Woohoo!
I finished the book! I can't believe it. I have worked so hard for the last several months, writing, revising, improving, and it's finally done. What a great feeling. Very exciting. Now just several more weeks of reviewing feedback from friends and editing, then it will be time to shop it around. I'm so thrilled. Here's a picture of the desk where it all happened. I'm going to miss that desk!
Sobre Mesa
One of the best things about Argentina is something called "sobre mesa." The literal translation is "on the table" or "about the table." What it actually means is to sit around and talk with everyone at the table after having eaten a meal together, particularly dinner. You may be wondering why I'd even point this out, as many people in the US and other countries may feel they do this already. But in Argentina (and perhaps other countries in Latin America as well), they take it several steps further. Here people will literally sit for hours after dinner discussing almost anything, telling stories, and just spending time. It's not really something that's done in the US, and it's a beautiful thing. We're often too busy with the next place to go, the family splitting to the four corners of the house to return to their video games, internet, and TV shows. There's not enough time to sit and listen to details of each other's lives.
In Argentina, you need to be careful if you are a dinner guest in someone's house. If, at the end of the meal, you get up and start to clean the plates too quickly, people might interpret your well-meaning action as a desire to cut the after-dinner time short. Some people might even interpret your behavior as rudeness! The best thing to do is wait for someone else to start to clean up, and then get up to help out.
I hadn't really noticed the "sobre mesa" happening so much in Argentina, and I didn't realize why until I remembered that it was because we did it in my house growing up. My family would sit around the table together after dinner and just be, and when we all get together we still do. The first time I noticed that others didn't do that was when I ate over at friends' houses as a kid and saw the typical American "eat and run" dinner style. I never really put it together this way until now. But now that I see how it is here, I'm grateful that my parents kept the tradition of sobre mesa in our house growing up.
When Not to Ride
It's coming up on summer in the States and many of my friends and family are talking about riding. A good friend told me he is embarking on the very exciting process of buying his first motorcycle, and looked to me for riding advice and a pep talk. Here's what I told him.
I am full of pep talks for you. But first I am going to do something uncharacteristic:
Don't ride a motorcycle.
Don't ride a motorcycle.
Don't ride a motorcycle.
You heard me say it now, and let me tell you why. A motorcycle is not to be ridden if:
1. You need to get somewhere in a hurry. This is the number one thing that kills bikers. That and not wearing the proper safety equipment. If you are in a hurry, then drive a car, take a cab, or find some other way to get there. Riding the bike should be done as a means of tranquil transit or recreational traveling. It's not for zipping from one part of town to another to meet deadlines. Not if you want to live. The split seconds that you lose when hurrying rob you of the time needed to properly react to surprises. I know. I've been surprised plenty. And I can safely say that every accident I have been in has been avoidable. When I was paying attention and moving along leisurely, everything that the road threw at me I avoided. The only accidents I have been in were a result of driver error. My error. I simply was going too fast and not paying enough attention. The day I stop motorcycling is the day I get into an accident that was unavoidable.
2. You aren't wearing safety equipment. I hope you will have already taken my example and know that you should use every single thing you can, even when it's 98 degrees outside. I NEVER ride without my helmet, Aerostich jacket, jeans (minimum, riding pants as well if going far), gloves, and lace up shoes (no flip flops, sandals, or anything that will fly off your foot the second you hit the ground). I suit up, look like a dork in the heat, and I could care less. Please note the photo below, I am fully suited in the desert, looking extra dorky and loving it. When I drop the bike I dust myself off and get back on and ride away. When people who don't wear safety gear drop the bike, they go away in an ambulance. Or worse.
3. You feel at all influenced physically, i.e. sick, buzzed, hung over, tired, depressed, agitated, emotionally unbalanced, or anything else that can impair your judgment. The only things keeping you from an unscheduled and painful dismount are your wits, reflexes, and physical strength. If any of those are missing you could be in a lot of trouble.
4. There is anything wrong with your bike. I don't care how minor it seems. Even just a brake light that's out can get you rear-ended. You have to think about the lowest common denominator on the road. The poor drivers who won't be able to react in time to a problem. If your bike doesn't perform the way it's supposed to, then you will be relying on the condition of the other vehicles on the road and the skills of their drivers to save you. Not good.
5. Things just feel "off." I am not superstitious. However, there are times when you get a strange feeling, like "maybe I shouldn't be doing this right now." I try to cultivate a sense of trust in that feeling. If you want to say it's silly go right ahead. But the point could be made that if you feel something weird about riding, then your confidence may be low, and perhaps in that case, you should take the day off.
Now, all that having been said, I think motorcycling is the way to travel and if everyone in the world rode bikes instead of cars, we'd be in a much better place. So, do ride, just use the common sense that God gave you and do it safely. You are more than capable of riding safely, and if you keep your head about you will be a very good rider. Just make sure to keep your head about you. And if you can't do that, then find another way home, ok?
Happy riding everyone!
Acceptance and the Way of the Traveler
Sometimes travel is not what you expect. The simplest things remind you that you aren’t at home. I go to the corner store and buy a bunch of stuff, milk and whatnot. It’s kind of heavy and the counter clerk put each liter of milk in an individual container. Immediately my sense of guilt kicks in, let’s not waste too much plastic, and I am about to tell her just to put them all in one bag but she’s already done it so I don’t bother. I felt guilty about this, and walked out over-bagged. And then one of them broke on me anyway. Moral? You can afford to waste plastic if the plastic is crappy. No that doesn’t sound right… There’s something to be said for not trying to do the right thing. Nope, not that either. How about: Wait and see if something is broken before deciding it needs to be fixed. Meh. Not much better but it’ll do.
Some things that are different here that are not so good:
1. Lots of cars don’t even have seatbelts. Or taxi drivers remove the seatbelts from the back seat. I may start a trend of rejecting cabs without a back seat belt because: 2. Nobody stops at stop signs. At intersections they drive through and look both ways. If someone is in the way they will probably slow down, but not stop.
3. Dogs poop on the sidewalk or on the grass. People seem to clean it up only if they feel like it. They mostly do not feel like it.
4. You can’t get a big cup of coffee. Ever. And when it comes it’s dark and they put a drop of milk, or worse, a kind of cream that is the consistency of yogurt into it. But the cappuccinos they make here are great. Just in small glass.
5. The houses do not have screens on the windows. I really can’t understand it. They can be gotten here, but nobody uses them. So instead the solution to mosquitoes is to put a mosquito bomb tablet into a little plug in device and sleep with the toxins in the air all night. It’s mind boggling.
6. People have less respect for personal space.
Good things:
1. medical treatment is fast and cheap for minor injuries/illnesses. More complicated if you are hurt badly in another type of situation, like a serious accident. Antibiotics can be gotten over the counter.
2. At the beaches in the south parents can let their kids go out to the clubs until 5am, and not worry that they will be kidnapped, raped, killed, drugged, or otherwise harmed. It’s just very safe by comparison.
3. If you hear the crowd at the beach applauding someone as they approach, and you look up to see some man carrying a child and walking through the crowd, no you haven’t seen a celebrity, it’s just the system they use for helping lost children find their parents. And it works well. Everyone starts clapping and the kids quickly find their way home.
4. Popcorn in theaters comes salted or sweet. I find that with time I actually prefer it sweet. It’s very lightly sweetened and goes down way easier than salty popcorn. You don’t a 6 gallon soda to be able to finish it. It’s like eating kid’s cereal out of the box; you can eat it all day and not get enough.
5. Free delivery of almost everything under the sun. Pharmacies, supermarkets, video stores, anything you need can be delivered for free.
Until next time, much love.
Back On Line
I am now back from Brazil, and from a month and change in the south of Argentina and ready to get back to work full time on my book and to fill in the missing blogs and whatnot. Bear with me; should all be up in a couple of days. In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of a big piece of roasted meat:
Cheese and Lunar Travel
Brazil! What’s not to like about Brazil? Well, there’s the crime, the long lines waiting for things, and the crushing masses, trash, and poverty in some places. But other than there is very little not to like. The people are warm, friendly, and so… alive. They dance and sing anywhere for any reason, and there is music constantly blaring from several sources, it’s like Brazil is running it’s own soundtrack at all hours.
“Where are you from?” The grilled cheese guy’s cart smelled like stinky feet. People could smell him coming from down the beach. He held the pungent cheese impaled on the sticks over the fire with one hand, wiping the sweat from his brow with another. The one block of cheese in question he grilled next to it’s much larger brother. I’d expressed dismay at the size of the former, which prompted his query. I didn’t really see what his question had to do with much of anything.
“New York,” I said. He wore a big smile on his face, and the ubiquitous uniform of the working man on the beach: board shorts, A-frame shirt, Havianas, and a hat for the fierce sun.
“Yes,” he said. He smiled and looked down at the cheese, careful to turn it over the hot coals before it blackened. “I have a good friend in New York. He works there and sometimes he sends me money to try to help me out. In brazil, most people make just 200 Reales a month (about $100 US), he said. You can make that in just one day, no?”
