or immigration, we were merely traveling on through to Vietnam along controlled international spaces incidentally inside an award-winning building in one of the world’s greatest cities. Our bags were checked through security on the way off the plane, and then once again, for good measure, as we were boarding again about forty minutes later. In the plane we already knew where the stairs were, which seats were ours, where to put the bags. I suspected I might actually feel damned, faced with the very same landscape, same passengers even, on this new airplane. Like maybe time was looped up, repeating itself. But I didn’t, the business class cabin had finally become comfortable through familiarity.<br /><br />This was the short leg of our trip. It was filled with nervous-excited chatter about Vietnam, filling out immigration paperwork, some murmured language practice, We gathered all of our documentation, made sure these things were replaced safely in spots that were easy to access. On the televised map between the seats, the plane remained firmly over recognizable bright green landscapes the whole way. Outside the world was moonless and black. The flight attendant tried to offer me food again, but I’d eaten less than two hours before, and couldn’t face the duplicate meal on this duplicate plane. After such a long second flight, the hour and a half between nose-up and nose-down on this third one went by in a flash: the seatbelt sign dinged on, the outside darkness resolved itself into a cloud cover we immediately left behind, my ears started up, and the pinpricks on light out in the void were Ho Chi Minh City.<br /><br />What kind of first impression can be gleaned from an airplane? On a map, a city looks flattened and compartmentalized. Everything rendered in orderly uniform lines, everything can be seen. In reality, cities spring from the irregular ground and every nook is as isolated as it is accessible. Here was a number of lights, then a dozen, then a hundred, then a city. It spread from me to as far away as I could see out every window. A uniform pattern still: mostly low, cubic buildings punctuated sporadically with blinking skyscrapers. As we closed in my eyes adjusted, the maze of the city deepened. It was not lit up like Hong Kong, but lit from inside like a tent, the cracks in its shell revealing ghostly green flora, narrow fissures of streaming traffic, mystery. It grew more and more intricate before I really got a feeling, with no point of reference, for how close we were getting to the ground. It was fascinating, dystopian, both futuristic and developing. Enticing. Then every window in our air conditioned 777 fogged up and we could see nothing more until we were on the ground and hustled off the plane into Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport, where it was already almost nine thirty, Thursday night. I reset my watch one last time,<br /><br />I was really tired by then. My lack of sleep made for an almost phantasmagorical trip here, but it also really helped keep my nerves in check for dealing with taciturn officials. Even the open, officious, knee-jerk animosity of immigration agents the world over could not penetrate my protective stupor. I was forced to stand in a different line from Sunshine because the man in the uniform didn’t like me. The next guy barely looked up when I stepped over the yellow line. “Robert” he seemed to yawn inside. I said I was, and he stamped me. Sunshine had actually had to talk. We were met at the baggage carousel by one of Sunshine’s coworkers who helped us on through the airport and on into the sultry slap of the southeast Asian evening.</div></span><br /><div align="center"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2044167946&size=l"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_00SkWv4eRDA/Rz9S9iwBH3I/AAAAAAAAAAU/xzZDzd-YUNg/s320/Viet+Scape+BLOG2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5133913317479358322" /></a>Ho Chi Minh Cityscape photo © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1153197528370345822006-07-18T05:37:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:28.623+07:00Butterflies<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number XX/2006</div></span><br /><div align="justify">I have worked all week to rebuild my blog in this new and, one hopes, less restricted way. This is an explanation of sorts as to why I did it and what I hope to get out of it. 1,643 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—A style book is a resource publishing houses (like the New York Times, or Harper Collins) use to standardize formatting for the works they publish. It is a formal list of all the grammatical and typesetting answers to routine questions that pop up about preferential writing styles. There are as many different ways to write something as there are writers, and the style book offers guidance in tricky situations. It dictates house rules in the areas of formatting and the handling of verbal particulars. Ace reporters then know where to turn when trying to sort out material particulars such as: how do I go about inserting punctuation around quote mark? At what point is it appropriate to merely use numbers instead of spelling numbers out? Will the Washington Post let me print “asshole”? Will the editors at Penguin demand a certain endnote format? The list goes on and on because there are hundreds of standards. What is right for a doctoral thesis at Stanford and what is acceptable in the Boston Journal of Botany may vary by a little or a lot, but they do vary. One can assume there is a gulf of difference between the stylebooks of the Christian Science Monitor and Penthouse Forum.<br /><br />This journal also has a style book, though it seems a little overblown to call it that. For formatting, I choose to copy incidental firsts: an illustration I whipped up of my Halloween mask (<a title="Scroll to the bottom." href="http://mrcavin.blogspot.com/2004/10/devilution.html">here</a>) has been the antecedent for every other photo in this journal: I copy those unlikely parameters into every new file I post. The color of this blog’s background came about through accidental experimentation with the bizarre hexadecimal codes in the blog’s template. It was a pain to figure out how to replicate it in Photoshop, but I did it. Now it is saved for use on the borders of all of my Polaroid-looking frames. But or substantive issues, I keep a stylebook detailing the textual rules observed here. It is half a sheet of yellow legal paper, bulleted by handwritten five-pointed scribbles, and I know it is around here somewhere. Doesn’t much matter for today’s post if I find it, though.<br /><br />That sheet of paper probably tells me the following: star: do not write in the second person. Star: do not reference the blog itself, it’s a platform, not a subject. Star: write about yourself not your friends. Star: be inclusive, explain things for a wider audience than expected. Star: don’t whine. Star: write sentences out; no bulleted lists, net jargon, or other irritating brevities. So look, the thing is only half a page, so it is far from comprehensive. If life gets too tricky, <a title="Of course, this is too anal even for me." href="http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/cmosfaq.html">the Chicago Manual of Style</a> (14th edition) is on a shelf about four feet away from me. These tools help me keep a system imposing post consistency from one month to the next. They also to prevent me from posting tempting blog content like this:<br /><br />“Damn, its been six months since you last heard from me. Good thing I have been writing those letters to each of you. Hey Chris, stop reading this blog and get back to work!” [Star: do not overuse exclamation points or other bizarre punctuation.]<br /><br />All of this serves to make this project as tidy as possible. My desire is to work up to a writing discipline that will serve me in other areas, but also to keep the posts themselves from straying into ugly or bewildering territories. I also try to keep the content away from subjects off-topic or entirely pointless. There are certain style rules intended to keep these goals, too. There is no sheet for these: I tend to steer away from any daily journal or diary content, preferring to let experiences ripen in hindsight, connect thematically to other experiences, and formulate into a synthesis. I like the subjects of my posts to act as a springboard to research and learning more about the places I am interacting with. I try to write to the point, occurrences grouped by theme or time, which keeps me from dumping long lists of unrelated material together in one heap. Finally, I want to take my time and make something that I worked hard to make, spent some energy and mind on. Combine this with the fact that I work kind of slowly, and only pretend to work in chronological order, and the outcome is that my project is ever more divorced from the rapid timeline of its subject. Something new for the starred sheet, then: take notes, it’ll be six months before you finally tell Chris to get back to work.<br /><br />So that was my simple plan until I began to stumble upon its problems: any consistency of style is very restricting; little, unripe and disconnected experiences were disappearing between the posts; and oh, that escaping timeline. The fact is that there are very few readers willing to check back once a day for the forty days between entries. Some entries (a long history of everything that has ever happened, for instance) tend to bottleneck the process, too: while I am putting the hard work off, I cannot actually post the easy and fun posts that come along directly after. Who would ever find all the back-dated commentary that I am posting if it is hidden under newer backdated content, born tucked into this blog’s archives? I didn’t mean to insinuate above, if I did, that my own delusions of magazine are the right way to make a nice web log. Indeed, they are probably less valuable to the world than the more traditional bulleted, listed, linked, spur-of-the-moment, and—most importantly—frequently-updated blogs out there. But in the long run, this is not the real reason why I decided to change everything last weekend. Frankly, I decided I really wanted to be able to include some of that traditional, lightweight, easy to make stuff on my space, too. It looked like fun.<br /><br />That is why I’ve just spent something like fifty hours maddening myself with HTML and CSS to figure out how to include a second, smaller blog beside the longer standard content on this site. It just comes down to the fact that, like many bloggers, I would like to tell you all about the links that I visited this week, toss in a note about my upcoming vacation, or just tell you that nothing of any kind of importance has happened to me today. It could be a forum where I mention things that are happening in the Mexican news that have caught my eye. It might be a place where I can express an unsupported opinion. Mostly, it is a place where I can mention short little experiences that don’t resonate or change my life or teach me much, the disconnected things that were slipping by in the old standard. For example:<br /><br /><blockquote>On Thursday, November fourth, while it was still daylight on Sunshine’s lone sick day of the year, we stood and watched hundreds and hundreds of migrating monarch butterflies tumble by level with our second floor windows. They were visible from blocks away, black dots that grew in the sky into a pair of spotted gold wings, spindly and random in the air, and then receded into dots again against Cerro de la Silla. The birds were going nuts, swooping to and fro and mostly missing; but occasionally disembodied wings would sprinkle by, leftovers like a stale fortune cookie crust. In the wind, the severed wings floated much the same way that the living butterflies did, dead but persevering.</blockquote><br />Why should I have to do without that, just because it makes no difference to whatever else was happening that week? Just because I haven’t gotten around to writing that week yet? Jammed between our trip to Honduras and our friends Tony and Christene rotating back to the US, the butterflies were in danger of being forgotten simply because they were small and there was nowhere to fit them. Is there some reason I could not just impose the above, as is, into my journal? Yes: obsessive compulsion. I didn’t think it would look pretty to have long twenty-two hundred word posts clustered in with bulleted lists and three line sentences. I thought that would annoy me. Because of this, I created a whole new blog for that stuff, figured out how to make a new column for it to live in, and then I tried to figure out how to make it actually appear there to a greater or lesser extent. When all of this was done, I worried that the three column look would coop up longer content into a thin yardage of text scroll, making it harder than ever to read. I worried that the cluttered business of the new design would be confusing. I worried that readers might now know what the temperature was at the Monterrey airport (which is located in the mildly cooler town of Apodaca). The worries snowballed, and I attempted to solve every one of them.<br /><br />Now it is next week somehow, and I can tell it is daytime because I have the screen tilted away from the window reflection. I am just about done with this. In preparation for the roll-out, the new build, the encroaching go-live date, I wanted to write this down in explanation, even if it varies form the strictest reading of the style book. I was worried that I was alienating my few readers through my inability to keep up with the old blog right. The answer to this problems seems to be to make a bigger blog—two blogs—this I should be able to keep up with no problem. But the answer is also to stay engaged by not restricting myself from sillier, easier content more enjoyable, at times, to both you and me. Star: be interesting.</div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/Copious%20Notes.jpg'><img border='0' class='phostImg' src='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/Copious%20Notes.jpg'></a><br />Copious Notes © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1146444041853293122006-03-04T14:09:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:28.511+07:00Wanders of the World<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number6/2006</div></span><br /><div align="justify">The waiting was supposed to be the tricky part, but we made it. One week after submitting our bid list we know where Sunshine is to be posted in 2007. We are elated about it. 1,249 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—Friday we submitted our official bid proposal to the proper authorities, and sat back to wait. I very much handled this wait the way I predicted I would: I spent many hours a day cruising online photos of the places we’d included on our list while daydreaming about heading off to one or another of them. I worked my way slowly through the whole list (save one or two), and then started in at the beginning again. Sunshine has handled it more like we were told we would: she wants to know where the hell we are going and to get the suspense over with. I would imagine that this comes as no shock to anyone who has seen her on the days leading up to her birthday.<br /><br />In the days between Friday and now, we have been studiously following the traffic on the bid computer to see what positions are garnering the most attention. Many of the posh posts we had assumed high equity bidders would go for remained unassigned but showed heavy traffic, indicating many interested parties had listed them. Places like Canberra, Australia and Montevideo, Paraguay were showing that as many as thirty or thirty five bidders. London and Amsterdam were getting equally fought over. We had included none of these destinations on our list for just this very reason, higher equity employees would get them all. Some of the posts that we had expected to be included in the list above were not so vied for, though. Island paradises like Praia, Cape Verde and Port Luis, Mauritius were seeing some interest, but nothing like Canada, or the Hague. I suspect it is because paradise is sometimes hard to access by direct flight to a major airport. Cape Verde had been on our list, and Mauritius had not. By Mardi Gras, all of the positions we were bidding on had at least five or six interested others.<br /><br />By Wednesday, the post positions for the bidders with the highest equity were assigned, and since Sunshine was regularly checking the bid computer, we were watching positions disappear as they were given away. I got an update call late Monday afternoon letting me know that of all the posts granted that day, only four had been on our list. Coincidentally, they were my four least favorite positions we’d bid, and while I would have lived in any of them, I was happier that in this first round the list had narrowed to something more acutely desirable. Yesterday, Sunshine called me in the late afternoon again and told me of more positions snatched from our jaws. After that first day, this news was more upsetting: every new post dropped from possibility was a new post I had really secretly wanted to have most, and it hurt to lose it to someone else. Finally, early this afternoon, Sunshine called to let me know that she had gotten the official email that we were to be assigned Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, effective sometime around October 2007. This was incredible news since Vietnam had been our top choice; and, frankly, when we had watched the position disappear off the list yesterday afternoon, we assumed it was to a bidder with five percent more equity than we have. We’d given up on Ho Chi Minh. I suspect that it is possible we never did know what was going on as well as we thought we did.<br /><br />This is great. Heading off to Vietnam for two years is a dream come true. I was at home bracing myself to be excited about Yekaterinburg, Russia or Skopje, Macedonia; but what I really wanted was Vietnam all along. I had actually started getting upset when I heard that Dar-Es-Salaam was going to another bidder, but now Vietnam is my favorite place in the world, again. And it is more than just Vietnam to get excited about (not that it would need to be, with Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi, Danang, China Beach the Mekong Delta and Halong Bay in Vietnam), but the entire region. I’ll get to go to Laos and Thailand while I am there, Myanmar and China and Malaysia and Cambodia. Flights we take are so long, that it is generally taken for granted that passengers will stop on the way for a day or two of rest before getting back on the plane. These places will be in Bangkok or Hong Kong or Singapore. Our R&R leave, when we get it about halfway through our tour, will be in Sydney, Australia. There is just no bad news.<br /><br />We are going to the other side of the world.<br /><br />Tonight we celebrated at our favorite little neighborhood half Spanish restaurant. We just kept saying, “Vietnam, man! Viet-fucking-nam!” Now that it is late and all of this has, to some degree, sunk in, I realize that I really know very little about Vietnam. I’ve known some people from there, and some more from the SE Asian region. I’ve eaten a lot of what we call “Vietnamese Food” in the US, but I know enough about the cultural and folkloric qualities of cuisine to be suspicious of this actually baring much resemblance to the food I will find in-country. I have seen a number of Vietnamese movies that I have loved, and my images and impressions and fantasies of life there come from these: lush and hot tropical green surroundings cut with teeming masses of rickshaws and pedestrians selling street corner things and monkeys and durian and pointy little hats. Many of the people I know, family and friends, I’m afraid have images from movies, too—or newsreels, or grainy black and white newspaper photos: olive drab Hueys with open doors settle near the plume of smoke and the POV jumps up and down while young men with rucksacks jump and run for the whipping trees. Vietnam will resist these preconceptions. I expect it to.<br /><br />The minute I found out about Vietnam, I began downloading photos from the internet. I downloaded hundreds, some taken before I was born, others within the last few months. They are a confused array of wide streets and muddy rivers and French colonial architecture, low CC motor bikes and coffee shops and piles of mud and rain up to here for six months every year. But I have to wait for the real learning to begin. Our travel guides and written materials will show up mail-order, and we will get a glimpse of other westerners’ ideas about, and reactions to, and opinions of the country itself. Then, in early 2007, Sunshine will begin Vietnamese language and SE Asian Cultural classes in DC. Eventually, we will get on a plane and find ourselves in the hustle and bombast of downtown Saigon, and from that moment on we will not be able to throw a rock and hit something we could have reasonably prepared ourselves for. When Sunshine first was offered this job, and I first found out that this was what my future was going to be, I had big dreams of my life changing completely: the world around me going from pole to pole and changing extremely from one day to the next. This fantasy was left unfulfilled when we were put in Monterrey, no matter how much I have grown to like this place. Now I can see the kind of thing I was wanting there on the horizon, and I am just in love with it. I love it.<br /><br /><a title="Includes information." href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh_City">Here is the Wikipedia entry on Ho Chi Minh City</a><br /><br /><a title="Includes weather forcast." href="http://www.hochiminhcity.gov.vn/eng">Official tourism site for Ho Chi Minh City (in English)</a><br /><br /><a title="Happily go here!" href="http://www.vietnamtourism.com/e_pages/news/index.asp">Official tourism site for Vietnam (in English)</a><br /><br /><a title="Photos by theme." href="http://www.terragalleria.com/vietnam/vietnam-region.ho-chi-minh-city.html">Here</a>, <a title="Multiple Pages." href="http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/Vietnam/Northeast_South/Ho_Chi_Minh/Ho_Chi_Minh_City/">here</a>, <a title="Old French Saigon postcards." href="http://nguyentl.free.fr/html/photo_epoque_sud_p1_fr.htm">here</a>, or <a title="Art." href="http://yoda.zoy.org/photos/2002/12-Vietnam/">here</a> for good Ho Chi Minh City photos</div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/SE%20Asia%20region%20map.jpg"><img class="phostImg" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/SE%20Asia%20region%20map.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Southeast Asia photo illus. © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1146443986108162102006-02-26T06:38:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:28.393+07:00Strange Advocates<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number 5/2006</div></span><br /><div align="justify">For the majority of the last two months we have been wedging geographic information into and in between every other topic or activity. Our heads have become globes, and they are spinning. 2,172 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—In my opinion, the starting point for this new life was back on October 12th, 2004. That was the day that Sunshine was assigned to her first foreign post. The internal post ceremony, called Flag Day, is a time-honored culmination of several months worth of struggle and fuss to secure a decent starting point within Sunshine’s field of employment. The story of that day is <a title="First real entry!" href="http://mrcavin.blogspot.com/2004/10/flag-day.html">here</a>. On Flag Day, we discovered that we were to be moving to Monterrey, Mexico for two years beginning in February, 2005.<br /><br />On January 17th 2006 I was working a crossword puzzle with my mother in a little deli in Greensboro, NC when this process started all over again. I got a call from Sunshine who was at work in Mexico; she had just received the new list of positions we were to be bidding for next. Back in 2004, the list of available positions had been tailored to her graduating class, and therefore consisted of only entry-level positions, sized to correspond with the number of people in Sunshine’s class. From these, we had carefully chosen a list of viable positions based on Sunshine’s desire to possibly learn a new language and get some of her career requirements completed. During this time, every other member of Sunshine’s class was doing the same. A whole community, for a month, stopped talking about anything else. The air was filled with department jargon referring to cities, positions, and equities; ranked by how, were and, most importantly, why. It was sometimes hard to hold all of this stuff in one head. Plus, it was impossible not to at least half-way keep up with the lists of other people, people who were ranking the exact same positions we were. On Flag Day, we were assigned to post in Monterrey, México, based on Sunshine’s ability to speak Spanish and the need to fill a position there immediately. During the Flag Day ceremony, of course, we also got to watch the rest of our list be assigned to other people. It was a relief to finally begin concentrating on one country, only; but it was bittersweet.