Tag: adventure writing

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Eating the Dead, Dancing with the Living

Cassiani de Cassiani’s face is beaded with sweat but his smile remains steady through the regular wipings of his forehead.  Whichever of Colombia’s 314 ecosystems we presently occupy on this dirt road sixty kilometers south of Cartagena is tyrannical.  We are standing on the main street of San Basilio de Palenque, the first freed-slave city in the Americas and the last one still in existence, and my shirt is soaked.  The heat and humidity is causing me to hallucinate.  A man limps towards us, alone, a dwarf and a cripple wearing a cocked baseball hat and a basketball jersey and his face smeared white, the constant base beats of Palenque music coming from the gathering of local men sitting on a porch down the road behind him seemingly urging him forward.  He pays us no mind, slurring loudly but in an unrecognizable language as he walks past.  This village has done its best to resist outside influences for the last four hundred years, and today will be no different.

Cassiani and Alberto
Benkos, Cassiani and Alberto

Most of the following is probably true: Sometime in the late 1500’s, Benkos Biohó, an African island king, was seized by a Portuguese slave dealer off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, sold to a middle-man with the last name of Palacios, then deposited on the fortified walls of Cartagena and sold to a Spaniard.  Benkos quickly decided to forge his own path, organizing an escape with ten other slaves and making his way to the swamps and low mountains west of the Magdalena River and south of Cartagena.  He founded the Village of the Cimmarróns, organized an army, helped to free other slaves, and repelled the forces of the King of Spain, making the Hollywood transition from a minor island monarch to a major pain in the ass for the Spanish one.  But the best tales of heroism end with martyrdom, and Benkos Biohó, liberator of slaves, King of Handguns, and idol for generations, was duped into peace by the governor of Cartagena.  In 1621, after walking ignorantly carefree through the city streets, Benkos was caught, hung and quartered.  Today his statue stands in the San Basilio de Palenque main square, his back to Cartagena and his unshackled arms stretching out towards the west coast of Africa.

But his memory is strong, and San Basilio today is an economically depressed but culturally enriched town of about 3,000, most of them direct descendants of slaves brought to Colombia from Angola and Congo.  Benkos selected the area for its defensibility and others found it by following maps woven into women’s hair; we drive the sixty kilometers in a rental car, stopping for two legitimate toll booths and, after an unplanned diversion into a roadside village, three illegitimate ones, set up by entrepreneurial youths stringing ribbon across the road.  Eventually a large brown sign on the side of the highway directs travelers to San Basilio, along a long dirt road that ends in the village itself.  We park in the main square and next to a church with a stained glass window depicting not only a historically inaccurate and ironically white Jesus, but one who looks as if he’s been conjured up by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Of two men lounging under a gazebo and out of the sun, Cassiani de Cassiani is the quicker to his feet and far more amiable, and though he speaks only Spanish and Palenquero (a Creole mix of Bantu, Spanish, and maybe some Portuguese), he assures us he has an English-speaking friend.  We hire Cassiani as our guide for the day, and after picking up Alberto, whose “English” consists of a few recognizable words ineffectually mixed in with other sounds, Cassiani takes us on a walking tour and oral history of San Basilio.

South Park Jesus
South Park Jesus

Aside from the aforementioned Benkos Biohó and the foundations of the Palenque, Cassiani shows us the creek where the women still wash clothes and talk; shares that polygamy is practiced and that he has three wives; tells us of the importance of music in both current affairs (he is dancing or singing more often than he is not) and the role it played in defending the city in the early years; and describes the intense and lengthy funeral ritual of the Palenque.  The women play an elaborate role in the ceremony, called Lumbalú, to include mandatory crying, singing, and – here’s where the translation gets tricky – eating.  Of the dead.  Though this generally isn’t much of a shock for me – I have long been attracted to the sky burial practices of some Tibetan Buddhists and my recent discovery of the Zoroastrian’s Tower of Silence (#161 of 422 things to do in Mumbai!) has only added to my long list of places to see – the casual nature with which Cassiani and Alberto assert that they may have dined on their gammy is a bit disconcerting.