I regarded him for a moment. The truth is that some people can make $100. Many people can make a lot more than that if they were lucky enough to have been educated well. Of course I got his point. I simply nodded and decided I’d not quibble over the relative mass of a piece of cheese that cost me a dollar.
He told me about the beauty of the ability to have so much, such access to wealth where life was so much easier. I listened but wasn’t so sure it was such an improvement. I’d no intention of falling into the noble savage trap; certainly life here could be hard. But why did everyone smile? Why the “alegria?” I told him about the many people I knew in the US with strange maladies of the mind and soul, they have money, nice cars, all kinds of material success. But there is an emptiness. They lack the ability to make themselves satisfied otherwise. They don’t have love relationships, they have people of the opposite sex that they complain about. You will almost never see them walking down the street singing and dancing, unless you stumble onto a strange parade in New York City or Miami.
My friend Curtis, a five-time visitor to Morro de Salvadore, and short-term expat to Brazil knows a lot about the country. Already in some ways more Brazilian than American, he even married Rosie, a Paulista (a girl from Sao Paulo), and now speaks pretty decent Portuguese. Anyway, as my resident Brazil adviser on the beach Curt was philosophical about the place.
“We [Americans] are the kind of people that go to the moon. They could never do that here in Brazil” Curt said. “But what they can do here on the beach, the way they can be and live, the way they can enjoy the place they are in right this moment, we can never do that in the US.” Perhaps that is why we work so hard; because we have so little else but work? Perhaps that is why we always look for our happiness in other places, some as far as the moon?
I went back under the sheltering umbrella with my people, two Brazilians and North American taking shade together, and I laid back and forgot everything. I lost myself in my moment with the soft sand, the water, and my half-sized piece of stinky, grilled cheese. And I was satisfied.
New Years
The crowd walks by, all dressed in white for new years, holding half empty bottles of liquor over their heads, singing to a song played by the guitarist on the corner. The song is sad and soft and smooth. He plays songs by the Tribalistas, a kind of Brazilian super group made up of several of the most popular musicians of the day. They are walking en masse, mostly in bare feet or flip-flops, Havianas the brand of choice. There is the odor of humanity as they flow past, the crowd moving in one direction, down, towards the second beach where the huge party will be held. The women are carrying flowers to throw into the water, yellow for money, red for love, and white for peace. Only the women throw the flowers. The girls in our group had gone to get some. The red flowers were sold out. There’s probably something telling in that.
There are little lizards climbing on the walls, the people smile and greet each other warmly. Tonight many are strangers, in a few hours they may be intimate. This is a party for young singles of child-bearing years. The morals here are… different. People openly have sex on the beach under the moonlight. They make a slight pretense of going some distance off, or hiding behind a rock or something, but it happens regardless. All that is later of course. First comes the festas, and the dancing, and the rituals in the water. It’s seven hops over seven little waves. And a wish for each one. People wear white to celebrate rebirth in the new year, and enter the water. The flowers are thrown to the water goddess. The sex comes later. All vestiges of the African traditions that are now firmly rooted in the modern Brazilian culture.
Such beauty: the moon, the fireworks, the whole crowd moving together to the music blaring from the huge speakers placed on the beach. Happy 2007.
To Sunga or Not to Sunga
So it came down to this. Women of course are used to the idea of a bikini. In Brazil the only difference is that they make the bikinis smaller, if you can imagine that (If you are a man I am willing to bet you will certainly try). For men however, at least those from other countries, the idea of wearing something smaller than your average tighty whitey underpants on a beach seems a little too… flamboyant? No that’s not it. Exhibitionistic? Nope, not that either. Gay? Yep, that’s it. It just seems really, blatantly, flamingly homosexual. Which is of course completely acceptable, if you are in fact gay and trying to attract men. The average heterosexual male in the US, and in many other countries I've been to, would not likely feel comfortable so barely vested.
So what can you do? My friend Curtis, semi-resident Brazil expert, informed me that the locals think men who wear board shorts on the beach look weird. He repeatedly told me the story of the woman he dated, who after several dates asked him “why are your upper legs so white?” He realized he was an uncool gringo, and she ridiculed him for having a strange tan line. After that he got his first sunga. As he told me, it only feels gay if you’re the only one on the beach dressed that way. If everyone has sunga and you have bermudas, well, that’s when you start to feel a little weird.
So trying to keep a straight face, I stepped from the dressing room, while Curtis, his wife, and her female friend Nici looked on. It was a brave effort but I couldn't help giggling because, after all, it was my first sunga. And then they were giggling because it was my first sunga, and I was clearly a little nervous to step out. At least I hope that’s why they were giggling. Anyway, after some shopping around I bought one, and the next day wore it to the beach under some bermudas. When we got to our spot on the beach I busted them out. Nobody cared. "That’s cool," I thought. "Nobody cares."
Whenever a man walked by, Rose, Curt’s Brazilian wife, gave me the cutting play by play as the subject strutted his stuff. Like some Sunga Idol judge she tore the contestants apart, one by one.
"These guys know nothing about the sunga," she said. "Look at the colors they have chosen. Sunga is not the place to go crazy with four different pastel colors. Simple is best."
"Look at that guy!" She laughed out loud. A man walked by oblivious, in a pair of camouflage-patterned speedos. "Rambo Sunga," she laughed, holding her hands over her face to hide her mirth. "Oh, meau Deus, he thinks he is going to war in a banana hammock!"
Another group passed, tanned and well-muscled, wearing flower-patterned skivvies. "All gay," she told me in confidence. "And if they tell you they aren’t its just because they don’t know it yet. You should never wear sunga with flowers."
I was suddenly overcome by the knowledge that the same grueling standards that women use to judge themselves, they also apply to men. I was happy I’d decided on a modest sunga, basic black with a couple of stripes on the side. God forbid I get mangled like that by a bunch of girls while passing. Then again, on second thought, I really didn’t care. The difference between guys and girls of course is that we are more shameless in many ways. I lounge around the house in total comfort in my underwear. If I get to do it in public and nobody hassles me so much the better. The truth is the small bathing suit is much more comfortable. It dries in minutes, instead of chafing your legs half the day with collected wet sand like a pair of board shorts does. They may look weird at first, but all fashion is just a question of frequency of exposure and cultural acceptance. When in Rome and all that. The answer of course, is to sunga.
Here is a picture of the stunning beaches in Morro. What? Were you expecting maybe for me to post a picture of myself in sunga on the internet? What am I, crazy?
Attention Girl from Ipanema:
I will be traveling to Brazil for a week. I leave tonight. I will be on the Island of Morro, off the coast near Salvador do Bahia. I have heard a lot about you, but I have never had the pleasure of meeting you. Should you be somewhere around there, I will be the tall guy with brown hair, probably sunburned, and trying to speak very bad Portuguese. Call me?!
On a totally unrelated note, here are some photos of the trees around Recoleta. The greenery in Buenos Aires is remarkable.
Bad Santa
Santa Claus: The Personification of Everything that's Wrong with our Culture.
First of all: he's fat. He puts a "positive" role model image on a negative state. It's not good to be fat, yet he's jolly and always throwing presents around. He seems like the life of the party, even though when you weren’t looking he probably ate all the hors de'ouvres. The state of being fat can make you feel bad about yourself and harm your body. It can ruin your sex life. The fat kid is the one that is always handy to be the butt of jokes. As if it's not hard enough to go through school without any extra reasons to be picked on. Kids that follow his example will find more disappointments in life than the simple fact that they won't be able to slide into tight spaces like chimneys.
Santa’s physical state is actually the least of his problems. He is an emotionally inaccessible pseudo-paternal figure that replaces the true depth of human connections with cold, transitory, material satisfaction. He's a sugar daddy for developing minds. A training tool for the future whoring of our nation's youth. Do what I tell you and you will be rewarded. Do not, and I will demonstrate the strength of my pimp hand (with a piece of coal in it). Is this what we really want to teach our kids?
Santa is solely focused on commercial gain. Emulating the worst of our giant corporations, he takes what he needs to serve his purposes and the rest be damned. He overworks a race of diminutive, foreign indentured servants (read: illegal immigrant midget slaves) in sweat shop conditions to meet an impossible goal: gift the world's three billion children in a cyclical, never-ending, one-year deadline. Amnesty international has declined to make this issue their top priority why, exactly?
Santa has a very disturbing interest in pre-teens, which, quite frankly, borders on the pedophilic. He can be seen all across the world whiling away the hours in his revoltingly lascivious manner, ho-ho-hoing with a small tyke bouncing away on his leg, whispering into his lecherous ear. It's appalling and disgraceful. The man should be behind bars. We could go on at some length about his criminal nature, but in the interests of time we'll just gloss over the MILLIONS of acts of breaking and entering he routinely performs. And who else but a bad person has so many aliases? Santa Claus, a.k.a. Chris Kringle, a.k.a. Saint Nick, etc. What has he got to hide that he's going by so many different names?