<br /><br />This new bidding process opened a bit differently. Gone was Sunshine’s requirement to work a specific type of job, for example, within a specific type of language. Gone were certain restrictions based on first-time bidders. Lastly, the list was much longer due to the simple fact that it was no longer tailored for a specific graduating class. It was chilly that day outside the deli; and while mom worked our crossword for us, I stood and listened to Sunshine rattle off most of three hundred and sixty-four available positions abroad. It seemed unbelievable that we were going to have to whittle this down to a ranked list of twenty positions by February. My head was already spinning.<br /><br /><em>“Abidjan-CON, Abidjan-CON, Abu Dhabi-POL, Addis Ababa-COL/POL…”<br /><br />“Addis Ababa is Ethiopia?”<br /><br />“Yes. Ait Taipei-CON, CON, Ankara-CON, CON, APAO, Ashgabat-CAO…”<br /></em><br />First, it was necessary to crop this whole list down to something a little bit smaller. We were able to eliminate many of the jobs because Sunshine was no longer required to do them, in the language Sunshine was no longer required to bid on. There were many posts we could cross off because they were unaccompanied positions in conflict-stricken areas. This meant that we were not really looking at much of the Middle East, the entire western hemisphere, or many interesting places in between. Also, while Sunshine is still interested in learning another language, it would be better for her to learn a country specific language that does not typecast her too much in a certain area. We already have that going on a little in this hemisphere, and Sunshine’s Spanish proficiency will likely have us bouncing back to Latin America on and off throughout her career. If we were to go to an Arabic speaking country now, for example, that would be it: we’d spend the rest of our lives in one or the other kind of place. We would rather have a little more diversity than that, if possible.<br /><br /><em>“No: Bogotá Bogotá-POL/ECON, Bogotá, Bogotá, Bogotá, but: Bratislava-ECON”<br /><br />“Brussels-GSO okay, Bucharest-CON-ECON damn, Bucharest-CON, Bucharest-CON, Bucharest-AGSO though, Budapest-CON-POL, damn.”<br /><br />“That’s it for the B’s. Cairo, Cairo, Cairo-AIO, Canberra. Skip Caracas?” </em><br /><br />Once we’d done away with the things we weren’t looking for, we could concentrate on the things we were. It was a goal to gear our list toward smaller areas where hopefully our two-year stay would be adequate to see much of the country. In this way we were able to eliminate large and interesting places, like India and China. Places we are very interested in living later when Sunshine is tenured and our stays there are longer. Another important factor: salary differentials for hardship or danger get combined and recorded as accrued job equity. This helps during the process of bidding for a new job. Hardship differentials can be based on the difficulty in achieving expected quality of life due to a number of possible factors. These can include, badly paved roads or difficulty in obtaining goods or services. It can also be based on more immediate hardships such as the prevalence of disease, street crime, or distance from home. Danger pay almost solely consists of the possibility of the employee’s life being threatened by wars or political factions targeting Americans. More realistic dangers (hurricanes, mosquitoes, bacteria, corrupt police with AK-47s) tend to fall under hardship pay instead of actual danger. In our case, there is a five percent equity attached to our position in Monterrey, probably because of the pollution. This means that we will be able to pick our next position over people who are currently working positions with zero equity, posts like Paris or London; but after people in higher equity posts like Kinshasa (twenty percent) or Baghdad (fifty percent). Sunshine was interested in getting a little more equity this time around, and was thus able to focus her attentions toward certain types of places. After Monterrey, I just wanted to go someplace that got cold. Eventually, we were able to look at this long list in a far more manageable way. We had cut it down to a list of fifty-some positions that were all in one way or another interesting to one or both of us.<br /><br /><em>“Dar-Es-Salaam, Praia, Maputo, Cape Verde, Kinshasa, Cairo, what am I missing?<br /><br />“Djibouti?”<br /><br />“No, Djer booty!”<br /></em><br />This process above happened while we were in different countries during the end of January. There were long and strange international phone conversations back and forth. The two of us both worked with the list and independently, coming up with personal twenty-position lists picked in a vacuum. Sunshine did a major amount of internal research, learning about these jobs from the people who currently have them. She accrued facts about the housing, the distances necessary to walk or drive to get around in these actual city spaces abroad, and the consumer goods available at these posts. In other words, she learned useful things about the quality and cost of expatriate life in the cities we were considering. I did a little more “traveler’s fantasy” -type research, learning about the cultures, the architecture, the food. I looked up many photographs of interesting places in travel books and magazines, ruminated over the histories of seven hundred year old cities and important international regions. In this way, both of us managed to make personal bid lists that were wholly different from one another, using the same stock of about fifty positions. In some cases, it was because one or the other of us ignored the rules above for a really cool position (in my case, it was very hard to accept that we were not going to be bidding on Kathmandu, Nepal because Sunshine did not want to do the job that was available there). Mostly, our lists were different because we have different ideas about, and interests in, the world. By the time I came back to México at the beginning of February, we were ready to really wade into the thick of the process: from here on out we would become strange advocates for the places that had arbitrarily, over the previous two weeks, become very near and dear to our hearts. In this way we would try to percolate one final, two-person list from the two personal lists we had already made.<br /><br /><em>“Don’t think of it as a country, think of it as a city. Everything that ever happened in modern history happened here, first.”<br /><br />“Is every known species of lemur indigenous there?”<br /><br />“No, but it’s, like, a five-hour train ride to eight other places on this list.”<br /></em><br />For those three weeks the odd conversations intensified. Each of us did a little giving-up on, and a little hard-selling for, our places of choice. There was never a sense that we were arriving at the final decisions we were making in any other way than harmonious and gracious discussion. Sunshine was interested in several places in Africa that I was less interested in. On the other hand, she had no idea originally what I found so alluring about many places in Eastern Europe. So we taught each other, and the final draft was tugged and nudged and finely-tuned until it was something very acceptable to us both. I was telling her all about the temperatures and the climates and colored houses and accessible canals, and she was telling me all about the price of cereal and the sitting rooms and the fact that there was going to be a new Embassy being built. In this way, our understanding of the actual fact of the new place, and the act of living and working there, was becoming far more well-rounded. We also discovered that we were very interested in places we had not thought about much before (Tbilisi, Georgia, for example), places we discovered an affinity for together. It was strange to watch my perception warp from the beginning of the process to the end of it. At the beginning, I would have been pretty happy to accept a position in any of the fifty-some places that became our master guideline, but by the end I was very much interested in the places I was advocating. The hardest stage for me ended up being the positioning of the list itself. Ranking these positions one through twenty was very difficult, and the prejudices I had to foster to keep it from seeming purely arbitrary made it more. It was obvious that on different days, for example, I was more interested in Chisinau, Moldova than Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania. The next day, I was unable to recapture what it was I had possibly been thinking, and these positions were reordered again. The strange conversations between Sunshine and me continued along these lines for days. On our final list of twenty one (we added one extra because we were worried that our first choice was scheduled too tightly), there were finally two places I was fairly uninterested in going. In at least one of these two cases, it was a place I had debated a week before to have higher on the list.<br /><br /><em>“Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, Chisinau, Bucharest, Dar-Es-Salaam, Maputo, then Hanoi again, then Antananarivo, then Ho Chi Minh again.”<br /><br />“then Tbilisi, then Dar-Es-Salaam, then Maputo and Antananarivo before Hanoi again, then Djibouti…”<br /><br />“I’ll move Tel Aviv to nineteen if Hanoi two can still be at seven.”<br /></em><br />On the day we officially submitted out final bid proposal, February 24th, we had the only really tense moment we endured during the whole process. On the day we submitted, we discovered that one of our ranked positions had been closed. After having been very prepared for this deadline all week, we had to pick a replacement right then. Several harried phone calls later, our list was submitted to Sunshine’s career counselor. Sometime this week, he will sit down in a room with the career councilors of the other bidders and hash out, based on rank and equity and interest, which of Sunshine’s coworkers will get which position. I have heard that the waiting is the worst part of the process, but while I am certainly on the edge of my seat, I am glad that the choosing part is over. That part was grueling. By the time the results are in, I will have completely reverted back to my attitude at the beginning of this whole ordeal: there were twenty-one positions on that final list, and I would be happy to accept any of them. What was I thinking trying to decide between Antananarivo, Madagascar and Bratislava, Slovakia? How did I manage to do that? Maybe the very hardest part of the whole process is going to be the assigning itself. There is little danger of our getting posted to a place of tepid interest this time around, but once one position is chosen for us it will mean that we will have to mourn the loss of the other twenty possibilities.</div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/Sunshine%20and%20Globe.jpg"><img class="phostImg" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/Bid%20Process.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />photo © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1146443915381456352006-02-18T05:47:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:28.255+07:00A Note Regarding Why<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number 4/2006</div></span><br />I was up pretty early this morning reading the news. Violence is still escalating between cartels vying for control of the northern border. Suddenly, I heard a knock at the door…. 2,896 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost"><div align="justify"><strong>Crossroads Town</strong><br /><br />[NL]—The town of Laredo enjoys a sleepy history seemingly incommensurate with its current woes. Born alongside Spanish colonial expansion into northern territories in the eighteenth century, the area which is now Laredo was first discovered because it was an efficient place to cross the muddy Rio Grande. Soon, petitions were written, permissions granted, and a small huddle of adobe houses officially cropped up there. The residents of these houses watched as their Spanish flag was replaced by the Mexican flag after the war of independence, the Mexican then replaced with the Texan during the succession of the Lone Star Republic, and then, finally, as the Stars and Stripes were permanently hoisted at the end of the long “Mexican War,” a border dispute concerning much of Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Between these milestones, forts and battalions sprung up on the banks of this crossroad, garrisons were stationed, and Santa Ana marched through on the way to the Alamo. The little village of Laredo even enjoyed a stint as the capital of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande, a de facto no man’s land between the Rio Grande, America’s declared southern border, and the more northerly Nueces River, the northern border declared by Mexico. During all of this, dusty little Laredo abided as an important and all but unnoticed waypoint.<br /><br />But then something fundamental happened again, making Laredo pretty much unique, and somewhat determining the constancy of its difficult future. When the US finally convinced Mexico to recognize the Rio Grande as the border between the two countries, little Laredo, sitting on the river’s fertile northern floodplain, with its Spanish then Mexican heritage, was left in the wrong country. In response, patriotic Mexicans moved south of the river to retain their Mexican citizenship, and a new dusty little settlement was born: Nuevo Laredo. Throughout the years, these two Laredos have been inextricably tied together—the archetypical border towns facing each other across federal checkpoints and an intermittent river, evincing the worst of two worlds as a sibling love/hate thing. Together, they’ve seen cattle booms and onion booms and oil booms and tourist booms. Both have grown into medium-sized cities, with populations in the hundreds of thousands. Each has played its part as the other city’s exotic wild frontier, while both have sought to attract international attention through urban beautification, commercial opportunity, and an environment of multi-nationalism.<br /><br /><strong>Newest Boom</strong><br /><br />A quick summary of Mexican drug trafficking is a difficult undertaking because the illegal drug trade here has a long and varied history. Any attempt to pair that history into a meaningful brief is arbitrary and quixotic, picking and choosing from the daily struggles of hundreds of players over six decades of crime. Still, I will attempt to make some sense of the pertinent details of the last twelve years, starting in 1993 when there were still about eight major narcotics syndicates running things in the north of Mexico, smuggling drugs into the US at the behest of Colombian cartels. Colombian cartels had been having a tough time of it, with the US War on Drugs cracking down on production in Colombia and shutting down trade routes through the Caribbean. By 1993, Mexican syndicates were picking up the smuggling and distribution slack with Colombia’s blessing, widening land routes across the northern border. Three Mexican Syndicates emerged from this new situation dominating the drug smuggling scene: the Juarez Cartel lead by Amado Carillo Fuentes, the Gulf Cartel led by ex-Mexican State Policeman Osiel Cardinas, and the Tijuana Cartel led by the Arellano Felix brothers, Benjamin and Ramon.<br /><br />This Tijuana Cartel controlled the shipping routes into Southern California and along the Pacific coast of Baja California. Vying for power in the states of Sinaloa and Sonora, and revolutionizing trafficking through the implementation of state-of-the-art tunnels into Arizona, is the so-called Sinaloa Cartel, run by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a former enforcer for the Juarez cartel, and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, his stepbrother. This makes for bitter enemies in the Mexican underworld, and the Arellano Felix brothers attempt to have El Chapo Guzman assassinated in Guadalajara in May 1993, accidentally killing a beloved catholic cardinal instead. This lead to both an enormous public outcry—prompting the Mexican government to put the screws on the northern ganglands—as well as the arrest and imprisonment of Sinaloa clan’s El Chapo.<br /><br />By 1997 these federal crackdowns within Mexico had made things tougher for the local cartels. The corrupt head of Mexico's anti-drug agency, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, had been caught and jailed for allegedly being a cartel puppet. Federal agents and special forces were hampering trafficking across the border in strategic areas. Then, Juarez Cartel leader Amado Carillo Fuentes died during a botched attempt to change his appearance using plastic surgery, throwing the most powerful Mexican drug syndicate into supposed decline. Controlling the east coast syndicates, the Gulf Cartel honcho Osiel Cardinas was being harried by federal troops in his richest markets, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros (across the border form Brownsville, Texas). Unconcerned, Cardinas enticed a bunch of these federal crime fighters, all military special forces, to desert the government cause and hire on as his own personal army of elite narco-terrorists. Once recruited, these enforcers began to recruit and train new people, and they rechristened themselves <em>Los Zetas</em> after a Mexican Army radio call code for “commander.”<br /><br />But the Juarez Cartel was just biding its time. While shopping around for a new boss, it was situating its own people in corrupt high places, and rebuilding itself to its former glory with acts of drug-trade espionage. During 1998-9, the ruling party in Mexico, the PRI, was gearing up for the first election it would lose in seventy years, and Mexico was seeing a time of municipal change. By the time the PAN’s Vicente Fox took the oath of office in 2000, the Juarez Cartel was back to being bigger, and better placed, than any two of its regional competitors, rivaled only by the Gulf Cartel on the other side of the country. President Fox, in a showy effort to continue Mexico’s fight against its crime-riddled north, and in a show of cooperation with certain international drug initiatives, commenced a campaign in conjunction with US anti-drug agents that landed hundreds of wanted smugglers in jail, many of them high-placed cartel leadership. Mysteriously, this federal onslaught was most effective against all but the Juarez Cartel which was able to grow in the face of its competitors’ bad luck. In 2001, post September 11th reforms at US entry points effectively ended any ability to smuggle southern narcotics into the country other than by land from México, putting northern Mexican cartels in a position to control much more of the drug trade than ever before. Mexican syndicates creep over the border to control distribution and further trade through the US; but the statistics of drug use below the border also rises, the bottlenecked supply finding the point of least resistance in Mexican markets. Also in 2001, with the aid of El Mayo Zambada, Sinaloa Cartel honcho El Chapo Guzman successfully conducts a sensational escape from La Palma maximum security prison, hiding in a laundry truck and being delivered through the gates.* Thirty of the guards at La Palma, as well as the prison’s warden, are arrested and indicted.<br /><br />By the end of 2002, federal dragnets have paid off big: Ramon Arellano Felix has been killed and his brother Benjamin jailed. By March of 2003 even the head of the powerful Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cardinas, has been arrested after a vicious shootout on the streets of Matamoros. This leaves a power vacuum that proves to be too tempting to both the re-emerging Juarez and the Sinaloan Cartels, and both seek to grab it from different directions. The Juarez Cartel makes a pact with El Mayo Zambada to attempt to gain control of the teetering and newly headless Tijuana Cartel to the west, while it directly attacks the lucrative trade routes of the newly headless Gulf Cartel in the east. The newly liberated El Chapo Guzman splinters off and, setting up shop in the state of Tamaulipas, begins a long and bloody campaign to flank these Gulf Cartel holdings from the east; attacking, primarily, Nuevo Laredo and its resident ex-military Zeta enforcers.<br /><br />So the area is booming again. Big business for whoever ends up with control of America’s 165 million dollar a day drug habit, a vast majority of which is supplied to US distribution channels through the streets of Laredo. This former tough frontier-land joint and latter day revitalized shopping district is the most lucrative inroad to the US drug market, now handled primarily by Mexican Cartels on both sides of the border. Since 1935 the Pan American highway has connected it to the capital cities of Central America and Mexico, and just on the other side of the river US I-35 begins, a ribbon of asphalt that doesn’t stop until it reaches Lake Superior. Six thousand tractor trailers truck forty percent of Mexican exports over the three international bridges that connect the two Laredos every day. It is a drug smuggler’s paradise, and that is why El Chapo is fighting so hard to gain a territory that the imprisoned Osiel Cardinas and his autonomous gang of Zetas are tying so hard to keep. Caught in the crossfire, the people of Nuevo Laredo are grimly bearing witness to a staggering wave of violence. Charred bodies turn up in barrels on the sides of the highways weekly; firefights, between warring factions or police, take over busy streets in broad daylight. Reporters are threatened, kidnapped, even killed in retaliation for reporting these excesses to the rest of the world, newspaper offices are sprayed with bullets by the roving bands of enforcers. The Zetas roam the city in the backs of pickup trucks bristling with automatic weapons, strong-arming local businesses out of protection money, staging roadblocks, and in general running a lawless town their own way.<br /><br />Things are similar in other border towns. Osiel Cardinas is apparently able to run his Gulf Cartel from his prison cell, as is Benjamin Arellano Felix. Their turf has not been left as unprotected as everyone originally assumed. In La Palma maximum security prison, after years of bitter rivalry, the two bosses were able to hash out an alliance to strengthen their respective syndicates; though they were separated after violence erupted in 2004, forcing the government to federalize the prison. Several of the most notorious prisoners were moved to a border prison in Matamoros where, a few days later, on New Year’s Eve 2004, El Chapo Guzman’s brother Arturo was murdered. There were more federal crackdowns there, of course, and twenty days later six prison guards were discovered a short distance from the jail tied up and shot in the back of a Ford four by four.<br /><br />In 2005, Nuevo Laredo’s police chief quit and it took authorities until June to find someone brave enough to replace him. That man took office on the afternoon of the eighth and was gunned down in a parking lot less than eight hours later, so Nuevo Laredo was looking for yet another police chief. Federal agents involved in the inevitable crackdown, called “Operation Secure Mexico,” were fired on, with one agent wounded, by legitimate city police so confused and brutalized by two years of this conflict that they just shoot at any invading army. This prompted the government to suspend Nuevo Laredo’s entire police force of six hundred officers pending drug tests and criminal investigations. Six months later, less than half were allowed, or would volunteer, to return to the streets. By this writing, there is a new police chief who has remained alive in the position for seven months.<br /><br />There is news of violence or brutal murder along the northeastern border daily. What is represented here is just a small sample, quixotically and arbitrarily plucked from the trove of available information. Mexico’s fight against the situation here, escalating to a fever-pitch in this election year, has come under proverbial fire for simply doing nothing but providing more troops for the mobsters in Nuevo Laredo to recruit. Violence from this territory war has spilled north into the US as far as Dallas, and south to all corners of Mexico, where secondary players are fighting for the jobs being left behind by the war’s casualties. Central American youth gangs like Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang are crossing the border to hire themselves out as Mexican cartel enforcement. So are members of elite Guatemalan military units. All over Latin America, this run for the border is causing ripples of violence within the world of illegal drugs. But in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, the violence has long spilled into the everyone’s world. There the police, the reporters, the citizens, the federal agents, the politicians, and the drug lords are all getting killed. There were about one hundred and seventy unsolved murders in Nuevo Laredo last year. There have been over fifty already this year.<br /><br /><strong>Shorty and Me<br /></strong><br />So far this violence has only rarely made the 225 kilometer trip down the highway to Monterrey. Here, the city feels poised for this eventuality, but has remained relatively untouched. There have been a few shootouts here, one in a popular local seafood restaurant shortly before I arrived, and one in a Dave and Busters down the road, apparently connected to the killings in Dallas referred to above. Bodies have turned up in Guadalupe, a suburb located at the base of Monterrey’s most iconic mountain. Our local Police chief was killed in heavy traffic in February (on the same day another police chief was killed in another little town off the highway between here and the border), and raids on local residences have produced caches of military-style weapons and groups of reinforcements apparently stopping over in route to the war up the road. All of the instances of violence here have been very premeditated and very much focused on targets within the narcotics trade. There is currently very little feeling of danger on the streets of Monterrey.