Four Weeks in Bogotá (y Todovía Tengo mi Cabeza).
Bogotá sits on a high plain at 8,660 feet, her more than eight million inhabitants mashed up against the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes mountain range and sprawling west to the very limits of the Savannah of Bogotá. The city is huge – one of the twenty-five biggest in the world and the fastest growing in Latin America – and I can see much of it from my fourth floor studio apartment in the Chapinero Alto neighborhood. I have come here both to try to learn Spanish and to spend a few months transitioning from twenty-two years of government service into a new life in the civilian world; Bogotá serving as an air lock, keeping the figurative bad air from my past where it belongs and letting me breath something new and untainted. Unfortunately, the literal air at more than a mile and half high is thin and, along Septima (7th Avenue), one of Bogotá’s main north-south arteries, throat-achingly dirty. The city has a small army of exhaust-spewing buses and a huge one of tiny yellow Hyundai taxis that yield to no one, and they seem to be on the road twenty-four hours a day.
Every American guide book and website profess to Bogotá’s decreased crime rate since the 1990’s, but also warn of a continued reputation for violence. As such I’ve restricted my travel to the neighborhoods between la Candelaria – Bogotá’s original pueblo and city center – and the tower-apartmented neighborhoods of the north side of town, where the young and upwardly mobile reside. Regardless, I came to Colombia prepared for the worst, and my threat mitigation involves carrying small amounts of cash; making little eye contact; growing an intimidating beard complete with a Louisiana-shaped bald spot; and adopting a feigned accent where I speak Spanish quickly, hoping to thwart would-be muggers by leading them to believe I am not a gringo but rather an immigrant from some far off land where the Spanish is so pure and golden it is spoken at a pace unintelligible to mere Colombianos. I mentally prepare for my attackers both with imaginary action (where I swiftly disarm them, knocking them out with an elbow to the face and then gently lowering them to the ground, teaching them a lesson in both the power of violence and kindness) and imaginary words (“You want my wallet? Well guess what. I don’t carry a wallet. I carry a money clip. So go fuck off”). But the truth is that I have never felt threatened or uncomfortable, and Rollos (a native of Bogotá [i]) are disarmingly kind and patient.
I spend my first days in the Hotel B3 in the Virrey neighborhood, and over the weekend the neighboring eponymous park fills with runners, leashless dogs of all sizes, a small troupe of teenage acrobats treating a slack line like it’s a trampoline, athletes using the two or three open-air gyms, and the thick, sweet tinge of marijuana. I have never smoked it, but even I can tell what the good stuff smells like. I try to run the footpath, but the altitude sears my lungs, so I instead spend the mornings drinking coffee with the crowd and listening to a gypsy band compete for our attention with an impressively muscular and immaculately dressed transvestite playing a wicked Spanish guitar.
My home for the rest of the month is in the hilly, middle-class, bohemian and gay (both in emotion and sexual orientation) neighborhood of Chapinero Alto, a collection of older two-storey row houses and newer apartment buildings. This city is crowded but peppered with parks, and every inch of space is used. Two blocks from my apartment is Parque Portugal (which I quickly label “Parque Marijuana,” or, after my Spanish improves, “Parque Lleno de Mierda de Perro”) and it is never empty. The benches along the solo winding path host musicians, beer-drinkers, and the ubiquitous necking college students intertwined so tightly they look like a Picasso. A concrete court seems to be used for basketball only early on Sunday mornings; the remainder of the time it is used for fútbol sala by kids and dads; by grimy construction workers on lunch break, uniformly attired in boots, denim jeans and t-shirts, orange safety-helmets lined up neatly on a slope; or by a four-on-four night league where the shoe of choice is a dirty Chuck Taylor and the athletes are so skilled it seems to me that the small, deflated ball might be glued to their feet. Colombianos might be Catholic but their religion is fútbol, and a Colombia national team jersey is the single most popular article of clothing, particularly on game days, when the city is riotous with the yellow uniform (and if fútbol is their religion, tejo is their vice, a Colobmian cultural version of bowling. Except with gunpowder and far more beer and other drunk people standing near your target. Did I mention gunpowder?).
On Sundays the main roads of Bogotá shut down to vehicle traffic for ciclovia, and hundreds of thousands of residents walk, run, and ride (relatively) smog-free. It has been going on since 1974, started as a way to open more roads for pedestrians and bicyclists, and if you take Septima from north to south, you can end up downtown in a modern-day bazaar replete with carnival games, junk vendors, food stands, chalk artists, llama rides, jugglers, cuy races, and street performers with skill levels from drunk to painful to huckster to needs work to spectacularly talented. Keep walking and end up in la Candelaria, home to the federal government, countless hostels, world-class graffiti, and the labyrinthine Botero Museum, a world so fat and joyous that even the graphic shooting of Pablo Escobar looks like it might have been kind of fun.
Four weeks is not enough for Bogotá; I want to know the city. After a lifetime of being a mere intruder into foreign territories, I want to feel like a local. I want a bartender to know me by name, I want to give secret directions to cab drivers that show my local knowledge, I want to sing with the nonstop chants and pounding drumbeats at a Milenarios game; to know the feeling of joy when the streets erupt after Colombia scores against Peru. I want to know the hangover cure for aguardiente, or where to find the best arepas for breakfast. Nor is four weeks enough to learn Spanish, and I think the rotating Andres-Manuel-Rafael trio of security guards in my apartment building has learned more of my language than I of theirs. I want to tell them how lovely are the days in Bogota, with their counterintuitive morning heat and afternoon chill. I want to tell the taxi drivers that the music is actually Aerosmith, not Guns and Roses, and that regardless, neither are my compañeros. I want to flesh out, in Spanish, this “American” thing, where apparently every Colombian calls themselves – nee, every resident of every country in North, Central and South America – an “American.” Though I may be a North American, and “gringo”, when non-epithetical, is fine by me, I am certainly not a United Statesian, and after four weeks of struggling to read signs, patiently waiting for a turn at the gym, asking for directions and generally feeling like an immigrant where you don’t speak the language but learn enough to know that you sound like a child, which frustratingly compels you to speak even less; after all of this I feel confident that I can adequately express what it means to be American.