And oddly enough, considering this checkered past, he tries to claim some kind of moral high ground. Mr. Claus comes from a supercilious and ethically bankrupt point of view, which seeks to compartmentalize all human behavior into impossible black and white standards. Good/evil, naughty/nice, etc. Is there no tolerance for the ambiguous positions many young children find themselves in? For example, it's "naughty" to steal. But is it worse to watch your smaller siblings die from hunger, or to acquire for them a loaf of bread from someone who may have plenty? I am not making an ethical judgment here either way, but Santa certainly has no compunctions about doing so. Too bad he can't turn that light onto his own red-clad corpulence and consider the wrongs that he himself performs in his twisted machiavellian quest to be the biggest stranger-with-candy in the history of human kind. (Seriously, he makes Michael Jackson look positively normal by comparison.)
Doesn't anyone realize that placing such a blanket duality over everything just numbs the young minds and makes them that much more pliable to accept the nincompoop-like simplicity of a governmental system that offers two choices, democrat or republican; or one country's "just" wars versus their enemy's "genocidal invasions;” or Coke versus Pepsi? Clearly to any remotely intelligent and rational person the items being compared are the same. Are you kidding me? Naughty or nice my ass. Get real Santa, nobody's moral compass has just two cardinal directions. Clearly he's mad; holding everything to such an impossibly monochromatic standard. Imagine how he must beat the elf that forgets to glue wheels onto a toy!
And last but not least is the baby Jesus. What is supposedly the holiest of holy days for Christians all across the country (the birth of their savior and divinity made human), has been usurped by the fleshy, material-centric, invader from the North. Like some horrific crimson conqueror from the land of the midnight sun he comes, driving his pack animals before him, frothing and bellowing and howling, to overshadow the one spiritual claim the country formerly practiced with any uniformity, leaving a material excess and an accompanying metaphysical vacuum in it's place. Even Jews and Muslims acknowledge that Jesus was a great prophet and teacher. Most Buddhists will freely admit that Jesus had most likely achieved enlightenment. Jesus' birth was something that really almost anyone could appreciate. But no, every year his special day gets squatted upon by a big, fat, cookie-scarfing pagan.
For all we know, Santa probably ate the baby Jesus.
Traveler's Remorse?
We have all experienced the feeling. You buy something, and you think it's the cat's nuts when you try it on, or test it out. But somehow, once you get home, the doubt begins to creep into your consciousness. You didn't plan to own something just like this; maybe in your mind you envisioned it being or feeling a little different. Although subtle, the difference is enough from what you imagined to make you regret the choice. It's enough to make you say: this is not for me.
But I don't think that exists with travel. Traveler's remorse can only come from two sources: the desire to have stayed at home, or the feeling that somehow the very adventure you just completed could have been done better. But as an experience, as an event, it cannot be "remorsed" in the sense that you would return it. It is not solely a physical item that you have to exchange. It was precious moments of your life, lived and experience and catalogued. To take that away by trading it in, if it were possible, would be a horrific fate. You'd wake up being the same person you were before you left, having lost that valuable experience, whether you percieved it to be good or bad. The perception of the experience in the short term is especially unimportant, because often the real lesson from an experience can only come much later, even years later.
I think back on all the times I've traveled. Mostly I did it when I couldn't really afford to. I had other stuff that needed to be bought or paid for, other places to allocate funds. But looking back on those moments now, all I remember is the trips I did. The wonderful moments of actual living stolen from the daily struggle and drudgery we all face. I can't for the life of me remember what it was I was going to spend my money on. In fact it almost feels as though all the money I've ever made was invested into those precious travel experiences. Who cares what else I wanted to buy? I've been to places I had always dreamed of going. Is there such a thing as traveler's remorse? Not in my world.
Continued Gender Issues and Tango
So a great friend of mine asked for a bit of clarification on what I meant exactly regarding dances such as tango helping kids to define themselves sexually and as future men and women. He's actually a brilliant medical student with more than a little experience in the study of gender issues.
His question was basically "how would your theory work when considering that the simple dualistic nature of tango might not permit the inclusion of those that want to live in a different gender identity, or simply to live as one attracted to their own gender?"
Oddly enough I think it could still work. I danced the other day at a class with too few women, but there were a couple of men there that were training to be instructors (so they had to know both the men's and women's steps, which are very different and complex), and they both offered to occassionally play the women's part in the dance. One was a japanese guy and he was very fluid and a great dancer and he adapted to the part beautifully. It was actually cool to think that a child that might want to learn the other's role could, and it could work. A pleasant thought, to offer the individual in question a harmless way to explore their personal boundaries at an early age in a non-sexual, non-judgmental manner, perhaps helping to simplify and clarify their understanding of their own developing nature.
The man yeilded and followed like a woman, but it was very different because he knew the man's steps such that he could tell me what to do as I led him. Which of course makes me laugh at the ridiculous nature of what I am proposing. I've completely transgenderfied what is supposed to be my "simpler" solution. A man playing the woman leading the man who is supposed to be leading the woman, who is, in fact, a man.
As most people must suspect, dancing with the opposite sex in class is by far the norm, but it happens occassionally that one or another might momentarily "switch teams" to help each other practice. Perhaps my friend then said it best: "Maybe you can just think of the dance as a Platonian abstraction of the ideals of both sexes? Then the two halves simply come together in a melodic interplay of archetypes." Leave it to a science nerd to boil it down to it's bare essence. Well said, you gender-savvy geek!
Riding in Cabs
The taxi is an integral part of Buenos Aires culture. Because nobody wants to spend the extra money, people usually opt for the "often-good" public transportation system of buses. So the taxis are both equally reviled by the fiscally conscious Argentines (sadly accustomed to having to do more with less by generations of governmental and big business chicanery), and esteemed because they are just so much more comfortable and easy. And a cab becomes invaluable when there is a city-wide problem, or when one is in trouble.
Tonight, for example, there was a problem. Heavy rains followed by flash floods left everyone on street corners huddled under umbrellas, and all the taxi services were suddenly slammed. I got a ride tonight with some luck, but then it ran out when the driver decided to stop and not take me any further. I had to walk 30 blocks or so home in the rain. Surprisingly I didn't mind really, it was a nice walk.
The cabs here mostly run on methanol, so they are quite easy on the city air, which is a good thing because nothing else is really. But the cabs vary greatly in quality and if you stop one you are just as likely to get a pleasant fellow with nice music and the AC blasting as you are to get a smelly curmudgeon chain-smoking through his tracheal stent, in his sauna-like hooptie.
The thing I like to do lately is ask the taxistas for their best stories. And they have the most amazing stories. So far I've had Taxi drivers sing tango songs, talk to me about lost loves, and complain about transvestite elitists from Spain. As you might suspect, all manner of sexual perversions and bizarreness happen in cabs, from the profoundly sad (a girl in her early teens climbing a cab and telling the driver he can do whatever he wants with her, if only he'll buy her a sandwich), to the humorous (a cabbie gets propositioned by a visiting Brazilian bombshell, and upon leaving her he withdrew his wallet to pay for her services and instead she paid him for the cost of the room plus $300 pesos).
I asked about crime and using judgment to decide who one should and should not pick up. One cabbie simply said "if I judged everyone one the street by their looks before I picked them up I'd starve to death." Another driver, wiry and dark, told a related story about how the eyes deceive. Three months earlier a well-dressed man with a briefcase got in and asked to go across town. When they got to the destination the man removed a gun from his attaché and took everything the driver had, down to his cell phone, Ferrari key fob, and car stereo. But then most bizarrely, the thief held him captive in the car for four hours (!) before finally letting him go.
But of course appearances work the other way too. One driver told me about the elderly gent he stopped for. Immediately he regretted it because the old man seemed the type to take a cab two blocks to a restaurant, complaining the whole way. Instead, he asked to be taken across town. As they rode the old man asked if he owned the cab they were in. The driver said he did not, and then when he began driving he chose instead to invest his money in a house, and then used the money he made to support his three children and wife. He said there wasn't enough left over to save for a cab, and he could not obtain a loan without putting his house at risk, which of course was unacceptable. The old man listened attently to all this and asked for his card. One week later the cabbie got a call from the old man, and took him on a much longer trip. Then two more big trips again the next week. On the fourth meeting, the gentleman said "I expect you are the kind of man who repays his debts. Would you permit me to loan you money to buy a car?" The cabbie was beside himself, and he accepted. "This happened 45 days ago" he told me, "and this car is mine."
Amidst all this recounting of tales and histories, perhaps it's best to keep in mind what one cab driver said about taxistas in Buenos Aires. "You want a cabby’s story," he said. "Sure you can ask, but believe at your own risk. Buenos Aires hacks are the worst kind of liars!"
Today...