<br /><br />Of course, we are all very much on alert. The State Department has issued advisory after advisory warning US citizens of the situation in Nuevo Laredo. The US Consulate there closed its doors for a week in August of last year after an afternoon shootout on a busy nearby street. In Monterrey, Sunshine’s employers have begun to implement a heightened security routine including check-ins whenever traveling out of town. For me, the sole effect of all this violence has been that for three days I have had to get up at seven in the morning because professionals from the alarm company have been in the house, eight hours a day, grinding holes through my walls and running brightly colored wires everywhere. The three-foot masonry drills they use scream from every room in the house, and occasionally they test something that howls like a monster version of some ray gun toy I might have annoyed my parents with when I was nine. There are tall piles of plaster dust everywhere and all of my closets have been emptied out onto the bed. The cat has been wedged tightly between the wooden slats beneath our futon for days, eyes shut, counting the years being scared off the end of her life.<br /><br />I have been recruited to oversee this contracted labor, leaving me with plenty of time between curdlings of my nerves to ask, well, “why?”. It seems rather ridiculous to me, in this posh neighborhood, behind electric iron gates (which are situated on an incline and open inward like all the security books say the should) with a twenty-four hour guard, that I would also need a alarm system. It would be incredibly difficult to scale the sixteen-foot privacy wall in the back yard (assuming it is possible to break into the neighbor’s gated community). Anyone getting in here will have to hurdle some serious odds. I’m not saying it isn’t possible; but whomever makes it to my front door is going to be sufficiently sly, or sufficiently well-armed, to be unconcerned with the toy gun that will go off when a window breaks. No, more likely it’ll be me who trips the alarm through no more dastardly a crime than sleepily pressing the wrong code into the complicated wall interfaces that have cropped up here and there, and then I will have plenty of Español explaining to do when the police arrive. Still, I appreciate the spirit of concern for Sunshine’s and my security, and as soon as I am awake, I will certainly feel even more comfortable in my still very safe city due to this drilling. While I am still very sleepy, though, I felt the need to dig up a twenty-eight hundred word excuse for missing so much sleep.<br /><br /><a title="In Depth-er history." href="http://www.unesco.org/most/astorga.htm">Further Reading about the Mexican drug trade.</a><br /><br /><a title="Might take a minute to load." href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/">Fun interactive Mexican Drug information produced by PBS</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-size:130%;">*</span>Interestingly, in Mexico there is no law against breaking, or attempting to break, out of prison. Other laws broken in the commission of a jailbreak can be charged when or if the fugitive comes to justice; but in Mexico personal freedom is deemed an attribute so worth fighting for that the law very romantically makes no provision against its being sought by the incarcerated.</span></div></span><br /><div align=center><a href="http://www.dea.gov/fugitives/sandiego/guzman_wanted.htm"><img class="phostImg" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/El%20Chapo%20Final.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Wanted Poster courtesey the US DEA</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1142458946760383702006-02-10T12:41:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:28.129+07:00The Domestic Question<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number 2006/3</div></span><br /><div align="justify">One of the things that happened while I was away on sabbatical: we employed a woman named Rosy to clean once a week on Wednesdays. I met her right before I left, but today was my first official Wednesday since then. 1,371 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—Back on December twenty-first, the day before Sunshine and I were set to come home for the holidays, we finally interviewed a maid. Not that “maid” is the word I think most people use for what we were hiring. In the expatriate community, people hired to come into a home to clean or cook tend to fall under the catchall label “domestic” as in “domestic help.” A gardener, for some reason, is still called a gardener, and a chauffer is called a driver, but a maid is called a “domestic.” I think it is a play on words, domestic also meaning “from around here;” most people avoid the bureaucratic hassle of importing their own household staff. At any rate, I don’t like any of these terms for the position. “Domestic” has, as illustrated above, a rather ugly-tasting afterthought; and, while there is nothing terribly wrong with the word “maid,” it evokes some sort of costumed flounce dusting about in my Hampstead summer place. To me, maids come with butlers and nannies, and live in a little room under the stairs so they can dart out and polish something when I ring a bell.<br /><br />The thing of it is that I never really thought of myself as someone who should need to have a domestic help. It just seemed silly. I am home while Sunshine goes off to work, and it just felt like it should be my job to keep the house orderly and neat. I am rather orderly and neat anyway, and it did not fall outside of reason that I could keep a nice house while I was getting whatever it is that I do done on a day-to-day basis. Based on the prejudices admitted to above, in my mind maids were for rich people, and we are far from rich.<br /><br />Apparently, this is the attitude of most newcomers to this domesticity abroad: no one thinks they are going to get a housecleaner, though supposedly everyone eventually does. The houses are just so large and ornamental the daily tasks tend to take up the days, and the larger, sporadic cleaning gets lost in the shuffle. Eventually, an epiphany sets in: we could be employing someone who needs a job in México, instead of selfishly DIY-ing our household needs. It did not take long for Sunshine and I to eventually and predictably cave in. We started looking in earnest for someone to come and clean the house one day a week. We tried to get the woman who had been employed by our friends Tony and Christene when they left for the US in November, but she was snagged by some other household. We talked with a number of people, failing a number of times to act quickly enough to secure an applicant. Finally, we heard about Rosy from no less than three other people who employ her, positive things, possibly the most positive being that it seemed like she still had a weekday free.<br /><br />On the first day we met Rosy, we were packing to go off and celebrate Christmas. I was in the middle of my normal pre-vacation ritual: sweating and screaming curse words while I jogged around the house trying to clean it up before we left. Not only is it nice to come home to a clean house after traveling, but it is also nice to pick the place up a little for the Zix kids, Bonnie and Hannah, who come in every day to feed the cat and water the plants while we are gone. So, in the midst of locking all of the alcohol in the upstairs office and squeegee-ing soapy water off the stovetop, I needed to pause so I could tour a prospective maid around the house. It seemed a little ironic, at the time. Still, it set up a pattern, and I continue to feel like I have to clean the house up a little whenever the maid is supposed to show up. That day in December she toured around the house, and taken the job on the spot; possibly out of altruism. She even offered to help us pack. <br /><br />We hired Rosy, who comes into the house on Wednesdays, to deep clean and do larger jobs than the day-to-day level stuff that I am able to keep up with. Take out the garbage, wash the dishes, water the plants and make the bed? I do that stuff every day (almost). Push all the furniture out of the way, and mop the marble floors with a vinegar solution? That’s Rosy stuff. Rosy also helps out with the laundry (by doing it all), vacuums, sprays the accumulated North Mexican dust off the patio and out of the car port, and stands on chairs to do the same for the floor-to-ceiling windows scattered here and there around the house. Rosy tends to arrive at the house sometime after Sunshine goes to work at seven thirty, and leave before Sunshine comes home between four thirty and seven. For the six weeks after she took us on I was in North Carolina and Rosy was coming and going without really being seen.<br /><br />All that changed this week when I was finally home for my first ever maid. When I returned to Monterrey last weekend, I was surprised and pleased that the house was as nice, if not more nice, than it had been when I left it. Rosy and Sunshine and the Zix kids had done a good job with the place: the cat was fat, the plants bloomed, and the floors were shiny. A month and a half of other people deciding where things should go had taken its toll here and there—I spent the weekend identifying things that needed to be relocated for the sake of my obsessive compulsion—but the place was undeniably spotlessly clean. Even more clean that anyone expected, frankly: Sunshine has discovered that locking things away for us to do later doesn’t really work—Rosy will find the keys and fix it all while we are not looking. The only solution seems to be to leave the stuff we don’t want her messing with spotless before she arrives.<br /><br />Finally, this Wednesday, man and maid came face to face for the first time on the wet expanse of my kitchen floor, me seeking some breakfast a little after noon, and she dust busting cat hair off the kitchen counters. We can’t talk to one another, Rosy and I, because we do not share a common language, so we just sort of half waved and got on with it.<br /><br />Having this help is nice. I can never tell when the house is dirty anymore. As long as I keep up with the dishes and small things, the place always looks like we just moved in, and I like that. On Wednesdays I will, at least based on yesterday’s evidence, feel like I am in her way a little bit. I will wave and say good afternoon when I finally wake up and emerge from my locked bedroom. I will smile and nod when she tells me something about the room she has just worked on. Mostly, I will try to leave her alone and let her work. She writes notes to Sunshine about anything important; she tries to teach me the Spanish for “see you next week.” On Tuesday nights I will still feel like I need to pick the place up some because the maid is coming soon, and it turns out that this is less ridiculous as it sounds. I don’t want the woman to take on the little things that need to be done on the other six days of the week; these things I am willing to do. I want her to do the bigger things that I wont ever get around to. Dishes in the sink, clutter laying around; she would fix this stuff instead of doing something important, and she’d probably, based on the evidence, just put the stuff away in the wrong place, anyway. I don’t have the words to explain to her where things go, so I will be jogging around cleaning things up a little on Tuesdays. It makes sense. </div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/Floor%20Cleaner.jpg'><img border='0' class='phostImg' src='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/Floor%20Cleaner.jpg'></a><br />Invasion of the Cleaning Agents photo © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1142120987250196442006-02-05T02:01:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:28.017+07:00Friday Night Flights<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number 2006/2</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Flying is still a little bit of a trial for me, especially when I am leaving one home for another, especially with a highly-breakable monkey. Plus, we are expecting visitors, so I thought I would detail the routine. 1,693 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—I returned to Sunshine and the Monterrey and San Pedro valleys yesterday evening; to an honest-to-god feeling of homecoming and a little bit of Fall. In the backyard the big tree is bare, surrounded by crispy fallen leaves, the yard is weedy and temperature is actually a little lower than it was in North Carolina. The autumnal feeling does not extend to the inside of the house, however, where the plants that Sunshine has been tending for me are in the middle of a record-setting bloom. The cat, who sounds like a duck at the best of times, only spent about a half an hour reproachfully holding my six-week abandonment of her against me. More recently, she follows me around from surface to surface quacking balefully when I don’t pick her up. Sunshine is acting much the same. Subjectivity prevents certainty, but I suspect I am somehow displaying, in turn, just how much I missed everyone while I was away.<br /><br />Flying internationally always makes for a rather interesting travel day. On the trip to North Carolina in December, I had to carry five or six breakable ceramic animals in my carryon bag, as well as one life-sized, gaily painted clay monkey that was too fragile to pack. This I carried in my hands when allowed, and in a take out-bag from a defunct San Pedro restaurant beneath the seat in front of me when I wasn’t. I trapped that monkey in place with my feet while it was stowed, ever fearful that the tiniest little turbulence would snap its festive tail right off. This was a big switch for me, this worry about the monkey. It was not too many flights ago when I was nearly paralyzed with terror, and I was happy to see that my brief bout with flight anxiety had passed to the point where I could worry about something else entirely.<br /><br />The flight from Greensboro to Monterrey is like international travel in a bubble. It comprises, one after another, all of the irritating steps of going from one country to another, while drastically boiling the process down to just few hours. I still walk into an airport an hour and a half before I take off (boarding is a half an hour before the plane taxies, if possible). I still have to quickly take off my shoes, my belt, my rings, and my watch, slipping them, along with everything in my pockets, into buckets and sliding these through the X-Ray machine with my carryon, my camera, and my jacket. I get waved through a metal detector, but rarely get frisked with the wand thing any more. I have to hurriedly rearrange all of my stuff after being released on the other side of the security station: I have to find a chair or something to prop awkwardly against to get my boots on and I feel like a pervert fiddling with my belt in the concourse. All the while, suspicious uniformed officials mark my every move. Going to Mexico, I only have to do this once, but coming from there I have to do it before each flight. This routine was unbelievably enriched by the addition of the brightly painted and highly breakable monkey.<br /><br />The next step is to wait for a while in the plastic chairs, trying hard to concentrate on something besides the upcoming flight because I am worried that I will feel anxiety. Since my first terrifying flight, my flight nerves have mostly gone away, and my preflight fear centers around the discomfort of worrying that they will return. Twenty minutes into the ride, with the airline crossword in my lap and the nose beginning to level off, is when I realize, lately, that I am okay; and then there are no more problems until the next takeoff. I spend most flights working that crossword and trying to convince the attendant to give me the whole can of soft drink. I usually sit on the aisle, and in yesterday’s flight, there was no other passenger in my row. I keep the window closed until I am sure that I no longer need to ignore the fact that I am thirty thousand feet in the air. When I opened it yesterday, finally, somewhere over Arkansas maybe, or northern Texas, the first thing I saw was enormous striking lightening slashing through a tall swirl of black storm between me and the horizon. I sat mesmerized by this display, watching hundreds of bolts of brightness tear back and forth in the sky just over there out the right window. In the distance there were the little lights of other aircraft floating through the middle of this yawning display. It was amazing and beautiful and I felt so lucky to be present that it didn’t even dawn on me to be scared. I was glad I wasn’t riding in one of those little lights in its midst, though.<br /><br />Approaching Houston and Greensboro from the south there are fairly hard descending turns that can feel a little harrowing. Flying into Greensboro this is pretty extreme nose-down right bank, but in December the sunset was lighting in each consecutive window of the plane as we turned, and it was dark enough on the ground to see all the Christmas lights on the houses through the leafless trees. I found this distracting enough. Flying into Houston from the north is just a straight line in, and took place for me about two and a half hours into the flight, an hour after the snack, and two-thirds through the puzzle. Then there was the usual scramble to locate my stowed luggage (which is not necessarily right above my seat in these tiny Embraer Expressjets) and move down the line to deplane.<br /><br />In Houston things can be pretty simple on the outgoing leg of international travel day. My bags were checked all the way through to Monterrey in North Carolina, so I don’t have to worry about picking those up and rechecking them, and the gates are “close” to one another. Yesterday there was about ten minutes between getting off of, and then back onto, aircraft in Houston. All I had to do was walk the half mile between spoke-like concourses of B gates from 22 to 76. Incoming international travelers are treated to double the walk, once though baggage claim and then through immigration and customs (rife with friendly Department of Homeland Security officers), and then again between concourses which are sometimes a train ride away from one another. Yesterday’s layover was a lot easier, and I was able to misread a sign, walk far, far out of my way, and correct it all before the deadline to board.<br /><br />The last flight of my day yesterday was the shortest. It is an hour and twenty minute hop from Houston to Monterrey International, located conveniently in the small industrial municipality of Apodaca, about twenty minutes north of Monterrey proper. The flight attendant called this a “nose up, ass up flight” which means that there is really never a point where the plane levels off between ascent and descent. In that time there is a snack, a drink, and the hassle of customary paperwork. The flight attendant ran, quite literally, up and down the aisle throughout the entire ordeal. I had the really interesting first-time experience of being at the very front of the plane, in the single-seat number 1 row beside the flight galley. In the momentary pauses between dashing around, I got to chat amiably with my flight attendant. She made snide asides while pantomiming the security bullet points to the recorded instructions. She gave me the whole can.<br /><br />I am fairly practiced at filling out the customs and immigration paperwork by now, and it is not in any way tricky anymore. I had plenty of time to finish the crossword puzzle on this flight, and then watch the twinkle of Monterrey valley fill every window in the plane as we plummeted toward the runway lights. Several rows behind me a man complained of chest pains, and the flight attendant called down to have Monterrey EMS meet the plane, and we all sat there on the runway while the man was walked off first. In Monterrey, the smaller airplanes park on the tarmac, and busses drive passengers to the terminal. I had been allowed to stow my bag in the flight closet with all of the cockpit crew’s flight jackets and things because there is no overhead compartment above, or a “beneath the seat in front of” 1A. This would have worked out badly for the monkey I took in the other direction. I was able to deplane very quickly from this position, however, and made it to the passenger busses before everyone but the EMS patient, who waited patiently with me while all of the other passengers filed in and we were all driven to the lines at Mexican immigration.<br /><br />Here I waited in line to present my paperwork to the bored immigration official. He proceeded to give the same three- to six-month tourist card they always do, even though I have a two-year temporary resident permit stuck right there in my passport. A lot more walking up slick marble ramps and I was able to pick up my luggage without waiting, and proceeded rapidly through customs. At the Mexican customs checkpoint, and this is pretty much the norm all over Latin America, they have a traffic light activated by a button. When I walked up to the desk they checked my passport and declarations forms and then directed me to press that button. Supposedly, the traffic light randomly selects which travelers are let right through (green light), and which are immediately searched (red light) at the adjacent, stainless steel inspection area. Either way, all luggage goes through the X-Ray conveyor one more time. I got a green light, and walked out into the busy terminal where my girlfriend waited to usher me into a well-heated cab, through the twinkling lights of Monterrey and San Pedro valleys, and eventually into our Mexican home, complete with flowering plants and a vociferously quacking cat. </div></span><br /><div align=center><a href='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/Monkey.jpg'><img border='0' class='phostImg' src='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/Breakable%20Monkey.jpg'></a><br />Watch the Monkey, Por Favor photo © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1142120935580444372006-02-05T02:00:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:27.921+07:00Christmas and a January<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number 2006/1</div></span><br /><div align="justify">We both got to go home for the holidays, only we mostly went to different places. I decided I would stick around in Greensboro for six weeks because it had been eight months since I’d last been there. 1,440 words<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—There was a little while where, being on a rather lower rung of the departmental ladder, Sunshine and I were concerned that we might not be able to spend this Christmas in the US with our families like we normally do. Or more specifically: Sunshine might not, and I might have to go home and leave her here alone. There are apparently many people willing to cover the work during the relatively quieter time around the holidays, however, and this did not turn out to be the case. So around November we became certain that we would be able to come home at the end of December. Various itineraries and schedules were bandied about, and we eventually settled on the following: Sunshine was going to visit the family farm for a week over the Christmas holidays, and I was gong to head back to my North Carolina home at the same time; but stay there until after the New Year’s celebration at Café Europa, with its oyster shots and champagne. Then, with an eye toward giving Sunshine some room to work on the book that is to be the culmination of her 2001 Fulbright scholarship to Venezuela, I would go ahead and stay in the US for the rest of the month of January. Sunshine decided that she really needed to come to the Café Europa party also, even though there were days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve that she would have to be back in Monterrey. We bought three round trip tickets, and the deal was done.<br /><br />I was really excited about all of this. Sunshine had gotten to visit her Kentucky farm back in August for her birthday, but I had not seen the family and friends since the night I had hit the road for the border. That had been April. I was really missing all the people, the restaurants and shops, and other things about Greensboro. Honestly, I was really looking forward to maybe seeing a little winter, a little snow, while I was there.<br /><br />It is not normal for me to break the fourth wall in this blog. My style book indicates that I should very infrequently write in the second person, rarely relate interpersonal content that would fit better into actual correspondence, and never reference the context of this journal itself, like I am doing now. One of the reasons for this is to format this journal more simply as a string of personal essays, not a direct communication, in the hopes that the things that I am doing are worth recording as much as they are worth communicating. This decision is in a way a nod to this being a public diary, where my improbable readership may contain both people who know me very well, and people who stumble here accidentally. This presents problems at times, when I am trying to decide how to address certain issues. In this case, the majority of my supposed audience was seeing me on a day-to-day basis while I was in Greensboro, NC for six weeks; those people know full well what it was that I did there. But there are other people who live in far-flung corners of this hemisphere without that first-hand knowledge, but with less than passing interest in this personal topic. Today’s blithe abandonment of this blog’s normal MO is inspired by this ambivalence. The people who care about this subject already know about it, those who don’t can’t be expected to care. Honestly, the facts below the fold are presented only to mark the occasion of this time in my life for completeness’ sake.