Waking the Grand Wizard

Part II

Between 2010 and 2011, I was the Staff Judge Advocate at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The base’s legal headquarters was located on Forrest Road, named after famed Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. This, to understate it, rubbed me the wrong way. I attempted to change the road’s name, and was unsuccessful. My successor, one of my best friends and a black man, attempted to change the road’s name as well. I thought, shamelessly, there’s no way he will be denied. He too was unsuccessful. America, over the last few years, has dealt with our adulation of Confederate leaders, something that has always been an incongruity to me. How did we not see the dissonance in minority service members walking on parade fields, driving on roads, sleeping in barracks, and serving on bases named after men who would have them enslaved? The removal, tearing down, and defacing of Confederate statues was polarizing. Some saw it as long-overdue; some saw it as “woke” culture gone too far. That the latter would rarely seek to understand how these base names and statues came to be in the first place was, for me, frustratingly ignorant: Their construction rarely had to do with culture, heritage, or history. Rather, they were built and named in an attempt to pander to the Southern population and its politicians – most of the statues glorifying confederate leaders, or bases named to honor them, were in backlash to the Jim Crow era of segregation; in response to the Civil Rights movement; a barter to get cheap land for new military bases or more recruits from Southern states in the time period around our two world wars. History is not a monolith but a shapeshifter, and its true form often reveals itself simply when asked.

Two days ago, the Department of Defense released a list of more than 750 names at US installations around the world, all of which memorialized the Confederacy in some way, and all of which are under consideration for renaming or removal. Among them: Forrest Road at Fort Campbell Kentucky.

The below essay was originally posted February 1, 2010. It is reposted today in edited form.

Waking the Grand Wizard (Part I)

One hundred and ninety years ago, in a battered shack in a central Tennessee basin splotched by canebrake and bluestemmed barrens and teeming with dogwood, red oak, and poplar-treed expanses, young Marian, wife to blacksmith and subsistence farmer William Forrest, gave birth to twins. The couple named the second of the two children Fanny. The first, a boy, they called Nathan. Ten more offspring would follow, with an equal amount of tragedy not far behind.

William was unsuited for working both metal and earth. After spoiling his own father’s riches, William took his young flock to Mississippi to be closer to family, trying to alchemist his way from poor son to prodigal. He did not succeed. Nathan, now a thirteen-year-old, quickly found himself paterfamilias, his father dead from the residual effects of tuberculosis or scarlet fever. Or maybe the yellow kind. The color of one’s demon doesn’t matter much when everyone nearby is dying. Nathan contracted the disease as well, but survived. Five of his eleven siblings, his twin sister Fanny included, would not be so lucky. Possessing only a rudimentary education but already a sturdy lad, Nathan quit school and went to work to support his winnowed family.

Nathan was a resourceful, aggressive kid. At six feet two inches and a lean one hundred eighty pounds, he was also big for the times. A target, perhaps. At twenty he laid foundation for his future fable when he shot and killed two men and injured two others, all the brothers Matlock. Word spread that Nathan killed two of the brothers with a single bullet each from his two-shot pistol; he injured the other two after a bystander tossed him a knife. Apocryphal or not, Nathan was quite obviously a man of action. He took over his uncle’s livery and livestock business, married, moved to Memphis, and built an empire through dealing cotton, livestock, real estate, and slaves. By 1859, Nathan was retired and had in his possession well over one million dollars. Using the Consumer Price Index, that’s twenty-seven million dollars in 2010 money. Under the more bourgeois “Relative Share of Gross Domestic Product” scale, Mr. Forrest was worth a cool three billion, putting him just south of Misters Gates and Buffett on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men.

In November of 1860, America elected Abraham Lincoln its sixteenth president. Barely a month and a half later South Carolina, fearing the abolition of slavery, seceded from the Union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas quickly followed, and by April 12, 1861, relations between the Union and the seven Confederate states had degenerated to an armed stand-off at Charleston. Mr. Edmund Ruffin, a scholarly 67-year-old farmer from Virginia, attempted to speed things along by pulling a lanyard that lit a fuse which then lobbed a mortar round from Fort Johnson, over Charleston Harbor, and into the Union-occupied Fort Sumter. The stalemate thus resolved, the Civil War began.

Between April 17 and May 20, Virginia, Arkansas, and North Carolina seceded. On June 8, 1861, Tennesseans voted 2-to-1 to join suit. By mid-July, billionaire Nathan Forrest enlisted as a private in the Tennessee Mounted Rifles. Four years later he was a three-star general, had been directly engaged with and fired upon by enemy forces almost one hundred and eighty times, taken over 31,000 prisoners, cemented his status as World’s Greatest Cavalryman, ordered or condoned the wholesale slaughter of surrendering and defenseless black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, and uttered the timeless adage “war means killing, and the way to kill is to get there first with the most men.” Lesser known, but of great importance to this story, are his post-Civil War activities: Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Here is how I begin each morning in this, the autumn of 2010: I leave my house in Tennessee at 5:30 am, enter Interstate 24 at Exit 1, ensuring I stay left to avoid the tractor-trailers parked overnight in the narrow shoulder. I head west to Exit 86, now crossing into Kentucky, then drive south on Highway 41A amidst the closest thing we have to rush hour traffic as soldiers old and young hurry to morning formation at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Across the street from Jenna’s Toy Box, recently placed on the off-limits list by the Commanding General not for their extensive porn-and-bong collection, but rather for their equally extensive synthetic marijuana offerings, I make a right through Gate 5 and onto the army base. I’m allowed through only after showing my identification card to, more often than not, the contracted security guard and advice-dispensing Mr. Williams (staples: “Stay dry now!”, or “Keep smilin’, you almost made it to Friday!”). From beginning to end, the road at Gate 5 – Forrest Road – is just nine-tenths of a mile.

The nine-tenths is inconsequential. What is deeply troubling is that my office is here, on Forrest Road. The Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, the base’s legal heartbeat, its moral compass, the place where I spend at least sixty hours a week doing my best to lead, guide, and mentor fairness, integrity, and, hopefully, justice. I do so from my desk at about the half-way point of Forrest Road, named after a man who achieved vast wealth on the backs of enslaved black men, women, and children; dedicated four years of his life fighting against America; then headed up a new organization that would spend the next century and a half inciting violence against just about anyone who wasn’t white and Christian.

Aside from this short, nondescript road at Fort Campbell, Nathan Bedford Forrest is memorialized by, at a minimum, a town in Arkansas; a county in Mississippi; high schools in Tennessee and Florida; a park; a university building; monuments in Nashville; Selma, Alabama; and Rome, Georgia; over thirty historical markers throughout the state of Tennessee; and at least one figure in pop culture (run, Forrest). He is a favored Son of Tennessee and of the South, and is remembered accordingly.

What he does not have is any connection to Fort Campbell, nor to any unit ever garrisoned here. The famed Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division owe their lineage to, of all things, a Union unit from Wisconsin. No part of Forrest Road touches Tennessee earth. Nathan Bedford Forrest has no connection to the United States Army, even, other than taking up arms against it.

I want the road name changed. It is an affront, a blaspheme, a slur. A defile. A desecration. Sacrilege. Mumbai was once Bombay; Volgograd Stalingrad; Istanbul Constantinople. Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch; Miley Cyrus, Destiny Hope; Russell Jones (RIP) Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, Joe Bananas, and, fleetingly, the Old Dirty Chinese Restaurant. Entire cities and flesh-and-blood human beings change their names; it should be a minor inconvenience to rename a mile-long stretch of asphalt on an American army base.

I try. I marshal support, rally the troops, compose brilliant, concise, persuasive, outrage-barely-bridled emails. Like I’m a posh Brit: The condescension is there, but no one can specifically pinpoint it. I compose a list of people and places who might better represent our values and the 101st Airborne’s history. Colin Powell Road, Bagram Airfield Road, General Maxwell Taylor Road. I demur in my official memos, writing not what I think – Forrest was a murderer and slave-trading fuck and we should be ashamed we have a road named after him – but rather what I think will work: “The means by which Lieutenant General Forrest accumulated his great wealth is incongruous with the values and moral code of today’s Army.”

I’m told I need the support of the base historian. My previous experience with this gentleman was during a private tour of the museum, where he relayed to our group that the museum’s non-profit foundation used “wives of Special Forces soldiers as models for the female soldier mannequins because we couldn’t find any women heroes”. I present my case to him in his office, his troll cave, his shame attic. When I am finished he all but calls me a commie feminist liberal homosexual. Yesss, I whisper in my head, I am whatever fulfills your repressed, innermost Freudian dreams. Just support this name change. He does not.

I am unsuccessful in changing the road’s name. I submitted an official request. There was a vote, a four-to-four tie, and the garrison commander – the tie-breaking vote, a man who had previously assured me that he supported my efforts – voted against the name change. Forrest Road becomes my white whale. One wit in my office has hung a portrait of the man himself above my desk. Forrest’s goateed chin stares down at me for days before I notice him. I try not to hate him, to find common ground. I try to see him as someone else, someone other than who he was. He is reputation not reality; he is a caricature; he is simply someone fully human. I Hollywoodize him, seeing Billy Connolly from Boondock Saints, Michael O’Keefe from Caddyshack, Michael Keaton with a goatee. Any Michael, really, anyone other than this traitorous racist twit on whose eponymously named road my mail is addressed.

A Moose Is Not an Axe Murderer

High Times in a Pandemic

My small second-story West Seattle apartment feels palatial. It has big west-facing picture windows and a disproportionately large deck and a beautiful view of the Puget Sound and Blake Island, which is riddled, I am told, with raccoons that run the joint like baby-fisted mafiosos. Partially cloudy evenings produce sunsets unpaintable; on clear summer days, I am treated to views of the Olympic Mountains, the perpetually snow-capped mounts Brothers and Ellinor and Washington rising in the distance and, were it possible to get up high with the occasional Bald eagle and ubiquitous seagull (there are nearly ten species in my area, but they annoy me such that I shall deprive them of their individuality), views of the coveted Mt. Anderson. There is a western red cedar just to the north of my apartment, home to a multi-generational family of western gray squirrels; they taunt me through my sliding glass door as they eviscerate bags of Kingsford Match Light charcoal, the sturdy paper of which they use to line their nests. The tree is close. Its branches feather my deck, and the big trunk is near enough that I can spit water on it. The targeted squirrels, however, are quick like, well, squirrels. The tree itself lilts with the wind funneled through the narrow walkway that separates my building from the vacant house next to it, its upper deck at eye-level to me. Once I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink and a juvenile Cooper’s hawk landed on the railing across from me, staring at me through the window like I was the concave side of a Golden Corral sneeze guard. I gingerly stepped out onto the porch to take a picture; the hawk buzzed me with the audacity of youth, leaving me with a camera phone image of what was quite mistakably a wingtip. In short, my apartment is Eden in 850 square feet.

That is, of course, in non-pandemic years. In 2020 my apartment is a veritable prison, though a good one as far as prisons go, a place Martha Stewart might be banished to, occasionally furloughed in order to indulge in shrimp & pork wontons from Dumplings of Fury or complain – politely, as this is still West Seattle – that a highly contagious virus should not necessitate closing of the Whole Foods Hot Bar. Where, she might ask, is the humanity? My own humanity remains inside my apartment. Though I sleep in my room and exercise in my garage, the remainder of my life is spent at my kitchen counter. I prepare coffee on one side and drink it sitting on the other; I prepare food on one side and eat it sitting on the other. Here I do homework, read, write, and do work. I conduct conference calls from here, looking at the wall when I need to focus and then spinning around 180 degrees when the call has bored me and I want to look through the big windows at the life I used to have. I am the last man on earth. The world outside is nearly Armageddon, my figurative LoJack a combination of Covid19 restrictions and King County’s decision to close the West Seattle Bridge, the by-far-quickest way to get from West Seattle to regular Seattle, due to a “sudden change in crack growth rate”, which must be a confusing agenda item at urban planning meetings. It is as if Elon Musk has chosen my neighborhood as the experimental group for his Simulation Theory. And I in particular am the experimental group of the experimental group, as I occupy the middle floor apartment of what was once a three-story house. I can hear my upstairs neighbor stomping around like she’s the night watch at Riker’s Island; occasionally she waters her outdoor plants as if to drown them, the overflow coming down on me in a flash monsoon. Hearing her sliding glass doors triggers me into snapping shut my laptop and cowering under the roof eave. My downstairs neighbors are loud in a different way. They are ostensibly a couple. Her voice is shrill and grating, while his must be deep and tormenting, as I can only hear her steadily elevated responses that usually end in some version of “I (expletive) HATE YOU!” Later, through the floor vent, I can hear them reconcile, their consummation consummated by his deep, apneic snoring. They should probably choose different life partners, but I suppose that is up to Elon.

This is my life in late July when I decide I have had enough. There is a world to see, and in my humble yet eminently qualified opinion most of the best parts of it exist between the Pacific Ocean and the west side of the Continental Divide. I am going to see it. Or see it again, I suppose, and more specifically those parts of it I have not seen before, (mostly) those accessible by dirt roads and two-lane highways with narrow shoulders, where permits and reservations are less necessary and parking is free or cheap and I am less likely, I naively believe, to see a Sprinter van. I scour the internet for a rooftop tent (I find a Smittybilt Overlander shipped to me from a 4WD club in Stockton, California), buy literally the last bike rack in West Seattle (truth), and over-engineer a plywood and hardboard truck bed organizer. I cover the 3/4-inch plywood deck in discount outdoor carpet from Home Depot, then customize the interior with a place for a 20-gallon propane tank and a used Coleman stove; a compartment for a cast-iron skillet and a Dutch oven; and a longer section for fly rods that by cosmic luck perfectly-yet-unintentionally fits four six-packs of Georgetown Brewery’s incomparable Bodhizafa IPA stacked lengthwise. And then I decide to invite my ex-girlfriend along for the ride.