...a dear friend referred to me as the "questing, dancing, flexing bear, that should be turned into a cartoon," which cracks me up. That is all.
P.S. I've perhaps had a little too much vino tinto, and maybe that's why it's so funny.
Life's not Always Puppies and Sunsets over the Port
But sometimes, in fact, it is. Here's another view from my apartment--there's a rainbow in there somewhere but it's hard to see as the light was fading. Never saw a rainbow in a sunset before.
And here's a photo of my cousin's pup Clota. She's so freaking adorable it's just sick. Cuteness must be a product of Darwinian evolution. If she wasn't so darling she would have been punted off the terrace by now because like most puppies she pees all over everything. Seriously, who could not love this face?
Tango Time
I've become a fan of tango. I enjoy dancing in general, but I particularly like couples dances such as swing or more formal ballroom dances. I have often felt that a serious problem with our culture has stemmed from the diffuculty we have in exemplifying gender roles for our youth. One way this can be helped is by certain types of dance. The recent resurgence of swing in the USA has done a lot to illustrate my point. My views on all this stem in no small part from the the frustration I had growing up when all dancing with members of the opposite sex consisted of bobbing up and down in a semi-rhythmic manner within a few feet of your partner. Which, of course, is nothing like actually dancing together. In a moment's notice, your partner Mary, in her little bows and whatnot, could capriciously turn away and face a friend or another boy, and suddenly you'd find yourself just bobbing in the middle of the floor like a fool, all by yourself.
Once I learned swing I saw the beauty of being able to share something as a couple, to demonstrate two halves of the same coin, and how they can be different, yet equally important and beautiful. In a sense it's one of the few times in our confusing modern culture where the sexes can be comfortable in their roles and not feel the need to compete with each other. By mutual consent we split the work between us, and make something that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps in that way it's not unlike how a couple can work together to create a child. Those moments are too far and few, in my humble opinion.
So, I like tango. And even more importantly, tomorrow I buy tango shoes!
"That's freaking awesome dude!" (I inserted that line for those, that, like the swine they are, will have no idea what a majestic pearl I just bounced off their foreheads).
One who understands tango will understand that for me, tomorrow is the true gentleman's equivalent of a Jedi building his first light saber. It's the Queen touching a blade to my shoulders. It's my dad handing me the keys the first time I am to pick up my date alone. My tango shoes baby! (Shoes are key because a lot of the passes and turns and such require a special non-stick surface to perform. Modern rubber souls are the bane of Tangeros.) I can't wait to see what I get.
And I'll tell you something else. Tango is the bomb. Any couple could do themselves a world of good making time for a class twice a week. Crazy awesome sex is bound to ensue. It's great to have a dance that so clearly defines roles, yet permits each half of the pair to revel in their particular part and have equal merit. In this age of sexism, gender ambiguity, and x versus y battles, a man is suddenly and gratefully commended for being a MAN, and a woman is shamelessly elevated to the highest pedestals of femininity and raw seductive power, and for which, because of that brief instance, she is forever after remembered in that realm by those who witnessed her.
In tango, as in most couple's dancing, the woman is the flower. But in tango it's done in such an intricate and profound way that the woman is displayed with utter delicacy, grace, and elegance. She is not simply "led," she also has the option to insert a lot of flair into her movements, thus adding her personal mark, which many dances do not so readily permit. The man is the lead, and as such is the pinnacle of strength, dominance, and support to display the woman. But because there are so many subtle variations in the dance, the man has options in his lead, thus individualizing himself by individualizing the pair. Kind of like a great conductor makes great musicians sound even better. A great tango pair improvising in the moment is indescribable in the beauty it creates. It's what jazz is in a couple. It's seduction on another level. There's a line by the Counting Crows that talks about a girl doing flamenco:
She dances while her father plays the guitar,
she's suddenly beautiful.
And we all want something beautiful,
man, I wish I was beautiful.
That's how it is with tango. (And I apologize for quoting you the Counting Crows, but it fits.) You may see two of the fugliest people step up to the
pista and be cringing at the train wreck you are certain must follow, but imagine your surprise when, of a sudden they are moving together, as if their plain bodies had been swapped by aliens, leaving a dashing man and beguiling woman in their place, and they are dancing well and owning the space around them with the wondrous design they create together. Immediately the grace and inescapable beauty available to the least of us becomes evident and undeniable.
And just as abruptly, you may be struck with a pang of jealousy, for that formerly unfair maiden has a most charming skill that you lack, and God help you, she
IS suddenly beautiful. That homely man can do something that makes women pause to admire him, women that would otherwise not throw him a piece of trash with the time written on it. And you will know and envy their skill, and maybe, just maybe, you might be less likely to judge the next book you see by the fugly cover.
That is the power of art made manifest in movement. And its power may force you to reconsider many things. Real art changes lives. Particularly when it's so accessible. And with that realization you may very quickly head to the next tango class you can find. I highly recommend you do. Because if you can learn the tango, you will never again have to wish to be beautiful.
Follow up to the Psychobabble
So the next time I went to class, two days later, I caught the instructor. As much as I didn't think of it at the time afterwards it felt like a small vindication, so at least he sees I am not a total idiot. His response was perfect, as it was just so. "That's training." Big deal. Just got to keep training.
Auto-Ethnology (Warning full of self-help babble and martial arts stuff)
“The way is in training.” Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings
There’s nothing like a humbling experience to gain insight into one’s nature. Perhaps that’s why so many ascetics have sought to become mendicants, or practice self-sacrificing habits such as fasting and material abstinence. It’s difficult to cling to illusions of self when you are constantly being disillusioned. It’s impossible to be distracted by glittering objects and escapist behaviors if you have none.
The state of feeling shamed or humiliated is internal. What I mean is, nobody can make you feel ashamed except yourself. The effect on the psyche is to further depress the emotional and spiritual strength of the individual being tried. By humbling oneself, or by being humbled, one is forced to look internally to discover those mechanisms that are flawed, such as they permit the outer world to have such a destabilizing effect on the internal order. A very strong person can hardly be humbled. They understand that the circumstances surrounding life are always variable, and more importantly, subject to interpretation. The strong choose to interpret all external circumstances with a good deal of dispassion and detachment. Yesterday I was a successful (insert pastime/occupation), today I am a beggar. This kind of strain is typically too much for most of us to bear and recover from readily. Which is ironic given that it’s the destiny of all people. As we age and die, nearly everything is taken from us. Entropy is a given. For most of it’s a brutal shock to the system, like putting too much pressure into a machine, revealing the weak hoses that burst under the strain. The end result is that the mechanism can remain forever broken and dysfunctional, or it can be repaired and strengthened; the weak hoses replaced with reinforced ones, to continue the analogy.
I recently had a humbling shock. Like other realizations I've had about life this one occurred through the study of the martial arts, a more or less constant pursuit since the age of eleven. I have often felt, after so many years of study, self-discipline, and effort, that I am entitled to a degree of effortlessness in my training and growth. I’ve worked so hard for so long, I reasoned on some level, that I should therefore be able to learn faster, easier, or better than those around with the same amount of time/effort invested. Why I arrived at this conclusion I don’t know, having often had quite the opposite proven to me time and again, as my efforts haven't always resulted in the quickest application of the techniques that I’m supposedly learning. Yet, there it is, the feeling that somehow I'm more deserving of improvement without working as hard.
And so I'm forced to learn the hard way. After months of inactivity I return to my training to discover that I'm capable of being caught by someone far less experienced. I was in disbelief. I saw what was happening, I even knew how to prevent it. For some reason I just didn’t react in time. I didn’t apply what I knew. I failed.
We all fail. This particular time hurt because of the circumstances. I'm advanced (relatively) in my chosen art at this time. My opponent was a novice. I was in a new school with many unknown elements and all the techniques I know were done slightly differently, and had different names as well. My opponent caught me cleanly and quite beautifully. In reality, it should be a pleasure to forfeit to such a demonstration of technique and ability from any training partner, but especially from one so new to the sport! I should have felt grateful for having been shown a weakness in my game. Instead it hurt because I'm training in a new place and with new people (to whom I felt I must prove myself, display my worth, and otherwise justify my rank and status). Under other circumstances I’d have felt wonderful at having had the opportunity to help a fellow training partner. Instead I envisioned him as gratified at having humbled me, at having revealed me to be less that I cared to present. I couldn’t divine the good in the situation at all. I made excuses: my lack of condition due to recent inactivity, his application of a technique that’s illegal where I used to train, my unfamiliarity with the style of fighting they employ. It was all pointless. I simply got caught.
This brought about a cascade of recognitions about my other failings. All my weaknesses were drawn under a critical spotlight. Aside from my physical failings I recognized the fact that I am (to name just a few): completely self-absorbed, pedantic, egotistical, self-satisfied, vain, long-winded, unrepentant, stubborn, emotionally inaccessible, greedy, demanding, forgetful, mooning, and thoughtless. I could go on but you get my point (and I must reserve some shred of dignity here).