<br /><br />Christmas was nice, and though the yearly struggle to get back and forth to so many places has been intensified now with the addition of international travel, it is really nice to have some tradition to fall back on in the midst of all this newness. I packed numerous highly breakable Mexican ceramics in carryon baggage, through security checks and customs lines, without breaking one thing. Presents I received I shipped home. Later, Sunshine imported even more breakables for her visit on New Year’s Eve. Speaking of New Year’s Eve, it was a blast. The party at Café Europa gets better and better every year, and many of my friends we there.<br /><br />During my time in Greensboro, I satisfied many desires I had accrued while away: I ate Indian food, seven or eight times, in three different restaurants. I enjoyed leisurely daily stops in local coffee shops and bars. I indulged, far to often for the comfort of my budget, in that traditional Tate Street-type Sushi 101 that I so missed in México (but was sadly unable to ever manage to eat the more traditional Japanese-type sushi of Arrigato or Asahi or Kuki, in Raleigh). I got to eat Korean once, Thai a couple of times, and deli food almost every day. I browsed new and used bookstores for hours on end. I bought several used books in English and many new DVDs in a number of languages. Mostly, though, I hung out with friends, staying up very late at night, sometimes. Sometimes getting drunk. The only thing about the trip that was less than marvelous for me was the weather: a Spring-like sunny temperance prevailed, with temperatures in the upper fifties or lower sixties most of the time I was home. It never did snow, though this balmy January was occasionally punctuated with sudden rains that heralded a short-lived dip in the temperature. I will have to wait for another year to enjoy some longed-for wintertime.<br /><br />Early in the trip I became lass sure of my extensive schedule. I was concerned that I might become overbearing to the people I had thrust myself upon. Few had even been aware that I was coming to visit, and even less were aware of the sheer length of my home stay. I was worried that there was going to be no way for me to fill the time, that people who have to work sixty percent of the week were going to be frustrated by the prospect of entertaining me in the interstices. Honestly, I was worried that the world had moved along without me, and I was just putting people out by showing up on Greensboro’s doorstep unannounced, begging attention like distracting novelty. At the worst of my doubt, I felt like I was a prank I was playing on everyone.<br /><br />It is a strange little trick that time plays when someone is away, though, and I forget every time I come back home. For those in Greensboro, the eight months I was away didn’t seem like such a long time as it did to me, stewing out here in all that aforementioned newness. I arrived in North Carolina on December the 22nd and didn’t leave again until February 3rd, and during that time I was made to feel welcome in every case. I was never lonely or bored, I got to spend time with most everyone, over and over again, and I had a specifically wonderful time on every single day I was there. <br /><br />I mentioned completism above as the reason for writing this dry, fact-based entry; but that is not the only reason. I had a wonderful and comfortable stay, and feel this necessitates my breaking that last rule I usually keep when blogging. Thank you Ian and Phil and Heat and Ellie and Dan and Piper and Jeff and most especially Chris and Mark and Hannah and mom and Anne for opening your houses to me because I needed it and also because I just really wanted to be there with you. Thank you Anne, again, and Jenn. for allowing me the use of your cars while I was bopping around town; in addition thank you James and Greg and Flora and Mr. Beaver and John and Cynthia and Alice and Mary and Sarah and Lucy and another James and Jason and Leslie and Andrew and Blake and Meredith and Myra and the other Blake and Toune and Alex and Lisa and Jae and Jeana and Nina and Brian and Alan and Shake and Nix and Jakob and Tim and another Chris and Steve and Frank and Rachel and Rob and Erin and Matt and the Buckner and Tom and another Tom and Jerry and Joe and Julia and Bill and Melinda and Joshua and Maggie and Sandy and Chronis and that belly dancer and Scott and another John and even, by god, Lilly, for hours or minutes of great times and companionship and conversations while I was cast adrift at home. --Jeremy Cavin</div></span><br /><div align=center><a href='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/Happy%202006.jpg'><img border='0' class='phostImg' src='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/Happy%202006.jpg'></a><br />Happy New Year 2006 photo © Chris Young</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1133513754830622642005-09-06T15:21:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:24.794+07:00Weekend on the Altiplano<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number fifty-six</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Our three and a half day vacation to Real de Catorce with one of Sunshine’s coworkers and her fiancé. I was impressed by the beauty of the place as much as the eerie strangeness of the ruins. 2,782 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—Real de Catorce is a little over four hours southwest of my house down Mexican highway 40 and then 57. The route skirts along the interior fringe of the eastern <em>Sierra Madres</em>, the sister to the western range which it meets in a volcanic Y-shape southeast of the capital city. South of the Y, México is low and fertile, giving way to the rainforests of the <em>Yucatán</em> basin. Heading south down the center of the country, the land rises steadily as the mountain ranges move together to form the fulcrum of the Y. Here are México’s many high plains regions, where towns nestled on plateaus are often located seven or eight thousand feet above sea level. Towns on the tops of mountains can exceed even this.<br /><br />It wasn’t until last weekend that we finally managed to pick a time to drive to Real de Catorce. Sunshine’s American coworker Jen, and Jen’s Honduran fiancé Jack, had been recently reunited (their wedding is here in San Pedro later this month), and we thought it would be nice for the four of us to take a trip together. So at noon on Friday we loaded up Jen’s SUV and headed south out of town. Soon we were weaving through mountain passes steadily climbing toward the dry and unforgiving <em>Altiplano Potosino</em>, a high desert valley about a hundred kilometers northwest of the small waypoint of <em>Matehuala</em>. Matehuala is a gateway of sorts between northern and central México. A short way into this region there is a left turn onto a two-lane cobblestone road that snakes even higher up into the surrounding mountains. The valley floor in this place is already 5,250 feet above sea level. By the time we’d arrived in the <em>Catorce Sierra</em> we had gained an altitude of 9,042. Back in Monterrey the early September temperature had been holding in the lower thirties (the upper eighties, in F), driven down by the recent daily rains. Here the daytime temperatures seemed to fall into the teens at night (or the fifties in F). During the days it was clear and dry; but storms could be watched from miles out, speeding through the valley forty-eight hundred feet below.<br /><br />We had driven through a number of these storms while making our way through the valley. We could see them coming over the mountains on the horizon: walls of black clouds tracking across the barren, Jurassic-looking landscape. By the time we got to the unmarked Real de Catorce turnoff, however, there was nothing in the sky but sun bludgeoning the baked valley and the cobblestone road. Despite the arid and blasted environment, the ride through this valley was intense with blooming desert flora: bursting red cacti and tiny yellow creosote and some type of fluted white flowers filled the sandy spaces between the shale and slate of mountain washes. The whole area reminded me of a desert terrarium, one I’d have assumed was unrealistic due to the variety and density of the life super-imposed on the yellow boulders and dry white gravel of the valley floor. No matter how close I held my face to the ground the view resolved itself into many disparate examples of exotic plant life. I cannot quite express how much I loved this part of the drive. The desert was like some science fiction fantasy: completely alien and surreal in the face of my experiences and expectations. It was jaw-droppingly beautiful and uncomfortably savage. It would not take too long to wilt and die while standing still in this place; the world dehumidifies and mummifies whatever finds it way here. But still the place is populated by blooming, and somehow immortal, plants.<br /><br />The road next weaves its way up the mountain, past the plots of local gardens, the ruins of Spanish colonial silver rush communities, and the little settlement of <em>La Luz</em> which, like Real de Catorce, is stuck in an existence between the two. The two-lane road is narrow and made of rocks, but this is jarring enough to prevent traffic from speeding up much, and I somehow didn’t find the precipitous drop out my side of the window overly terrifying. In the US that drop would be on the other side of a guardrail, but here it was not, and the tires could feel uncomfortably close to nothing the few times other cars were met coming back down the mountain. The spectacular view as we climbed thousands of feet over the stone ghost towns nestled in the valley was enough to distract me from the height, however. Eventually, the road levels, and we found ourselves at the mouth of the <em>Ogarrio</em> tunnel (famous for starring in <em>The Mexican</em> alongside Brad Pitt) which would take us through the mountain and to the town on the other side.<br /><br />At the beginning of the tunnel, a man charged us a small toll, gave us a ticket, and then called to the other side of the tunnel on a rotary-dial phone hanging on the wall beside his little chair. Traffic must be coordinated in this way because the mile-plus tunnel is only one lane. There was a minute long wait before we were given the go ahead to proceed. A really long traffic tunnel, begun by miners about a hundred and fifteen years ago, is a spooky and claustrophobic space. The tunnel is lit brightly by bare yellow bulbs every hundred feet or so, but my eyes still had to adjust to the dark to pick out the details there: a little shrine dedicated to safe travel, crosses placed in remembrance of past accidents, and little ventilation or flood runoff shafts cut into walls held up by thick wooden cross beams just like any mine from any movie I have ever seen. After about six minutes we were blinded again by the daylight on the other side.<br /><br />On this side of the tunnel we were to give half of the ticket back, proving that we had paid. While Jen handled this, local children ran up to the windows asking us if they could help us to a hotel, a parking place, or a restaurant. The kids were just trying to make a living, but we didn’t need the pressure after the long drive. We pretty much knew where we were going so we waved them all off and began rolling slowly through the town. The road immediately becomes main street on this side of the tunnel, and cuts straight to the south of the <em>zócalo</em> about three blocks away. Lining those blocks were market stalls, shaded by the traditional blue tarps, which were selling food and religious souvenirs to the pilgrims here. Between these stalls there was hardly enough room for our SUV, so we had to detour down a spindly, almost vertical side street to find a parallel route. It took us a little over forty minutes to make it all the way to the hotel, but this is partially because we scouted ahead on foot at one point. In Real de Catorce there is really no predicting when the road being traveled will wilt away to nothing under your wheels, or incline so steeply that stairs have been carved into the stone. Turning around is pretty impossible too: the old stone buildings were built in many cases right at the road, without sidewalks, at times less than ten feet from one another. It was slow and interesting going, but eventually we were parked and checked into the hotel. I was really impressed with Jen’s driving all along. There were a couple of places where we had to talk her through some nerves, but she never did give up or start crying. Kudos.<br /><br />There is not a whole lot to see in Real de Catorce. Or rather, there is not too much to relate. The center of the city is to a great extent restored and populated. Here is the imposing <em>Templo de la Purísima Limpia</em>, the parrish church dedicated to St. Francis. Two blocks west is the little terraced zócalo, <em>Plaza Hidalgo</em> (a story higher than the street at its southern border, and a story lower than the street at the northern one) with a lot of plants, wrought iron gates, and a large, festive gazebo. Situated on the steep street around this plaza are Italian and Regional restaurants, grocery and convenience stores, and artesanias selling primo <em>Huichol</em> Indian handicrafts. Here it’s also possible to rent a Jeep or horse tour of the surrounding countryside, get a guide or shoeshine, or just have a chat with any of the multinationals visiting or living here.<br /><br />The church is impressive, its two-toned façade a by-product of multiple stages of construction and reconstruction, towers over the predominantly one- and two-story town. It is possible to see the stark white dome of the church from almost any point in the valley. Inside it boasts fine art and a floor made of casket lids. A large part of the walls are dedicated to the display of <em>retablos</em>, small works of devotion serving as a prayer of thanks to, or perhaps a favor of, St. Francis. These predominantly take the form of art printed or drawn on a small card with a written message. These are the postcards the tourists here send to god.<br /><br />Straight up the western side of the plaza the road levels out after a block, and then rambles over an old bridge and away from town. Here we found the gate to the hill-top cemetery and the austere Church of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The cemetery is exceedingly beautiful and broken into two parts: a newer section in front of the church and an older section up the hillside behind. In the old area there is a particularly pristine and predictably fertile example of the rich plant diversity in the area. Alongside <em>sage</em> and <em>globemallow</em> and <em>filaree storksbill</em>; <em>beaver tail</em>, <em>cholla</em>, and <em>prickly pear</em> cacti; <em>century plants</em>, <em>chuparosa</em> and <em>brittlebush</em>; I saw my first <em>peyote</em> buttons. I didn’t even know what they were until later when I saw peyote depicted in a Huichol yarn picture in town. Peyote grows primarily right beneath the surface of the soil, so the tops of the buttons look like a cactus version of moss. The new area of the cemetery is cluttered with interesting graves, ornate with mosaics and wreaths and crosses and statues, rather serving as the final witness to the variety of people who have visited here and stayed. There are <em>mestizo</em> and <em>Indio</em> Mexican graves, Swedish and European graves, Asian and Middle Eastern graves, and even United States hippie graves. The graveyard is picturesque and calm, but it is difficult to walk around the tightly-fitted plots. Here and there little trees cast little shadows, and when we were there—in a sunny part of the day—there were people stretched out napping in them.<br /><br />The inside of the church at the cemetery is in many ways as bleak as the outside. The walls are blue and water damaged, as if major restoration might not have made it quite this far down the road. The frescoes on the walls are faded and damaged, making them difficult to decipher. The floor here is stone, and the barren interior echoed with the click of my new boots. It is my favorite church in the world: in the apse, rising twenty feet in the air, the framed Virgin of Guadalupe stands in her brightly colored robes before her radiating halo. She is hung in a larger painting of columns and flanked by statues of angels. Across all of this is a net of Christmas lights, surrounded by sparkling garlands. Well-tended and marvelous, our Lady looks forever out the wide wooden arch of the doorway across the limitless blue valley almost five kilometers beneath her.<br /><br />Heading back to the plaza we passed a new-looking hotel, made of cinder blocks instead of stones, whitewashed and gaily accented in typical Mexican pastels. Behind barbed wire in a shrine of its own are the framed photos of Brad Pitt, Julia Robert, and Gene Hackman—these are headshots and publicity photos, not local snapshots, but serve the purpose of commemorating the event of their stay here. The film production that took over the town at the turn of the century was a debatably positive thing at the time, and its effects on the town’s press and tourism may very well be debated still. But Real de Catorce remembers dozens of weird times and strange happenings; and like those other moments in history will claim these stars as its own.<br /><br />On south of the plaza things quite literally go downhill. Traveling only a block or two, all roads come to the <em>Arroyo de la Concepción</em>, a dried-up mountain runoff filled with spiny cactus paddles. Here the central area of renovation also comes to an end, and it is possible to walk past a bewildering array of roofless, tumbled stone structures from the heyday of Catorce just on the other side of the arroyo across whitewashed, antique bridges. Archways remain, supporting little but debris and a tangle of cacti carved with graffiti. Old brown walls stand in a drift of broken terracotta. Chickens and cattle graze here and there; some are tied to a tire, some are not. Packed occasionally in and around the ruins we could see a cleared field sporting gamecock cages. Sometimes walking around a ruined building brought us face to face with a territorial dog in someone’s backyard. For a while, Sunshine and I were followed by a saddled horse who had taken an interest in us. The canyon goes on and on, down and down, with steep mountaintops all around, and the remains of this city’s long history strewn like an unraveled labyrinth that had slid down and come to rest there.<br /><br />We stayed in Real de Catorce for two chilly nights and one, full, sun-roasted day. During this time what we mostly did was wander around and look at the marvelous place, drink plenty of fluids, and get a little sunburned. There is no place in town to exchange money, no ATMs or banks, and it is rare to find a place that will take a credit card. The people are gregarious and helped us in our discoveries of Indian art and interesting new food (<em>cabuches</em> are pickled <em>biznaga</em> cactus sprouts which look like the end of an asparagus and taste a little like an artichoke). I was simply not dressed well for climbing down through thistles and ruins: my new boots are not as adequately constructed for climbing as the old ones were, my pants were not rugged Levis but silly Dockers. Nor was there much time to wander without restraint. These frustrations cancelled each other out, and prompted my oath to soon return with a rope and a flashlight and some band-aids. In the evenings we ate good food and I watched the others play Uno while we all drank good Mexican rum. The room was cozy and orange and lit by provided candles and an overhead bulb with a tin shade that threw stars around the room like a disco ball.<br /><br />On Sunday we headed home along the same route we’d taken to get there. The wait to exit the sierra through the one-way tunnel took about thirty minutes longer this time. We took the road a little slower, stopping occasionally for a quick walk through the amazing plants to take pictures, or to look out over the incredible views. We stopped in the little town of La Luz to see the ruined monastery, old church, and abandoned mine shaft there. In La Luz, enterprising people had turned a number of the old Spanish ruins into pig pens. The dirt road in front of the dilapidated church was strung with white paper banners. These were either leftovers from a party last weekend or decorations for the upcoming Independence Day celebrations. A group of children on bikes guarded the SUV cheaply while we were away.<br /><br />Soon enough we were on the road again. On the mountain side of the road the trip was less frightening than the cliff side had been. The trip through the high valley was less riddled with racing thunderstorms today. All too soon the weekend was over. I really fell in love with Real de Catorce. The countryside is harrowing and hot and beautiful and terrible to behold. The remains of the mining town are a playground of hidden nooks awaiting discovery. The air is far cooler there than it is here. It’s like paradise.<br /><br />More excellent photos <a title="Good." href="http://www.anthonysloan.com/realdecatorce.html">here</a>, <a title="Better." href="http://www.anthonysloan.com/realdecatorce2.html">here</a>, and <a title="Best. Note the insides of the churches." href="http://www.anthonysloan.com/Real_de_Catorce_03.html">here</a>.<br /><br /><a title="Volunteer FAQ." href="http://www.aurisproject.org/Volunteer/vfaqs.htm">Want to travel to Catorce Municipality cheaply, immerse yourself, and help people?</a></div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/Real%20de%20Catorce%20Photos.jpg"><img class="phostImg" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/Real%20de%20Catorce%20Poloroid.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Click here for more Real de Catorce photos © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1133513659557213352005-09-06T15:20:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:24.686+07:00A History of Tourism<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number fifty-five</div></span><br /><div align="justify">While anticipating an upcoming weekend trip into the high deserts of San Luis Patosi, I did some research on our destination. Real de Catorce is a slowly repopulating abandoned silver mine and ghost town near sacred Huichol peyote grounds. 2,023 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost"><strong>Things I know about Real de Catorce</strong><br /><br />[NL]—It is a special place, Real de Catorce. “Magical” is the description I have turned up again and again in the resources I have gathered for this history; a breathless preciousness which is nonetheless evident even in the data. Long before Europeans set foot on this continent, the <em>Huichol</em> Indians lived on the harsh southwestern <em>Sierra Madres</em> in the neighborhood of México’s western central highlands (on the northern borders of <em>Jalisco</em> and <em>Michoacán</em> states). The Huichol people considered the mountains of the northern central highlands sacred and made seasonal pilgrimages there (after Spring and Summer rains) to gather the area’s bounty of <em>peyote</em> to use in ceremonies back home. As history progressed they would make this trek to the <em>Catorce</em> Sierra through the territories of rising <em>Olmec</em> and <em>Aztec</em> empires, but somehow escape being conquered and assimilated. When the Spanish eventually discovered them in their homelands they resisted New World assimilation as well, busily synchronizing their own religion with Catholicism to maintain the low profile that characterizes the tribe.<br /><br />Probably inadvertently, the Huichol led the Spanish to Real de Catorce in the mid-seventeenth century. The Spanish, busily oppressing the northern indigenous peoples in the usual ways, set up camp here in this unlikely high mountain pass. Here they had numerous skirmishes with local <em>Chichimecas</em> (remember: the <em>Náhuatl</em> catchall name used by the Aztecs for derided northern border people, translating into “Dog People”) and some sources even cite Comanche raids. The settlement was recognized by the Spanish crown in 1638, and designated a official “Real,” which means “royal” and indicates the official blessing of the king. Events of the next hundred years of Catorce’s existence are murky. Sometime in the seventeen forties, an Indian raid reduced the town records to ashes and much of the first hundred years of Spanish Catorce’s history is no longer known. The little Spanish real was forced to persist under a multitude of hardships including the severe climate, Indian uprisings, and food shortages. But persist they did. The Spanish strongly suspected there was silver up there, and one suspects that throughout the years just enough was found to keep Catorce populated.