“Ex-girlfriend” doesn’t capture the essence of our relationship, but that is an adventure tale for another time. As a cross-country co-pilot, Elon himself couldn’t have designed one better. She is exceedingly entertaining, brilliant, adventurous, and unfamiliar, if I might embellish (despite risk of bodily harm from her quite capable hands), with the culture and ways of the wild American west outside the East Bay of northern California, a community she once described to me as her “small town” (her brilliance does not extend to population density assessments). I pick her up at the SeaTac Airport with my truck fully-laden, and from there we begin our drive to stop number one: Glacier National Park.

Our late start necessitates a stopover at Idaho’s Blue Anchor RV Park and Campground, an ominous beginning for the rooftop tent. We take a lap around the paved loop to find far more RV than Campground, an amalgam of decades and socio-economic groups; many have “Utility Task Vehicles” parked alongside, five-figure masculinity deficit machines that I had hoped, impossibly, to neither see nor hear for the next three months. Some RVs have picnic tables between them and their neighbors, elaborate Adirondack chairs and fire pits and Edison lights strung above them, and I wonder if I should have waited out the pandemic in my apartment. Upon returning to the entrance we are greeted by a very sweaty, shirt-unbuttoned, maskless, and – I don’t want to sound too judgy here – likely intoxicated gentleman who leans his head well into the passenger side of the truck. Like ostrich at a roadside safari park and I have the bucket of ostrich trail mix on the driver’s side far into the truck. Ex-girlfriend is holding her breath. The man assures us we can park anywhere and pay in the morning. We do not pay in the morning.

*****

As Covid has prompted every couch-loving, The Voice watching, suburbanite dweller to also go mobile, Glacier is booked for camping. We are instead headed south of Glacier, to Hungry Horse Reservoir and Lid Creek campground. Lid Creek is on the south side of the reservoir in the Flathead National Forest in Montana, home – to quote Recreation.gov – to “lynx, grizzly bear, and bull trout.” Lid Creek is far from the highway and, like most of Montana, disarmingly beautiful. We pass few cars on the long dirt road, the reservoir occasionally discernible on one side of us as we drive through a dense forest of cedars, hemlock, and pine. The sun is bright and the air is clean and quiet. In addition to lynx and grizzly bear, Glacier National Park and the area around it is “home to at least 1,132 species of vascular plants” – those with water and nutrients – as well as “804 types of perennial herbs.” Our reserved campsite is in-between two empty sites, separated by trees and a lovely trickling creek and surely several hundred varieties of the aforementioned greens. I back into the campsite, remove the tent casing, then use the attached ladder as leverage to unfurl the tent in all its glory, an obnoxious, accordioned, ripstop flag marking my occupation. I CLAIM THIS LAND FOR ME.

A rooftop tent is a glorious thing. Ostensibly invented in Australia, land of all things venomous and ground-dwelling, in reality it was invented 300,000 years ago when a man realized he could claim to be protecting his family by taking them to higher ground when all he really wanted to do was to feel superior (this was before UTVs). There are benefits, to be sure. It saves space. You don’t have to roll up your tent and sleeping bag every morning. The views are ridiculous. You are also potentially eye level with a moose.

I drift to sleep with the darkening sky and the moderate drop in temperature, contemplating the integrity of claiming this as Night 1 of Rooftop Tent rather than last night’s stay at the Blue Anchor RV and Campground (I did not pay, I decide, therefore it did not happen). Ex-girlfriend does not, apparently, drift off to sleep, as I am awakened by a whisper of some urgency: “Someone is outside.”

I do not believe this for an instant. Kind of. “It’s an animal”, I assure Ex-girlfriend. But my 300,000-year-old man’s instinctual hypervigilance to danger has also kicked in, because what if someone is outside. I keep my eyes closed, but am now coming awake and listening.

“How do you know,” she asks.

“Because we’re in the middle of the woods.” This is an unsatisfactory answer to a previous dweller of the East Bay.

“What if it’s an axe murderer?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “It is an axe murderer. He drove 32 miles from Whitefish, parked his car before he got to the campground, and stomped loudly through the woods while bypassing several other campsites to murder us – with an axe – in our rooftop tent.” She shushes me: There it is again.

I hear it. It seems uncomfortably close. I do not admit this. “It’s an animal,” I assure her.

“WHAT FUCKING ANIMAL IS BI-PEDAL”, she asks. I’m inclined to remind her that as a human, any axe murderer is likely to be both bi-pedal and an animal. I think better of it, but she’s also shaken me a bit. It does, in fact, sound bi-pedal. And it has now bi- or quad-pedaled its way closer to the tent; it is close enough that we, with held breath, can hear it breathe while it chews.

*****

In addition to lynx, grizzly bear, and bull trout, moose also exist in some abundance in and around Glacier National Park. The moose is the largest animal of the deer family, as well as the largest antlered animal in the world. It can weigh as much as 1,600 pounds, is a terrific swimmer, and can run up to 35 miles per hour. Goofier looking than a giraffe but less so than a camel (both one and two humps), the moose is also the only North American animal scientifically labeled, as a species, as “cantankerous” (trust me). They are herbivores, and eat leaves, bark, twigs, and underwater vegetation, and it is this knowledge that has emboldened me to declare that because our visitor, bi-pedal or otherwise, sounds to be absolutely devouring the life-sized terrarium we have chosen as a campsite, it is definitely not an axe murderer.

“It’s a moose”, I say.

“Didn’t you say they were cantankerous?”, she asks. I make a mental note to get a new word to describe a moose. I also offer that we are safe in our rooftop tent.

She counters. “Aren’t we at about its height?” We are, in fact, right about at the moose’s height. “It’s going to charge the truck,” Ex-girlfriend says.

“It’s not going to charge the truck.”

“Its head is going to come right through this window right here.”

“Its head is not going to come through the window.” I am now on high alert, because I know that a) a moose is, in fact, cantankerous, and b) its head could, in fact, come right through this window right here. At 6’ or 7’ feet at the shoulder, the moose – if it is a moose – could jut its protubering lips through the window and rest its flabby dewlap right in-between our two sleeping bags. We both are now staring hard out the window towards the sounds of uprooting and chewing. I decide to shine the flashlight to confirm our visitors’ mooseness, and there it is: a grainy, photo-negative black and grey outline, eyes reflective, ungainly head with lips churlishly moving laterally with every smack and gnash of vascular greenery.

“Oh my God,” says Ex-girlfriend. “It’s a moose. We should call 911.” She is serious.

“And tell them what? That there’s a moose in their national park?”

“Someone should know,” she declares. She is momentarily distracted by the fact that she doesn’t have cell coverage. She is genuinely considering calling 911. I need to pee, for which I must, of course, descend the rooftop tent. She is having none of it. “Isn’t your sleeping bag waterproof?”, she asks, not without condescension. “It’s like a giant diaper. Just use it.” I shine the light again on the moose to distract my bladder, but also to admire this beast, just a thin layer of canvas between it and the two of us. It pulls giant bunches of plants. We breathe. It chews. We lean closer and share an occasional whisper. “They really do look like the drawings on Moose Tracks ice cream,” she says. “Which would be amazing right now.”

We are quiet again, listening. On this rooftop tent, with its astounding views and self-indulgence and implied superiority, we feel small and insignificant and lucky to be a part of this cantankerous animal quite patiently sharing her meal with us. We watch, noses pressed against the window netting, hands under chins on our pillows in an elevated bed.

A few more moments of silence. Then the moose, head down and still eating within the glow of the flashlight’s nimbus, takes a half-step towards us. We are entranced, but her movement is reminder of this animal’s sheer size and potential power. “Do you want to share your almond butter with the moose?”, whispers Ex-girlfriend. “Because I don’t. Turn off your flashlight.”

So I do. We fall asleep staring through the tent’s roof windows, a Big Sky worth of stars above us, the sounds of smacking moose lips nature’s white noise. Eden comes in many sizes.

Song of Taos

The song I see when the aspen leaves

change the angle of the sun

before it touches my skin,

weathered,

and the sound of a wing whistle

from a red-shafted flicker

sounds the same as the wind

vibrating

over the folds of my hammock,

Is a song of reunion,

sang by high deserts and snakeskin belts,

and concrete poured over big sagebrush,

a foundation

overwatched

by new moons,

and the blood of christ,

and magi in the zocalo,

unbathed,

and the smell of piles of split pinyon and juniper.

High Desert, Open Road

Reno to Buckeye Creek

The ragged wagon train traveled east from Silver Mountain city, two or three families at the limits of patience and purse, turned away from Jacob Marklee’s toll bridge for lack of funds. Instead, they followed a double-rutted track winding down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas, a decade’s worth of wooden wheels tamping down and doubling an older single-track trail cleaved by iron-shoed horses and leather-booted trappers and over-weighted prospectors. And it, in turn, surely followed paths worn by thousands of years’ worth of Washoe and Numu peoples and, for millennia before that, mule deer and elk and moose and whatever other giant mammals descended the big mountains in the winter, leaving the sugar pines and junipers to find warmth and water amongst the aspens and cottonwoods and sagebrush of the high desert below.

Or at least this is how I imagine it, as I pump my brakes on the steep descent of Highway 89 from modern-day Markleeville – population 201, an increase of 13 humans (presumably) from a decade earlier – for Highway 395 southbound, paralleling the shallow West Walker River and leading to my next stop in Bridgeport, California. Highways of man and beast have always led to water, and surely always will, no more so than in the arid, mountain deserts of the Great Basin. And as much as I romanticize hearing the imaginary grind of wagon wheels on sedimentary desert rock, of feeling the pull and stress and sweat of oxen through leather reins in my hands, I also know no pioneer ever experienced the liberation of the open road, windows rolled down, left forearm burned, hand surfing the airstream like a backseated-child while the poetry of John Prine serenades through crackling speakers. I drive the switchbacks, the smell of overheated brakes intermixing with residual brushfire smoke and the inimitable aroma of wet sagebrush: There is nothing more nostalgic than the smell of the Nevada desert after a rain. No mind that I’m technically in California; the pull of my youth does not recognize mere political borders.

The last 180-degree bend in the road parallels a miniature altiplano, a broad, flat plain of scrub brush lazily funneling between two sheer, barren ranges, a glacial ghost. I can see for miles, a cloudless blue sky interrupted to the south only by the ever-soaring turkey vulture, an animal with a sense of smell so keen that gas companies unintentionally stumbled upon them as collaborators: Have a leak in your pipeline in the middle of the desert? No worries, look for the congregating buzzards – the chemical additive included in natural gas smells like decomposing flesh to a scavenger. A good reminder, I think, that hidden utility lies in us all. I pull over at the bottom of the hill to ease my brakes and to write a note – the image of “glacial ghosts”, I think, is a good one, and I don’t want to forget it – and see a jackrabbit duck under a sagebrush as an overhead vulture floats by, its shadow diving and climbing on the varied surfaces, a black flag unfurling.

Bridgeport Valley & Sawtooth Range

I follow Highway 395 to Bridgeport, a small town of alfalfa farmers and cattle ranchers and upper-middle class Bay Area alums who have recognized the value of clean streets and starred skies. And, also, the value in relocating to a new community but still in your own state, where the locals are less apt to complain about the “goddam Californians” moving to town and jacking up property values. I take Twin Lakes Road from 395 to Buckeye Creek where I will camp for the night, asphalt splitting in two the Hunewill dude ranch, both sides of the road containing cattle and horses, and tourists sentimental for less contentious times. I slow my truck as two men on horseback, wearing the weathered felt hats of working cowboys, no doubt rakishly handsome and impossibly polite, casually herd a cow and calf towards an open corral, the Sawtooth Range of Yosemite lurking like a Hollywood backdrop. Somewhere – everywhere, perhaps – near the tops of those mountains is my Tree of Life, spring snowmelt that finds its way east down the Sierra Nevadas, through creeks and valleys to the East Walker River, then joining the West, then through my childhood village of Yerington, Nevada, eventually dumping into Walker Lake. If it makes it there. Water in the Nevada desert is more precious than the state’s prolific haul of silver and gold, and the takings of men upriver, for hay and garlic and onions and cattle, has left Walker Lake 180 feet lower than before we non-indigenous decided the looming, people-eating Sierra Nevadas were simply too big to cross, and that this valley right here would do just fine.

I arrive at Buckeye Creek campground and am alone. The post-Fourth of July crowd is gone by Tuesday morning, though the detritus remains, waste overflowing bear-proof bins. I park my truck far from the sight and smell of the trash and restrooms – I’d make a poor gas-leak inspecting buzzard – and sit down on a rock. Then I listen: the ticking of my cooling-down truck engine. A slight breeze from an indecisive direction. White noise from the creek below me. A chirp. No, a peep. Condensed. Or abbreviated, like a short exhale from a squeaky toy. From my periphery I see the source, an athletic flash of movement from a camouflaged chipmunk, an animal so invariably small and cute that I am sure they must all die in adolescence. At first there is one. It is curious, and brave, though that is perhaps boosted by the startling quickness of this animal; I try to take pictures with my cell phone but it moves so fast the image is blurred beyond recognition.

Do not be lulled. They’re meateaters.

I unwisely throw an almond in its direction, and before the chipmunk can claim it two more appear from the edges of my campsite. They barrel into the first chipmunk, the three of them rolling around like a cartoon dustup, a victor emerging to take the nut into its hands, as big as a football to a child. And now there are more. Perhaps ten of them; they dart into and out of my vision one at a time, distracting me, sniffing at my backpack, the wheels of my truck, the picnic bench. I feel one brush against my bare left foot as I watch another in the opposite direction; they are probing me, testing my defenses like Zulu warriors at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, and I hope I am Lt. Bromhead in this reenactment and not Private Williams.