The upshot is to have arrived at the moment I did, where I realized the ability to feel better about these and other aspect of my life is within my power. It’s a matter of choice. I remembered that I must follow the model of those who choose to have greater inner strength. I must resolve not to let myself be hurt by feelings of inadequacy in my training. I can do so by foregoing any expectation of adequacy. I don't practice the martial arts to justify my sense of accomplishment, expertise, or self-worth. I do it because I love to do it. My quality is not measured by my performance, but rather by my steady application of intention, by consistently electing to improve. That is the measure of the practitioner. This recalls the cliché of “nine times knocked down, ten times get up.” So I chose to get up again, to take the lesson I was given, and be grateful for it. Even if I got it from a white belt. Especially because I got it from a white belt. Regardless of the source, it was a lesson I desperately needed to learn.
In reality this insight into my training is the least of the benefits I’ve garnered from this experience. I’ve also come to realize how my failings have affected my relationships, particularly those of a romantic nature—all the most recent ones that I’ve had. In each I was too distanced from my own feelings to be able to connect in any real way with the people who were trying to get to me. They were knocking, ringing, and some even banging down the door, but nobody was home. This pained me greatly to acknowledge that my own selfish behavior had caused hurt in these people. I took from these people the physical comfort they offered, and little else, all the while offering little more than the physical in return. Is there anything more painful than to truly see our reflection and note the monsters we sometimes permit ourselves to be? It sucks to hurt people by accident. It really sucks to look at how often we do it on purpose, while making believe we didn’t. I have resolved to never enter into another romantic relationship without being fully available in all senses. I'm not going to be unfair and offer less of myself to another, because in the end I hurt myself most, when I finally have to look at myself. When I finally have to realize that my solitude is my own creation; the havoc I wrought around me is just the bitter icing on the cake.
So in the end of all this, what can I do but say thank you? I will go to class and give that white belt a big sincere hug because he doesn't know what he’s done for me. He may one day, but until then I will do my best to help him, and others, the way he helped me. Yes, that’s right, I’m going to utterly smash him all over the mat until he achieves greater self-awareness. Just kidding. I’m going to do my best to be available in every sense in my training, to absorb and share as much as I can in my training relationships, as I will in all my other relationships. The way is in training.
Buenos Aires, Retiro. Settled Into My Badass Apartment! Too Bad It's Time To Move
I am behind on my trip notes from August but I've had people asking about what I’m doing here in BA, what it's like, etc. So I’ve decided to post some notes out of order, and I’ll fill in the missing parts later. It’s been fairly smooth settling in, the allergic reaction I suffered to the fleas this summer while camping is almost completely gone but there are still some scars where they attacked en masse. I started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu here and running to try to get back in shape after two months of doing nothing except riding the motorcycle for ten hours a day.
I’m living on top of a building overlooking the River Plate with a fantastic view of all the variants of a city in microcosm around me. I can see the train station of Retiro with the famous clock tower in front of it, the rich neighborhoods of Palermo, the poor Villa 31 slums located in the middle of the wealthiest land in the country (which the other residents consider a cancer on the locality, because it's growing and it's so bad at times that even the cops don't want to go in there), and of course off in the distance over the water I can see Uruguay on the horizon. There's even an esoteric recluse metal artist visible from my window, his rusting junk piles of scrap waiting to be turned into shining sculptures. At night the view is impeccable:
As much as I love it here, come to find out almost as soon as I moved in and got set up with cable modem, office furniture, bus schedules and whatnot, I have to move out! I'm staying with my cousin, and her landlord decided to sell the place so we are getting ejected. She will move in with her boyfriend and I am left to fend for myself. Well, nothing is easy but what can you do. I'll find someplace else that's cool too but it's just a bummer because this pad is sooo sweet!
Onto a topic of awesomeness of another kind: the food. As you may have heard, lots of meat here, the best in the world. Argentina also makes excellent, inexpensive wines and I've been gorging myself and life is very, very good. Here's a sample of the way the typical barbecue is prepared. My uncle hard at work and believe me it was as good as it looks:
Now onto recent headlines. They talk about how bad the crime is here in Argentina, both institutional and otherwise, “todos son chorros” they say, particularly about the politicians, but I haven’t seen it that much personally, at least not any more than in any other country, the US included. I guess it depends where you go, what time of day, and what state of mind you're in, like anywhere else. Years ago I had a camera stolen at a restaurant here in Buenos Aires, but only because I forgot it on my table and when I went back it belonged to the waiter. But of course I'll call you if it turns up, he said. Right. Another time a cheeky cabdriver pulled the switcharoo and suckered me out of $40. I knew it was a scam and would have gotten out and told him to go suicide himself but he had my bags in his trunk, which were worth a whole lot more than $40 to me. Other than that I have been fine here during the many times I've visited.
That’s why I was cracking up so much when I read about the Bush daughter’s phone and purse getting snatched from their table at a restaurant. Ha! Their personal secret service agents didn't even notice! That’s hilarious. (Maybe it was the same waiter that has my camera?)
Taken from Yahoo News: “ABC reported that the theft was not the only difficulty the Secret Service faced during the fraternal twins' two-week visit. One of the agents got into an "altercation" after a night on the town and was beaten, the television news organization said, citing police reports.”
How the hell do you beat up a secret service agent? I thought those guys were cast from molten titanium and trained since the age of six in pits with hungry dogs? And what about his gun? His pepper spray? A black jack? Nothing? First a theft from under the nose, and then an ass whooping on top of it? So I guess that in terms of security, the Bush twins were given the benchwarmers for their visit here. Do you think these guys will ever get invited to another white house softball game when they get back? Will they ever receive another Easter ham from Barbara? I'm guessing not. I’m still giggling over it.
A Trip Highlight!
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Anaconda to Lewiston. 330 miles (Hell’s Bend state park).
Finally my riding butt was coming back. It was getting easier and easier to put on the miles. The more I rode, the less frequently I looked down at the odometer. If my body was aching from riding I knew it because I'd constantly check the odometer to see if I’ve clocked the miles I needed before I let myself take a break. By the end of the trip I was riding 100-150 miles without stopping, and without even really looking to see how far I'd gone. I could focus on the journey.
That trophy yours?
The kid sat on his bicycle, looking up at me expectantly. He was referring to the motocross trophy in the room behind us, in the hotel’s breakfast area. That and the fact that I was loading up what looks like a big dirt bike. A logical enough conclusion if your world is as small as a child’s, or if your imagination is half as enterprising.
No, I smiled. Not me. Just riding through towards the Shalkaho pass.
Oh, he said. Watch out for the Georgetown area, lots of fires right now.
I nodded appreciatively at his solemn warning. I wouldn’t have given him much credit except that I had heard the same thing yesterday. The news was even less welcome now. Last thing I needed was to ride into the middle of a forest fire. I did that once already near the Andes in Argentina years ago. Knowing that you could be riding into a blaze big enough to kick across roadways and rivers and envelope everything in its way is more than a little nerve wracking.
The road towards the pass seemed fine and I saw no indications of fire over the hills so I decided to take the route, albeit cautiously. It was gorgeous. The ranges were gently graduated with small pine forests at their bases, like beards leading up to the balding peaks. A nice canyon opened up along the Pintler Scenic Route. Huge sheets of rock jutted at a 45 degree angle from the roadway, making striking geometrical images. At the end the stream that cut the canyon sprung from a cave through the rock, continuing it’s downward path.
I finally rounded the last of the paved road and hit the dirt pass. The way was nicely pressed and graded, wide enough for two cars at all points, and very well-maintained. Even the worst roads here are far better than most other places in the world. That’s the startling thing about the United States. We keep dirt roads around almost for nostalgic purposes. Because they’re not really dirt roads. They are too maintained, too tame, too… nice. It’s just a paved road without the asphalt. That’s why I was a bit shocked when I hit some small washboards. After everything bike has gone through in the 40,000+ miles I’ve ridden it, this was nothing. As I glided along over the slightly saw-toothed path I could imagine the bike saying don’t make me laugh.
A sign read: Shalkahoe Pass, elevation 7250 feet. The kid was right, there had been fire through here not too long ago as I saw some burned out patches in the treeline. I later learned that the whole valley on the Western side had been burned in the year 2000. This area was a literal (forgive me) hotbed of forest fires.