“Do you mean cannibalism?,” I ask.

“No, (something in Spanish and/or Palenquero).”  Both Cassiani and Alberto are animated in their denial that they are cannibals, and I quickly realize that this might be an awfully inconsiderate accusation to make towards someone you’ve just met, in their own homes, who are being so kind as to show you around their village.  I try to clarify.

“Tu comes los muertos, o tu comes con los meurtos?”

I will admit my Spanish is, to be overly generous, flawed, but we leave our initial meeting with Cassiani under the distinct impression that, at one time at least, eating mami- and papi-bits was a way to both honor and communicate with dead family members.  Internet research does not support that the Palenque are cannibals or ever adopted the practice, but nor does it say they are not cannibals.  And though “cannibal” seems a bit harsh, the word itself actually comes from the Spanish word caribal, in that the Spanish believed that the Caribs of the West Indies perhaps, occasionally, ate one another.

The Famous Cassiani and his Marimbula
The Famous Cassiani and his Marimbula

We make our last stop of the day at the home of Rafael Cassiani Cassiani, just on the east side of a barrio-dividing line none of us can see and at the site of the future police station (San Basilio does not now nor has it ever had a police force, and disputes are resolved by village elders).   Rafael Cassiani Cassiani, master of the tabla, apparent novice on the marimbula, and Palenque goodwill ambassador, sits in his back yard, shirtless but with an impressive silver award hanging around his neck and a smile as bright.  He lists the countries he’s been to, all of which invited him to play and to sing, and then does the same for us.  It is mesmerizing, in part because we are witnessing something so foreign, in part because we have been rewarded for taking a chance without preparation, and in part, no doubt, simply because we are here.

 

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Third Beach to Hoh River

We sit on giant driftwood bleachers in the morning sun, peanut butter and rice cakes in hand and the protruding cliff face of Taylor Point rising in the distance a mile in front of us, up from the Pacific Ocean at the south end of Third Beach, space and fog lazily obscuring the sea stacks of Giants Graveyard.  I am on the Pacific Northwest Trail at the western edge of the Olympic National Park at my older sister’s urging, and though she intends a three-day hike from Third Beach to the Hoh River to be bonding for her and her oldest son, it is quiet therapy for me, an opportunity to perhaps accomplish something visceral and palpable after fifteen months of spinning my cubicled professional wheels.

We drove up from Reno the day prior, my sister, oldest niece, and oldest nephew, leaving hours too late but not feeling particularly pressed, as I have embraced my pending retirement.  Or am trying to.  Shifting, on a dime, from twenty years of Army service and a largely feigned laissez faire commitment to schedule to actually living The Attitude of Meh is no simple task.  I’ve started the transition by not shaving, committing (or not. Whatever!) to developing a personal beard style I call “Spanish Moss,” which looks exactly like you think it might.  So we leave a few hours late?  Not to worry.  We turn a ten-hour drive into a twelve-hour one and, still well shy of our start point, are consoled with an extended trip to a Portland-area Wal-Mart to pick up last minute supplies.  We overnight at the Lewis and Clark State Park near Winlock, Washington, hours short of our target but exposed to a view of the indomitable Mount St. Helens to the north.  The volcano looms large both in front of us and in my older sister’s and my memory.  Though it is recently active, it most spectacularly erupted in May of 1980, exactly a month before my sister’s eleventh birthday and a year before our mother’s third divorce and our repatriation to Nevada.  We lived in northwest Washington when the mountain blew, winds carrying volcanic ash the 250 miles north to our small town of Sedro Woolley and depositing it on our family’s cream-colored Ford Galaxy 500.  The car had a big back seat and a wide, gently sloping rear window with an apartment-sized shelf above the seat that served naturally as a bed, fort, or escape pod for any road trip of longer than an hour.