Amateur Night at Gethsemani Abbey

(Or: How I Unwittingly Prepared for Social Distancing)


“I am what I live. Don’t tell me who I am yet. It is still being spelled out.”

– Brother Paul Quenon

Fifty-two miles south of Louisville, among rolling hills of switchgrass and swaths of cut corn stalks and stands of uncut red oak and dogwood, near a three-way intersection of shoulderless, asphalt roads, sits a small, red-brick house. There is a grain silo nearby, and a faded turquoise water tower and an idle combine harvester in a fallow field across the way, and occasional, speed-limit minding traffic driving through cool late-February air so thin of humidity the birds fly and chirp in unmuddled joy. It is a scene ubiquitous in this part of America, in this time of year, these rural bucolic settings of west Appalachia so fungible a blindfolded local from six states around could not, with blindfold removed, positively identify his location.

Until: a mile to the north – along Monks Road – after a shallow bend to the east, down a small decline, and through the touchdown goalposts of a cross to the west side of the road and an elevated statue of Joseph and Jesus to the east, rises the sprawling, muted white, neo-Gothic compound of Gethsemani Abbey.

On The Road at Gethsemani Abbey
Gethsemani Abbey, Trappist, Kentucky

Ten years ago I read The Seven Storey Mountain, the monk and author Thomas Merton’s autobiography about his physical path from Europe to the United States and back again, twice, eventually ending up at Columbia University as a 21 year old sophomore, and his spiritual path from vice-loving atheist to Trappist monk to envoy for global humanism. Merton lived devoutly, not just in his Catholicism but in his attempts to find clarity in life and thought; despite living much of his life as a monk, and the latter part as a hermit (though not a very good one), he was a man constantly on the move. He delved philosophically into many things – I presume a monk has plenty of time on his hands – and was a man for his time, his writings and social commentary from the halls of an abbey in central Kentucky about the global issues of war and race and non-violence clarion call for two generations of men looking for clarity as to what America was giving them. Or, perhaps more importantly, what it was asking of them.

Merton’s popularity as a writer, philosopher, and social critic resulted in droves of young men turning to Catholic monasteries in the post-World War II years as well as during and after Vietnam, but Merton’s own brand of religion might be summed up, ironically, in what he described as his naïve beliefs as a young man: that all religions “lead to God, only in different ways, and every man should go according to his own conscience, and settle things according to his own private way of looking at things.” Merton dedicated much of his life to Catholicism as the path to God, but his philosophy and intellectual curiosity, along with his late-in-life exaltation of Buddhism (he died, alas, courtesy of shady Thai insulation, suffering a fatal post-shower electric shock from a ceiling fan in a multi-faith retreat center outside Bangkok) intrigued me as evidence that his early beliefs were maybe the more accurate. As Buddha suggests, sort out your own salvation with diligence.

Seven Storey Mountain didn’t move me enough to return to Catholicism, though to be fair “return” is a bit of a stretch. I often embellish the intellectual path to my contemporary agnosticism by explaining that I was “raised Catholic,” as if my childhood piety were interchangeable with “to do the right thing,” or “by wolves”, but to be honest my Catholic exposure was mostly isolated to the short time periods around my baptism (SUPER young. Like, a baby. And I didn’t get a vote); First Communion, around the age of seven, where I received the blood and body of Jesus Christ (ew.  And again, no vote); and CCD on Wednesdays during the seventh and eighth grade (where I first exercised my right to vote by stopping attending). Perhaps the most enduring of Catholic canonical law came courtesy of my grandmother, who assured me that my tongue would turn black if I lied, or, upon a slight injury like a stubbed toe, declared that God was punishing me for some moral infraction I committed at an earlier date. Or would commit later, or was perhaps simply just thinking of committing, even if I didn’t yet know when. That God is ever ready to balance the ledger by slamming my shin into my bed frame has proven far more practical than Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.

Who would tell that face he’s eating Jesus? And the hair looks exactly the same today.

What did intrigue me was this idea of going to a monastery. Of dropping out of society (or at least intentionally inserting yourself into a very different one) in order to contemplate some higher ideal. To read. To write. To wear a robe and Birkenstocks and take long walks, perhaps with my sleeved hands clasped casually behind my back, a precocious speckled fawn close upon my heel or a cartoon bird on my shoulder. To hum a Gregorian chant or two. Mostly, to just be quiet for a while.

Entering a monastery presents some practical decisions, the figurative shedding of skin and literal shedding of friends, family, worldly possessions, and even your name notwithstanding. Where to find a monastery, for starters, and then which order to choose. You might be familiar with the Jesuits, they of Georgetown and St. Joseph’s and Boston College fame (and twenty-four other major universities), or the perhaps less famous Franciscans (Felician University, anyone?) or even the Benedictines. But how about the Dominicans? Or the Carmelites? The Premonstratensians? Or the Cistercians, Carthusians, Passionists, Visitationists? The Friars Minor Capuchin? Or the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration?1One website lists more than 300 different orders and congregations, from the simple and descriptive “Grey Nuns” (no doubt an early example of reappropriation, old nuns taking the young nuns’ slur and claiming it as their own, “you know what, you…you brunette. We are grey and we’re going to start our own thing”) to the sanguinary “Adorers of the Blood of Christ” to the very specific “Camaldolese Hermits of the Congregation of Monte Corona” to the optimistic “Sisters of Jesus, Our Hope,” a name I imagine was settled upon only after a lengthy debate as to whether they shouldn’t end with an exclamation point, and whose recruitment material includes the assertion that they “live vows of poverty, chastity and obedience within a vibrant community life.” Hopeful indeed. Anyone? The names start to delve into the impossible, adorers of blood and regret and sorrow and other emotions, unlimited by the restrictions of time and space, spawning the unavoidable satiricals like Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption2http://www.ourladyofperpetualexemption.com/ or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.3https://www.thesisters.org/ Choosing the correct monastery can’t be a decision one takes lightly. And we are all human, so rivalries and jealousies surely emerge. If I choose the Benedictines, will the Franciscans forever look down upon me? Do I look better in grey or black (no one looks good in brown)? Are there dedication rankings, one order taking their vows more seriously, one more forgiving in their dress (you can wear jeans here brother, he said unironically), another more collegial? I once heard an Army general tell an Air Force officer that his career choice was “a fine alternative to military service” – do the monasteries have an equivalent? Will the Opus Deis and Brothers of Mortification of the Flesh4I made that one up. tighten a figurative cilice or whip a condescending discipline in my direction should I choose a more, eh, cool denomination?5“They are doing so as you write this”, says my grandmother from her grave. “Watch yourself mister.”

The choice was made for me, my selection of Gethsemani Abbey sealed when I read Seven Storey Mountain, and after a stop at Wal-Mart (bananas and energy bars), Hobby Lobby (pens and butcher paper), and Target (yoga mat and yeah, I know), I drive the 30 or so more miles towards Gethsemani, past an empty log cabin that falsely purports to be President Lincoln’s boyhood home, then into the town of New Haven (population 891), on whose outskirts I spy my first Confederate flag of the day,6There is a brute inside of me who fantasizes about mandating that every home that sports a Confederate flag must also hang an oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln near their doorway, and look him in the eye each morning upon leaving their home, and thank him for letting them live in America. This is not a good thought to have prior to spending time at a monastery. then beyond that through the aforementioned three-way intersection and then into the parking lot of the Abbey. It is mostly full, late-model cars and designer trucks and even a Tesla, but it is tranquil, and the few other people standing around the cars are quiet. I carry my luggage instead of wheeling it behind me and follow two hipsters also checking in, they with matching puffy jackets over flannel shirts and matching thick brown belts holding up their crisp Levi’s and sporting matching short hair and beards and glasses and matching weathered (one faux, one not) brown boots, a hipster uniform.7Moment of self-reflection: Is this me? Is this what I’ve become? Just another truth-seeking, back-to-when-life-was-cool hipster, destined to make my own shoes and use locally-sourced beard oil? Is this me? No. But mostly because I do not wear jeans. One guy has two drumsticks (wood, not chicken) protruding from his satchel, and I imagine him in his room air-drumming all weekend, a silent one-man one-father one-son one-Holy Ghost drum circle.8I like your cymbal Jesus! Or is that your nimbus?

The monk behind the counter is old and stooped and hoarse, gravity working its magic on spinal and vocal cords alike; he asks me if I’ve been here before, and where I’m coming from, and did I drive? He mischievously shames me for flying and then driving just from Nashville rather than all the way from Seattle, as if I’ve cheapened my experience already, and then spends what seems to be an inordinate amount of time deciding in which of the several vacant rooms to place me. He hovers over his ultimate selection – room 310 – long enough that I think he has momentarily fallen asleep, but then he pencils my name into the register in neat, uniform block letters, hands me my keys while I listen intently to his directions, and then at 4:35 p.m. on a Friday, after speaking what I hope will be my last words until Monday morning – “thank you” – I turn and ascend the stairs.


Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915 of an American mother and a Kiwi father. They died when he was six and sixteen, respectively, and he grew up in France, England, and the U.S., raised by his father and then an uncle. He was a smart young man, though hypersensitive, it seems, to emotion and unfairness and was afflicted (and concerned) by some extremities in his own personality. He smoked packs of cigarettes a day, drank profusely, spent time in jail, talked into the early morning hours with his university pals at both Cambridge and then later Columbia, loved women – he most likely fathered a child to whom he never spoke or acknowledged – and in general fully partook of life in the 1930s. Had he not died by electrocution, wrote a New Yorker article in 2018, “he might have died by overstimulation.”9Jacobs, Alan, “Thomas Merton, The Monk Who Became a Prophet,” The New Yorker, December 28, 2018. Merton arrived in the U.S. for the last time in 1935, enrolled at Columbia, and was eventually thunderstruck by Catholicism. He entered the church in 1939, immediately began exploring the priesthood, and after opening a Bible – in Latin, of course – to a random page, he found his finger falling on a portent: “And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place.”10Gospel of Luke 1:20. A monastery it would be.

Merton visited Gethsemani Abbey in April of 1940 and returned for good in December of 1941. And whatever Merton was looking for, I think I might be looking for it too, but in the obverse, not for a life permanently slowed, or one clarified by the regimented liturgical process of centuries of rigor and tradition and obfuscation, but a simple reset, a restart, a regeneration, a re-anything that might re-mind me of what once was, that time and place where I felt indomitable, and in a flow, as if in every moment lie the potential of something amazing about to happen. To find those things hiding the true meaning of other things, a stripping away of the things we know are unimportant, or those things we think are important but really aren’t but have somehow allowed them to dominate our daily existence. Perhaps just a continuing assessment of whether Maslow was full of shit. That would do too.


Room 310 is on the west side of the dormitory and down the length of a hallway covered in blue commercial-grade carpet, the last door before a set of large windows. I get a small shock as I insert my key into the lock, as I do each time I unlock my door over the next three days, surely my grandmother sitting at the foot of God, casting tiny thunderbolts in my direction, reminding me both to be on my best behavior and also who is in charge in the unlikely event I’ve forgotten, God no doubt now wondering the same thing.

The room is austere, but frankly much more accommodating than one might expect of a monastery. There is an open closet, a nightstand, an armchair, and a single bed with a bedspread that might be cut from the same heavy textile as the hallway carpet. There is a crucifix on one wall, with a desk and desk chair under it, and two pictures on another (stations of the cross, I think confidently, grateful there is no schooled Catholic nearby to tell me otherwise or conduits through which my grandmother might shock me), and on the bed are a folded towel and washcloth and a roll of toilet paper. I unpack, and breathe deeply, and close my eyes, and frankly feel just a tiny bit emotional because, for the first time in a very long time, I feel like I am doing something. Not “doing something”, but something. Checking a box, fulfilling a promise, lining out a list, exercising dominion over myself and how I spend my time and how I exert my energy and reminding myself that I once said I was going to do something and right now, right here in this old building in the middle of Kentucky occupied by men who, years ago, decided they were going to do something – I am doing something too.

I sit down at the desk and read through the daily retreat schedule, the words familiar – Vigils and Lauds and Terces – even if their specific meanings are not. In the top drawer I find a red folder stuffed with notes from the occupiers of Room 310 before me (“pilgrims,” some of my predecessors call us), and now the monk’s attentiveness to my room assignment makes sense.11I learn later that retreatants don’t leave notes in every room, and that the red folder in 310 must occasionally be emptied of old ones to make room for the new. The dates range from early 2014 to just two weeks ago, from a concise yellow-sticky don’t give up, peace will come to you to a six-page missive describing the writer’s every day at Gethsemani. Some are monotonous and boring, a few tragic, some meandering and uncertain; most are nearly-uniform tales of a search for some sort of internal quiet, notes written on postcards and grade school ruled paper and personal stationery, some in tiny, all-capped letters, others in soaring, beautiful cursive or written in thick fuchsia ink so thick it bleeds through the paper so I can’t read the other side.12I am momentarily derailed by the number of “over!” or “other side” – sometimes accompanied by a rightward pointing arrow – written on the bottoms of these small notes, as if paper were so multi-dimensional that lack of directions at the end of a clearly incomplete note would leave me searching about the room, overturning furniture and rifling through drawers and looking under rugs for the remainder of the note, occasionally stopping in the middle of the room, one arm folded across my chest and the other holding my chin in perplexion of where, oh where could the rest of that note possibly be? until a cartoon bulb lights above my head and I snap my fingers in realization: LOOK ON THE OTHER SIDE.  I read only a few, planning on pacing myself over the next two and a half days, and I resist the urge to immediately organize the notes into chronological order (sub-urge resisted: oldest to newest, or newest to oldest). I find, however, an OCD comrade-in-arms, NP from Parnell, Tennessee, who gives me permission; she rearranged them on September 7, 2016, and there are so many retreatants between her and me who are obviously heathens.