The desire to take these scenic roads may seem silly to some, especially since the way is so housebroken, as I just mentioned. After all, the back roads are slower, less comfortable, and if I should have a problem will result in much more inconvenient to get help or out get out. But somewhere down deep I was hoping to experience something different, something far out of my normal routine. The clichéd less-traveled road did not disappoint this day. I’d just finished taking a pit stop, and was coming around a corner when their appeared in my way what I’d hoped, but never thought I would see in the wild on this trip—a bear! He was a fat little juvenile, about as big as a St. Bernard, and he loped off the side of the road and scuttled down the edge of a steep hillside, his wide bottom bobbing ridiculously as he fumbled along. He stopped once or twice to look back at me with what I can only assume was curiousity, but kept moving so I had very little time. I rolled up in neutral and whipped out my camera, afraid to turn the bike off lest the little guy’s mother come charging from the tree line and catch me unaware. The camera was on full zoom and my hands were shaking in addition the motor’s vibration, but I managed to catch him. A pity that the autofocus picked a flower in the foreground as a target and he came out fuzzier than I’d hoped. But I got him, and I will never forget the excitement and wonder of that moment, seeing a wild bear live in front of me.
But what a thrill! I was shouting out loud in happiness on the bike. I couldn’t believe my luck. To get that kind of proximity to a creature like that, under those circumstance is next to impossible for many of us, as nature gets increasingly more corralled. Sure, there are tons of bears near human dwellings and in natural parks and you can see them, but this was on a mountain, and the dirt pass went through his turf. I caught him unaware, in his underpants walking through his living room, as it were. It was very special and unexpected. That’s why when I went around a corner soon after I nearly soiled myself when I thought I saw a grizzly. A huge-headed, enormous, and menacing grizzly reaching above himself to scratch at a tree trunk. I carefully slowed as I passed and then decided to risk riding back to look again, ready to blow past him if he started for me. Turned out to be a log fallen against a tree just so, to cast a perfect likeness of a grizzly scratching the bark near his head. What was I saying about an enterprising imagination?
The universe provides. That’s a saying I have been taking to lately and I really think it’s true. Sometimes just when you need it, the right thing comes along. I noticed the day before that my bike tire had a problem, and it needed to be addressed as soon as possible, but I didn’t really have the tools to do and needed a shop. So it was when I came over the pass and entered the little hamlet of Hamilton. I saw a place with a big Kawasaki sign and pulled in.
Kelly and Rich were the manager and mechanic, respectively. I couldn’t have encountered two nicer guys to help me with the issues I’d had. I’d also been looking out for a Kawasaki P15 model police bike to get some photos up close and maybe even ride it for the book I was researching. Not only did they fix my bike up, but Kelly let me check out a customer’s P15 they had in for service, by the strangest of coincidences. While I had to make a needed pit stop I was able to kill another bird with the same stone. The universe’s timing is impeccable. The bike’s owner was a former police officer. He had had such fond memories of his service motorcycle that he just had to buy one for himself after he retired. I couldn’t have been more pleased as Kelly rolled it into the sunlight for me to pore over and take the photos I needed. I’m also not supposed to tell but I even got to sit on it. You rock Kelly!
Rich and the boys corrected the problem I discovered, which I was annoyed to learn I’d had since I left New York, where my new back tire was put on with the bead improperly set. This was fixed with what he called “a satisfying pop.” Rich also performed some other needed maintenance. He was a neat guy, he’d led a pretty full life for just having 30 years of age. Rich was married with two kids, raced trucks off road for fun, and had some scars to show his driving experience. He was in the army in North Carolina and flipped a truck. He put his arm out the window when it rolled, instinctively, almost as if to stop the truck’s roll with his bare hand, and you can imagine the result. I certainly can’t blame anyone for their reactions, God knows some of the less than brilliant things I’ve done without thinking, but Rich judged himself harshly and felt it was a pretty dumb thing to do upon reflection. He ended up with a two plates and fourteen screws and counted himself lucky to still have an arm.
Devon and KC were the two teenager brothers helping out in the place, doing the brunt of the less sexy tasks around the shop. Nice guys both, Devon planned to join the Marines and be a diesel mechanic. KC said he didn’t quite have it all figured out just yet. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t either, but I didn’t know if it would make him feel worse or better about his situation.
I left the crew and continued, and along the way I saw a big rock being eroded, chewed out from underneath by a stream. The boulder was a big as a shed, probably several hundred tons, laid out flat and slowly being eroded by the water so that it stood on a stilt extending down from it’s underbelly. Very, very cool and a great example of all the amazingly interesting things to see that aren’t even in national parks or on maps. While everything else has been going on in human history over the last hundred millennia, that rock and stream have slowly been playing their game, waiting for travelers to come along and bear witness to see who wins.
I rode on along Route 12, following both part of the Lewis and Clark Trail and the trail that marked the flight of the Nez Perce led by Chief Joseph. The road wound along mile after mile of beside a gorgeous river cut through a lush valley that was perfect for motorcycling. If this route wasn’t on the top ten list of motorcycle roads in the US, it should be. What an amazing ride.
Smoky Anaconda
Silver Gate to Anaconda, Montana, 251 miles.
One of the (many) strange things about the way I travel is that I often don’t know where I will sleep, or exactly what route I will take, until I get to there. A lot of people don’t believe me when I tell them this but it’s true. I just kind of pick a general direction and start going. I am always fairly certain to encounter either a place to camp or perhaps a nice cheap hotel somewhere. This is a lot more potentially problematic in Latin America, or in other third world places where banditry, lack of infrastructure, or other obstacles abound. But more often that not it’s really pretty easy. Besides, in places like that it’s often impossible to call ahead for reservations, and what do you do if you encounter a problem on the road and can’t make it to the hotel as planned? Best to just wing it. Something always appears—the universe provides, as it were.
Sometimes I do have a friend house or some other destinations along the route as way points, but in fact I much more often find myself in situations that are unknown or unexpected. They are often routine or not worth mentioning, just another roadside hotel or typical camp site, but sometimes they are so interesting and unusual as to appear almost… providential. Which is how I made my way to Anaconda.
When I woke up I prepped my gear and was given a quick tour of the Ridge Riders Lodge by Julie Griffin, a Southern girl who’d come to work for the summer there. Rough-hewn and quaint, the old Lodge was built in the 30’s and supposedly a favorite of Hemingway, and may even have been where he wrote part of Old Man and the Sea. At the very least a flashback scene from the book "For Whom the Bell Tolls" takes place near there, where the main character, Robert Jordan, drops a pistol into the frigid mountain waters. Inside were a series of murals depicting native American life in various seasons. They were hung below the second floor railings, and were dated 1956. The story goes that the artist came and ran up a large bar tab and offered to pay it by making the paintings.
The lodge is nestled among the mountains next to several cabins that were built a few years later. The fire of 1988 nearly destroyed it all. The residents saw it coming and built firebreaks, incorrectly, and the fire jumped right over them. The old buildings appeared to be doomed, when suddenly the wind shifted and forced the fire up the hillside away from them. These historic cabins avoided destruction by just 100 feet! You can see the proximity of the fire by surviving tree line below.
The lodge has no heat, so it’s kept closed during the winter because it’s too cold. I was told the story of the time one of the employees arrived to open it up in the Spring, and his dog wandered off inside. A few moments later the dog reappeared, chasing a bear straight out the door.
Yellowstone park was stunning, but it had a certain sterile quality that’s difficult to describe. There were beautiful rock formations, tolkienesque craggy peaks and boulders strewn across the valleys (left there by passing glaciers no doubt). There were bison, deer, and bighorn sheep wandering freely. The animals had the run of the place, which is as always great in a park. As I rode along I noticed a ranger hauling a dead deer onto truck. I passed more gorgeous scenery. There were creeks with boulders the size of golf carts and SUVs inside. Every inch of the pristine cleanliness seemed too ordered to be real; like a Disneyland version of wilderness perfection, or a forest pretending to be a golf course. Bambi never had it so good. I mean even the dead are carried off so as not to spoil the view! (Or the bouquet.) Don’t get me wrong, the park is incredible and definitely worth the $20 entry fee just to ride through it, but it’s a bit strange that it should be so manicured and shellacked. Parks I saw in other places, such as the Teddy Roosevelt National Park, has similar attentions paid them by the rangers, but they somehow felt less artificial. I imagine that it must be incredibly difficult to keep a place that sees over three million visitors a year unspoiled, and for that I applaud them. Indeed, there is so much to see and do in the park that it’s impossible to see hardly any of it by driving through.
The fire of 88 hit Yellowstone as well, and there were hillsides with rows of burnt trunks still standing. Almost twenty years later and hardly a sapling has come up to replace the dead pines. Around the hills can be seen more of the semi-burned pine logs, strewn about like spilt pins. Strange that the part that was destroyed by fire and left to it’s own devices is also one of the park’s more natural looking places.
As I exited I passed a bridge over a the Gardner river, one more idyllic little gem in this over-precious park. Not far from there was a sign indicating I’d crossed the 45th parallel, the exact midway point between the Equator and North Pole. I wonder how many times in life we cross such places and never know it? How many times have I been higher than Everest in a plane, for example? Or for that matter, even more mundane things such as how many gallons of water have I ingested? It would be neat if when we die, we get to see a scorecard of all the strange trivia of our lives.