<br /><br />In 1772 the main silver vein was struck and the settlement boomed. The “real” gained the distinction of actual township, and was christened <em>Villa Real de Minas de Nuestra Señora de la Limpia Concepción de Guadelupe de los Álamos de Catorce</em>, or Real de Catorce for short. What followed for a while mirrors the history of <em>Guanajuato</em>. The boom brought miners and magistrates to Catorce, and generated a surprising amount of wealth for everybody. During the heyday it was generating a significant portion of the world’s silver and operating as the number two mine in the nation. Construction was begun on parish church located in the center of town, with world-class neo-classical altars and frescoes decorating the opulent interior. Construction on the church finally ended in 1817. Troubles hit soon after, though, and by the time of the war of Mexican independence, in the eighteen teens, the mines had mostly flooded and silver production began to trail off. Spain was in no mood to lend assistance, but eventually in 1822 an Englishman by the name of Robert Phillips made the journey to Catorce with a patented “steam machine” and pumped the water back out, allowing the mine and town to continue another eighty years or so.<br /><br />By the eighteen fifties the town was booming again, indeed at its golden age, producing millions of dollars worth of silver a year, and swollen to a population of forty thousand people. Cosmopolitan stone river walks and Spanish colonial plazas dotted this small, unlikely oasis teetering in the dry, thin air. Catorce boasted a world class theater where Caruso sang. In 1888 the plaza and central downtown were completely remodeled and a few years later construction began on a 2.3 kilometer tunnel through the mountain to make the sierra more accessible to the trade routes in the valley below. The parish church installed its iconic neo-classical altar of St. Francis, an incredible jointed wooden figure that could sit or stand. St. Francis had another big impact on the town's spiritual tourism: the installation inspired a tradition of annual pilgrimage to the site on St. Francis’ holy saint’s day, October the fourth. This tradition persists to this day. On the eve of Real de Catorce’s decline, the town experienced one last great moment: in 1895 the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz traveled here to inaugurate two new mine pumps purchased from California, and to gift the town with a clock for its church. His trip was accomplished by train from México City, mule-drawn cart from the valley town of <em>Matehuala</em>, and a horse to take him over the mountains because the tunnel was net yet completed.<br /><br />Fifteen years later the bubble of Porfirio’s México finally burst, and the towns of the Catorce Sierra began to quickly decline. The Mexican revolution of 1910 spiraled the country into a new era of domestic change and made control of the badlands in northern Mexico—a hotbed of revolutionists and, incidentally, lawlessness—that much harder to control. This and slumping world silver prices signaled the end of the good times in Real de Catorce. The rich mine owners split, fearing Mexican social reform. Without work, many of the poor laboring class migrated elsewhere. The people in the middle drifted off to make a living wherever all the other people had gone. The lawlessness of the area found purchase in the empty homes and bars of the largely abandoned town and managed to mostly push away whomever still remained there. By the thirties and forties the feared social reforms were busily stabilizing northern México and even the lawless holdouts in the high mountain passes had to leave town. Until sometime in the 1970s Real de Catorce languished, eroding on the mountainside, with a population never higher than about three hundred farmers.<br /><br />Except on sacred days, of course. Pilgrims still walked here to pay homage to St. Francis on his special October day, in the church famous for his altar. The Huichol still came here seasonally for their ritual peyote. Wanderers still made their way here, following the trail of these pilgrims. In the seventies some of these strays who found themselves here, stuck. Since then, Catorce has been enjoying something of a renaissance. Artsy and hippie type people have descended in relative droves, attracted by the ghost town atmosphere, the indigenous culture, and the abundant peyote. Affluent folks looking for a quiet, interesting location have bought and restored homes here. Restoration projects have rebuilt, to a degree, the center of the village, and continue to preserve the ruins of the Spanish towns on its outskirts.<br /><br />The surrounding landscape of harsh rock and historical, abandoned ruins are appealing to the traveler looking for adventure; as is the quiet isolation. Global expatriates are opening shops and restaurants. The stunning Catorce Sierra backdrops appeal to movie producers, also. Today, so many tourists are sampling the peyote growing naturally across the hills that the powers that be fear for the Indian supply. The municipality has toyed with the idea of growing special crops just to assuage the demands of this non-traditional tourism. There are new cosmopolitan things happening in Real de Catorce, and the town is struggling to live again by capitalizing, finally, on the pilgrimages it has been inspiring for thousands of years.<br /><br /><strong>Things I do not know about Real de Catorce</strong><br /><br />The name “Real de Catorce” translates into “Royal of Fourteen,” and it has become somewhat cosmopolitan to speculate as to why. No one really knows, but the same can be said of many place names in a country so filled with dramatically disparate etymologies. Explanations include stories of Spanish hardships (Indians may have killed fourteen early settlers, or maybe soldiers, on the hazardous <em>altiplano</em> passes near the towns inception), or odes to the location’s remoteness (fourteen bandits might have lived in a hideaway in the high valley in the town’s early years). More plausibly, It may have been the fourteenth silver strike in the area (the previous thirteen would have collected, with their equipment, at the site of the bonanza), or the fourteenth town in the northward expansion along the Sierra Madre range. Possibly is was named after thirteen other caravans had been less successful in discovering the high route through the mountains. Many other towns enjoy strange names decreed by the Spanish crown in the days of colonization. The long, official name of the town translates loosely to “royal village of the mines dedicated to our lady (of the immaculate conception) the Virgin of Guadalupe of the fourteen cotton trees.” Is that a clue? Or is it more accurately “… of the cotton trees of fourteen,” deepening the mystery? No one knows for sure, but in the case of Real de Catorce, everybody seems to be guessing.<br /><br />Other mysteries about the town persist. Much of México is surrounded by folklore, and in a place with a history as haphazard as Catorce, fueled as it is by a hallucinogenic cactus, strange stories are prevalent. This might explain the rich conjecture around the village’s name. Or another example: it is hard to understand why the settlement persisted for the hundred and forty years between its beginning and the eventual discovery of the big silver vein that marked its success. Catorce Sierra is a lousy high mountain pass: it is almost impassible, for one thing, and so high up that it is much colder, dryer, and has thinner air than surrounding routes. It is far easier to simply walk around this high sierra. Local explanations insist that a <em>vaquero</em>, cooking by his campfire early in Catorce’s history, noticed the heat from his fire was melting the surrounding, silver-laden rocks. Apparently, this tiny amount of incidental silver sustained Real de Catorce for the better part of a century and a half, but this simplicity is unlikely. Perhaps the vaquero had noticed the peyote, and the “melting rocks” are only a sly allusion to his resultant chemical dependency. But is this a reason to doggedly raise generations of little Spaniards in the cold, the sun-bleached dessert? Fanciful explanations lead to more of the same, and they are also easy to invent.<br /><br />Ghosts supposedly walk all of the mines, as well as the route leading into town (the Rag Man used to blow out the lights leading the way through the long <em>Ogarrio</em> tunnel). Goats are prevalent here, and so are <em>Chupacabras</em>, the nocturnal phantasms who prey on them, leaving behind a carcass drained of blood. At night, animals keep tourists awake: donkeys and horses bray loudly, dogs bark, and roosters crow. The sound is amplified by the barren vertical surroundings. It is known by the locals that at night animals talk to the ghosts living in the ruined towns surrounding the valley. Some nights it seems like they are having an argument.<br /><br />To me, the most prevailing mystery is why this beautiful place is a ghost town at all. The facts listed in the history above in no way realistically account for the exodus of tens of thousands of people in less than three decades. There was no black plague, no volcano, nothing that would suggest the kind of cataclysm usually associated with a whole population picking up and disappearing all at once; and yet this has happened. There are very few records in other places to indicate an influx of Catorce immigrants in any great number at any time in history. The population of this prosperous town just up and vanished into destinations unknown between 1910 and the 1930s. By the time Franciscan restoration work, in the person of Father Albino Enríquez, began on the parish church in 1939, the only few families occupying the high Catorce Valley were farmers and goat herds. Why was the town so completely abandoned? This remains a much more compelling mystery that what the word fourteen is doing in the name.<br /><br /><a title="'" href="http://www.allmexicoaccommodation.com/sanluispotosimap.gif">Map: the state of San Luis Potosí.</a><br /><br /><a title="...but the English is wonky." href="http://www.realdecatorce.net/">An official website about Real de Catorce; includes some good photos.</a></div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/Real%20de%20Catorce%20Map.jpg'><img border='0' class='phostImg' src='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/Real%20de%20Catorce%20Map.jpg'></a><br />View from Catorce Sierra © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1133513544045471202005-08-27T14:34:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:24.451+07:00Weekend Funhouse<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number fifty-four</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Hey, there is a surprise carnival spinning around in the street in front of our house. It just showed up out of nowhere and now it is all I can think about. 1,238 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—Three days ago the road in front of our house was blocked off and a crew of workers filled it from sidewalk to sidewalk with strange machinery under blue tarps. The road, a sort of east/west lane to the south of our house that loops from the larger road downhill to our immediate north, accesses various neighborhoods on the side of the mountain we live on. The closed section is hardly necessary: we can still get back and forth to the places we go; but we are cut off from many of the other neighborhoods, and one of the handier routes for returning from San Pedro’s central entertainment district in the valley west of us.<br /><br />Day before yesterday the mystery was solved. The tarps had been taken off and underneath them were carnival rides. All that day and yesterday workers have been unloading, fitting together, and calibrating these rides. Stands have been set up and lights have been strung. Electricity has been wired to everything, confusingly crisscrossing the road everywhere before being covered over with mats and squares of outdoor carpet. After dark last night all of the switches were flipped on, and the little street carnival came to life. Empty rides swung and music blared long into the evening, even though the little amusement park wouldn’t be open for business until today. I am not sure those switches have been turned back off since then. Even now, as I type, it is to a soundtrack of horns, sirens, rock and roll radio, happily screaming children, and wonky melodies spilling out of the merry little street fair that has been erected in front of our house. Colored lights beam and radiate though our vertical blinds and at any given moment the house seems filled with artistically color-coded portent.<br /><br />The house has become so enjoyably surreal that the little fair was sort of a disappointment when we finally walked out to take a look about an hour after dark tonight. It is a fundraiser for the church that has been being built across the road since before I arrived in San Pedro, and it seems to be primarily geared toward young kids. There is a little pet store set up in a tent on the church grounds selling chirpy little birds and wet turtles. They have some of the healthiest baby iguanas I have ever seen, all bright green and sturdy looking. Near this, many of the adult chaperones have congregated, sitting over <em>Loteria</em> boards and shouting back at the amplified announcer, or standing in line to pay for heaping plates of steaming tacos. The smell of food smoke is everywhere. The church courtyard is filled with white plastic tables. Outside of this court, adults are few and far between, standing in the darker outskirts and talking amongst themselves. Even the teenagers simply prowl to and fro under the dizzying noise and lights, lining up along the walls around the rides looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes. Younger children—the handful still allowed out this late—ride the little rides here and there; looping elliptically around some swinging device in a brightly colored plastic bucket. Many of these kids are the lone occupant on their ride, their parents talking to the operators while standing just outside of their charge’s wheeling orbit. Here and there little booths sell candy and chances to win light-up <em>Virgen de Guadalupe</em> mirrors by playing a complicated-looking game with marbles on a scored pegboard.<br /><br />We wandered through the crowd, checked out the animals, and then continued to wander. Sunshine had picked up a sum of carnival funny money, and was interested in trying out the Loteria. I was unsure that we would manage to understand well enough, as semi-literate beginners, to really play without cheating off other people’s boards. In Loteria, the announcer picks a pictographic card from a bowl and then composes a cultural riddle or poem that needs to be deciphered in order to mark a corresponding pictograph on the player’s board. The rest shakes out like bingo, but the rules are set at the beginning whether the player is shooting for a row straight across the board, or some more advanced configuration. The game was moving pretty fast for a beginner, and I didn’t feel I was able to really keep up. I was feeling uneasy about the whole scene, as a matter of fact, and we ended up walking down to the little park about a block and a half away. It’s a really nice night in Monterrey, about thirty-two degrees C with a steady little wind. My feet are still getting used to my new boots, and I could tell coming back from the park that my pinky toes were going to look bright red tonight. On one steep part of the hill I found a hundred-pesos bill just lying in the road with no one even near it. I kept my eye out for people combing the ground all the way back to the fair, but never saw anything like that.<br /><br />I guess that the most disappointing thing about the little street carnival was that we waited until too late to go, when the screaming crowds I had been hearing all day had boiled down into a few bleary children and a pack of disdainfully cool fifteen year olds. It was a little disappointing that all the rides were built for Mexican pre-teens, and would have tipped right over beneath the weight of even someone Sunshine’s size. Sunshine was happy enough spending her chits on flashing, light-up lollipops and things from the candy stands, but she’d have been happier if we’d been able to ride on one of those noisy, brightly-colored plastic rides. Secretly, I was a little relieved we couldn’t. Sometimes I feel a little awkward as it is, standing out like I do here: a foot taller and twenty-five percent more reflective than anyone around me. Irregularly, this makes me feel shy about seeking to draw even more attention to myself than I already have to, babbling and stuttering around trying to get normal things done. I don’t know why tonight was especially like this, but I was pretty relieved to be far too tall to ride these rides. To squeeze myself into a Mexican-sized plastic bucket and give my brooding and angst-filled teenage audience something to look at for three to five minutes riled me. I just wasn’t feeling like being gringo the clown tonight, so our otherwise inappropriate sizes were just fine by me.<br /><br />Soon we walked the block back home (but only that far because we had to walk down to the electric gate and then back toward the fair to get to our door). We were quiet because the experience had been a little bit of a downer, in a way. I felt sheepish about feeling shy, and Sunshine was disappointed about her remaining carnival cash. I guess both of us were a little nostalgic about a time when Sunshine could have whirled around in all the cool flashing lights, and I’d have watched her out the corner of my eye, trying to act all cool and bored. But its twenty years later and the whole thing just looked better from a distance, somehow, than it did close up. And still, as I type this, the happy carnival music and colored lights bounce merrily around the house.</div></span>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1133513490785227632005-08-26T11:50:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:24.340+07:00Mexican Food<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number fifty-three</div></span><br /><div align="justify">One of the enjoyable aspects of any travel is the food, and México is especially attractive in this regard. Also it is just a tiny bit unexpected. 1,142 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—An interesting fact about México: it is very cosmopolitan about food. This is to be expected, sure, in a big city like Monterrey, but I have generally found it to be true in every place I have been. Costal towns sport dashing and exotic seafood cocktails cooked in citric acid at the table, markets griddle up cactus paddle tacos on steaming bar-side hotplates, and delicacies such as <em>huitlacoche</em> (corn smut), <em>flor de calabaza</em> (pumpkin flowers) and <em>chapulines</em> (crickets) permeate local menus from the most modest sidewalk food stalls to the finest dining rooms.<br /><br />Meat, poultry, and fish can be ordered and prepared in an astounding variety of ways, many involving splitting the critter lengthwise and spitting it over glowing coals. To serve: carve off chunks until it has been whittled down to its revolving core. Apparently <em>cabrito</em> (young goat) and <em>pollo</em> (chicken) are the select objects of this gourmet attention. Beef and pork anatomy are cooked in many of the expected ways from tip to tip, including some traditional recipes for parts that the US diner is less likely to have experienced eating regularly: <em>barbacoa</em> (beef head and face), <em>lengua</em> (beef or pork tongue), and <em>chicharron</em> (boiled or roasted pork skin). What is left is dumped in many of the traditional Mexican soups: <em>pozole</em>, <em>xóchitl</em>, and tortilla. Fusion, sometimes accidentally achieved through the making of foreign foods with local products, also broadens the horizons of culinary possibility. Never more so than the naturalization of normal vegetarian fare through the application of healthy doses of local meat. Light pasta primavera leaden with regional bacon pretty much gives birth to a whole new dish. Same with cheese dip which happens to contain a sizable island of shredded, redly barbequed goat.<br /><br />While there seems to be very little of the type of food cooked in United States Mexican restaurants, and sadly no Taco Bell among the usual list of successfully imported fast food brands, there is no lack of opportunities to eat ethnically diverse cuisine, including Korean, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Hawaiian, Irish, US American, French, Argentinean, Cuban, Arabian, Lebanese, Italian, and et cetera, including a whole host of different Mexican regional restaurants usually labeled with words like “traditional,” “typical,” or “twenty pesos for five.”<br /><br />There are also myriad crêpe places dotting the landscape, the number of which it would be impossible to exaggerate. Not only are there whole crêpe restaurants, but it is possible to get crêpes at many restaurants dedicated to other kinds of food. Crêpes may be purchased at all coffee shops, for example, or in the movie theaters, or most other places in between. I have grown really fond of these fluffy little French griddlecake wraps, whether filled with veggies-n-cheeses for dinner or fruits-n-crèmes for dessert.<span style="font-size:85%;">*</span> One of my favorites is the Italian cheese and mushroom crêpe. With the observed lack of the standard burrito-type fare, we have grown to think of the crêpe as “Mexican food,” and are growing more and more suspicious of the authenticity of those places at home which neglect to include this menu item.<br /><br />Other food items available at the movie theater include beer, nachos, and sushi. As a matter of fact, there is no scarcity of sushi anywhere in the city, and I should probably attempt to think of this as “Mexican food” as well. The problem is specifically in my own prejudices. Crêpes tend to lend themselves to all sorts of dramatic cultural tampering, as do omelets and dumplings, because they are fairly defined by the ingredients of their filling. Not so much so with sushi, which can be rendered unrecognizable as a result of too much tampering with the theme. I am certainly aware that sushi is a popular fusion cuisine, the traditions of which are often fogged by local ingredients or innovative chefs. Fine. I am also totally sure that what I basically define as sushi is the product of an Americanization of the traditional Japanese stuff, and thereby just as totally false as any other variation. Also fine. I can’t help it, though: strange sushi dishes, finely prepared and gastronomically enjoyable as they may be, still boggle my mind when sat on the table before me.<br /><br />Thus, I am loathe to even refer to the crab-stuffed tempura fried <em>poblano chilis</em> I enjoyed on my first Monterrey outing under the heading of sushi, even though that was what the restaurant billed itself as. Same with the wonderful fried crabmeat blocks, called <em>sushi cubes</em>, that are available on a menu in central San Pedro. These are served as a pile of five large blocks with a side of tangy <em>katsu</em> sauce and a squirt of iridescent blue <em>wasabi</em> gel on the side of the plate. My fantasy is to get three or four orders one day and build a little house with them, seeing as how they are the Legos of the sort-of sushi world. Working down the list, the most traditional place we have eaten, a place that even served hot sake and lemon-fresh finger towels, included a soy sauce marinated <em>jalapeño</em> condiment on our table.<br /><br />But my fragile, apparently very insular, world of sushi seems to have met its Mexican match today as we tried out a little place in a San Pedro strip mall. Here is where the destruction of my culinary assumptions and the helpful addition of Mexican livestock have come together to leave an indelible impression on my checklist of flamboyantly off-cultural cuisine. Ordering an otherwise pretty standard roll, I missed the three letter word in the menu that indicated it would be prepared with tender roasted sirloin. There was no danger of my accidentally eating this, however, as what was delivered to our table was, indeed, a roll of roast beef wrapped in rice and seaweed with a little poke of cucumber in the middle. This is such a little thing to fly off the handle about. Certainly there is nothing un-Japanese about thinly-sliced marinated beef. And yet this Arby’s roll, this meaty curl of east-meets-southwest, obviously achieved something wholly new, possibly unholy; and, frankly, I found it jarring. Sushi-n-Roast. All I could really do was stare at it and wonder what strange new escalation was to befall me the next time I ordered ostensible sushi at the next place down the list. Or if it was possible, that the lowest scientific point of troubling ersatz world cuisine had been observed, and it was all uphill from here.<br /><br /><a title="San Pedro listings will load." href="http://www.elnorte.com/libre/offlines/guias/guialugares.asp?idlugar=0&idzona=1&amp;idgenero=0&idguia=31&idtipolugar=19&idcampolugar=1">Here is an excellent directory of the Monterrey metropolitan restaurant world. Includes San Pedro, referred to here as “Valle” (the Valley).</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*Not all crêpe places cute-up their menus to the extent that I have satirized them here. Still, since the items appear in Spanish as “verduras y quesos” and “frutas y crema” it is easy to substitute that happy-go-lucky ampersand stand-in, the n, when ordering or translating.</span></div></span>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1133513387955865772005-08-09T03:42:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:24.235+07:00Old Kentucky Home<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number fifty-two</div></span><br /><div align="justify">This is an account of the first time I return to the US after several months living abroad. It is my first trip home after coming to think of Monterrey as my home. Actually, it is hard to decide what isn’t my home now, from minute to minute. 