Dinner is served promptly at six p.m. My first meal is what appears to be leftover grilled cheese sandwich halves and broccoli and mushroom soup and a dessert of Jell-O. There are fifteen to twenty other people here in line, mostly men, one of whom asks, out loud, for sugar, and just like that my Totally Ridiculous in Hindsight Plan B: No Human Voices is gone (Plan A was for total silence, which was just a silly expectation on its face. At even the quietest times I could hear the dull thrumming of my heartbeat in my ears, let alone the church bells and road traffic and birds and wind and other humans saying offensive things to me like “hi” or “good morning”). Plan C, then, is reserved for me and is within my control, which is to just be as quiet as possible, both within my head and outside of it. And so I try. I pick my feet up when I walk. I pull my chair out with two hands, lifting it instead of dragging it across the floor. I pick up a fork, then a knife, then a spoon, one at a time so they don’t clink against one another. I sip my tea and chew and swallow and breathe like I’m getting stalked, like I possess the Secret to the Universe to be stolen from me should I make a noise and disclose my location. The phone and computer are already off, of course, and will not be powered up again until Monday morning (if ever!), and I Peaceful Warrior and Downward Dog rather than blaze through push-ups and sit-ups; I turn the pages of my books methodically and slowly; I curse the reading light for its hum. I find myself doing things with deliberation and intention, a slowing down of my motions, walking quieter, breathing quieter, turning pages quieter, pushing down the toaster with precision, feeling the catch rather than bludgeoning it into submission. I have less of a death grip on my pen, the vanity of the cursive of my youth returning over the hours as I write this that you are reading, or scrawl out a list of things to Google at a later date.13Who was with Buddha when he invited Mara in for tea?; who wrote “All-American Despair”; E.O. Wilson; is Jesus always looking in the same direction when depicted on the cross?; Viaticum; Samadhi; phrase “get up on the wrong side of the bed’; Midrashic; Goliards; do nomadic cultures have a lot children, and who can I blame for overpopulation?; Détraqué; Law of Polarity; difference between an abbey and a monastery; sub question: Do people have sex during silent retreats at abbeys?; sub sub question: If so, do they feel guilty afterwards?; learn the de Profundis; sub-task: learn te deum; Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican; why is there a w in wrist? wrong. wrestle. wren.; origin of the phrase “to square a circle.”; do x-rays detect water?; Fred Swaniker; Michael Emerson / North Park Univ.; origin of phrase to “go South”; any difference between a knob and a peak?; “tal vez me puedes ayudar” – correct?; Polonnaruwa; Demoniac; why did Sodom take all the heat? Can’t we commit gomorrahy? Or gomorrahize someone?; Franciscans v Ignatians v Benedictines v Dominicans; what’s with Jesus cursing the fig tree?; fleshpot; in spite v despite.,14I know you’re not interested. But if you’re curious: Ananda; Stephen Rodrick; the world’s leading authority on ants; no, but down and to the right is definitely prevalent at Gethsemani; the Eucharist when given to a person near death; a state of intense concentration achieved through meditation; the Romans, highly superstitious, believed that one should always start the day by getting up on the right side of the bed, and getting up on the left side – the wrong side – portended a bad day ahead; Jewish methods of interpreting biblical text; a group of young clergy who wrote satirical poetry; no. Probably pre-Industrial Age agrarians; an insane or psychopathic person; everything is dual!; though it’s certainly debatable, a monastery is the premature version of an abbey; I’m guessing yes; for sure if they’re Catholic; basically, Psalm 130; I shall add it to the list; the parable suggests humble prayer, alas, “publican” here is a tax collector, and not, unfortunately, a pub owner; “wrist,” like many other “wr” words (wrestle, wrap, wrinkle…) used to be pronounced with the “w”. The 17th century left the sound behind, and we’re still waiting to drop the actual letter; it’s a geometry problem – turning a circle into a square in a limited number of steps – doubling as a metaphor for the impossible; no; a guy from Ghana doing some really, really cool shit; a guy from America doing some really, really cool shit; though it may have to do with western notions of directions and symbology and degradation (south is always towards the bottom on western maps, which is the same direction as a plunging stock market graph), some Native American tribes used the same term to describe death or dying; yes! A knob is a peak or hill having the shape of a knob (though the University of Kentucky, for what it’s worth, calls a knob “erosion remnants” of an upland area – there’s even a “Knobs Region” of Kentucky (as opposed to the “Bluegrass Region” or the “Pennyroyal”)), a peak is the high point of a mountain or a ridge; not really, though it would probably get you by; the second-oldest of Sri Lanka’s kingdoms; one possessed by the devil; the curse, I assume, of being second. No one really talks about St. Paul either; this distinction is simply too long to discuss here, but know there are at least 39 orders and hundreds of congregations; this, like much of what Jesus said, is open to interpretation. Maybe he was just hangry; places that offer “luxurious or / and unrestrained pleasure or amusement,” or what my grandmother called those she perceived as hussies; use them interchangeably (just no “of” after “despite” please).

But the world is a noisy place, and the previously overlooked or ignored are magnified by the silence. Silverware, a heater, a microwave, a faucet, spreading butter on toast, sliding out chairs, chewing, drinking, throat-clearing, swallowing, zipping, ice in glasses, automatic paper towel dispensers, an elevator bell, a church bell, an alarm bell, breathing, sneezing, coughing, snot-rocketing, farting, burping…a flushing toilet sounds like a jet engine; rolling luggage industrial machinery; flitting warbler a forest monster of Grimmian proportions. But here’s the thing: it’s good. Like really good. And it’s infectious. I read, I write, I sit and listen to birds. Or the air. Or nothing. I walk in the woods, avoiding eye contact with the occasional other human being, lest my social contract with the world obligate me to say “hello” or “good morning”, instead offering my best attempts at, but clearly fake, Duchennes smiles with a quick, nose in the air ‘sup bro, I acknowledge you but I refuse to do so overtly head nod. And I did all this in silence. Or at least according to Plan C.15To be fair, I broke Plan C three times: The first time a quite involuntarily “hey little birds!” spoken to, surprise, little birds I felt were accompanying me on a walk. I caught myself mid “little,” quietly both toning down and tailing off the “birds” part, a clear moment of shame. The second was while looking out my fourth floor window at the garden below, a big Kentucky coffee tree (gymnocladus dioicus) center and something cypressy and equally big to the right. An American crow (corvus brachyrhynchos) landed at the feeder near the wall, forcing all the other birds to fly away, drawing my eye immediately to the coffee tree in front of me where a brilliantly red-headed Red-Headed Woodpecker (melanerpes erythrocephalus) hopped up the trunk, quickly, high enough to draw my eye to a Great Blue Heron (ardea herodias) flying slowly, dramatically, just across the tops of the trees, an Ukiyo-e woodblock in motion, the ridiculousness of the five-second sequence of events prompting me to whisper, “what in the world.” And the third: During a long walk, after I spit on my arm, prompting me to call myself a name I am embarrassed to repeat. And for about two days, free of the detritus of life in 2020-America, free of Instagram likes and Facebook followers and fake news-peddlers and fake news-accusers and fake-news consumers and Buzzfeed clickbait16“30 BuzzFeed Headline Tips You Need to See to Believe” is a real thing. and Phantom Vibration Syndrome17No, you’re not crazy. Your thigh or butt vibrating despite nothing there is also a real thing. and free of a TV or Netflix or a lap top or a cell phone or even a watch was, for me – and can be for you, too – a real path, to be trite, to freeing my mind. To quote George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic (and definitely not En Vogue) who was quoting Junior from Platoon, who was most likely paraphrasing Emmanuel Kant who was probably riffing on David Hume who surely borrowed from Plato who, we can all agree, probably stole everything from Socrates: free your mind and your ass will follow.18And after all that, Buddha probably said it first. So I freed my mind. And my ass followed. And it was good.19For the discerning reader: yes, I edited Moses. Using “very” in the sentence “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen. 1:31) weakens “good,” especially because the doer here is God. Is God capable of just normal good? As in, “that’s a good first try God! Now let’s see if we can do better.” No, he is not. God knows only “very good,” so using “very” is Moses just trying to pad his word count. Or so would say Mrs. DeGiacomo.


Rarely the same path.

It is Sunday night, my last night at the Abbey, my last night of Plan C. I can already feel focus drifting away, partially because I have spent a weekend reading and writing and most definitely not clock watching, and now I must get back to the real world, and I have a day to plan and a rental car to return and a plane to catch. I imagine writing a fake Airbnb review from someone who didn’t know what they were getting into (“incessant ringing of bells, guests unfriendly and hotel staff either nowhere to be seen or all together at once, boring church attached to the hotel – not ONE picture of Jesus!”), think about the proper amount of money to pay for my weekend of lodging and food (Abbey-suggested amount: “that is between you and God”), about whether I can continue what I’ve experienced over the last few days but IRL. Can I hide distractions, turn off my computer, un-install my Spotify for stretches at a time, leave my phone in the other room when I sleep? Can I communicate better, both with myself and with those important to me? I think of the language we use when texting, compared to emailing or writing a letter, compared to talking on the phone or talking face to face, compared to those things we agonize over when we want to convey the important-est of messages, and I think about the advance of technology and the absolutely mad rush of twenty-first century America, compared to the deterioration of meaningful introspection and communication, and how it has affected our expectations – and the expectations placed on us – such that we must reply now!, to the point where our smart phones not only suggest responses (“great, thanks!”) but we take them up on the offer. Haste has eliminated the personal, and like slow food that makes for a better meal, consciousness of thought makes for a better person, if I might only give myself the time. If we might only give ourselves the time.

“Tell me. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Mary Oliver


Pass it on: On the Road with Jose

A Country for a Shirt

Or: The Things we Trade

I am surrounded by Mexicans.

Thousands of them. Multiple generations. Old women with tightly wrapped, salty gray buns perched on their heads, simple black skirts down to their ankles; husbands and wives with painted babies in one hand, six-packs of Tecate in the other; teenagers gender segregated, the boys lurking and thick like thieves; trombones and trumpets and pounding drums; wire-frame bulls with spinning horns and tails, propelled by bottle rockets, carried on the shoulders of those in possession of higher levels of risk or machismo or, most likely, both. Many are painted like cartoon skeletons, some are costumed. In front of me, a demon in a grotesque mask has constructed giant bat wings that expand, violently, with the pull of a string; behind me, a man with plastic devil horns protruding from his head, black hair slicked back, his mouth a flame thrower upon the assistance of an aerosol can and cheap lighter. But for wooden stilts, he is entirely dipped in red, a Mexican Achilles.

It is Day of the Dead, and I am in Oaxaca, the beating heart, so to speak, of the Mexico-wide Dia de los Muertos corpus. Few nations are as festive as Mexico, and where death is normally a somber affair, Mexicans – the indigenous populations in particular – consider such melancholia an affront to the departed. Instead, remembering the deceased is a celebration, and celebrate they do. Day of the Dead is a mash up of cultures, the traditional worldview of Aztecs and Toltecs and other pre-Columbian Nahuan people modified by Catholicism imported from Spain, and where the Catholic-American Jesus of my youth looks condescendingly down from his crucifix, shaming me for nothing other than simply being alive, after a week of watching these celebrations I fully expect Catholic-Mexican Jesus to say guero, toss me up a beer.

*****

Mexico is, if I stretch the truth, home turf. My history begins at a crossroads in the San Bernardino Valley of southeastern Arizona, the Sonoran Desert to the west and the Chihuahuan to the east, the dusty American copper town of Douglas to the north of the US-Mexico border and, just to the south of it, Agua Prieta – a town named not for water dirtied by mining refuse, but because the indigenous Ópatas watered their animals there, leaving behind a muddy mess. My Irish-American mother, in the throes of labor, made my Mexican father drive us north across the US border to ensure I was a native-born son, a gratuitous trip given her own American citizenship. Destiny often cloaks bad information.

I lived the first eighteen months of my life in the small Mexican city of Cananea with my mother, older sister, and biological father.[1] The marriage was short, and though ties with the Mexican side of my family were all but severed for most of the next two decades, the gravitational pull has endured.[2] Excepting the 460-ish miles between Juarez and Ciudad Acuña, I’ve eaten in nearly every border town from Tijuana to Matamoros. I’ve absorbed the sun in the seaside beaches of Cabo San Lucas and Zihuatanejo, sipped coffee in the laureled parque principals of Guanajuato and San Miguel, walked the thriving metropolis of Mexico City, and took an astonishingly beautiful but equally ill-advised train trip aboard El Chepe from Chihuahua, over the Sierra Madres, through the Barrancas del Cobre, and ending in the small town of Los Mochis in the northern part of the infamous-then-and-now state of Sinaloa. I harbor an unrealistic belief that invisible Mexican DNA somehow camouflages visible Irish skin, allowing me to blend in as a vacationing Chilango rather than what I am: just another escapist gringo[3] from north of the border. But I never leave Mexico ready to go home, and in some ways, I suppose, I return south in search of what might have been.