We sit around the campfire, old-growth Douglas Firs towering over us, my sister and my niece and nephew, the latter two now far more adult than child so they can share in the jokes as we talk about our lives as kids.  Wistful and meandering is the conversation chain that flows around family and a campfire; a late morning start and a long drive turning from a discussion on volcanoes and ash to a Galaxy 500 and rear windows and road trips to remember that time a storm blew your bedroom windows out in the middle of the night and there was glass all over your bed and mom and dad couldn’t find you?  Though nature can be powerful, the supernatural is inexplicable and whether through the banality of chance or the magic of fortune, a storm neither sucked me out of second-floor windows nor peppered me with glass shards, as I was snug asleep at the foot of my sister’s bed in the next room, a place I frequently went as a child, driven there by nightmares.

We get up early the next morning and pack like professionals, driving three more hours through the Scrabbler’s-delight towns of Hoquiam and Quinault and Queets; stopping for coffee at one of the Northwest’s ubiquitous drive-thru coffee bars; then north along the 101 and certainly one of the prettiest stretches of road in America.  We just make our pre-arranged pick-up time at the Oil City Road trailhead.  Though most people hike from the Hoh River north, we’re doing it in the reverse, and Seth from Forks has agreed to pick us up here and drop us off an hour north at the Third Beach trailhead.  Seth is a college student in Boise, but lives here in Forks, and though he appears to be about twenty, the interior of his truck, with its coffee mugs and backpacks and work gloves and climbing gear, gives the impression that he’s already living a full life.  He shares his local knowledge, elating my sister with the good news that the coastal black bears are timid (“the inland bears are another story”); titillating her with the insider information that the town of Forks, though the literary locus for Twilight, was simply copied and reproduced en masse in British Columbia for the film because it “was cheaper and Kristen Stewart would have been bored out of her mind if she had to live here for three months” (she would have been); and entertaining all of us by calling Aberdeen, home of Kurt Cobain, may he rest in peace, “Methlaberdeen.”

Parting Shot, Hoh River

Seth drops us at the start of a canopied trail leading a mile and a half from a parking lot down through the Hoh River Rainforest, and after passively-aggressively-unsuccessfully suggesting that my sister, niece, and nephew remove their rain gear (“it’s not raining, and you’ll get hypothermia”), we head for the beach.  Google reviews of this hike promise ankle-deep mud; knee-deep and fast-water river crossings; boulder-scrambling that requires properly timing the tide; and a trail that is “more obstacle course than hike.”  So, after a peanut butter and rice cake fueling, and a second passive-aggressive-unsuccessful rain gear removal suggestion, we begin.  I have nominally prepped for the hike, my only concern with negotiating boulders around a blind corner, so I naturally assume that the first stop – Taylor Point – is where we must cross boulders only during the outgoing tide.  It is not.  It is, rather, the impetus for the first of our two “group discussions.”

Not having children is both boon and bane.  I am free to come and go as I please, and am not burdened with the demands of responsibility for a living, breathing, DNA-sharing thing.  I need not exert the inefficiencies of, to be blunt, caring.  This, of course, is theory; in practice I would be perpetually panic-stricken if I were a parent.  A scraped-knee would likely induce in me barely concealable tears and a minor case of hyperventilation.  My niece and nephew are now 17 and 19, but it is hard to look at them in any manner other than as objects to be hurled wide-eyed and giggling into the air or as face-painted children ready for an “Uncle Jay Day”, something I surely looked forward to more than they did.  So as I venture fifty yards or so onto the boulders around Taylor Point, and realize that I cannot see anything but cliffs and more rocks and an incoming tide and that this might cause some problems for my traveling companions, I, as my older sister might say, lose my shit.  I look back at my sister gingerly negotiating the boulders and my niece absorbed in her vain search for tide pool creatures, and say “turn around.” My sister freezes, pauses, looks at me, then asks, “turn around?”