1,303 words. <br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—The last time I really thought much about rootlessness I was also in Kentucky. At the time I had just spent the previous day throwing out whatever still remained in my house. A long evening saying “so long” to everyone at my favorite bar, and then a long night on the toll road through West Virginia, brought me to that new day in rural Appalachia. This had been the first leg of the weeklong journey that ended here in San Pedro, Nuevo Leon. I was pretty tired after that first day, but I could not escape the exhilarating feeling that wherever I happened to be standing was, at that moment, where I actually lived.<br /><br />In a smaller scheme it was possible to imagine that, as of leaving North Carolina, I had immediately slipped into a state of heading home again. I am certain that this is the way many people feel about pulling up roots and moving great distances. A baseball metaphor lends its cliché: start at home, hit that pop fly into the sun, and round the bases back to home. One moment I was standing on my doorstep, and the next I was twelve hundred miles away from a new doorstep and heading there for the first time. Except this doesn’t feel quite true. From the moment that I locked the doors in NC that last time and handed my keys to Phil, I became something more than homeless, or even homeward bound. At that moment I moved into the rather migratory state of some kind of meta-centric. Home followed me wherever I was. I was not walking around inside it, it was radiating from me. My cliché began to stretch into absurdity as I imagined myself someday passing fourth and fifth and sixth bases in a constantly expanding home-run in an increasingly ridiculous baseball analogy.<br /><br />I know this is just a lot of words, but it was interesting for me to think about throughout the week. My stuff was either at my mom’s, or in Mexico, or hurtling just a tiny bit over the speed limit between the two. Other things that I used to own were now the possessions of other people. There was nowhere I could not stop and simply stay. I had no special claim to any place, really—no leases or binding documents—and it was fair to say that wherever I happened to be—in the car, say, or Kentucky, or a roofless rest area outside Dallas—was no more or less informed by my presence than the home I was heading to. There was no reason they could not all thought of as my home. Far from a scary feeling, this was a freedom; this rootlessness gave me an equal ownership in every place available to me: no strings attached. The whole world was just that sunny baseball field and I was just the man to haul ass around it.<br /><br />Much time has passed, though, and we recently returned to Kentucky for Sunshine’s birthday. While it was hot in Northern Mexico in July, with temperatures regularly hitting the hundred and teens, I had been concerned about heading back into the humidity of the southern US. I had also been a little concerned about our flights, since the last time I had boarded a plane I had spent the fifty minutes between Monterrey and Mexico City in terror. This time around the fear of flying had lessened some. I armchair speculate that this sudden phobia is my working through post September eleventh issues, as asinine as that sounds; I am hoping that I will soon return to the hardened air traveler I once was. Stepping into the Kentucky weather was about as bad as I excepted, but after several hours I had mostly stopped noticing it.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/Monkey%20in%20Boots.jpg"><span style="color:#000000;">Sunshine’s birthday was about the middle day of our vacation. I gave her cowboy boots wrapped in homemade “legal alien” wrapping paper that included our faces. A fantastic time was had by all.</span></a><br /><br />I was incredibly excited to be back in the US for eight days. It was coming home, of course—what isn’t now? It was also a great opportunity to take advantage of the many comforts afforded me by my familiarity with the place. Sunshine’s parents are fun and relaxed, the farm is beautiful, and there’s little more to do all day long than sit on the porch looking out over the toy-studded landscape. That, and to do a heck of a lot of shopping. It is difficult for me to isolate the things that I miss from home (the US) when I am home (in Mexico), but it was very easy to find things I couldn’t live without while at home in Kentucky. Every store we happened to duck into sold some necessary item, the cultural exclusiveness of which had gone unnoticed until just then.<br /><br />I was very happy to see my mother, who picked us up at the Lexington airport, and Sunshine’s father who was waiting for us at the farm. I was very happy to see our friend Ellie who happened to be in Lexington on business. Sunshine’s mother returned home from China about halfway through our visit, and I was very happy to see her. Sunshine’s extended family foliage of cousins and uncles and aunts and nieces and neighbors came regularly by, and I was happy to see each and every one of these people whose names I had still been struggling to sort out two years ago. The air was clear, the sky was starry, and the food was filled with comfortably predictable ingredients. The first night we were stateside we ate in a Mexican restaurant. We just can’t get food exactly like that anywhere in Mexico.<br /><br />But in a used bookstore in Lexington I had the predictable emotional pang. We had returned to the United States exactly three months, almost to the hour, after I had crossed the border in the other direction in April. Sunshine had gotten to come to her childhood home and see her people. It was her birthday and she had been in Mexico almost twice as long as I had. Fair enough. As much as I love Kentucky, though, the majority of my people are elsewhere. The places and foods of my childhood homes are in little mill towns strung along I-85, long grown safely nostalgic. But this trip to the US, and Kentucky’s close proximity to North Carolina, has kindled a homesickness that has made me reevaluate my first superficial ruminations on my own rootlessness. I imagine the frustrations and fatigue as the sun sets on that endless baseball diamond, my multiplying team members strung along on the bases before and after me. So, there may be a scary side to this after all.<br /><br />Currently, in Mexico, I am becoming attached to new people and new places. After we flew back here yesterday, and after customs and immigration, I was happily tucked into a cab whisking us through a city comfortably familiar. I probably even said something like “We’re home.” I was happy to be in the comfort of our house, in our neighborhood, surrounded by our things. I was happy to be greeted by our cat. Tonight or tomorrow night I will be happy to see our friends Christene and Tony, and to dine on excellent Mexican food with them. I am happy; but I am also still homesick, even though I am home right here. This, like the fear of flying, is something it is possible to imagine plaguing me throughout the foreseeable future. Is every base to be home plate? More or less. It may become very confusing to have so many homes to enjoy returning to. It may be bittersweet to always have to leave one to return to another. </div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/1024/Kentucky%20Home%20Run.jpg"><img class="phostImg" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/102/1769/320/Kentucky%20Home%20Run.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Front Porch. Photo Illustration © El Joy</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1129959570739455462005-07-26T12:38:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:23.927+07:00Hypothetically<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number fifty-one</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Travel abroad, and especially living there, is always an experience rife with mystifying new complexities. Maybe he most mysterious part is that thin political line on the map between two countries. 1,658 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—Living abroad, especially in México, has given me a much more intricate view of the political boundary known as the border. At home, it was easy to think of the border in narrower terms than it is now. The border was ours; you know, American. On the other side, foreign nations went about their daily, foreign lives. To some, those nations represent a clandestine desire to cross that border and take up residency in the US, legally or otherwise, and the border is something primarily in need of control or defense. To others, México or Canada are places to escape or retire to, and the border is a gateway to home base. Still others concern themselves with products that might be imported over the border and then sold illegally. In the US, the border with México runs 1,951 miles along the southern edges of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Between México and Texas, the border is a partly muddy, partly dry half-baked river called the <em>Rio Grande</em>. This river is the busiest international border in the world.<br /><br />But what the border now represents to me is a complicated and utterly necessary international line in the sand, replete with imponderable rules and regulations, international laws and confusion. It is owned by more than merely the US and México, and is used by nationals of many different countries. It is the source of custody disputes that are decided at the Hague, a critical market for multinational vendors, and a two-way trouble spot of bureaucratic documentation for anyone utilizing it in its capacity as a conduit. It is a swath of the best and worst of its two worlds, amalgamated and alchemized into a whole third world which can be confusing and familiar at one moment, and confused and overly familiar the next.<br /><br />If I sound like I am complaining, I want to stress that I am not. As a US citizen, the border is mostly open to me. While it is difficult to get the type of visa I need to live here for two years—or to work, or to buy property—it has been very easy to get temporary ones that allow me to stay and travel. Plus, every time I cross that magical border again, these easy visas—really only tourist cards—are renewed. It is far more challenging for my counterparts to cross the river in the other direction, requiring vast documentation proving national ties, costing hundreds of dollars, and sometimes requiring US sponsorship. And if that weren’t enough, while the majority of the people I meet on this side of the border appreciate my business, interest, and presence; my counterparts might be met with paranoia, racism, and jingoism. These knee-jerk reactions in the US color the views of the physical border, and its users, for a far greater number of people than the radicals who write in the newspaper op-ed pages, rant on talk radio, and mobilize into a volunteer armies (who literally sit in state’s defense against the tide of illegal population daily threatening America’s terrestrial shores). Even moderate people might find themselves thinking in terms of the border as a doorway for an alien <em>Them</em> to use when desperate to make a new life, and <em>We</em> venture through to enrich the life we have. Reasonable people might conclude that the laws being broken at the border are primarily being broken by <em>Them</em>.<br /><br />Living abroad can clear that attitude right up. In the expatriate community it is easy to come across the opposite type of story. Custody battles loom large, and it has become a very difficult paperwork hurdle for a single parent to bring a child across the border. Worse, foreign criminals have been known to kidnap, rob, or kill here. It is possible that kidnappers, robbers, and killers attempt occasionally to flee here, imagining that they might be safe outside of US jurisdiction (an idea so fundamentally wrongheaded that it takes but a few seconds of clear thought to see the lunacy in it). Runaways, joy riders, and underage drinkers cross the border regularly for an escape into the thrill of adventure. Interestingly, the unconscious misperception that the international border is somehow theirs, solely within the purview of the United States, adds to the possibility that perfectly innocent travelers might skip the small but legalizing step of actually getting proper documentation for the trip, adding to the problem. Others, hypothetically, are unable to get this documentation because they truly are entering the county illegally or for illicit reasons. Even the most innocent excursion, no harm intended, could represent both things.<br /><br />A dad might take his son for a day trip into Mexico to see a relative, and do so without mom’s knowledge. A group of fourteen year olds could decide to take a road trip after school one afternoon to learn something about the world. It is very easy to enter México with benign intent and still be breaking the law. México doesn’t require much more than a driver’s license to visit border areas for a day or two. Tourist travel cards are required whenever a traveler ventures outside of México’s border zone, which extends approximately twenty-five kilometers into the interior, or stays for over three days. This assumes that other intents and purposes are legal. In the instances above, for personal reasons, people who don’t feel like they are doing anything morally wrong may still fail to do what is legally right, fearing exposure. In other instances, ignorance of the rules or how to go about actually following them, can be a culprit.<br /><br />Ten years ago, I traveled all around México without the proper forms simply because I could not find the building in which I was supposed to get them. No one ever bothered to check until after midnight one night on a bus between <em>Tulum</em> and <em>Veracruz</em>, when armed men identified me as a traveler without legal documentation. I had not intended to do anything wrong; nor was I more than marginally aware that I had. I was not breaking any imperative laws. But I was, technically, an illegal alien.<br /><br />Like many illegal aliens crossing into the US, most people traveling incorrectly in México are rarely identified, and are not considered too much of a threat to the nation, either. When they are caught, México seems to be overly gracious in handling them. Reading the newspaper, it is possible to find citations for travelers committing crimes and finding their way to Mexican prisons, or deportation back to home prisons. But the innocently guilty, like yours truly in Veracruz or these other standard, hypothetical lawbreakers (our runaways, for example), tend to be treated with kindness. At most they are asked nicely to leave. They can be detained in youth shelters until they are picked up by parents, or escorted back to their country of origin. In the case of teen runaways or thrill seekers, this means that they will be treated to a hot meal and some shelter after their money has run out. Runaways don’t tend to break many laws. Often, they are simply too young to be legal. Maybe they have traveled over the border with undeclared items, minor amounts of controlled substances, or pets that have not undergone quarantine. This might cause a little hitch in the friendly system México employs to deal with these kids. Now we are talking a little bit of extra crime, smuggling maybe, controlled substances; or perhaps merely the minor snag that the shelter just doesn’t allow pets. Our hypothetical runaways never thought of themselves as smugglers, surely; the pet was purely for personal use. In my own case, since I was not underage, carrying contraband, or otherwise illegal beyond the status of my travel papers, I was given the opportunity to belatedly obtain them several months into my trip. Our hypothetical runaways are in a little deeper. They must be supervised and then repatriated. The contraband pet must be quarantined or dealt with in some other way.<br /><br />It is possible, then, to imagine that someone else might take the pet, if only to remove the obstacle. Maybe it is almost midnight, raining heavily, and the police are on their way. Whatever social worker, security agent, or Samaritan, seeing that the loved and un-quarantined animal presents a legal issue for México and the kids, a stumbling block to their shelter, and its own problem of repatriation, might take the pet temporarily until something can be worked out. This harmless act of kindness, to kid and animal nationals like, also falls on the other side of border legality. So, in this hypothetical way, the innocent fault can spread, accidentally turning more unsuspecting victims into international scofflaws. Plus, it is impossible to imagine that there will ever be a time when the pet and the kids would be able to be reunited, anyway. It is another wrongheaded idea cleared away with a little further speculation. The next day, or whenever the hurricane is over and the parents show up to drive the runaways home, the pet remains contraband. Smuggling back over the border would make it illegal in two countries. So, either the animal would have to permanently adopt the cover of Mexican pet, or expose the web of lies that its hypothetical presence outside of quarantine represents.<br /><br />So, after so many stories and so much conjecture, I am getting to the point where the paranoia and suspicion I feel in regard to the border has nothing to do with those trying to use it for the usual illegal purposes of invasion or trafficking. Rather, I am concerned about what innocent lapse or overlooked detail will make me the next accidentally illegal alien abroad. In other news, today we finally found a permanent home for a sweet little gray Mexican kitten that we found on the street just before Hurricane Emily hit the <em>Tamaulipas</em> seaboard.</div></span>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1129959497358144532005-07-22T04:37:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:23.842+07:00Emily's Last Day<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number fifty</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Part three of my experience with Emily: today Hurricane Emily disappeared completely from the map, leaving only aftermath, her toll taken in more flooding and buildings and jobs than in lives. 563 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost"><a href="http://www.weather.com"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 3px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="© the Weather Channel" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2096/567/320/WeatherChSatLastSized.jpg" border="0" /></a>[NL]—The last thing that I did before going to bed last night was to change the towels we’ve had catching the water that has been seeping in around the windows and mopping up the puddles on the floor beneath them. Throughout the night, I was aware of the wind moving around the house, but not so much that the trees were whipped violently around. Just a spooky yawning sound. It rained most of the night. By the time I woke today, Emily was gone, all that was left of her was a sky full of gray streaks and a ghostly purple puff on the satellite images.<br /><br />Well, and water. Monterrey is flooded in places, and there’s a <em>Catarina</em> River where there is usually merely a Catarina river bed. During the last day or two, all of the sports fields and tents that usually populate the dry bed had been removed, and the river managed to flow, full of not much more than run-off, much the way nature originally intended. Apparently, there are still places in town without power, and several roads are still closed because they are either under water, or too strewn with debris to travel on.<br /><br />Overall, I have been very impressed with the way México handled the storm. Thousands of people were evacuated along the <em>Mayan </em>Riviera in the <em>Yucatán</em> before the first, category 4, hit; and then thousands more along the fishing villages on the Gulf Coast for the category 3 version that came at Monterrey. Many of these folks were picked up by army trucks as they walked along dragging their luggage. Many were put up for free in inland hotels and makeshift shelters. While a sadly large number of people lost their houses and their means of employment, it seems as if there were no casualties. I can’t stress this enough: none. Nobody died.*<br /><br />Outside, the thick cloud cover is low enough to completely enshroud the surrounding mountains. The hill that separates San Pedro from Monterrey is completely visible, but the larger <em>la Silla</em> and <em>los Mitras</em> mountains are chopped off at the knees. This would be a striking day to go mountain climbing, if I was certain that I would not need a boat to get across the valley itself. The clouds are a dark color, but thinner areas are allowing light to penetrate in places, giving the environment a bright gray quality occasionally lined with golden sun. It is raining now, but these are gentle showers which are coming and going, totally different from the all day, from lesser- to greater-degree storms of yesterday. By the end of the weekend, I hear, the showers will have subsided, even, and then the occasional pocket of hurricane wreckage will be the only things left of Emily. And construction sites on the coast, of course. And a river.<br /><br />*A small, sad note. Apparently, after all my lowered evaluation of the danger to the people who live here in San Pedro, the one recorded fatality of this storm, in either incarnation, was reportedly washed away in flood waters right near my house. I have no idea how—I never saw any amount of flooding on our side of the little ridge that separates us from Monterrey. Possibly she was somehow caught on the side of a mountain and was lost in the flash flooding of its sudden watershed. </div></span>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1129959341654500642005-07-21T13:56:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:23.739+07:00Hurricane Emily, middle day<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number forty-nine</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Part two of my experience with Emily: her category intensity has lessened but she continues to head right for our house. Break out the towels and candles (and bread and cheese). 894 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost"><a href="http://www.weather.com"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 3px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="© the Weather Channel" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2096/567/320/WeatherChRadar5Sized.jpg" border="0" /></a>[NL]—<span style="color:#cc0000;"><strong>7/20/05 10:35am EST—</strong></span>Good Morning. Some real rain started hitting the ground about ten minutes ago, seeming to fade in and out in intensity. There is still very little wind, but visibility is, like, nothing: I can maybe see a hundred yards. This place is surrounded by mountains (We are on one of them), and there is no way to tell. The temperature on the patio is 72 F, several degrees cooler than I keep the air conditioning in the house. Looks like Emily made landfall about 6:30am EST, and is trucking inland at ten miles an hour. Centrally, after several hours of being on land, her winds are still turning at right about 110mph. Brownsville, Texas has reported gusts of up to 63mph. Currently, I have no information on the storm surges (coastal México was supposed to endure tidal movement up to twelve feet higher than the norm). Nor can I seem to ferret up any information on exactly when Emily heaved ashore in <em>Laguna Madre</em>, about 90 kilometers south of the US/México border. She is still heading maybe a little north of where I am sitting.<br /><br />As I have written this, the rain has eased up a little, and visibility had increased enough for me to barely make out some of the mountains around me. It is still pretty quiet out there.<br /><br /><span style="color:#cc0000;"><strong>7/20/05 2:45pm EST—</strong></span>Pitched and less-pitched rain all morning, but seems to have leveled off a little now, so I suspect that we are between the arms of Emily’s pinwheel. The wind has still not gotten dangerous here, while <em>Matamoros</em> (on the Texan border coast near Brownsville) is reporting gusts of almost 70mph. I can hear it at times howling around the house, but not terribly often or sustained. The temp has gone up some, but is still a freakishly cool 76 F. Visibility has improved over this morning, but the day remains hazy and dark. Emily is still headed right towards our neck of the woods, and after being land bound for nearly seven hours, is still turning at 85mph. She’s also speeding up, heading cross-country at 10mph.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;"><a href="http://www.weather.com"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 3px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="© the Weather Channel" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2096/567/320/WeatherChRadar6sized.jpg" border="0" /></a>7/20/05 5:19pm EST—</span></strong>There’s actually very little new to report. The rain is still happening, but it has settled into a easy pace unlike the gusty rain of this morning. Otherwise, it still looks very much like it did: cold (70’s F), gray, with low visibility. In Monterrey, the dry riverbed running through the south of <em>Centro</em> is raging with water, and there are multiple areas out of power. Several main roads near the riverfront have been closed. This is more of a way to limit people from driving around, probably, than any real concern that the usually non-existent river would be over spilling her banks or flooding out the raised roads around her. But Emily is almost here, and is still coming right for us at 12mph, and swirling at 70. We still have power (obviously), so I am going to go make a sandwich.