In Bozeman I finally picked up my cell phone, forwarded to the post office by my sister. I stopped along the road later and made a lot of phone calls, just because I could. Seventeen miles outside of Butte, along Interstate on 90, there were rocks that made strange shapes and bizarre images as I passed. Very cool! Faces, spines of dinosaurs, animals, bubbles, butt cheeks, bent knees, and odd art were all formed in the medium of fuchsia rocks.
Just past the continental divide I veered off 90 toward the mountains on smaller roads, hoping to cross over into Idaho and get that much closer to Seattle, my next planned stop. Along the way there were some signs. They read: Opportunity, 1mi, and Wisdom, 50mi. Feel free to insert an appropriate comparison here for yourself.
As the sun began to set I knew I’d have to stop soon. I was hoping to take the Shalkaho pass but I was advised not to go up there to camp because of the fires that had been blowing through. These same advisers also said it would be too cold to camp. On August 15th! How cold could it be? The latter reason didn’t bother me but the former did, so I took a room in a local motel for $50.
That was when I noticed the smelter. On the way into town the tremendous mountains of slag were readily visible from the road, but unless you’ve read about it, there’s precious little around to explain where they came from. And there’s even less to explain the absolutely monstrous towering chimney sticking up out of the hills. This was the former home of the Anaconda Copper Company, which is now shut down and is the assets and property are owned by BP Amoco. It is also currently the largest superfund cleanup site in the country. This whole situation may be best summed up with the back cover text of an interesting book called
Smoke Wars: Anaconda Copper, Montana Air Pollution, and the Courts, 1890-1924:
The copper mining and smelting communities of Butte and Anaconda, Montana, today host the largest Superfund cleanup site in the United States. Hazardous waste and companies that place profit before environmental concerns have long plagued Montana's mining and smelting industries, according to this provocative history of air pollution. Smoke Wars begins with the fight in Butte to abolish heap roasting -a process that created dense clouds of low-lying, noxious smoke and caused death rates in Butte to exceed those of New York City in the 1880s. While a hard-fought public victory forced smelters to end the practice, Butte's air pollution remained notorious until industry consolidation caused the transfer of most smelting operations to the great reduction works in Anaconda, twenty-six miles west of Butte. Smelting in Anaconda led to the second phase of the smoke wars -the opposition led, this time, by farmers in the Deer Lodge valley whose livestock and crops were dying from exposure to the arsenic and sulfur dioxide released from the tall stacks of the Anaconda Reduction Works. Finally, the federal government entered the fray -protesting damage to the national forest. Even the federal government was unable to force Amalgamated Copper—or the Company, as it was known throughout Montana—to control its toxic emissions. With lessons for the current environmental movement, this landmark study raises issues of corporate responsibility, the rights of citizens, the costs of industrialization, and the relative value of the environment, issues still hotly contested today.
Some quick questions resulted in being directed to a small park dedicated to the site. Apparently it’s not enough that the whole town is smothered in black hills leeching antimony, arsenic, mercury, and other nasties into the groundwater, but now the people can come and play right next to the poisons in a commemorative park to further celebrate the town’s glorious exploitation by the wealthy mining industry. Yay!
The smelting tower is colossal. It used to be the tallest stack in the world, but now it’s the second or third. It’s nearly ¾ height of the Empire state building, probably just as tall if you were to remove the Empire State’s spires. The Washington monument could fit inside it the smelter with room to spare. It now looms unused on the black hills like some gothic tower of Mordor. They don’t know what to do with it. The locals complain; some want it torn down, but the old-timers want to keep it. They tried to get people to come and do base jumping off of it as a tourist attraction, but all the high power lines prevented it. The town isn’t ugly, but it’s about the farthest thing from a tourist hotspot as you can imagine--although I did manage to get some pretty pictures. If you go to visit, just make damn sure not to drink the water.
Forrest Gump Has Got Nothing On This Guy
Miles City to Silver Gate, Montana, 255 miles.
I woke up and hit the road, riding past Billings on the main highway (94). There were smooth rolling hills with scrub that turned into sparse trees over eroded badlands, finally becoming beautiful carved rock from the Yellowstone river’s windings, hinting at the delights ahead in the park. I saw abandoned cars, cattle trains, and huge stockpiles of round hay bails laying around.
Along the way I noticed a guy walking the opposite direction along the freeway. He was lugging a bedroll and backpack, and looked more than a little out of place. I felt an overwhelming urge to talk to him and cut across the median and rode back towards him. He was stopped on the side of the road, shirtless, straw hat tied up under his jaw, his bags beside him. His face was tanned and leathery and he sported a bushy beard. He said his name was Mike Curry, and he was 59 years old. He’d walked around the USA for almost twenty years, from one side to the other. He used to have a place to go for a while, and would crash in his mom’s basement , but she passed on about ten years before. He said he doesn’t like to work much, and when he realized that he just started roaming. By then he’d crossed the country maybe twelve times.
“I used to go end to end but not much anymore.” He told me. He spoke lucidly, and seemed to have his wits about him. He asked if I smoked, and when I said no he found a cigarette on himself and pulled the filter out of it and began to smoke it. I asked him a lot of questions and he answered them all in a friendly manner. He said if people showed interest in him and were nice to him, he was always polite and honest with them. He told me tennis shoes are the best for walking long distances-he’d used about 60 pairs of shoes doing his walks. He washes his face and keeps his socks clean, but he stopped brushing his teeth when he was thirty. “About three years later I started having real problems.” He confided. “I got an abscess and it hurt for a while but after three months it went away.” He’d lost all his molars. “I probably chew my food too much.” He told me. “When my tooth hurt real bad I found a dollar and bought some aspirin. I took ten and you know what? It really works!” These days when he’s in pain he takes about six aspirin every two hours. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that an abscess can lead to a much more serious infection, or even death. By that time he’d moved on to another subject anyway.
“Every three four years somebody slugs me. Probably started with my dad, he and my brother used to hit me, not closed fist, but you know. My brother hit me once didn’t even hurt.” The police of various towns have hassled him, especially when he drinks. That’s part of the reason why he doesn’t go from coast to coast anymore. There are towns where he’s had experiences that have soured him, and he won’t go back. He got quiet on that subject and so I asked him about animals he’s seen. He immediately perked up.
“I was on Cameron pass, about twelve thousand feet up, going from Denver to Salt Lake and I saw a moose. He was as black as this bag,” he said, pointing at my Givi case. “They don’t stay that way all year, get brown you know, but this one was big and black. ‘Bout as big as an elk I’d say.” He also once saw a black bear. “He just walked up to where we were, was with Jim, this buddy of mine, and was working for the forestry service. It was us and a bunch of Indians, trying to make some money—I was never too good at making money—and then this bear comes up and sat down, tame looking as can be.” He moved his hands animatedly as he told the story. “He was watching us to see if we’d feed him. I thought about it but he could’ve ate all our lunches and not even been full.”
“I saw a rattler once, not much anymore these days they pretty much killed ‘em all off. Anyway I saw him in the road and heard him rattle and I kind “whoop,” stepped to the side you know,” He smiled a brown-toothed grin as he mimicked his little evasive hop, “and I kicked some dirt on him. Then I just walked around him.”
Considering Mike’s situation, I offered him some money, which he seemed very happy to accept. I also offered him some first aid supplies.
“Don’t need it,” He told me. “Never get sick.” Apparently he’d forgotten our conversation five minutes ago where he told me about his life-threatening tooth infection. But he was adamant. He wouldn’t even take some non-aspirin pain killers. I also offered him a small can of pepper spray for defense from wild animals, or from people. He wouldn’t take it. He didn’t even carry a knife for defense. “But I can give as good as I get,” he assured me.
I could smell pine for miles before I entered the
Beartooth National Forest. I was riding down the Beartooth Highway, a winding, picturesque passage claimed to be the most beautiful in America by Charles Kuralt. I climbed up the mountainside, but there was a construction crew there halting traffic. I waited on line to take the Beartooth pass. A guide truck led us for safety past the construction workers, along a curving switchback laden road that transitions from a forest ecosystem to sparse alpine tundra in just a few miles. It was like the Scottish Highlands up there.
A sign read: “This is Bear Country!” I had to admit with all the bear hype I'd half expected that they be lying in wait, ready to come pouncing off the hillsides to sideswipe bikers clean off their motorcycles. But I never saw any bears in or near Yellowstone. There was flat open tundra and moss, freezing cold lakes, and glacial ice up in the 12,000 foot peaks. I entered and then left Wyoming in about 45 minutes. A breathtaking ride. They were perfect roads until the top where there was gravel as they did the roadwork. What views. Saw several “whistle pigs,” a.k.a. marmots; they like to sun on the road. They look like a beaver with a bushy tail. They loves the high plains, and they whistles and shriek when you go by, probably to warn you off.