I do not like feeling anything but fully in control, and though I am confident that no wave foreseeable could possibly shake me from my perch, even the potential danger of some harm coming to those I see – even erroneously – as ones in need of protection is uncomfortable.  So when my sister asks, “turn around?”, it triggers in me something instinctual.

“TURN THE FUCK AROUND.”  This is a gross, and, in hindsight, hilarious overreaction, but the self-imposed burdens of leadership are significant and spontaneous, and turnthefuckaround seemed like a pretty good thing to say.  My sister moves, quickly.  My niece is cooly unconcerned, and my nephew chooses this moment to remove his raingear.  But we scramble back across the boulders, our final few steps retracing the original, which were then on dry sand and are now in shin-deep water.  The debrief is fairly quick.  We agree that in return for moving quickly when there is a hint of urgency in my voice, I won’t swear anymore, which is a fairly reasonable concession on their part.  The raingear, however, stays on.

The most dangerous stretches of the Third Beach to Hoh River trail are conspicuously marked by large, black and red circular discs affixed prominently on trees and next to an entry/exit point diverting you away from the beach, and danger, and into the rain forests of the Olympic National Park.  They should not be ignored, at any cost, and heeding their warning, after climbing up or down wooden rung-missing ladders and rope assisted inclines, rewards you with silent marches on trails peppered with Pacific banana slugs, looking unmistakably like giant turds; through permanently damp, waist-high skunk cabbage, deer fern, and pick-your-berry (Salmon? Huckle? Black twin?); under soaring Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock.  There are obstacles to be negotiated at every turn, cooperation required, and like a corporate sponsored team-building event, we are positively lifted by the time we make it to Toleak Point.  Everything seems to converge here.  Sea otters, permanently content on their backs, float with the current; Bald eagles projectile-shit from tree branches like expectorant, a county fair participant readying to launch a watermelon seed in reverse; sea lions cruise the channels between rock outcroppings, hunting fish and barking commands to each other like bloodhounds on a chase.  It is easy to imagine life here hundreds of years ago, single plumes of campfire smoke rising from the tree line, soft-lit Thomas Kinkade landscapes unobstructed by the noise and tools and trappings of electricity and progress.  We find a camping spot, luxuriant, just above the beach and the driftwood piles marking high tide.  We hang rope to dry our gear and quickly make the camp ours, pitching our tents and taking forty-five minutes of collective effort and patience to start a fire.  My niece and nephew are, literally, without complaint, and I am a bit ashamed that I find it moving.  If we can’t start a fire, no biggie, but we did, and that’s pretty cool too.

We’re set up early enough to scour the beach, walking over a thick blanket of dried, shredded paper-like seaweed and finding, among other things, Styrofoam coolers, rope, nets, buoys, bags, and all things plastic.  The ocean is an artist, a driftwood sculptor and a gem polisher, but she occasionally does her best Andres Serrano impression, vomiting on her shores the effluence of man far and near.  My nephew finds a bleached skull, sans the jawbone but a radiator-like screen in the nasal cavity intact, and we spend twenty minutes debating what this belonged to.  Is it a coyote or a wolf? An adolescent saber-toothed cat?  A dog?  Sea Lion seems badass – it’s a lion of the sea, after all – but I realize that Google will settle this debate and then, as quickly as we gained it, the knowledge will be gone.  No need to retain it, the answer is always just a search engine away.  I wonder what Google, for all its power, has done to the imagination of a boy.

Last WalkWe spend the night at Toleak Point and head out early the next morning, traversing beach, then rain forest, then beach again.  We startle a raccoon and trace the solo steps of a deer, joined briefly by a larger, second set, then solo again as one set of tracks disappears in the woods to the left and another in the ocean to the right.  Other than a slight mist the night prior, the weather holds out for three days.  Freshwater creeks are shallow but adequate, and with our water filter we could have safely left all water bottles and Camelbacks at home and survived just fine.  The warnings of mud and a fast river crossing are false, as the drought has reached the coast as well.