This time, I have come to Oaxaca as reset. Mexico is salve to my chronic affliction to better define who I am regardless (it is fifty per cent of me, after all), but more recently, as possible cure to a more acute need to unfuck myself. I am mired. I have found myself unmoored where I thought I was permanently anchored: five years ago I was falsely accused of sexual assault.[4], [5] It was, in the parlance, a Significant Emotional Event, and one that revealed me to be pervious when I thought I was mostly im.[6] In Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kalk argues that trauma changes us fundamentally and physiologically (duh). The essential sentiment here is that trauma persists in all sorts of insidious ways, to include an elemental desire to go “home” in reaction to adversity, even if that “home” is a root cause of the trauma itself, and that understanding it as such can help to change the body back to its pre-traumatic form. Which is how, in some ways, I view Mexico. Though it is not the source of my trauma, and I spent little of my formative life here (and none of it memorable), it is my beginning, and the specter of it is ever-present. It bookends the first eighteen years of my life, marks the beginning of the end of the first important relationship of my adulthood, and now the middle, perhaps, of the second. But in Mexico I’m anonymous, and the country itself remains securely, and seemingly perpetually, in shambles. It is not lost on me that she is also perpetually falsely accused. Surely Mexico can sympathize.

Our vision of travel abroad frequently lacks precision. We can differentiate within our own country and culture – Boston is obviously not Birmingham, Boulder, or Burning Man – but America typically evokes a solo image in those who have not yet been here. The aerial towers of Manhattan perhaps, or the excess of Hollywood or the audacity of Las Vegas or the brittle utopia of Disneyland. But more than likely it is the singular but enduring spirit and optimism of the American West, where all is possible if you’re willing to put your back into it. For those who have grit, who work hard and take risks, who ingest the mantra of the “American Dream”. In America, persistence and confidence trump even stupidity. It may be naïve, but it works because we say so. Perception becomes reality.

Similarly naïve is our vision of Mexico. Though the two nations have much in common – both are vast countries with a diverse population and geography, troubled histories of invasion and subjugation of indigenous peoples, inspirational stories of rebellion and perseverance, heroic tales of the rise, fall, and rise again of national icons – our portrait of Mexico is not one of optimism and confidence, but of conflict and corruption. Perception does become reality, and fairly or not, Mexico is the bogeyman in our North American closet. They bring us our drugs, our cheap labor, our border violence, our tight-skirted jezebels and swarthy cinematic villainy hell-bent on defiling the American dream. But supply feeds demand, and history is not monochromatic, and Mexico fits this image no more than does an infallible America. If your fear relegates your forays south to the pampered and filtered seaside resorts, you deserve the vulgarity of the wet t-shirt contests, fishbowl margaritas, vomitous undergrads, and kowtowing, eminently forgettable waitstaff who await you. Better to buy American; give your money and dignity to a South Florida Johnny Rockets. But if you want better food, and better music, and the best-shittiest beer in the world, and you’re comfortable being just a little uncomfortable, then head south of the border.

My history begins in Mexico, but my history’s history, like many half-Mexicans, begins elsewhere: Spain. Before it was an empire it was an ebb and flow of kingdoms, but by the mid-1400s Spain consisted largely of the Christian crowns of Castile and Aragon and remnants of the Moorish Nasrid Dynasty located near Spain’s southern coast. The two Christian kingdoms united under the marriage of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand II, and in 1492 – a big year for the western world – the “last sigh of the Moor” was breathed when Boabdil, Abu Abdallah Muhammad XII, Sultan of the Emirate of al-Andulus, the last Muslim King of Spain, relinquished his capital city of Granada.[7] Just a few months later, a persistent, carpet-bagging Ligurian convinced the Spanish royals, after two years of lobbying, to fund his quest to reach Asia not by heading east, but west. Cristòffa Cómbo in his native tongue – Cristoforo Colombo in Italian, Cristóbal Colón in Spanish, and Christopher Columbus[8] to you and me – first approached England, then Portugal (twice), France, Genoa, and Venice before finally securing funding from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The queen, keeper of the Royal Purse, first sent Columbus packing yet again, but Ferdinand, after some discussion, convinced Isabella to take a chance. As legend has it he then personally tracked down Columbus, brooding yet again on the road home, to deliver the good news. On August 3rd, 1492, Columbus finally set sail; he landed in the Bahamas just two months later. In March of 1493, victorious in discovery if not yet in riches, he returned to Spain, leaving behind 40 men on the island of Hispaniola.

If history were a shopping spree, Columbus’s return to Spain would be Black Friday, and those waiting outside Best Buy’s doors at 4am were the young men of the state of Extremadura. Bordering Portugal (home of perhaps history’s greatest sailors), the region was impoverished but seemed to infuse its name – “extremely hard” in English – upon its denizens. The most famous conquistadors were from here: Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Hernando de Soto, Francisco Pizarro, and Hernán Cortés all originated in Extremadura, claimed parts of the New World for Spain as well as themselves, and elevated Spain into an empire while destroying, by cunning, violence, and virus, entire civilizations.

Of all the conquistadors, Hernán Cortés was perhaps the most ruthless. Of lesser nobility but also lesser wealth, Cortés left home at nineteen for Hispaniola to seek his riches in the new world. He spent a few years in Cuba, earning enough money and status to captain an expedition to the mainland of Mexico, arriving in 1519, most likely landing at Chalchihuecan beach in the modern-day city of Heroica Veracruz. He immediately took possession of the land in King Charles’s name, and as consolation gave the surely bewildered locals long-sleeved cotton camisas from Spain. A country for a shirt. Such is the story of all the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples, and the remainder of the Spaniards’ time in Mexico rings familiar: Cortés ignored an order to return to Cuba, burned his own boats in the harbor when he heard whispers of mutiny and retreat, and took on a brilliant and beautiful Nahuan mistress (never mind the likely rape, slavery, and sex-trafficking; for la Malinche’s perceived traitorous role in the defeat of the Aztecs, she remains despised even today). In addition to cotton shirts, Cortés and his men brought horses, and guns, and Jesus – installing crosses and images of “Our Lady” to replace Moctezuma’s idols to Tezcatlipoca and Huichilobos – and shed plenty of Aztec blood in the name of gold, King Charles, and the contemporary version of colonialism. Just two years after his arrival on the Mexican mainland, Cortés conquered the capital city of Tenochtitlán and defeated, for good, the Aztec empire.

For his successes Cortés was bestowed the title of Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, despite never setting foot in the state. If he had headed to Oaxaca, he might have taken the path I did from Mexico City: east to Puebla and beyond, then south towards Tehuacán, avoiding the Trans-Mexican volcanic belt – the Sierra Madre Occidental – and continuing on to Oaxaca, approaching the valley from the northwest, the city center at the north end, the small artist’s barrio of Xochimilco to the north of that, where I find an apartment for about $300 a month, the only as-yet-unrevealed downsides being the cockroach or two I kill daily and what sounds like an active silver mine on the other side of my bedroom wall. There is a church nearby, and a graveyard, with all its affiliated Dias de los Muertos noises, and cobblestone streets providing foundation for an urban minefield of unattended dog shit and the whoosh click whoosh click of handlooms and bread vendors on foot and moped, announcing their locale with a mellifluous cadenza of ellll PANNNN, and cafés with beans sourced from just over the mountains and, though I initially came here to be alone, my 23 year-old nephew is on his way to join me.

*****

History is malleable. Memories change, and what we witness is not even always truth. The strongest memories occur when an event, or the perception of it, coincides with emotion; physiologically speaking, neurons interact with other neurons in a synapse and release a neurotransmitter. Whether those synapses have a particularly strong connection – when an event and the perception of it meet with violence – helps determine the strength of the memory, its resonance dependent upon how often those neurons are reactivated, or how often that violent interaction is reenacted.

For example: In August of 1995 I was a twenty-four year old soldier stationed in South Korea and at the tail end of an exhausting one-year tour. As self-reward, a friend and I took a 10-day holiday to Thailand, where I grew an extraordinarily lame soul patch,[9] drank too much, and delighted in, courtesy of a London grammar school teacher, my first experience with the inscrutable self-deprecation that is British humor. In the early morning hours of August 3rd in Phuket, Thailand, I learned that my first siskid[10] was born in Nevada, but because we are centers of our own universe, my oldest nephew’s history begins not with him, but with me. Thailand plus first exposure to British humor plus birth of eldest siskid is, apparently, a particularly strong synapse (the violent collision of event and emotion), and that I get to tell my nephew exactly where I was and what I was doing when he was born means those particular neurons, from that place and time, are reactivated, at a minimum, every year on the second of August. I take great pleasure in re-sharing, annually, the details of this gift with him, and the best indicator of my pending dementia will be not when it appears I believe I’m telling him his origin story for the first time – I treat it no other way – but when I forget to tell him at all.

It is difficult to view him as anything other than a small object to hurl into the air, to regale with Army stories, or, in a most peaceful of memories, as one end of a game of long-toss, me in the middle, his younger brother the antipode. Yet now here he sits, wispy blonde sandlot of a beard, young mannish, across from me on the top floor of a Oaxacan cinder block house, barking dogs and fireworks and pre-Dias de los Muertos trombone-laden parades interlacing his nascent riff on the brilliance of Camus. An hour earlier he disembarked the ADO bus from Mexico City late but with a look of subdued pleasure typically reserved for lottery wins and first kisses. He is, in many ways, exactly the young man you would have predicted he would become. His sensitivity and conscientiousness as a kid has found traction as a young adult, and he not only emotionally shoulders the responsibility for the world’s ills and injustices, but has apparently determined that a personal sartorial style of “hobo grandpa” might somehow offer personal penance, weathered moccasin slippers and a heavy wool, roll neck Native American print cardigan a modern-day hair shirt. He refuses to buy anything new and has a shameful reluctance to bargain, yet still shows up with three travel bags, two of them surely lifted, under concealment of darkness and the neurocognitive effects of marijuana, from a Goodwill donations drop-off. I chalk his laissez-faire attitude towards planning, packing, and efficiency up to millennialism rather than conscious intention, and, in short, am ecstatic to see him here. Solitude is cool, but traveling with a nephew less than half your age is cooler.

He is a recent college graduate and current irresolute. Though he has professional goals, they are months down the road, and he is now more like a beach bum without beach; snow bum with neither snow nor mountain. Which is a good place to be. But where my nephew came for adventure and protraction, I came to Oaxaca as latest attempt at the aforementioned life reassessment. Over the last several years, I have learned a few things – both about myself and about others – that I thought I knew but really didn’t. Like chemistry, I understood the equations (sort of), but couldn’t quite internalize the process. Adversity was a world I thought I knew, but in truth had been more of an outside observer. And much like traveling, you never really know a place until you live there for a while. Now I’ve lived there for a while, and though the happiness line on my life’s bar graph has generally trended up, the TJ-promised Pursuit of Happiness has proven more elusive[11]: In the previous several months I have quit a job, quit a professional partnership and changed a personal one, and intentionally dislocated from any permanent address. The intent was to strip myself of all distractions and accouterments in order to better focus on the jing in my qi,[12] but an ex-girlfriend – part-time muse and full-time confidant – has offered up the alternative explanation that I actually like being sad. This is not ridiculous. Humans certainly introspect, but rarely do we take time when we’re kicking ass to revel in it. We’re far more likely to wallow in our sadness, and to do so solitarily.[13] Cortés traded a country for a shirt; here I am trading adversity for seclusion.  

However difficult it may be to refind purpose and happiness, negotiating a foreign country has always been easy, and is quite often when I feel in my element. Comfortable being uncomfortable. But learning Spanish is a different story, and it is a task at which I am resoundingly successful in failing. I wasted two years of lessons in high school, and could easily blame the Nevada public school system,[14] or the social Petri dish that is high school in general, but the fact is that failure was due purely to an insecurity in how really bad I was at learning what might have been my native tongue. No one likes to be perceived as dumb when apathetic seems so much nobler. With maturity and confidence comes the acknowledgement that both can be true; I am here in Oaxaca regardless, and I swear to dedicate myself anew.

I start my mornings at the A.M. café, a local coffee shop favored by tourists and language teachers, where I swap greetings with Ricardo the barista, my Spanish never improving but our handshake gradually more elaborate. I take my coffee to go, and walk the several blocks to the Instituto Cultural for my Spanish lessons, passing navy and white-uniformed kids walking to school; smoke-belching city busses; sidewalk-driving motorcycles; and lurid, exceptional graffiti of all genres, influenced by politics and irony and indigenous art and, surely, Banksy. The language school is on the sprawling compound of an old colonial estate, and though I see students of all ages and ethnicities, five of my eight classmates are older women, all from the Seattle area and unknown to one another. They bring cookies to class, take copious notes, and make no attempt at mimicking a Mexican accent. They all have innocuous enough sounding reasons for being here, and though they profess to be living their best lives, traveling the world with or without husbands or partners, I find their stories too convenient, and imagine them instead as drug mules, their “I’m retired!” exhortations savvy cover for what they are: carriers of Mexican black tar heroin[15] headed for the Pacific Northwest, where they will make the notoriously sedate Emerald City downright comatose. I create backstories for each, individual specialties and nicknames reflective of their preferred methods of violence, la aguja de tejer and la masa de pastel and la pellizcadora, all founding members of the upstart Pelos Azules gang and third only to the Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación cartels as most feared and with a wider reach.[16]

After class I walk the streets of Oaxaca City, a grid of cobblestones and parks and wide streets with narrow alleys and high walls and sprawling churches, quiet interiors in direct contrast to the boisterous exteriors of tourists, and street vendors, and indigenous buskers, the men often sleeping off hangovers while dirty children rotely squeeze and expand accordions behind an empty cup ready to collect loose pesos. There are weddings and comparsas[17] seemingly daily, and occasionally it is difficult to determine if they are one or the other, both loud and festive and musical, a riot of colors. I see one wedding – I think – led by giant-headed, 15-foot tall papier mâché bride and groom, closely followed by a coterie of dancing Mexican women in differently colored pastel dresses, all conservative but one, her with smile ignited and shimmying hips and a leg slit so high the mesmerized bystanders[18] focus on her and not the actual newlyweds, and if Oaxacan brides toss their bouquets, my money is on this girl in lime green. I am always perplexed at the sensuality of Mexico, home of the second most Catholics in the world, and Oaxaca does nothing to reduce my curiosity. Though it is famous for its festivals, food, and mezcal, I think “City of Necking Teenagers” must surely be the city’s slogan.[19] Parts of Oaxaca’s streets are connected by narrow arteries that open up into small squares, then disappear again on the other side, and counting the young couples, wearing matching school uniforms and so intertwined I cannot tell where boy stops and girl begins, becomes pastime.