In Silvergate, just outside Yellowstone, I rented a room for the night when I saw a biker roll up on his BMW in front of the hotel. His name was Bill, and we got to talking. He’d been riding since he was 15, had a daughter, and had been divorced twice. He was taking a tour around on his bike, and seemed like a pretty nice guy. He told me that if I was ever up around Aspen to look him up, he’d let me stay up there if I passed through. I felt bad that he was going to look for camping,
as it was pretty chilly up in the hills. There was an extra bed in the room and I invited him to use it. By way of thanks he bought me dinner up the road in Cooke City, where I’d passed earlier and gotten gas. We drank and ate and played pool. We talked about what had gone down in Cody, Wyoming, the Hells Angels rally that went through there. The buzz was that some bikers had accosted the sheriff’s daughter. It sounded like the plot for a bad A-team episode. [I have since researched this incident and have found no mention of it. Must have been hearsay. This link is to the
Wyoming Highway Patrol’s official report on the week’s events.]
How To Goof Off In Montana
Killdeer, ND to Miles City, Montana. 320 miles.
In the morning I met Kip, a farmer that came up in an RV with his family to help some more of their family with the harvest. They said they’d work for about a week and then go home. If needed they’d come back later as well. He advised me to ride up 20 or 22 to see the badlands, a rougher area than along the main route and very pretty. I thanked him and said I would.
Rode out from Killdeer. Saw more flatness, just some pretty normal eroded hills and odd slopes. Huge sky. You could see over the horizon and then if the road raised up a little, you could see another horizon behind it. The sky had a certain
flatness, below which there was nothing. Above the line were clouds like cotton batting, scattered across a pane of glass. I continued North and then BAM, came around a corner to the incredible badlands scenery you see in all the cowboy movies. Now that’s what I was looking forward to, thanks Kip! He was right as well, I never saw anything like this along the normal route I followed later.
I stopped for gas and saw a nice new pair of deerskin ropers (gloves) to replace my worn-out pair and tried them on. They make an excellent warning to any deer with bright (or dull) ideas on the road. It's kind of the equivalent to a skull and crossbones in deer speak. "Oh my God," one can imagine the deer saying, "is that guy on the motorcycle wearing uncle Larry? Let's get out of here!" I also bought electrical tape to tape across the top of my face shield to act as a sun visor and also to finally fix the throttle lock, which had been causing me a lot of problems because of the fact that my throttle hand was getting more and more aggravated since my injury in Chicago.
I also noticed something odd… near the back of the store past the truck headlights and winch hooks and baling wire was a cooler, with Coca Cola or some other name brand on it. However, inside there was nothing edible for sale—quite the opposite. These were items that you would never want to ingest, but unfortunately most of us ingest them every time we eat any kind of farm raised meat. The cooler held antibiotics and vaccines for various cow maladies, for sale to anyone who wanted to inject them into their stock (or anything else for that matter) at any time. Most of us have to get a doctors prescription before we can take them ourselves, but any farmer with a third grade education can handle them at will, administering them to his property. And then that property can be sold to the general public for our consumption, with no warning or indication of just how much the food we are about to eat has been medicated. I have a new health care solution for anyone that may be interested! Yes, it sucks to have to go the doctor for your problems and co-pay $20 each time you get a cold (or worse, pay the whole bill if you lack insurance), but it’s cheap and easy to go to McDonald’s three times a day for some bovine antibiotics if you catch a sniffle.
I left the store with my new gloves and began working on the throttle lock. A cowpoke with his dog in the back of the pickup pulled up. He walked past and greeted me, and looked past me at a guy filling a souped-up, off-road 4x4, with rusted out wheel wells and a cracked windshield. It was leaking profusely underneath as he filled it.
“What arya leakin?” the dog owner said, one hand holding the door open as he looked back.
“Just gas.” The man said, and then fired up his truck and tore off down the road.
After passing some oil derricks I swung through the
Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I passed the North unit, but actually rode through South unit. The park was fairly deserted and I had the curvy roads to myself. The detour was a nice break from straight boring plains. I saw prairie dogs, wild horses. No bison. So far the only place I'd only seen bison had been outside the
Lake Ilo National Wildlife Refuge, near killdeer.
I entered the state of Montana and the scenery seemed to change the second I crossed the border. There were more hills and rolling plains, and less flatness. Montana is called the “big sky country” and it doesn’t disappoint. It has a really, really, HUGE sky. Just went on forever. The sky looked even bigger because the cloud layer seemed to sit higher up. The speed limit was 75, but I could barely maintain it comfortably. And on hills or with a strong headwind I was sometimes going less. In case you were wondering what it feels like to ride a bike like mine around the highways at these speeds, you can try this: go to your local Laundromat with about $10 in quarters and a box full of hammers. Put the hammers in the dryer and pay for 6-8 hours with a one-hour break for lunch. Set the machine on “tumble dry” and have a seat on top of the dryer. Let me know how it works out for you. It’s actually not that bad, and the tingling and numbness will progressively lessen as your body gets used to it. But I was beginning to realize that although my bike was an ideal choice for riding to South America, where many of the roads were so rough that it the KLR’s big suspension and other qualities made it ideal, here on the pristine, level asphalt the US there were few things more annoying to be found on the road than the constant vibration of the motorcycle itself at the higher engine rpms over many hours.
I stopped for more gas at a little station with a very old set of pumps. I didn’t walk right in to pay, and the guy inside came rushing out at me. I think he thought I was going to run off and ran outside to stop me. I looked up at him from my camera—he saw I was just snapping a photo of the pump, and he walked back inside. When I got inside I asked him about it, but he denied it, kind of sheepishly. “We need to go and check the pumps ourselves sometimes, to make sure the numbers are right.”Yeah sure.
I rode along further and passed a sign: “Home on the Range, Exit 7.” So that’s where that is.
Saw a guy riding up and over an eroding badlands hill on an old Honda 500 two stroke. A beast of a bike. For those who don’t know, two strokes are not legal for street riding, because of they have more unclean emissions in their exhaust. Four strokes, which use the same four-step combustion process as cars, are much cleaner, but historically nowhere nearly as powerful. These days the four strokes have come a long way, but until recently a 500cc two stroke could be compared in terms of power to a 900cc four stroke, the 500 came in a much lighter package. Suffice to say this guy was throwing a monster around on the hills.
I turned around to get a better look and take a picture, and the rider came up to meet me. His name was Jim, and he showed me his left arm. His hand was wrapped up with stitches, and the elbow was swollen and messed up from hitting his funny bone. Both injuries were work related; he puts tires on cars. He lamented his financial state. He traded a car for the bike and his wife was mad about it.
“It’s hard to pay the bills around here.” He told me. “You make eight dollars an hour and you’re doing good.” His wife worked as well, they had two kids they supported between them. He blamed his current situation on his past. “I goofed off too much as a kid. Nothing to show for it now.” If he did most of his goofing off by riding around on bikes, seems like time well spent if you ask me.
“I was on Cameron pass, about twelve thousand feet up, going from Denver to Salt Lake and I saw a moose. He was as black as this bag,” he said, pointing at my Givi case. “They don’t stay that way all year, get brown you know, but this one was big and black. ‘Bout as big as an elk I’d say.” He also once saw a black bear. “He just walked up to where we were, was with Jim, this buddy of mine, and was working for the forestry service. It was us and a bunch of Indians, trying to make some money—I was never too good at making money—and then this bear comes up and sat down, tame looking as can be.” He moved his hands animatedly as he told the story. “He was watching us to see if we’d feed him. I thought about it but he could’ve ate all our lunches and not even been full.”
A sign read: “This is Bear Country!” I had to admit with all the bear hype I'd half expected that they be lying in wait, ready to come pouncing off the hillsides to sideswipe bikers clean off their motorcycles. But I never saw any bears in or near Yellowstone. There was flat open tundra and moss, freezing cold lakes, and glacial ice up in the 12,000 foot peaks. I entered and then left Wyoming in about 45 minutes. A breathtaking ride. They were perfect roads until the top where there was gravel as they did the roadwork. What views. Saw several “whistle pigs,” a.k.a. marmots; they like to sun on the road. They look like a beaver with a bushy tail. They loves the high plains, and they whistles and shriek when you go by, probably to warn you off.
as it was pretty chilly up in the hills. There was an extra bed in the room and I invited him to use it. By way of thanks he bought me dinner up the road in Cooke City, where I’d passed earlier and gotten gas. We drank and ate and played pool. We talked about what had gone down in Cody, Wyoming, the Hells Angels rally that went through there. The buzz was that some bikers had accosted the sheriff’s daughter. It sounded like the plot for a bad A-team episode. [I have since researched this incident and have found no mention of it. Must have been hearsay. This link is to the Wyoming Highway Patrol’s official report on the week’s events.]
flatness, below which there was nothing. Above the line were clouds like cotton batting, scattered across a pane of glass. I continued North and then BAM, came around a corner to the incredible badlands scenery you see in all the cowboy movies. Now that’s what I was looking forward to, thanks Kip! He was right as well, I never saw anything like this along the normal route I followed later.