At Jackson Beach we climb down the vertical face using fifty feet of rope ladder, eat the remainder of our dehydrated food (Jamaican Jerk Chicken and Pad Thai) and have our second group discussion.  This one concerns whether we stay our last night here, risking setting up camp at what may or may not be the high-water mark, or wait for the tide to go out and skirt the point, crossing what turns out to be the much-anticipated boulder field.  The latter wins, and my sister and I kill time talking about life after the Army.  I watch my niece and nephew walking in the sun and think about how one experiences life and risk and adversity and beauty relevant to our age.  This trip as a twenty-year-old, in possession of a healthy ego and an unearned sense of optimism, would have been a significantly different experience than that of a forty-four-year-old in transition.  Articulating the risk of hypothermia from wearing raingear when it’s not raining, for example, is such a pedantic thing to say, but life is easier when someone is there to protect you, no?

The tide starts to go out, so we pack up and start our trip around the last corner, hesitant, not knowing what is on the other side or how far we have to go.  But it opens up after a few hundred yards, the beach covered in giant driftwood logs like dropped matchsticks and the flats reflecting the setting sun and the most extraordinary view.

cropped-Parting-Shot-Hoh-River1.jpg

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Air America

The Delta Embraer E75 from Reagan National begins its descent, and from my window seat I watch us settle into the thin layer of altostratus clouds covering central Florida like batting, diffracted and billowy, perfect mirror-imaged moguls repeating themselves as far as I can see.  Soft rays from the five p.m. sun contrast the clouds and the blue sky, but we pass through quickly and everything below is muted aquarium blue, and blurry, like looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool.  This is Orlando, the Orlando Airport specifically, and my three nights at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport Hotel (prime location within the airport!) are appropriate, given this is the last leg of my two-month trip and here too is where it started.  The Orlando airport is Biosphere east, its giant windows and Macaroni Grill and hotel bar sporting too few barflies and too many Wrangler and polo shirt clad Grainger Industrial Supply salesmen small consolation for the sixty-something hours I spend within it.  A flight should end in an adventure, not a cage, and the delicious snack mix upon which I gorge at the bar does not fulfill my need for adventure, or the potential for danger, not just the threat of broken bones and bruised egos and humiliation but also the kind emotive, that sensorial overload we earn from placing ourselves in positions unfamiliar.  Adventurous my work trips are not.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that the danger of the modern person is his constant effort to escape from the street in which he lives, and that were he to be snowed in, with his neighbors and immediate surroundings his only stimulant, he “should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known.”  G.K. overreaches, and his early 1900’s didn’t have the luxury of today’s air travel, but his sentiments remain true: we delve not into our neighbor’s business, ostensibly out of respect but really because once we learn of that wilder world, we still have to face our neighbors in the morning, and wouldn’t that get awkward.  But when your flights end in taxis, and domed airports, and city sidewalks, you take your adventure as it comes.

Nashville at night, to paraphrase Shawn Mullins, is far more Los Angeles than Grand Ole Opry, despite it being the home of modern country music, the proof in the glut of decorative, Crayola-box spectrum piebald cowboy boots and bought, not won, belt-buckles; embroidered, rhinestoned cowboy shirts more Affliction and Ed Hardy than Pendleton and Sheplers.  And boobs. Boobs everywhere, huge, fake ones, spilling from spaghetti strap shirts and protruding out the front side of back-less dresses, on all ages, 16 to 60, inappropriately large when they should be average, or smooth and taut where they should be leathery, Tennessee such an unhealthy (third in obesity!)[1], unathletic state to have so many giant breasts on Time for Timer[2] bodies.  Nashville also has, I suspect, more people per capita who talk to themselves.  Loudly.  No timid under the breath commentary here, and your presence is more likely nuisance than potential audience, particularly for those crazies lingering west of the railroad tracks running under Broadway; a stark juxtaposition to the itinerants on the east side, some brilliantly playing guitars and fiddles, or white five-gallon plastic buckets and accordions, mandolins and melodicas for whatever money you’re willing to throw down, metal or paper non-discriminatory.