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;">7/20/05 8:54pm EST—</span></strong>Emily's eye folded in and she became a tropical storm around 6:30 EST earlier today, and that tropical storm continues to move directly over our heads at 12mph, wind speeds are 50mph, just five miles per hour less than the hurricane category one. We are still not experiencing the kind of winds that have ravaged the Gulf Coast of México, but the gusts that we are getting don’t seem to be slowing down much. Local broadcasters are stating that the worst is yet to come. This worst will apparently be when the center of TS Emily passes overhead in about four hours or so. It has continued to rain non-stop, and portions of Monterrey seem to be enduring some pretty heavy flooding. Several airlines have discontinued service today already, and the airport is scheduled to close later on tonight. Sunshine's workday has been cancelled again for tomorow. A main bridge over <em>Rio Santa Catarina</em> has mostly washed away. Thousands have been evacuated from lowlands and poorer, surrounding neighborhoods. From where I sit, looking out the window, the visibility is lowering again. I can no longer see our neighborhood, just rain and clouds that reach all the way to the ground.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;"><a href="http://www.weather.com"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 3px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="© the Weather Channel" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2096/567/320/WeatherChRadarLastSized.jpg" border="0" /></a>7/21/05 2:50am EST—</span></strong>Now the wind is getting gusty. Occasionally it howls around the house, and blows the rain straight at the windows. Visibility has become odd now that it is night. The lights of downtown San Pedro are very clear, but the giant, iconic mountains surrounding us are completely invisible in banks of clouds. This includes the top of the mountain my house is on. Tropical Storm Emily is pretty much overhead now, though she doesn’t necessarily have a defined center anymore. After about fifteen hours, the rain has again become intermittent, and right now seems to be taking a break. Sunshine’s employers made the decision several hours ago to close again tomorrow mostly taking into consideration that many would not be able to navigate to the building in the possibly increased overnight flooding. Since there has been little phenomena besides heavy rain, the cats haven't freaked out too much. Many of my windows are leaking, but nothing has broken, including the plants and things outside. I keep finding frogs clinging to the concrete walls around the yard. I’ll bet I don’t have to water that yard again until September.</div></span>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1129959242228967302005-07-20T14:05:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:23.644+07:00Hurricane Emily, first day<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number forty-eight</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Part one of my experience with Emily: this storm is crazy. It speeds up and slows down and gets bigger and smaller. This post covers the first days of sporadic updates to this blog as Hurricane Emily marched overland directly at Monterey. 1,006 words<br /><br /><span class="fullpost"><a href="http://www.weather.com"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 3px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="© the Weather Channel" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2096/567/320/WeatherChSat2Sized.jpg" border="0" /></a>[NL]—<strong><span style="color:#cc0000;">7/19/05 10:00am EST—</span></strong>Hurricane Emily lost a lot of speed over the <em>Yucatán Peninsula</em>, dropping to category two (barely: sustained winds a the eye were about 55mph) yesterday as she returned to the open sea in the gulf coast. Slowing a little, she also picked up a little more mass, widening considerably even as she dumped a lot of her rain on <em>Cozumel</em> and <em>Cancún</em>. Her pressure started to drop again over the gulf, and as of this writing, she is speeding back up: her winds are 90mph, and that number will probably rise. It is forecasted she’ll now be at a strong category three when she reaches the gulf coast about two hundred and fifty kilometers directly west of Monterrey.<br /><br />And that’s kind of weird; I am not sure I have ever seen a hurricane shoot so levelly west before. She took a little of an upswing right before the Peninsula, and then only because of running aground. Since she has been in the Gulf, she seems to have been trying to correct her westerly bearing. Of course, I have been outside loudly calling her name.<br /><br />Today is the day she’ll start to hit. The eye will hit sometime late tonight, or early tomorrow am. I am going to, at least temporarily, keep tabs on what is happening with the storm, as well as what is happening outside. When these two things come together, I will probably lose power for a while. We are on the side of the mountain, so while I suspect that any sustained accumulation of water due to torrential rains will indeed cause flooding, that flooding will be lower than our house. I hope. We’ll see. The emergency groceries were bought yesterday, and Sunshine’s employers have cancelled most of business tomorrow. Now I wait to see what happens.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;">7/19/05 10:30am EST—</span></strong>Weather clear with big puffy cumulous clouds. Very little breeze. Temperate eighty-six degrees, Fahrenheit, but humidity feels higher. Emily is threatening the coast with storm surges that should be hitting within the hour. I can not tell there is even a storm, much less anything like that, from here.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;"><a href="http://www.weather.com"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 3px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="© the Weather Channel" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2096/567/320/WeatherChSat3Sized.jpg" border="0" /></a>7/19/05 12:45pm EST—</span></strong>Weather here much the same as before. Some of the clouds getting a darker look to them, but still lazily hanging there. The ominous thing about them seems to be that they are losing definition. The edges are getting hazy. Temperature still pretty low at 92 F. Emily up to 95mph winds, traveling 14mph WNW. First buffeting of Gulf Coast about 45 minutes ago.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;">7/19/05 3:15pm EST—</span></strong>Still very much as it has been here, but all of the clouds have gone smeared across the skywith lowered visibility over <em>Cerro de la Silla</em>. Temp at 88 F, no breeze down here at all. Birds are all atwitter and everything. Looking at the Weather Channel satellite images to the left, it seems as if the coast is finally getting some of Emily’s rain. As for her, she's spinning at 100mph now, and slowing to 12mph WNW. Her eye is about 200 kilometers from landfall.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;">7/19/05 5:05pm EST—</span></strong>Okay, it’s cloudy now. Sometime in the last hour the sky got really dark and covered over by a continuous ceiling of level grey. The wind has not really picked up, though, and the temp has gone up to 92 F. 20-45mph winds, and lots of rain, are hitting the coast from Galveston to <em>Veracruz</em>. Looks like the front wall of the hurricane is just beginning to touch up against the coast to my east now, and Emily’s storm front has moved into <em>Nuevo Leon</em>.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;"><a href="http://www.weather.com/"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 3px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="© the Weather Channel" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2096/567/320/WeatherChSat4bSized.jpg" border="0" /></a>7/19/05 8:01pm EST—</span></strong>It started raining about two hours ago. It started in with the wind a little, too. About an hour ago, the sun peeked under the flat disk of cloud cover for a little while. The rain comes in gusts like the wind, but neither are very dramatic yet. Emily has picked up speed again: swirling at 125mph, and coming ashore at 13. Several reports from Southern Texas mention winds nearing 50mph at the coast, where weather professionals predict 3-12 foot storm surges before the eye lands. Currently, it is dusk in Monterrey (even though there’s about ninety minutes until sunset), but there is no wind or rain. Just eeriness.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;"><a href="http://www.weather.com"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 3px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="© the Weather Channel" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2096/567/320/WeatherCHSat5Sized.jpg" border="0" /></a>7/19/05 11:43pm EST—</span></strong>And it remains spooky out there. All of Monterrey and San Pedro feels hunkered down, but nothing is happening. There’s no rain, no wind, there are tiny little white puffball clouds in the air. Looking to the left you will notice that the eye of the hurricane is under fifty kilometers from the beach, and that there is clear sky here. I suppose this is predictable; “the calm before the storm” is a cliché for a reason. But the cliché seems unexpected somehow, tonight, when I know Emily’s landfall is just an hour or three away. Maybe more: she’s taking it at an easy seven miles an hour now, holding at a 125mph maintaining a category three status. She is holding her course for just north of us.<br /><br /><strong><span style="color:#cc0000;">7/20/05 3:03am EST—</span></strong>The center of Emily will be running ashore two or three hours from now, apparently (she keeps slowing off the coast), and I’ll be asleep for that. There is a thrown- off part of her storm wall heading around her now, being aimed right at us. But the mountains here have been protecting us from much of what she can do from a distance, and probably will defeat this projectile cell, too. Contrary to expectation, Emily has sustained 125mph winds, even though the pressure in her eye is still dropping—one more little surprise for me. This means Emily is still powering up, and might possibly achieve category four by landfall. Outside in San Pedro, it has grown thickly clouded again, and rain is coming and going. Still not a lot of wind. By six am what is going to hit us should be hitting us, though. If it is loud enough, I’ll probably wake up and report it. Goodnight.</div></span>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1128062227452326522005-07-18T09:35:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:23.558+07:00Like Dry Leaves<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number forty-seven</div></span><br /><div align="justify">When I look into the sky over the parking lots and landscaping of San Pedro, I can just make out the storm clouds gathering. Hurricane Emily has already hit Mexico once, and now she is coming for us. 1,160 words. <br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—Today was a gorgeous day: cool, mostly cloudy with shockingly blue sky between ominously speedy gray clouds, a little blustery. I was somewhat surprised by this, owing to the Hurricane.<br /><br />I was first alerted to Hurricane Emily two days ago when she was about sixty miles east of Jamaica, forecasted to travel a gentle, elliptical west-northwesterly curve, her eye churning over Kingston and heading ashore the following week in southern Texas. My own prediction, based, as always, on what it is I have seen in the past, had the hurricane making a sharper turn north during her Jamaican landfall; then savaging Cuba, losing a lot of strength over the Keys, and hitting the US mainland as a tropical storm on Florida’s left coast.<br /><br />I was very wrong, of course. Emily was a wee lass of a category two hurricane back on Friday, advancing on Jamaica at a little over three miles an hour. The thing is, she never took that small turn the weather people predicted, nor the larger one I spent the majority of the weekend talking about. As she kept to the open water, passing beneath Jamaica, she strengthened into a category four storm of 155mph winds. She sucked up a considerable amount of water and picked up her momentum, speeding up to eighteen miles an hour. Late tonight or early tomorrow morning she will beach herself on the Yucatán Peninsula, just north of <em>Tulum</em>. But she won’t be stopping there. By Monday night she should be heading on through the gulf. Straight at Monterrey.<br /><br />By last night it was raining wildly outside, though if I was reading the satellite right it is merely due to some westerly systems that are affiliated with Emily only because her high-pressure front wall is forcing them onto our mountain ranges. We went out on Friday night, but it just seemed too tedious to try to navigate around yesterday, especially with no end to the weather in sight. But once today dawned relatively clear and very nice, we decided to chance a trip to the mountain overlook of <em>Obispado</em>, located just west of central Monterrey. It might be the last time we get to leave the house for a while.<br /><br />In the majority of Monterrey pictures I can find online there are one of two different landmarks. The vast majority of these photos, of course, include the <em>Cerro de la Silla</em>, our iconic Saddle Mountain. The other landmark is the little hillock of Obispado, rising shortly from the city center, dwarfed by the surrounding spectacle of the <em>Sierra Madre Oriental</em>, and flying one of the largest flags imaginable in atmospheric conditions. Pictures that do not include Obispado are often taken from the top of it. Obispado mountain, as short as it looks with its high-contrast background, is still tall enough to serve as an excellent lookout point for Monterrey, which turns out to be another strikingly large-looking city from this vantage. We parked about two thirds of the way up the hill, and walked to the top. Running along the switchback road a the base of the hill is a little civic museum and the eighteenth century Bishop’s Church that lends its name to the mountain. There is also, apparently, a convention center, fine dining restaurant, and gift shop. We walked right past all of this to get to the top of the mountain. And the top of this mountain, smallish in the pictures but large enough to see from the top of, is an enormous thing when hiking to the summit. We were both thanking our lucky stars that the temperature was no longer in the forties for this trip. I was also pretty happy about the constant driving wind which seemed to strengthen a little with every new foot we trudged up from street level.<br /><br />The view was worth it. I was able to see almost all the way to the airport. It was easy to tell how different parts of the city are not as far away from each other as getting driven around has made them appear. Things that took twenty-five minutes to reach by cab were, in reality, just over there. Monterrey stretches, puddled in the flatness of this river valley, to the horizon in the places that the horizon is not populated by enormous mountains. We watched a train come in from the direction of <em>Saltillo</em> and the caves that riddle <em>las Mitras</em>. It was so windy up there that the birds were having trouble making it over the top, sliding sideways or backwards into a more navigable altitude. The thunderous den of the flapping Mexican flag, a football field over our heads, made it hard to even hear this wind. Sunshine wondered whether the flag would cause casualties if it ever flew from its pole out over the city. Yes, she concluded, that flag would kill some people. From the top of Obispado, I was able to finally locate the whereabouts of Monterrey’s huge central double cemeteries of <em>Dolores</em> and <em>Carmen</em>. There they widely sat, northeast of the mountain and west of the <em>Alameda</em>’s puff of green treetops. Maybe no one would have to die if the runaway flag landed there.<br /><br />Heading back down the mountain to these cemeteries, we paused to take a look at the <em>Templo Obispado</em>. The church is very nice, a noted architectural example, and I thought that all of the cool cacti growing on the grounds were particularly interesting. It was a little tricky to get the car out of its parallel space and down the side of the mountain, but Sunshine managed it, and we found the cemeteries without much difficulty. The place was utterly beautiful, a vast metropolis of stone and concrete, crypts and above-ground plots, peopled by hundreds of angels and Christs and Virgins. We were only able to stay there for about twenty minutes before they closed, according to the posted hours, but we did get to wonder around for a while, looking at row upon row of quiet, scenic, and shady final resting places. The place was overgrown by giant shady trees, many of which were palm, and it just seemed like a nice place to be. From the cemetery it was possible to see Obispado’s three hundred and thirty foot flagpole rising from its silly stump of a hillock.<br /><br />By the time we were heading back to the car there was a man with a bicycle who was fastening one of the two doorways into the front gate shut with a giant chain. He didn’t speak to us, but I am pretty sure that if we had not left when we did, we would have been locked inside the cemetery’s ten foot privacy wall overnight. While that would certainly have had its attractive aspects, I certainly think that there would be a much more appropriate time to try it than ground zero before the pending hurricane. </div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/img/102/1769/1024/Obispado%20Flag.jpg"><img class="phostImg" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/img/102/1769/320/Obispado%20Flag.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Flag versus coming storm. Photo © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1128062066039831082005-07-05T10:45:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:23.463+07:00Fourths<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number forty-six</div></span><br /><div align="justify">My first ever US Independence Day celebrated abroad is also celebrated millions of miles away from the planet at breakneck speeds. 828 words. <br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—I forgot to take my camera to the Fourth of July party. If I had, I would have had the digital technology to capture this moment of my international life: Dan still has wet hair from the cannonballs he was doing earlier as he lights off tubes of sparks that sail over his privacy wall. In front of him, nine or so people sit and watch; eventually they break into a cracked and variously certain rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. It is not the first holiday I have spent while expatriated from my country, but it is the first where that is an overt irony.<br /><br />This is Dan’s party, and he has been good to us. There is plenty to eat and drink—he’s even barbequed ribs on the brick grill that came installed in his back yard. He and a DEA agent have been diving from the top of the pool house into the smallish pool. People are friendly and happy, and there is very little to indicate that our little American party is so estranged from its nation of birth. I am standing approximately one thousand miles away from the last place I celebrated the Fourth of July. I strongly suspect that the police will be called at any moment: today is just a weekday for Monterrey, and what we are lighting up sounds enough like gunshots to possibly alarm an already tense northern Mexican community. The police never come, though, possibly because all of the neighbors are at work.<br /><br />This has been an eventful long weekend, full of sci-fi and Independence Day parties. Today, before coming to Dan’s house, we watched <em>Guerra de los Mundos</em> in the VIP theater at the mall. Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise examined the working-class freedom-fighting father in a hostile, alien-ravaged world in a way that was informed by the events of September eleventh. I ate a Philadelphia cream cheese and manchego crepe during the post-apocalyptic apocalyptic turmoil.<br /><br />On Friday, Sunshine attended a more official party at her employer’s, an annual black tie event that is orchestrated to reacquaint area VIPs with the charming nationalism of their American guests. A celebration so structured and premeditated that the night is very much more like work than gaiety. Sunshine and her coworkers are instructed to mingle in Spanish and spend very little time talking to people that they already know. Classy background music provides the ambiance, wine sparkles, there is a great attempt made to produce classy hors d'oeuvres from “typical” American cuisine. This party is confusingly enacted on a date close to, but never on, the fourth day of the month.<br /><br />I had assumed that I was not invited to this function due to the fact that I am not an official spouse and this is such an official party. When it became apparent that I was sort of expected to go, it was already way too late for me to have the suit dry cleaned in time. I was ambivalent: on one hand, it would have been interesting to see such an classy shindig; and on the other, well, it seemed so much like work. Sunshine had been preparing for nothing else for the past week, working with committees for decorating and catering and inviting and et cetera. She seemed to have had a good time when she came home that night; but she came home exhausted and she seemed equally glad that the whole thing was finally over.<br /><br />By last night we had taken our first road trip in México, braving the flames of the sun to travel down the way to Santiago. Sometime early on the morning before we did this, 83 million miles away from where I am sitting, a US space probe, moving at 64,000 miles per hour, fired a washing-machine sized bullet at a moving comet, finally scoring a direct hit fifty-two minutes after midnight last night. The first fireworks already, with it being a holiday in only two American time zones. The Deep Impact space probe had traveled over 266 million miles in a 172 day flight plan. Both the impactor and the delivery vehicle sent back thousands of riveting digital images. The whole maneuver was conceived to help Earthlings study of the origins of the universe by taking a good look at the insides of an ancient comet. This feat was pulled off with only very slight deviation in trajectory and impact predictions that were worked out before the probe’s launch in January. This is wonderful space news, and a towering testament to math and engineering, evident both in an elliptical orbit somewhere between Venus and Jupiter, and here in this room where I watched the whole thing unfold wirelessly on my laptop. I think about this feat of science every time the DEA agent cannonballs into the pool, sending a plume of water into the neighboring yard.<br /><br /><a title="Wow." href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/">NASA’s Tempel 1 Deep Impact mission and other news can be found here.</a></div></span>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1128061985537787892005-07-04T11:31:00.001+07:002006-11-14T09:45:23.342+07:00Only 41<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number forty-five</div></span><br /><div align="justify">A half hour or so south of Monterrey there is an idyllic little town called Santiago. Between these cities, stretched along the hot highway, there is a shopping Mecca. 1,714 words. <br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—México’s <em>Carretera Nacional</em> (Highway M85) runs its sun-blasted course from the Tamaulipas border town of Nuevo Laredo, through Monterrey, and on to points increasingly south of the border. Taking this route down through the arid dust bowl of Nuevo Leon’s winding midpoints, the next town on the map is Santiago, about thirty kilometers deeper into the interior. About twenty K along the way is the popular shopping area of <em>los Cavazos</em> which is conversationally referred to as “la Carretera” because of its proximity to this main artery. Starting just behind Monterrey’s iconic <em>la Silla</em> mountain, snug in the scorched earth of the northeastern Sierra Madres, this long strip of booths, concrete shops, and corrugated metal lean-tos winds along both sides of the Carretera Nacional for a half dozen sunny blocks. This strung-out mercado is a great place to shop for many things considered traditionally Mexican and attracts a prodigious amount of daily visitors to what is otherwise a baked and sunburned cake of dusty heat.<br /><br />To further our circle of familiarity, we decided to head off on our first Mexican road trip on this beautiful July day. Sunshine could show me this much ballyhooed roadway market, and we could both see the quiet little village of Santiago, tucked into a crevasse in the surrounding mountains, where there is a honest-to-god lake and the very famous waterfall <em>Cola de Caballo</em>, or “Horse Tail Falls.” Santiago or bust.