There are several markets in or near the main square. One is dedicated largely to textiles of bedspreads and pillow cases and intricately embroidered shirts and dresses; one to touristy arts and crafts of hammocks, cheap lucha libre masks, and alebrijes, the fantastical and colorful Mexican folk art animals; another seemingly to the local delicacies of fried grasshoppers, piled into great wooden bowls, and stacks of dried maguey worms dangling on threads like fish on a stringer; they move and spin in the breeze, a mobile for baby ogres. But the largest market – Central de Abastos – is on the outskirts of town, and Sundays brings Oaxacans from all over the state selling anything that isn’t permanently affixed to the earth. Like many markets in third-world countries, the U.S. State Department advises I watch out for pickpockets, but it’s unnecessary caution: I intend to fill my bags, not empty them. Mexican markets are flame to my moth and, similarly, I go to them simply because the light is on. Central de Abastos serves as headquarters for furniture factory, fish market, florist, shoemaker, saddler, dressmaker, butcher, baker, produce, pawnshop, potter, mendicant and medicant. I walk the market without goal, directionless, moving more quickly only through the butcher’s aisles, where stinking meat and smoke and flies discourage loitering. By the end, I walk away with a dozen eggs, a pound of skirt steak, tortillas, a pint of honey, a pineapple, a knot of quesillo,[20] and six small avocados, all for less than $6.

The market is ringed with dilapidated and dusty maroon and white taxis, colectivos that make shared runs between Central de Abastos and the towns near Oaxaca; they announce their destinations with elaborately lettered village names scrolled across the top of the windshield. A row of food stalls align the pereferico road outside the market, small trailers with bar seating for four or five, stacks of meat on a vertical spit, slowly rotating around a natural gas flame; the cook expertly shaves off thin slices into a small flour tortilla and adds pineapple squares he slashes from atop of the rotisserie, catching them into the tortilla like a bartender trick from a campy chain restaurant. The gringas, topped with salsa and quesillo, are tacos dopamine, and my nephew and I eat them until we’re too tired to chew with our mouths closed. At night we walk the streets, intermixing with the comparsas and other tourists, watching young kids dancing on tall stilts and listening to trumpets blaring; they are the happiest of instruments, I think, because it must be impossible to play them quietly. We sip artisanal mezcal – a redundancy in Oaxaca if there ever was one – and yes, the hipsters are here. Mezcal is elementally local, and the best is harvested, by hand, either illegally or under restricted permits, from the mountains around Oaxaca, but hipsters have rolled in and made it bougie. The indigenous owner of a local distillery outside the city tells us he drinks about five shots a day, the first as soon as he rolls out of bed, while the bartender at Mezcaleria Los Amantes in the tourist district pours delicately with accompanying grandiloquent narration and tells us that one must drink mezcal “like you kiss.”[21] Regardless, and unlike Colombia’s aguardiente – literally, “fire water” – this shit is tasty.

My nephew leaves after a week, off to Mexico City where he will lose his wallet and identification, and then to Bogota and Cartagena, where in the surrounding jungle he will touch a bird or a cat or a wild pig and contract the local version of salmonella or jungle fever, completing a long thru-hike despite delirium and explosive diarrhea, returning to town on the back of a donkey, triumphant. I am left to deal with the unfucking.

I switch my Spanish lessons from the group setting with the Pelos Azules to one-on-one courses – again, the seclusion – with Manuel, a bespectacled twenty-something Zapotec who rides the bus well over an hour each way in order to attempt to teach me Spanish in a Oaxacan coffee shop. He is bright and motivated, and in between flashcards and oversugared coffee, we talk about the prospects of work other than language instruction that perhaps pays more, or even of living somewhere other than Oaxaca. Manuel is, in any conventional American wisdom, broke. He is married with a child, has no car, no savings, and lives on a small farm with his parents. He survives, in the most literal sense, day by day, and espouses happiness. Though I am not surprised, I press him. Studies have shown that though there is happiness in poverty – as there is in wealth – there is a threshold that corresponds with simple survival. What and when we eat; our labor as it relates to our physical and mental health; whether we’re able to provide for our families; or even to be able to identify a future – preferably bright – all contribute to our ability to be “happy”, whatever that means. I have my own experience with this level of poverty, and believe that not being able to plan for anything beyond the next paycheck alters us physiologically and, most often, detrimentally. But there is a higher limit as well, and the rich certainly experience inadequacies, and unfulfillment, and sadness, and cheating spouses and cancer and shitty children and a lack of purpose. What they don’t experience is a fear of losing a roof over their heads or an uncertainty as to where their next meal is coming from, or whether they should use their last dollars for gas money to get to work or breakfast for their children.

Manuel is undeterred. Money pays for things, he admits, and can buy security, but under no circumstance can it buy happiness. We worship that which we choose; some choose money or fame or time or reputation. Manuel chooses the present. “Purpose and happiness is where I find it.”

*****

The exterior wall between my apartment and the silver mine next to me serves as ad hoc soccer goal, three or four kids kicking a raggedy ball, piles of dog shit no doubt serving as impromptu defenders. An overweight boy is one of the few kids I observe wearing shorts in the temperate Oaxacan weather; he is the only one without a shirt. I think he must fancy himself the last real man in Oaxaca. He also unknowingly teaches me Spanish – gol!, yells a child; no es!, answers the fat kid – and that I can recognize present tense warms me. The past and future are simply simulations in your mind, I think, and the only real thing is the now. The future is pure speculation, and history is rarely true – or at least not the whole truth. For example, I was born in America not as a result of my mother’s heroic attempt to ensure my American citizenship, but simply because the hospitals were better there. She was not thinking of my future, but rather my (at the time) present, and the idea that my immediate vitality might be at risk if I were to be born in a subpar hospital. This is, I think, a good lesson. Perception might be reality, but it doesn’t have to be, and we can’t trade seclusion for clarity, any more than we can trade a country for a shirt. The trades we make are constructions of our own imagination, as are the things we choose to worship.

I choose to worship the present.


[1] Such a clinical way to describe one’s begatter, but what in lieu of? Natural father? Paterfamilias? Perhaps, given my ongoing attempts to learn Spanish and in a nod to Vice President Pence’s glorious display of mailing-it-in code-switching, my padre biológico.

[2] Even in dreams: Though most of mine are Daliesque – a few of the more memorable include switch-hitting dinosaurs fungoing rocks in my direction while I rowed a boat across Lake Shasta; crocodiles swimming backwards while swallowing my friend Ted; and a Bolivian marching band drum-and-fifing Jesus and his entourage up a Greek hillside switchback – some of my dreams are of such lucidity they effect real life. As in: I once dreamed I won the single sculls silver medal for Mexico at the 2004 Summer Olympics. I knew not whether to salute the flag or hold my hand over my heart; regardless, it inspired me to take up the real thing, and yes, you are reading a first-person travel narrative typed by the calloused hands of the Novice Division Champion, single sculls, 2007 Head of the Occoquan.

[3] Where are you from, gringo? Like the ferengis of Ethiopia or the muzungus of Uganda, gringo in Mexico is a ubiquitous term for just about any foreigner, and is not reserved for their neighbors to north. The term is Spanish in origin, and was intended for Greeks (griego); the Spaniards brought it with them to New Spain, where it eventually morphed to ‘gringo.’ Not to worry; much like “Canuck,” it’s not necessarily an insult. But have no doubt – you’ll know when it is.

[4] Such a vicious pairing of words, sexual and assault. No room or time in today’s world for clarification or elaboration, let alone consideration of evidence (or a lack thereof) or truthfulness of an accuser, or even an accused’s answer of “no, I didn’t.” As contrast, note that assault alone has become downright banal: Mayor Pete Buttigieg described President Trump’s draft-avoiding fake injury an “assault on the honor of this country.” Writer Mark Shea called Trump an “assault on common human decency.” The New York Times cited his “assault on climate science.” The watchdog group Common Cause has an entire website based on Trump’s “physical assault of the press.” The Washington Post cites his “assault on democracy,” and Rainforest Rescue blasts his “assault on US National Monuments.” Former CIA Director Mike Hayden wrote an entire book on it, and specifically Trump’s apparent “assault on intelligence.”

[5] No, I didn’t.

[6] Why are we only impervious? Can we not be pervious? Can we not be whelmed? Or plussed, gruntled, or combobulated? When I show mercy, am I not with ruth? Is my full torso not my riff? If I’ve dismembered a limb, can I not remember it? If I work for myself, am I jugated? Can I not be ept with my writing? And don’t get me started on ‘regardless’. Regardless, I love words, and remain fully gusted with the English language.

[7] In what is surely enshrined in the Pantheon of the Most Tiger Momish Things ever Uttered, Abu Abdallah’s mother, seeing him burst into tears upon one last look at his former kingdom, said “you do well, my son, to cry like a woman for what you couldn’t defend like a man.”

[8] Of Italians, Ligurians, and Genoans: Contemporary language refers to Columbus as Italian, but like his “discovery” of America, the truth evolves. Columbus was ostensibly born in Genoa, spoke Ligurian (though wrote almost exclusively in Spanish), and surely referred to himself as Genoese, yet even that is scrutinized – there are theories he was Catalan, Iberian-Jewish, Greek, Portuguese, Polish, Sardinian, Corsican, Norwegian, and – because why not – Scottish.

[9] “Who do we blame for the soul patch?” asks Vox. Indeed, whom do we blame? Despite the unlikely event one’s soul might escape from a leaky chin, a soul patch does not, in fact, patch anything. It’s just a shitty goatee abbreviated, and we’re all to blame.

[10] Why no gender-neutral English word for the child of a sibling? Why be forced to write “my oldest niece or nephew” when sobrino, or neveux, or the delicious but unwieldy geschwisterkinder will do? I propose siskid (or, if you must, brokid. Or sibkid. Or cuzkid).

[11] Important to note that Mr. Jefferson most likely cribbed this sentiment from Epicurus, a Roman philosopher who believed in the importance of living the good life. Despite dying from dysentery and a urinary tract infection (perhaps he led a life just a little too good) Epicurus was Epicurean to the end: “I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions.”

[12] The New World Encyclopedia has a more straightforward fix: move about 20 minutes a day, feed my body correctly, practice yoga or meditation, and to do something I “really enjoy every day!” Seems easy.

[13] Original sin isn’t disobedience but loneliness, and God is patient zero: Adam and Eve left his company for the forbidden fruit of knowledge, and he’s been punishing humanity like a petulant child ever since.

[14] College Media Network ranks Nevada’s public school system 46th out of the 50 states; Forbes, 47th; World Atlas, 47th; US News, 45th; and USA Today, dead last at 50. Fortunately, none of these sites ranked the states by percentile, as I don’t totally understand how that works. Because I went to a Nevada public school.

[15] Translated, the Mexican slang for their exported heroin is Mad Libs in reverse: little bomb, pitch, white, pretty, horse, bald, load, meat, tar, scrap, bubble gum, brown, cat, the correct, goat, powder, bark, tiger, white tiger, north tiger, glass, oaf, and “fan of coco”, and if taking heroin makes me feel like I feel when I’m watching the film Coco, I might consider it.

[16] Perhaps the real reason I fail to learn Spanish is a lack of focus.

[17] Essentially, a parade endemic to a specific neighborhood or extended family, with local musicians and honoring the neighborhood or family dead.

[18] It may have been just me.

[19] Distant seconds: City of Low Awnings, City of Dog-shitted Streets, City Where the Early Bus Avoids the Protests.

[20] Oaxacan cheese, or quesillo, tastes like Monterey Jack, looks like mozzarella, handles like string cheese, and was concocted either by the devil or a harried but genius babysitter. See it made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3nG0ef2xYc

[21] My nephew slams his before the bartender is finished with her instruction.

Incorruptible

Ukraine sits atop the Black Sea, a ragged-edged landmass cut in half by the Dnieper River running north to south; the Carpathian Mountains of the northwest slowly ceding elevation to the Great Steppe of the east. It shares half of its border with Russia, the other half split amongst six other nations, and though Ukraine is in Europe, it is also something akin to Oklahoma: bordered by Russia to the east and Europe to its west, it shares Oklahoma’s cultural and geographical androgyny of being something (Midwestern or Southern? Great Plains?), both, or nothing at all. Ukraine (European or Russian?), despite occupying roughly the same longitudinal space as Turkey, has the additional slight of being deprived Turkey’s celebrated transcontinentalism as the cultural and historical bridge between Europe and Asia; even in the midst of political upheaval and an oppressive government, Ukraine received more U.S. airtime debating whether Ukraine properly has a “The” in front of its name (it doesn’t).