Across the street from the Sheraton I pause to hear a young man give his testimony to a mix of itinerants and groupies, black and white, backpack-laden and homeless, some crammed at his feet like a mosh pit and an equal amount strewn across the plaza like morning-after red Solo party cups.  A city bus roars by, denying me the opportunity to hear the preacher give his take on the role of wife, but at the same time a disheveled, scholarly looking man approaches me from the sidewalk, cigarettes and keys in one hand, newspaper in the other.  We listen to the preacher for a few minutes, then talk ourselves, about Jesus, and wives, and bluegrass music, loudly enough that we get shushed by a half-asleep vagrant, until the man tells me he’s locked his keys in his car, and could he just borrow a few dollars for the bus and I realize it’s all a ruse and as epical a beggar’s pitch I have ever heard.

In Reagan National I pass Laura Bush and one of her twin daughters, the two of them focused, a string of dark suited men both in front and in back, a silent, woolen pinstriped elephant walk; on a flight to Phoenix I witness two robust twenty-something black women, obviously on their first flight, vociferously and adamantly refusing to part with their bags which the flight attendants want to check; as clear, I think, a manifestation of black mistrust of any sort of government bureaucracy as one could ask for.  The black women’s resolve outlasts the flight attendants devotion, and they keep their luggage.

On a flight to Kansas a couple behind me talk to their young child, non-stop, explaining every detail, the finer points of acceleration and lift, depriving him of any element of surprise, or the exhilaration of flight, likely creating apprehension where there may have been only joy.  Explaining how 80,000 pounds of alloyed aluminum defies gravity sounds sketchy to even my ears, and it must be gobbledygook if you’re two, so why not just let the kid enjoy the ride?  I find hope for them when they discuss, at length and after smacking their son’s hand for smacking his own mother’s hand, their suspicion that “perhaps we’re sending the wrong message.”  Realization late is better than realization never.

Leaving Detroit a middle-Eastern man – Yemeni, in fact, which turns out to not be a state-sponsor of terrorism – moves up several rows in order to sit across from me, in a row of empty seats, him wearing a thick winter jacket despite the stiflingly hot preflight airplane air; he looks from front to back multiple times, nervously, apprehensively, each one of his looks making me, in turn, more nervous and apprehensive.  He spends too much time in the bathroom, and upon return begins to pray, semi-prostrate on the seat-back tray in front of him.  This causes me such consternation that I lift the arm rest, unbuckle my seat belt and turn slightly towards him; I will not let him leave his row if it appears he’s making a break for the cockpit.  And though I like the idea of hero, I’m more lover than fighter, so I instead engage him in conversation.  He is neither bomber nor one-way pilot, but rather a Detroit gas station attendant on his way to Yemen to visit his three children, last seen more than two years ago, and he produces pictures of his two daughters and son.  The eldest daughter, surprisingly, is the object of his most affection, and he pauses at her photo the longest, a Disneylandish five by seven picture of the girl standing, arms crossed, with her own airbrushed headshot in the upper right corner. Shame, I think, on me, and I wonder if any of the 9/11 terrorists had saccharine pictures of lovely daughters in their wallets.

From Orlando to Philly a precocious girl next to me asks me to smell the feet of her stuffed Minnie Mouse (I do), then peppers me and everyone else around us, for the rest of the flight, with all forms of the word “irritate.” She uses it correctly, if not gratuitously.  She’s irritated, her father is irritating her, she doesn’t mean to irritate me, the air is irritatingly cold.