[i] As opposed to “Costeños” from Cartagena, or “Paisas” from Medellin.
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.”
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.
We 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.
Photos: Bujumbura, Jerusalem, Washington, D.C.
Portugal in Pictures
Assateague Island National Seashore
Guanajuato in Pictures
Reno in Pictures
Life on the Lincoln Highway/The Fourth Street Project
Carl Graham Fisher, the astigmatic speed-freak credited with envisioning the first trans-continental road – the Lincoln Highway – may not have ever stepped foot in Nevada, but his life mirrors the boom-or-bust history of the Silver State. Born in Indiana, Fisher’s father left him when he was young, causing Fisher to quit school early to help support his family. He proved adept at the task, and revealed himself to be a remarkable inventor, investor, and showman. By the age of 50 he was worth over $100 million and famous for his promotional stunts, which involved, among other things, dropping a car from a hot air balloon and then racing it back to town (the dropped car was engine-less; he drove a prepositioned, perfectly good car back); riding a bicycle off the roof of a building; and enlisting a baby elephant, frocked in a Fisher-project sandwich board, to caddy for a vacationing President-elect Warren G. Harding. Like the history of Nevada, Fisher’s fortunes rose and fell, and he was destitute near the end of his life, surely the result of the Great Depression, but probably the result of his whims as well. His then ex-wife, whom he met and married when he was engaged to another, said he was all speed and that his millions were simply incidental – “he just liked to see the dirt fly.”
In 1913 the thirty-nine year old Fisher conceived of the Lincoln Highway, eventually labeled Highway 40 and now known as Interstate 80, and though through much of the country her asphalt is laid within a few miles of Fisher’s original trace, for 8.6 miles in Reno the Lincoln Highway still resides, incognito, as Fourth Street. All of American History moves east to west, and so it does here as well: the oldest stretch of the original Lincoln Highway begins somewhere around the very modern Rail City Carwash; her terminus a parking lot in Verdi on the other side of railroad tracks with an elevated view of an abandoned, vandalized trailer and a short walk through a sandy field to the Truckee River. Here I find two fly fishermen, retired, going home to Santa Cruz with nothing more than a nibble or two. The older man tells me that he remembers driving Highway 40 as a kid, staring out the window from the backseat of his father’s car at the desert, then the motels and bars, then more desert. I tell him the buildings probably haven’t changed much but keep to myself my suspicions that the road seems to be about as lucky as he is. Fourth Street, I think, could use a nibble. Or two.
Three hours earlier I am the first breakfast customer of the day at Los Compadres; on the way out I watch as an industrial sized garbage dumpster births an old woman. We lock eyes and she, sheepishly and after a pause, says “I was talking to the bird.” I ask if it answered; she smiles and continues her day. I momentarily consider following her rather than Carl Fisher’s aspirations, but instead walk across the street to inspect the artwork on the Desert Sunset bar. The owner, huge and tank-topped and holding back a pit bull with a giant metal chain the size used to tow cars, emerges from the motel next door. He’s gregarious and proud of his business, and we talk about the other hotels on Highway 40.
A sign on the door at Shorty’s tells me that ROADHOUSE TOM’S COATRUN Has Moved to the Wonder Bar; I contemplate their frivolous use of capital letters but quickly resolve it in Shorty’s favor, as I have a weakness for the semi-colon and who am I to judge. An Indian – the sub-continent type, not the native – at the desk of the Hi Way 40 Motel lets me park for free while I take pictures; the woman at the In-Town Motel does as well, reluctantly and only after scolding me for texting while I was turning into her parking lot (guilty). I am sized up by a prostitute near the bus station; I discuss the tragic beauty of the mosaic entryway of the N.C.O. Railroad Depot, soiled by urine and spray paint, with a man sporting a neck tattoo and who I think is going to ask me for money but instead just stands and stares with me; I pause from picture taking at Abby’s Hwy 40 to let a man, severely overweight, pass by in his wheelchair. He moves not by pushing the wheels with his hands, but by shuffling his feet slowly forward, one never fully extending beyond the other. For three blocks I am enchanted by a middle-aged Hispanic man’s custom bicycle. It has thick wheels and extended handle bars and a beautiful silver eagle mounted on the head stem. The bike is painted the colors of the Mexican flag, and I tell the rider – booted, cuffed denim jeans, snapped-to-the-top black satin jacket with matching slicked back hair and dark sunglasses – that his bike is badass. He says thank you.
The west end of Fourth Street is no more optimistic, but the fornlorn seems to have dispersed a bit. There is an artist’s motel, seemingly in business but without a car or person in the parking lot; a brief stretch of industrial, the kind built big and cheap and windowless and populated with gymnastic centers and beer distributors; then a huge, abandoned wooden riverfront resort complex, fence locked and without any indication of what it once was. Then, nothing. A stretch of road with high desert and retaining wall on the right and a rolling river with trees in foliage the colors of fading sunshine and leaking chlorophyll on the left. This, I think, is what must have driven Carl Fisher’s dream, and the dream of Highway 40 and is maybe even what drives someone’s dream on the other end of Fourth Street. Maybe the dreams of a woman who talks to birds.
The Preakness