<br /><br />Driving south along the Highway, we came to the medium-sized mission church that signals the beginning of the Carretera. This traditionally whitewashed two-story adobe building had been turned into a store for Mexican arts and crafts. The place is beautiful and filled with beautiful things: ceramic lily tree candelabras and clay animals, hand-painted vases of all sizes, woven fabrics, and wooden <em>Loteria</em>-themed wall shrines made of beans and bits of glass. They had the coolest wicker loveseat I have ever seen, long, low, and with jaguar heads for armrests. The stuff was, for the most part, priced in a way I felt pretty good about, and I even ended up buying a jaguar head planter for my bathroom. But the pure joy of the place is the building itself: the mission church with a capped well in its newly-covered courtyard and little off-center adobe bell tower. The floors are covered in slate tiles. The stuff for sale fills the first floor and the courtyard within the old privacy wall, covering every centimeter of flat space on the floors and walls. Some things even hang from the ceiling. Upstairs, in the back, are living quarters, I assume for the proprietors, opening onto a pretty, somehow green, little vine-filled back yard.<br /><br />The heat today was amazing. I am pretty much getting used to the dry, furnace heat of this semi-desert world, but today was almost surreal. On the way out of town, in occasionally heavy but slow-moving traffic, the air conditioner in the car meekly struggled to putter out thinly chilled air. I kept trying to crank the little knob to “high” but it was already as high as it would go. By the time we pulled into the mission church twenty-five minutes later, my Coke was like coffee and I was somewhat afraid to get out of the car. The parking lot of the church, a patch of road shoulder roasted sterile long ago, sits adjacent to what must have originally been the gate to the church’s outer courtyard. Here there are already many interesting, larger scale items of interest for sale, but today it was simply too bright to see anything (and to hot to feel around). We scurried into the shaded open courtyard in self defense.<br /><br />The accessible part of the building was not air conditioned. Inside this uninsulated clay oven, the air took on a more humid quality; though if this was because of some residual dampness in the old well, or just a byproduct of the shade, I do not know. It was so neat in there, however, with so very many interesting things tucked around everywhere, that we stuck it out for a good twenty minutes before retreating to the car and promising to return in the fall. The car was a blazing crematorium, or course, the Cokes just this side of actually simmering; but at least there was the puttering blat of cool AC, and a breeze through the windows once we got going on the highway again.<br /><br />Not far down the road we started passing flower and fruit sellers (about the twenty kilometer mark south of Monterrey). Then we were passing a strip of road where the majority of the parked vehicles were advertising dogs for sale. Cages were lined up along the baked shoulder and in the backs of pickup trucks, men standing beside handwritten signs would hold a playful little tuft of puppy up to the passing traffic. Another minute or so later, we started flashing by the Carretera proper: runs of low stalls and concrete bunkers connected across the road by stout pedestrian bridges, busily populated by shopping families beneath fluttering tarps and Mexican flags. We opted to stop here on the way back when it was a little cooler, maybe. So we drove straight on through the action to the sleepy town of Santiago.<br /><br />Santiago is such a quiet little place that it was very easy to find a parking spot on the <em>zócalo</em> right in front of the eighteenth century catholic church. The town is idyllic: leafy and slow—certainly a complete reversal from the modern reality of downtown Monterrey. Like some preserved TV village, Santiago sports a laid back, Sunday afternoon sort of a small town ambiance. People strolled around the town square, listening to popular music playing from inconspicuous speakers throughout the plaza, birds chirped, flowers bloomed. There is really very little to do in Santiago: it is a small place, visited mostly as a jumping-off point for the area’s scenic nature preserves or for the water sports offered down by the lake. It is telling that the free map we picked up at the tourist center is dominated by friendly arrows indicating the shortest routes to these surrounding areas of interest. A tiny map of Santiago with the Church in the center and multiple invitations to leave town. But the overlooked village itself is very appealing, rambling colorfully across its gentle slopes, verdant and very picturesque.<br /><br />Down the hill from the middle of town, with its church and zócalo, three Italian restaurants, a pharmacy, and little civic museum, we could see across the street to the large lake pooling at the bottom of the mountains to the southeast. We wandered in that direction for a while, but didn’t feel like crossing the highway on foot, so we turned around and chose one of the Italian restaurants to relax in. This is when we noticed something very strange: we were sweating like crazy. Twenty miles away in Monterrey, I have never gotten so much as a damp armpit due to arid surroundings that steal the moisture right out of my skin. In Santiago however, nearly on the shores of a large lake, where there is precious moisture just laying around on the ground, it is a whole lot more humid. Actually it is sweltering, sultry, and oppressive.<br /><br />So we retreated for an hour or more into the restaurant, which was vastly more successfully air conditioned than the car. I liked the place a lot, it was dark with high wooden ceilings and the waiters seemed to actually be Italian. We sucked down a number of drinks, and the appetizers were yummy, but I was served a fettuccini that was full of ham. What I will remember, looking back, is that the whole time we were there, we were wiping hot sweat out of our eyes. By the time we left, we had grown accustomed to the temperature inside, and stepping outside felt like taking a hot shower. The climate in July, in Santiago, is a lot like the North Carolina summers I left behind. It is far more uncomfortable than the more deadly desert air a few miles north. We hurried to the car, and headed back to the arid places to which we have grown accustomed. Getting in the car was uncomfortably akin to settling into a stew.<br /><br />With over two hours of blinding daylight left, we parallel parked in the toasty berm alongside the Carretera. The revolving electronic sign we had just passed had the late afternoon temperature written out in small light bulbs: 41 degrees. Outside the car, I could feel my lips begin to crack, but at least I was not basted in sweat anymore. For the next hour plus, we strolled along the Carretera down sidewalks shaded with stretched blue tarps. Beneath the tarps were rows of stores selling souvenirs, saddles, and stationery; plants, pottery, and custom wooden shelving; bedroom sets in wrought iron flower or crescent moon motifs, electronics, jewelry, hardware, cutlery, tiles, terracotta, and toilets. There was one overpriced squirrel monkey who looked pretty comfortable in the heat. Roaming along beneath the tarps was like window shopping beneath a solar strobe: alternately too sunny and too shady to see.<br /><br />Incredibly, standing between the shaded sidewalks and the shops were long lines of working stoves griddling up all manner of traditional Mexican fare; and, incidentally, filling the covered areas of the Carretera with clouds of billowing heat. We bought a deck of Loteria cards and water, but the hungry could choose from funnel cakes, cornbread, <em>gorditas</em>, tacos, and select peelings from vivisected spit-roasted baby goats. It smelled wonderful, but I was beginning to blacken around the edges by the time we finally headed back to the car. A little less than an hour remained before nightfall, and the sun was now almost to the low line of scrub that decorates the mountaintops. Inside the car we were cozy and warm, nothing near the broiling we had endured earlier in the day. We nosed our way back into the heavy traffic heading toward Monterrey; north to the constant 24 degrees of our ferociously climate-controlled desert sanctuary. <br /><br /><a title="Card bingo puzzle." href="http://teresavillegas.com/ll_pages/ll_about.html">A short explanation of Loteria can be found here.</a><br /><br /><a title="These are standard." href="http://www.somethingsowrong.com/features/loteria/index.asp">The Loteria deck I bought looks similar to these</a>; <a title="Strange." href="http://www.elsewhere.org/loteria/v/Villegas/?g2_GALLERYSID=e49d53d3de0c20a3fee8c50c5374d935">but not these</a>, <a title="Even stranger." href="http://www.elsewhere.org/loteria/v/clemente2a/?g2_GALLERYSID=e49d53d3de0c20a3fee8c50c5374d935">or these</a>.</div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href='http://photos1.blogger.com/img/102/1769/1024/Sun%20Coke%20Panorama%20FIXED%201.jpg'><img border='0' class='phostImg' src='http://photos1.blogger.com/img/102/1769/320/Sun%20Coke%20Panorama%20FIXED%201.jpg'></a><br />Can I have cream in that? Photo © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1127454602229969972005-06-27T11:30:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:23.159+07:00Monterrey is Okay<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number forty-four</div></span><br /><div align="justify">Initially I was less than enthusiastic about Monterrey versus other Mexican cities as a place to live. After doing a little traveling around, and a little acclimating to my new home, I am warming to the place. 1,482 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—After traveling to México City and Guanajuato, and learning so much about those places in very concrete and historical ways, it feels embarrassing to admit that I still know very little about Monterrey. I was eager to start changing that, so we made the trip over the bridge and through the tunnel to town today.<br /><br />Part of my trouble with Monterrey is its distance from my house: far greater than I am willing to walk in the June heat, here. Also, this ignorance self-perpetuates because it is very difficult for me to take a cab to town due to my inability to give the driver a destination, owing as much to my feeble ignorance of Monterrey’s locations as to my feeble Spanish.<br /><br />Certainly there are plausible reasons for all of this, but there are also shameful excuses. We are located inaccessibly, in a cultural and environmental desert, making it easy to put off acclimation to this new place. It is entirely too hot in the middle of the summer out there, and, really, there is just not that much to acclimate to. It becomes a rather less pressing necessity. San Pedro, at least the parts around me, is pretty dull. The house is great, and there are plenty of things to do in it. Culture shock is something that one has to slowly wear away by subjecting oneself to ever greater amounts of that culture; and that is very easy to avoid here. This self-perpetuation rolls along: hard to go, sort-of don’t know what to do, not immediately interested, mildly troubled by daunting ignorance and minor cultural divide. Then repeat, with more intense qualifiers. The solution, as always, is over the bridge and through the tunnel.<br /><br />Plus, I found Monterrey disappointing. This is the shameful part. There is something about travel that can be looked at as the peeling off of fanciful prejudices to be replaced with local realities. This is probably much of the reason I never came to Monterrey when I was traveling in México a decade ago. Monterrey is very real, and fantasy visions of México and Mexican culture are hard to maintain here. These are not so difficult to maintain in ancient and quaint Guanajuato, although they are just as false there. My attachment to this desire to travel in a fantasy México from movies and literature is a byproduct of my fancy of the exotic. In reality, exoticism owes more to willful ignorance than knowledgeable perception to perpetuate a thing’s mystery. Once you see real people, running about living real lives, with jobs and educations, they immediately become normal people and lose their exotic mystery. This is all very obvious, of course, but it can be a hard thing to let go of in the face of a really beloved fantasy. Conversely, once faced with these realities, often it seems that the fantasy was at best without merit, and at worst actively corrupt. If you shut your eyes when you think about México, and you see banditos and bell towers, piñatas and mariachis, terracotta and adobe, you should be aware of what I mean. That all of these things exist here is somewhat beside the point; México is a real, modern place made up of far more than these icons. Monterrey is a city with very little invested in the tourism of people interested in maintaining a vision of México’s exoticism; Monterrey doesn’t care about all of that.<br /><br />I don’t mean to make myself out like an idiot clinging to some Pancho Villa romance. Or like someone who is disappointed that México is fully in the twenty-first century. México is vibrant and dynamic and real, and I like it just fine that way. But, for just a little bit, it is sad to feel my fantasies recede, and it can hurt to come face to face with my own inexplicable presumptions.<br /><br />We took a cab to the Mercado Juarez, located in the central district of Monterrey, somewhere between the end of the Macroplaza and the city’s pretty, tree-lined Alameda. The Alameda is where families and teenagers would stroll in the evenings and weekends in a small, fantasy Mexican town, firing their guns in the air, and trilling loudly. Here they go to the shopping centers and watch movies, talk over crepes and baguettes in stainless steel coffee joints in palm shaded strip malls. The Mercado was very much the way I remembered them being from my trip ten years ago. A massive concrete building crammed with booths grouped by subject. In one corner there are electronics, in another CDs, and in another little places to sit and eat. Guanajuato’s Mercado Hidalgo was much the same, though more touristy and fanciful, mostly brimming with non-essentials like candles and ceramics and toys. In other parts of México, and the México in my head, the mercado is also where people go to buy grain for the livestock, browse hooked rows of butchered pigs, and pick up the hardware for the farm and the fences. The mercado is tons of fun, and filled with really cool stuff, but at all times it was impossible to ignore the reality that Mexicans do their real shopping at the grocery store.<br /><br />Across the street from the mercado, we found ourselves in a piñatería, a bulk candy store specializing in the festive papier mâché figures as well as the industrial servings of brightly colored fallout rewarding the person who manages to beat them open with a stick. The candy was awesome: every conceivable shape and flavor, leaning toward the freakish. Rows and rows of chamoy- and tamarind- and chili-flavored hard, soft and gummy candy; hard pastel cereal-marshmallow scoops in the shape of ice cream cones big as a monkey’s fist. Straws and ropes of powdered sugar, figurines of crusted sugar, and toys and bottles of liquid sugar occupying a vividly-colored warehouse of boxed candy. In México, sweets stores known as duclerías produce and sell Willy Wonkan varieties of fancy confection; chocolaty, powdered sugary, and fruity fantasies of dessert living. La Catrina in Guanajuato, with its pharmacy of colored bottles of fancy syrups and candied fruit-encrusted stuff, is an example of this. The piñataria is the downscale reality, sporting every conceivable type of packaged candy product as different from a dulcería as orange circus peanuts to grandma’s apple pie. The whole warehouse is like the swag of a particularly strange and successful trick or treating, and occupies the space of a medium-sized grocery store in the US. And of course, populating the rafters like a condemned zoo are the countless swinging carcasses of frilly, crepe piñatas. Fantasy versus reality: I wanted to see piñata bulls and donkeys and cactuses and big hats, “traditional” things that make good souvenirs from my stint in this country;. The piñatas that sell however, are the ones that kids want: Star Wards, Finding Nemo, Spongebob and dinosaurs. The piñatería also sold hot sauce.<br /><br />Wandering on down the road we passed numerous small bookstores and an occasional used clothing store; a paper goods store for art and office supplies and long rows of white privacy walls advertising this and that in colorful three-foot-tall block lettering. The black school-type city busses looked pretty third-world with their chicken wire and missing doors, but many of the passengers had mobile phones and PDAs. It was pretty hot out, and we began to make our way over to the Barrio Antiguo, the old area of town with the strange sushi buffet and the huitlacoche joint. I wanted to eat at a Greek restaurant Sunshine had been telling me about. This took us past one of Monterrey’s museums where I was finally able to get a few postcards of this city in the gift shop. After eating, we wandered in the cooler Monterrey twilight, enjoying the comparatively leafy and pretty neighborhoods just northeast of the building Sunshine works in. We stopped at a gas station to pick up some eggs, but they were out.<br /><br />Monterrey is a good town. There is plenty to do here, and there are friendly people to do them with. There are a few museums I will venture into later, I am sure. There is a reportedly excellent planetarium and science center. There are several large technical universities, and several feats of modern architecture. The food is consistently wonderful and the water is actually drinkable. The array of things to see and do are not engineered to be spectacular to some fantasy tourists from an exotic culture; this is a real city, interested in its own people and things. It is not lovely, but it is a nice place to live. I am just not sure I would want to visit here.<br /><br /><a title="Canned," href="http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000344.php">On the one hand, Huitlacoche is excellent; but on the other hand, it looks nasty.</a><br /><br /><a title="versus Homemade." href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/docbrite/227886.html">On the third hand: something from the blog of Poppy Z. Brite.</a><br /><br /><a title="In Spanish" href="http://www.la-catrina.com/">La Catrina’s website.</a></div></span><br /><div align="center"><a href='http://photos1.blogger.com/img/102/1769/1024/Horseman.jpg'><img border='0' class='phostImg' src='http://photos1.blogger.com/img/102/1769/320/Horseman.jpg'></a><br />La Silla panorama © the Author</div>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8394988.post-1127454548936864252005-06-23T14:19:00.000+07:002006-11-14T09:45:23.072+07:00Power<span class="fullpost"><div align="right">number forty-three</div></span><br /><div align="justify">It’s my first foreign power out, and not it occurs to me that it is pretty important to have power in the desert in the summer. 1,172 words.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost">[NL]—Tonight we went to see Batman Inicia in the VIP screening room at the mall down the road. It has been a fairly movie-related week, actually. Coming home in the early am, after being up all night on the bus, has undone much of my progress re-orienting my sleeping patterns after a decade of second and third shift employment. So, in a week filled with mind-numbing domestic chores I also found myself staying up very late at night again, just like the old days.<br /><br />Tony and Christene, the couple who took care of our house during the two weeks we were out of town, did a mighty job of it. The cat is alive, and the houseplants are thriving and blooming. Hector, the man who works on the grass, has the yard kempt and growing in the front, but either he couldn’t get the back gate open or the lack of rain this month has been particularly brutal, because there is a narrow swath of dead earth running the length of the back yard. So, along with the sleeping late and knocking two-weeks worth of dust and eddies of swirling cat hair off the house, I have spent a large amount of my time since my homecoming outside; watering brown nubs of brittle, dead grass in the back yard. Not as much fun to do as it is to read, really, but if I can’t bring the stuff back to life in the next eighteen months, or so, we will have to replace it.<br /><br />All this excitement was made palatable by the arrival of my headphones early in the week, making it possible for me to quietly watch DVDs all night without disturbing Sunshine, who has to be asleep by ten pm if she wants to get up for work on time. Before the headphones, this meant that I could only watch movies on the weekends when she could stay up late, because it is too bright in the house to even start the projector, really, before eight pm. On the weeknights, I have about six hours of applicable darkness between the our respective bedtimes, and now I would be able to use this time to watch movies instead of skulking creepily around the house hour after aimless hour. I was very excited about these headphones, and was eager to start using them right away.<br /><br />We had been planning to see the Batman movie that night, actually, but Sunshine got stuck at work a little late, and we had to put it off until today. Instead we went to an Italian restaurant near here for dinner, and then went to the grocery store. There was next to nothing in the refrigerator due to our carefully consuming everything possible before we left for México City, and then throwing all of the bad stuff out when we returned. This invasion of domesticity makes a poor substitute for going out to the movies, but at least I would have something to drink in the house tomorrow. We got home with dozens of yellow plastic grocery bags full of perishables.<br /><br />Shortly before Sunshine was to turn in, the power went dead. This was our first power out in México, and it was sort-of neat. The power went out with a little tink right after I had turned on the kitchen light, so we immediately understood what was happening. The house was eerily silent. Out in the front yard we could see that the whole area was out, several neighborhoods, so there was no need to go checking breakers or anything. We made some rum and Cokes, and sat on the little patio over our front door, watching as the neighborhood was quickly candlelit. The security guards were struggling to dismantle the electric gate at the entrance to our community. I assume the natural reaction of many of our neighbors was to go someplace with electricity, and their SUVs and minivans were lining up impatiently along the street. Every kid in the neighborhood immediately congregated in an impromptu sleepover at one house right across from us, judging by the excited shouts and waving flashlight beams coming from all their upstairs windows. There was a general excitement in the air outside that contrasted with the unnatural quiet of the powerless house.<br /><br />Worry set in soon, though. Domestic worry first: would Sunshine get up at six with no alarm clock? Would the thousand pesos of groceries we had just gotten make it through the night? The house was already getting warmer, and we were shutting doors and things to keep cool air locked into its different spaces. In the desert, in a rich person’s house, there is little need for a lot of insulation. Our house is made of cinder blocks, and the temperature was thirty-nine degrees (C) outside. Inside the thermometers were climbing pretty quickly. I keep the temperature in most rooms set at twenty-three or -four, and a half our after the lights went off, it was already climbing past twenty-eight in every room. The worry started in earnest, now: there was no reason to assume, even in this very rich neighborhood, that the power would come back any time soon. We’ve heard stories of power outs that last for weeks. I was a little worried about the food and the cat and the two of us all curling up and burning the same brittle brown the yard does. I was also doing a lot of whining about my new headphones. Sunshine went to bed, and I busied myself protecting the liquor and the ice from the coming inferno. The power came back on about an hour later while I was addressing a few remaining postcards from vacation by candlelight. The thermometers were reading thirty-four already. It took a lot longer to cool the house back down than it had to warm it up. Looking around San Pedro, it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the realities of the unforgiving landscape on which it has been erected. Things like this remind me that this is an environment that must be fought off constantly for survival.<br /><br />So, if we had gone to see Batman Inicia yesterday we would probably have totally missed the power out, and I would have not gained all my newfound respect for the desert. Conversely, we might not have gotten seats in front of a two puzzled eight-year-olds who loudly quizzed their parents as to what was happening on the screen throughout much of the movie, as we did today. We still could never have made it to these seats in time to get the cream cheese and Manchego cheddar crepes that I have been craving, though, and that is a shame. Still, I am on top of the world. Barring any new loss of power, knock on tile, I will get to watch movies, silently to all outer perception, for as long as I can stay awake tonight. Everything is a-okay.<br /><br /><a title="Four stars!" href="http://mrcavinreviews.blogspot.com/2005/06/batman-begins.html">Click here if you are interested in my thoughts on Batman Begins.</a></div></span>Mr. Cavinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01634994342702518448noreply@blogger.com