Before the dissolution of the United Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991, Ukraine was more likely known to contemporary Americans as “the breadbasket of Europe,” an otherwise anonymous nation in the Soviet empire, along with Moldova and Belarus and Uzbekistan, popular only with anti-communists and geography nerds. The anonymity has only been slightly alleviated by Ukraine’s recent interactions with Russia. Like every other country between the Bay of Bengal and the Irish Sea, Ukraine has a history of conflict, and its own past shows that it has been populated and ruled at various times by seemingly every letter of the alphabet (Austro-Hungarians, Bulgars, Cossacks, Goths, Huns, Khazars…), but conflict persists even today. In March of 2014, Russian forces first occupied and then annexed the Crimean Peninsula in the south of Ukraine; shortly thereafter they supported pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region in the east. After nearly three years and thousands of casualties, a sort of status-quo has emerged, with Russian-backed separatists controlling two Oblasts (essentially states) on the east side of a borderline, and Ukrainian forces the west.

Russia’s occupation of Ukraine may have originated as a response to “Euromaidan,” a November 2013 student movement in Kiev’s Independence Square that sparked a revolution, since memorialized in the 2015 documentary Winter on Fire. Equally celebrated for its raw footage as it is maligned for the conspicuous absence of inconvenient details, there is a scene in Winter on Fire that demands our attention, a display of courage and grit and inspiration that Americans typically pretend is reserved for the fabric of our own national history and ours alone: a crowd of tens of thousands, listening to yet another opportunistic politician – this one Vitaly Kiltschko, a 6’ 7” two hundred fifty pound former world heavyweight boxing champion – attempting to hijack their movement with false promises and pleas of compromise, upstaged by a young rebel, a mid-twenties man who snatches both stage and microphone from Klitschko and, spewing frustration and spit and determination, says, essentially, enough. My brother died here on these streets yesterday, and if something doesn’t change, I am prepared to die here tomorrow. It is an emotional moment in an emotional film, and whether it depicts sentiment, truth, or truth as we want to see it – a condition we are coming to know in our own country – is irrelevant. It worked: the sitting president fled the country for Russia, the students of Maidan become national heroes, the riot police disbanded, memorials were erected. Life goes on.


 

Things change, of course – they always do – but a presidential exit and a new government is not always the remedy we think it will be. Ukraine remains a nation in some turmoil, but that is in the east. Today, Kiev’s Independence Square is empty of protestors, and my only struggle is in refusing the surprisingly persistent advances of a man dressed in a bear costume asking would you like to take a phony picture. His thumb_20161204_124915_1024Ukrainian accent makes “funny” sound like “phony,” and he has plenty of competition in Kiev, where potential abounds for pictures funny, phony, or otherwise: a woman with a hat matching the feathered heads of her pigeons, Roberto and Julian; a man with his own karaoke machine singing 70’s and 80’s American standards, panhandling for money not to allow you the opportunity to humiliate yourself on the crowded sidewalks of Khreschatyk Street, but for him to continue; brilliant, lonely violinists in the Kiev underground, including one in full camouflage; an interpreter uttering the incongruent yet ambitious sentence I will never stop listening to the Cocteau Twins. In my hotel lobby I see and overhear two Americans discuss, without apparent irony, the thankful end the new American administration will bring to illegal immigration, all while awaiting an introduction to their potential new Ukrainian bride (username “weeege” gave the same hotel a poor rating on Trip Advisor for allowing the girls at the “strip bar” upstairs to surreptitiously entice him with overpriced cocktails; the hotel – a stickler for detail – accurately pointed out that the business was neither a nightclub nor a strip bar, but rather a “cabaret”).

The love connections occurring in my hotel lobby aside, the best draw in Kiev are the orthodox churches, and none are more remarkable than Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. The tombs of this cave monastery sit under snow-covered hills on the west bank of the Dnieper River, just south of the Ukrainian Genocide Memorial and further south of the Undying Glory Memorial at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, an eighty-five foot obelisk that today overlooks an idyllic, post-communist, Grant Woodsian scene of sleds and snowboards. A blue sky backdrops a single smokestack, dominant alongside rows of residential apartment buildings designed in an architectural style best described as “ugly.”

20170126_081930
St. Michael, down with the mudras.

To be unknown is surely the safest path to undying glory, and time helps. The caves under Pechersk Lavra hold the preserved, mummified remains of more than one hundred monks, or “incorruptible relics”, men who spent the brunt of their lives underground in seclusion and are thusly relegated to it in the afterlife. I hope they enjoy(ed) satire, because for those who sought salvation through solitude, they are now objects of relentless adulation. The active monastery is the most visited site in Kiev, and neither snow nor sub-freezing temperatures deter tourist or penitent. There are twelve churches, some golden-domed, some ornate, and three underground; all trace their ancestry to Antoniy, an ascetic monk who, upon returning as a missionary to his native Kiev after living in a mountaintop cave in Greece, found his new digs to be a bit too elaborate. Antoniy moved into a four-by-four yard cave originally dug and occupied by Hilarion, another devout anti-socialist, and I cannot but picture a crusty old wild-eyed Antoniy as hermit crab, his unkempt beard indistinguishable from soiled robe, giant rose-colored claws protruding from gaping sleeves, patiently hiding amongst the trees until Hilarion, grown fat from years of eating defenseless grub worms and inattentive squirrels who happened by, vacates his earthly shell and scurries off for more comfortable surroundings to accommodate his growing backside.

Somehow this lifestyle below ground was attractive. Despite (or, perhaps, precisely because of) the cave, a diet of rye bread every other day, and only water to drink, Antoniy drew a crowd. Locals assuredly came first to stare, but then they came for blessings and advice, and his fame soon spread. Then the acolytes arrived. First Nikon, then Theodosius of Kiev (just one?), and in 1051, a church was built and the Monastery was born (the curmudgeonly Antoniy spent little time above ground: he quickly dug himself another hole, farther from the church).

The caves today have stuccoed walls, tunnels large enough for one to walk and two, just, to pass, but there is still no electricity. Instead, light is provided by weak flames from gaunt candles, some sconced on the walls, others held nakedly in the hands of the living. As directed by a picture pasted to the wall before we enter the cave, I hold mine with my palm up and the candle between my middle and ring finger as I follow my guide, who smells slightly of horse blankets and speaks to me in heavily accented English, down into the caves. She is informative and speaks without break, but when she answers my first question by simply pretending I didn’t ask it, I suspect she has memorized the entire pitch in English. Her devotion is not limited to delivering a quality, if not rote, tour: after ritually kissing the first three of what she says are one hundred twenty coffins, she tells me that I can make a prayer. I waste it praying that she doesn’t kiss every coffin.

The relics are incorruptible, the guide tells me, because the ambient condition in the caves is scientifically proven to be adverse to mummification, yet here they are, one hundred twenty men and boys, perfectly preserved, if one could only see them beneath their silkened, gold-threaded, ostentatious hats, headscarves, and robes, resplendent in purple and teal and aqua, a veritable-but-dead Prince Army. My grandmother would have called them “snazzy,” which, though ostensibly a merger of “snappy” and “jazzy” (and implying that not only did something exist so glorious that neither snappy nor jazzy sufficiently described it, but also that the word’s inventor was prescient enough to not suggest “jappy”), I am more concerned by the contrast of these luxurious fabrics with the sartorial choices of their ultimate icon. Jesus, I think, would not be impressed.

Several of the coffins contain two monks, and my guide says that they are brothers. Not brothers “from zuh same mudder and fadder” but “spiritual bruzzas,” which sounds to me like something else entirely, and suddenly the caves reek of illicit love.

This would not be unheard of. Though homosexuality in the middle ages was strongly discouraged (and it remains taboo in Ukraine today), that a monk might find love in the tonsured arms of another is hardly news. Ukraine has its own historical drama, in fact, in the 13th-century love affair of Evagrius and Tit (I am not making that up), a deacon and a priest who were joined in a same-sex union, had a falling out, an attempted reconciliation, and then a tragic death. At their wedding, the officiating priest said that God had “willed to bind” them as brothers by both nature and spirit, and that God should “bless your Servants united also that, not bound by nature, they be joined with bonds of love.” In short, if Evagrius and Tit couldn’t consecrate their marriage with a baby, let it be consecrated with love.

Were the “spiritual brothers” of Pechersk Lavra shown the same decency and tenderness as that shown to Evagrius and Tit? Or were they relegated to knowing glances, passing fingertip brushes in dark hallways, stolen kisses in underground caves? Immaterial. They are now bonded for eternity and share the twin bed of a glass-topped coffin, the lips of a million worshippers pressed upon their caskets amid the muted glow of tallow candles.


Havana: Life in the Open

The cry of a baby, the gunfire rattle of a metal whisk stirring in a metal bowl, the repeated gargly “ur ur urrr!” of a street rooster, the skilled pull of a bow across the strings of a violin, a vendor’s cry of aguacate, aguacate, AAGWAAACAATAAAY: This is a moment in time in la Habana, a life lived in the open, unsanitized, raw, smelly, loud, and beautiful.  Maybe.

There are two Havanas – the one the tourists see, with five-star hotels and personalized, top-down city tours in beautiful pink and green and candy apple red Buicks, Chevys and Fords; thirty-dollar meals in swanky hotel restaurants (cheap to the Westerners who patronize them, more than a month’s wages to those who work at them) teed up with live Afro-Cuban music at your feet; a good night’s sleep in a room with the luxury of glass windows.

San Miguel Street, Havana
San Miguel Street, Havana

And there is the other Havana, the city of two million people densely packed into every available space, building codes non-existent (or ignored, or simply unenforced); where clothes seem to exist only on bodies and balcony clotheslines; where the throaty rumbles of sixty-year-old American cars, held together with the Cuban equivalent of baling wire and duct tape, ply the streets in a non-stop parade of ingenuity and the failings of communism; where everyone is poor but no one starves, plentifully fed on not-again black beans and rice.  The inhabitants of this five-hundred-year-old city live life in the streets and without windows, the life private impossible, nixed by a condescending, paranoid government and a collapsing infrastructure that keeps the vibrant life outside rather than in, the discussion of whether this is a good thing or not moot, as that is a debate for the wealthy, people rich in resources or time or options.

Havana is unlike anywhere else, a city that was once among the most affluent in the world, first as a stopover for the riches of the plundered goldfields of South America on their way to Spain; then as an international commercial port connecting the Old World and the New; then as a strategic pawn in the United States’ quest for superpowerdom; and now the second-to-last vestige of a system that simply doesn’t work (congratulations North Korea, you win).  The tourist neighborhood of la Habana Vieja still exudes magnetism, but the remainder of the once-grand city invokes not the Fall of Rome, but Angkor Wat in the early days, every block littered with the viscera of colonial and baroque architectural treasures, many breathtaking both for their former grandeur as well as for their current distress.  Some sprout decades-old trees literally growing from their walls and roofs, yet all but the most decrepit still provide housing for the city’s residents.

To be a Habanero is to be communal, to have limited choices, to be resourceful, and to be really, really patient, because in Havana you wait.  You wait at a government exchange center to convert money (but not in line – a spoken “quien es el ultimo” to any gaggle and you instantly find your place in the queue); outside upscale restaurants for a wireless signal; for the hardware store to stock the part you need to fix your shower (mas tarde – “later” – always mas tarde); and, inexplicably, for ice cream, on the sidewalk with hundreds of others at the corner of L and 23rd.  The ice cream at Coppelia might be good, but the reality is that, like many other things in Cuba, it is good simply because it is the only thing Cubans know –  the nearly sixty years of isolation, despite being just a one-hour flight to Miami and with many Cubans having relatives in the U.S., has taken a heavy toll.

It has only been a year since President Obama eased the economic embargo and restored diplomatic ties with Cuba, and just over seven since Fidel (“the bearded one,” or, if you’d rather not say the name, a simple stroking of the chin will suffice) handed over power to his brother Raúl, and the Cuban government still keeps a tight control on the reins. But things are changing, albeit slowly. Twenty years ago Cubans could not rent out rooms in their homes to tourists; today casa particulares are the best and most common places to stay in Havana.  Eight years ago locals could not patronize the very hotels that employed them, today they can.  Four years ago Cubans could not buy and sell property, but today they go for outrageous sums that only ex-patriots can afford.  Six months ago, the town of Viñales, the third-most visited place in Cuba, did not have access to the internet; today the citizens wait in line at the government communications store to buy two-dollar an hour scratch cards they can use only in the wifi-zone of the village square.  And this in a country where the average monthly salary is just fifteen dollars, the equivalent of an American paying $490 for an hour of internet access.  The rest of the economy here is just as illogical: seventy per cent of the work force is employed by the government; cab drivers make as much money in a day as do doctors in a month; men surreptitiously sell coveted potatoes with a no-eye contact, whispered papas like they’re slinging crack on a street corner.  State-owned stores have limited selection, are poorly stocked even in those few things they are ostensibly supposed to have (get your bread at the state-owned bread store; your expensive powdered milk at the powdered milk and cheese store; your booze at the booze store), and have remarkably, though understandably, poor customer service.

Liquor Store
Liquor Store

At a liquor store I ask the clerk seated behind the counter if the sodas are cold.  She has options to inform her response, and could a) stand up and open the cooler door to touch the cans of soda; b) keep one butt cheek on her stool and stretch her arm the approximately two feet to open the cooler door to touch the cans of soda; or c) yell out for someone else in the back room, whose job is apparently to check for cold cans of soda.  She predictably chooses option “c”, though she does take my money and put it in the cash register.  At a convenience store (the irony), there are no five- or ten-peso pieces to give me my full change.  The clerk gives me a handful of coins and, after I point out that I am shorted, an indifferent shoulder-shrug.  Oh well.  Such is life in Havana.

If it sounds like I’m down on Havana, it is because I am.  Perhaps my opinion is unfairly shaped by my experiences:

A brief deviation, or, “That Time I was Detained by the Cuban Secret Police.  Twice.”