From Hawaii to DC I sit next to another daughter, this one a laconic college senior returning from a trip with her inversely verbose mother, them discussing the daughter’s future but the latter dominating the conversation.  She solicits my opinion routinely; she wants her daughter to be in “policy,” but the daughter, wearing too-tight jeans, a long sleeve mock turtle with a peach colored button up sweater and a strand of pearls, just wants to write.  She is uninspiring, and I wonder at what age the prematurely mature turn from precocious to simply boring.

In a Philadelphia airport hotel bar I witness a female bartender taking absolutely no shit from the Korean couple who own the bar, first exasperating the husband, then pleasantly taking my order for a beer (“another Sierra Nevada honey?”), then exasperating his wife.  It becomes apparent the bartender has only worked here a few weeks, and I do not know how it can last too many more.

From Denver to San Francisco I read that the world still thinks America is the coolest country on the planet; boarding a plane in Seattle I overhear an older woman, fumbling with her dated cell phone over the tops of her glasses, ask her traveling companion “how do I put this thing on vibrator;” on the way to Kansas City a meticulously manicured male flight attendant hits on me, casually dropping my name during his rounds: “can I get you something to drink Joe?”  Beat. “That is your name. Isn’t it?”

My cab driver from Incheon International Airport to my Seoul hotel is an American citizen; Mr. Kim – all Kims and Lees in Korea, no Hatfields versus McCoys here lest the country eat itself in genocide or mutually assured destruction – is 41, but has spent the last twenty years of his life on America’s west coast after spending the first twenty here.  He left his fifteen year old daughter with friends so he and his wife could come home to take care of his ailing father, and he tells me, salaciously, that though his wife was born in America, her “body is all Korean.”

The flight to Korea chases the sun for the duration, mirroring the revolution and defying darkness; the return flight counters it, defying time (I leave Seoul at six pm on Friday, and arrive in Seattle at 1230 the same day).

Gone: the resetting of watches upon touchdown. Cell phones are tethered to satellites, and watches will be gone from the civilized world soon enough, at least for practical purposes, serving instead as they do in the Third World, nothing more than a bauble, a Swatch Watch for the 21st Century.

In Seattle, a friend’s beautiful downtown wedding is juxtaposed with listening to a convicted triple-murderer, being prepped to testify for the government in a trial against a co-conspirator, complain about his haircut.  I crack a joke about the difference between a bad haircut and a good one (two days), and am later horrified at my detachment in the presence of bona fide evil.

I find that flying more often makes it harder, not easier, a subconscious recognition, perhaps, that my odds are decreasing; particularly on takeoff, where I start to imagine the plane nose-diving into a field, or houses, or a river, and I wonder if I will close my eyes during the fall or keep them open.

While waiting for my ride in the Incheon International Airport, I meet 32 year-old Keshab Raj Sapkota, an American Soldier as of one year ago and a Nepalese citizen the 31 years prior.  He taught social studies in his hometown of Butwal until he won a proverbial Golden Ticket, a free path to American citizenship, just one of about fifty thousand annually out of nearly fifteen million applicants in the Diversity Program.  Keshab had a point-six percent chance to win this Green Card Lottery, and after spending about six months at Ft. Benning, Georgia, here he is on his way to the 2nd Infantry Division at Camp Casey, Republic of Korea, to be an air conditioner repairman in order to provide for a better life for his wife and daughter.  Such are the things that make us American, and I think, perhaps, America is the coolest country on the planet, in spite of it all.

[1] Gold to Mississippi, Silver to Louisiana

[2] When I’m slow on the draw, and I need something to chaw, I hanker for a hunka cheese.  When my ten gallon hats-a-feeling five gallons flat, I got something planned, which is little cheese sandwiches.  When my get up and go has got up and went, I hanker for a hunka cheese.  When I’m dancin’ a hoe down, and my boots kinda slow down, or any time I’m weak in the knees, I hanker for a hunka, a slabber slice a chunk of, a snack a day’s a winner, and it won’t spoil my dinner, I hanker for a hunka cheese.