On a Sunday in the park across the street from the Santa Rita de Casia church in the residential Miramar neighborhood of Havana, Berta Soler and her Damas de Blancas sit idly on concrete benches waiting for mass to release.  They are dressed all in white, some two-dozen women, some holding small Cuban flags or umbrellas for sunshade; most carrying black or red purses and cradling a stem of flowers; each with a satin scarf of blue and white draped over their shoulders like priestly vestments.  In 2003, seventy-five journalists, artists, community organizers and the husbands of these women were arrested and jailed for anti-government activities; in 2009 sixty-four were released on condition that they immediately leave the country.  The remaining eleven refused to abandon Cuba, and though they too were eventually set free, Berta and her damas continue their protest.  They meet here every Sunday – have met here for the last thirty-three Sundays – where many of the women, hustling from mass services across the street, join Berta and the others in their circuit: up Quinta Avenida, east towards Havana to the clock tower at Calle 10 and then back again, where they sing a few songs and give a few speeches and then walk the three blocks towards the beach and into the waiting crowd of what they say are government employees ordered to confront and beat them.

I sit on the steps of the rotunda here, in Parque Miramar, as two men sitting next to me methodically fold and shred some papers into Chiclet-sized pieces and then toss them to the wet ground; a young boy plays with yards of Mylar tape discarded from an old VHS cassette, pausing only to take a piss on the steps next to me, the two of us making brief eye contact over a short wall that saves me from being splashed by his urine.  I wander the square searching for someone who looks like they might speak English, and find Antonio and Eduardo, who tell me the story of the damas.  I take a few pictures of the women, and then make my own way towards the beach, past a few parked busses and through two intersections hosting an abnormally large group of men and women sitting in lawn chairs, leaning up against fences, or standing around, as if in wait for something or someone.  At the corner of Calle 26 and Avenida 1a I wait, camera in hand, for a gap in the traffic to cross when a white Soviet-made Lada comes to an abrupt halt next to me, blocking my way only slightly but clearly indicating it is here with a purpose.  Two men casually dressed step from the car and walk, aggressively, towards me; one significantly larger than the other has his wallet cupped in one hand, thumbing out just enough of a cheap, laminated identification card that I can read the letters: DSE.  Departamento de Seguiridad del Estado – the Department of State Security, or the Cuban secret police.  He asks in Spanish for identification; I give it and tell him my far and away most commonly repeated Spanish sentence: lo siento, mi Español es muy malo.  He says reporter?, I say no; he looks at my Virginia driver’s license and says American? and I say yes.  I am a tourist and have I done something wrong?

I once read that when someone responds to official questioning with “have I done something wrong” you can be assured that he probably has, and probably knows it, and here I am now: I want to make fun of his trinkety government ID and his shitty car, but I know exactly why I was stopped, know exactly who he is calling on that ridiculous, dated push-button cell phone, and the fact is that I am significantly nervous.  A night or two in a Cuban jail would have no doubt been, in hindsight, a story of which I would regularly brag, but in foresight a night or two in a Cuban jail sounds less than appealing.  He tells me to wait, and then a similar white Lada pulls up, an immagracíon sticker on the door, and the big undercover DSE guy points at me melodramatically, as if there is a possibility that there is a second shooter, some unidentified man on the grassy knoll who got away, but here!, this guy!, the one in the blue t-shirt and blue suede Pumas, we almost lost him but for the shoes, that pair of analog LoJacks on his feet, here is your guy.  The immigration officer, who speaks decent English, takes my ID card and then we begin a brief Q&A:

What’s your name?

Jay Morse.

You are a journalist?

No.

What are you doing here in Cuba?

I’m just traveling.

Can I see your passport?

I don’t have it, I only have a picture of it on my phone.

You are staying at a hotel?

No.

Where are you staying?

With a friend.  Actually, a friend of a friend.  Actually, a family friend.

What is the address?

I don’t know it.

What is the phone number?

I don’t know it.

Do you have a business card?

No.

Do you have a visa?

No.

What is the address?

I told you, I don’t know it.  I only know it when I see it.

Where is it?

The intersection of 60 and 19.

Let me see your passport.

Again, I only have a picture of it, but here it is.  Can you tell me why you stopped me?

The question seems to have tested the limit of his English, because here is where we revert to purely the Español and where I have also regained my confidence, because he doesn’t understand the address, writes down my passport number incorrectly, and doesn’t seem to care where I am staying or who I am.  My increased agitation is met with bored, blank stares, and with the two undercover agents having driven away and this man’s partner back in the car, waiting, we have reached an awkward impasse.  The Cuban government accounts for about 70 per cent of employment here, and Cubans generally get paid very little; in exchange, they work very little (a Cuban friend told me of a saying: “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”) and even breaking contact with me seems to be too much of a chore.

But the interaction has done its job.  I don’t dare wait around to see if there is a violent confrontation with the damas (I find out later there is one), and I curse my stupidity in taking too many pictures, in talking to one of the organizers, in wearing blue suede shoes, in sweating so profusely even in the cool Cuban December weather that I could be tailed simply by following the water spots dripping from the back of my neck.  I am hyper-vigilant, and I take a long way home, stopping every few blocks to look around to see if I’m being followed.  I walk beyond where I’m staying and around the block again, just to be sure, wondering the entire time how this must compare to living here every day, because I start looking at everyone with suspicion, the young men across the street from my house who don’t seem to do anything but sit; the old woman on her second-floor balcony I pass by on my way to the third floor gym; the shirtless guy at the liquor store who, it seems, I now see every other time I leave my house.  Perhaps this is part of it, keeping the ignorant masses ignorant and the apathetic masses apathetic, this notion that you can never be sure who you can trust, or be confident to whom you can safely vent, even in just a moment of weakness, about some frustrating aspect of the system under which you live.

Two weeks later I am again detained, this time at the airport when I am trying to leave, and spend forty-five minutes in a dimly-lit back room with one man who asks me a series of stupid questions, prepared in ink, and then records my stupid answers also in ink.  He too asks if I am a reporter, this time I tell him “no” but that Cuba is making me want to be one.  Later, another man lazily goes through all of my belongings while five others, and a dog, look on; I ask one agent, who speaks English, why I am being detained.  “It is normal procedure,” he says, “just a random inspection.”

“Bullshit,” I answer, “I have watched an hour’s worth of people walk through customs without incident.  I’ve been to a lot of countries and I’ve never been treated like this.  So why am I being detained?” And now he is resigned, and beleaguered, and seems almost apologetic.  “You’re right,” he says, “it’s not random.  But I have no idea why.  Where did you go while you were here?  Did you talk to anyone? See anyone unusual?”

**********************

Everyone in Havana I speak to, or at least those with whom I feel comfortable asking pointed questions about life in Cuba, tells me to just not talk about the government.  Don’t ask questions, and don’t criticize.  I tell one man about my interactions with the DSE near the park, he tells me “it’s no big deal.  It happens to everyone.” But it seems to me to be a really big deal, because even with my view of Havana tainted by a giant undercover agent snatching from my face any rose-colored glasses I may have worn and stomping them into the eroding sidewalk at my feet, the city just seems sad, a façade of what once was.  Havana’s storied almendrones (because they are shaped, apparently, like almonds), the legions of vintage American cars Cubans use as taxis, are spectacular at first blush, but in reality they are the exoskeletons of ghosts, a conflation of American bodies supplemented by Bondo and spray paint and powered by French and Russian diesel engines, running on Chinese tires and controlled by German steering wheels with street-fabricated parts and accessories holding it all together.  They are appropriately tank-like, because but for a few of the major thoroughfares, Havana’s city streets are comprehensively pot-holed, an urban floor-is-lava playing field: touch intact asphalt to stay alive.  Giant grey dumpsters occupy some street-corners, though they are in the middle of the road more than they are not; where there is no dumpster, people just drop their trash.  On one street corner both the road and much of the sidewalk are simply missing, the telltale mark of a backhoe that simply scooped up a pile of accumulated garbage, sidewalk, road, and all.  They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.

I experience little of the stereotypical, though often validated, joy and vibrancy or love of life that one finds in other Latin American or even West African countries.  And where a traveler may often experience internal conflict in wanting a country to remain the same – the absence of technology and brazen consumerism is refreshing, but a rickshaw is charming only for the man in the back – I find myself wishing Cuba would change.  Quickly.

The Other Cubans

The Artist:  The century-old brick and plaster house is both drunk with her art and testimonial to her resourcefulness; old keys for branches and buttons for windows and screws and stamps and hasps and beans and a surfboard tip for a mountain and driftwood machetes and the metal handles from black binder clips depicting what is unmistakably Mary cradling baby Jesus. Her canvas is never canvas – too hard to come by – and she instead uses wood and cardboard and old skateboard decks and the reverse of old posters, anything that will hold paint and ink and glue.  The ArtistI watch as she quickly cranks out three cityscapes, each with a brightly colored Cuban flag, buildings in varying stages of disrepair, and a more subtly drawn slogan, propaganda either for or against, the choice in the eye of the beholder.  She wants everyone to know that the beautiful buildings in Old Havana – her inspiration – are falling down, but she feels stagnated by the times, and everything looks today like it did yesterday like it did fifty years ago.  “Nothing is new,” she says.  “I think the muse is on vacation.”

Las Damas de BlancasThe Marcher: In 2003 seventy-five artists, journalists, community organizers and husbands were arrested and jailed for their anti-government activities; sixty-four were released in 2009 on condition that they immediately leave the country. The eleven remaining refused to abandon Cuba, and though they too were eventually released, their struggle continues.  For the last thirty-three Sundays, Berta Soler and her Damas de Blancas have met here, outside the Santa Rita de Casia church, where they protest their husband’s imprisonment by making one circuit up la Quinta Avenida to 16th Street and back again, then walk the three blocks to the beach where they are met, violently, by what they say are government employees ordered to confront and beat them.  And next Sunday? “We do it again.”

The Musician: The Malecón is a ten kilometer stretch of seaside road from Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta west to the Rio Almendares; dilapidated and ever-deteriorating buildings to the south and black coral rock breakers and a concrete wall to the north, Tromboniststorms above the Straits of Florida occasionally bringing waves so violent they smash against the seawall, flood the road, and drench the buildings beyond it.  Upon the wall sits a lonely, solitary figure with not a tourist in sight; a Miami Heat hat on his head and a trombone pressed so tightly against his lips his knuckles turn white.  Armando is a professional, he says, but lost several of his teeth to disease – he shows me his dentures – and now is practicing just to get back to where he used to be.  He plays three songs, All of Me, Memories, and the last, as I’m walking away, Yesterday, the significance of the last amplified by the supporting band of crashing waves, old cars, and history.


el CombatienteEl Combatiente
:
 On December 2, 1956, a twenty-nine year old Fidel Castro and eighty-one other men crash-landed the yacht Granma at Playa las Coloradas and changed Cuba forever. Francisco was eventually there too, a young man tired of Ferdinand Batista’s thuggery and wanting change.  Of the twenty-four men in his small unit, twenty are still alive today, on the 59th Anniversary of Castro’s landing.  Now Francisco sits on the sidewalk outside his house in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana, where he meticulously scrawls out orders for his wife’s pan con perro, pan con mayonesa, and pan con croquetas and unsuccessfully cajoles her, twenty-five years his junior, into posing for a photograph.  ¡Vive Cuba!

The Boxer: In Barcelona in 1992 Héctor Vinent Cháron won an Olympic gold medal in the light welterweight division; he did it again in Atlanta in 1996. He boxed at the same Olympics as Oscar De La Hoya (reported net worth of more than $700 million), Gimnasio de BoxeoFloyd Mayweather ($500 million), Antonio Tarver ($10 million), David Reid, and Eric Griffin; and beat Sugar Shane Mosley ($10 million), David Diaz ($15 million) Stevie Johnston, and Fernando Vargas. Ring Magazine lists Héctor as the fifth best Olympic boxer of all time; today he sits on crumbling steps in an empty doorway across the street from the Rafael Trejo gym in old Havana, a stopwatch and whistle hanging around his neck.  He trains a few locals, his son, and the occasional drop-in tourist, and keeps ready a dog-eared folder full of pictures – him with Sugar Shane Mosley, him carrying Teófilo Stevenson’s casket, him fighting in Biloxi, Mississippi – and old computer printouts showing the brackets from his Olympic and World Championships.  He shows me a picture of his dresser at his mom’s house, stacked with trophies surrounded by medals; in one corner, an Olympic gold.

Frank, Playa Setente IIThe SurferThe surf along Playa Setenta is frequent and breaks both ways, but one man is selective.  He catches waves half as often as everyone around him but rides them twice as long.  He’s a dolphin trainer, tall-building painter, window-washer, rock climber, skate-boarder, champion BMXer, and part-time model, but the waves are what he lives for.  He is, surely, the best body-boarder, stand-up paddler, and surfer on the island, and though his uniform of board shorts, flip-flops, tank top and knock-off Wayfarers would place him anonymously on any surf spot in the world, Cuba is where he will stay.  For now.

The Campesino: All seventy-eight years of Angel’s life have been on this small plot of land adjacent to the Valle de Viñales National Park, where the campesino grows sweet potatoes, zucchini, avocados, corn, and coffee Angel the Campesinoplanted so sparsely and randomly intermixed with the lush, natural vegetation that he has to hold the plants in his hands before I can see them.  An “hola” and a smile turns into a forty-five minute discussion on family, farming, hurricanes, coffee (Brazilian is the best but he’s willing to change his mind), tourists, sons and pants – the former of which he has three; the latter, one. “Farming is hard and I wish I had more money.  But I have this view every day.”