Tag: travel

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Episode IV: The Road to Pristina

I return from Ohrid, turn in my rental car and hustle to the Skopje bus station for the three-hour ride to Pristina.  I hand over a wad of denars to pay for the ticket, my stomach rumbling as I begin to feel the inner-workings of those last two for-the-road macchiatos having their way with me.  I would like to avoid a public bathroom, but I may not get a vote in the matter, and now, it seems, is not a time to be choosy.  The Skopje bus station shares a men’s room with the train station, is poorly lit, dirty, smelly, and guarded by a ruffled elderly man charging 10 denars (about 20 cents) for the right to pass.  He has an arm’s length of toilet paper, if you so desire, and Cyrillic reading material as well, and inside the broken-locked stall is a simple porcelain-lined hole in the ground.  I enter, hesitate, and reconsider: this is clearly not for the fainthearted.  But I came seeking adventure, and if it presents itself as a Balkan train station bathroom, so be it.  I pay the man, leaving my backpack at his feet, and decide against taking in my headlamp – there are, no doubt, countless things in the world worse than what awaits me, but at this point none come to mind, and I don’t need illumination to help with my evaluation.

With both mind and other processes clear, I board the bus and focus on things more important.  The short ride to the Macedonia-Kosovo border is mountainous and winding, but once across, Kosovo opens into a vast basin, the Sharr and Goljak Mountains on either side cupping a brown expanse blending the Dukagjin and Kosovo Plains, the road running through it like a daisy stem, a few houses interspersed here and there among the detritus of post-war life, wood and metal and cinderblocks and trash; oh my the trash.   Plastic and garbage line the highway from the border to the Pristina outskirts, strung-together colorful like polyethylene prayer flags, modern-day bread crumbs marking the trail to progress.  There will be progress at the end of this line, no doubt, environmental regression traded for economic progression.  People who produce so much trash are people who can afford something else.  Poor people use everything, then reuse it, but the people who leave their trash here, on the side of the road, have the luxury of selection, and either have nowhere else to put their waste or simply do not know what tomorrow will bring.

We rumble ever closer to Pristina, the rubble and scrap now forming piles, now moving back away from the road, now behind buildings, now gone completely.  In its place, progress.  Development, advancement, chrysalis, a flowering; and that’s what Pristina is, a flowering at the end of a daisy-stemmed road, the city practically blows up before me.  Shiny new boxy mirrored buildings, stuccoed and glassed, I’m at the industrialized outskirts, and then car dealerships every third building, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, Porsche, Hyundai, Citroen, Skoda, all here, buildings so new they must have been waiting at the international border on the backs of idling tractor-trailers, half on this truck, half on that one, Caution Large Load truck in front and back, impatiently waiting for the Kosovo Grand Opening.

Pristina is a frenetic mess, but things are clearly happening.  The city itself has been here since the fall of the Roman Empire, but Kosovo has been an independent nation only since 2008, and even that is dependent upon who you ask – the Serbian Prime Minister, Kosovo being a former state in his nation, has said that as long as Serb people exist, Kosovo will be Serbia.  Kosovo shares a border with Serbia, and was a Serbian state until 1999 when NATO airplanes, many of them American or American funded, bombed Serbia until Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslavian President at the time, agreed to withdraw Serbian troops from Kosovo.  It is an intensely sensitive and complex set of facts to an American ear, though I find Kosovars, many of them self-described Albanians, see it in fairly simple terms.  I am told, among other things, not to enter Serbia from Kosovo unless I came from there first, I am told to avoid northern Kosovo, where Serbian enclaves are still in abundance, I am told, more as a challenge than as a question, you are here on holiday, when I say “I am here on holiday” (illustrative is the number of pages – four – Lonely Planet dedicates to Kosovo.  By comparison, Latvia gets fourteen).  I visit the Gracanica Monastery, a few miles south of Pristina and six hundred eighty-nine years old, and find it guarded by a KFOR Swedish machine gunner.  I ask him if there is ever trouble.  “There is occasionally trouble,” he answers.

But that is for yesterday, and Pristina is for today.  Apart from the Grand Hotel, prominent both for its size and location near a busy intersection and for the industrial grime shower-stall stains all over its facade, every building seems new.  Pristine Pristina.  I find a side alley hotel, boring and fungible outside but spotless and tasteful on the inside, the black-and-white suited owner selling me on the in-room jacuzzi and wireless internet, though he is marginally contemptuous when he learns I don’t have a laptop.  My room is equally pastelled parts Stevie Wonder and Queen Elizabeth, and after dropping my bags and having a cappuccino, I head into the city.

I walk the packed sidewalks, everyone going to or coming from, knee-high boots and jet black hair and Jackie O sunglasses ubiquitous.  Urban Pristina is a maze and has accumulated as much trash as the suburban, so I try to look up instead of down.  The streets are unannounced, the concrete structures new and unpocked, the old ones aged or bombed beyond recognition or shrouded in scaffolding and I only get my bearings after stumbling upon the caged and bubble-wrapped National Public Library.  It is unlike any other building I have ever seen.  I eventually work my way back the direction from which I came, and soon realize I am woefully lost.  Not an unusual occurrence, and typically intended, but my internal gyro is effected by further bad luck: it is St. Patrick’s Day, and I seem to have found the only city in the world without an Irish bar.  Again, a cappuccino; again, a request for directions; again, helped by a stranger.  I am practically walked back to the Hotel Begolli, and after taking my first bath in about a decade, the terrible European techno-pop blaring beyond the point of recognition from the jacuzzi radio assuaged by multiple Pejas (“Kosovo’s Finest Beer”), I sleep, dreamless, the streets outside my window quiet.

I leave Pristina the next morning, on a bus and via Bil Klinton Boulevard, heading for Peja, or Pec, depending on your Albanian or Serbian point of view.  It is a beautiful town at the base of the more beautiful Accursed Mountains, and I waste the day away on a rooftop bar reading about Alexander and Henry Adams and talking with my waiter who has a friend in New Jersey and two girlfriends in Pec and would like to go to America, but it is so hard to get a Visa.  It is easy if you are American, he says, you can go anywhere you want to, your passport is like a get in free card but it is very hard to get into America.  I tell him that it is, I suppose, all a matter of timing and that he’s just a little late, a few hundred years ago his ancestors could pretty much go wherever they wanted.  This appears to be of little solace.  But a few hours later I am reminded again what it is to be American, and this time I am humbled: it is midnight, I am on a bus and leaving Kosovo for Montenegro, and at the international border a guard is saying Josep, Josep, until I realize he means me.  “Joseph?” I answer, “Morse?” And he, from the front of the bus, leans his big bus-driver hatted head towards me and says “Josep.  American.  Come here.”  And my first reaction is an internal should I bring all my things because this might be bad. I should bring all my things because this might be bad but I leave my pack in my seat and go forward, the guard tall and stern.  “You are here on business?” he asks and I say no, holiday.  “Holiday?” I hear, for not the last time.  “Holiday?” Yes, I reassure him, I am here on holiday and then the man says I have a brother in New York and my sister lives in Utah.  Utah! Utah! and I am safe.  “Utah is a long ways from Kosovo,” I offer, and then tell him I am from Nevada.  “Nevada,” he says.  “You have good horses.”  And I am overjoyed and I love this Kosovar border guard, at midnight, the day after Saint Patrick’s Day, on my Balkan holiday.  We do have good horses, I answer, and beautiful mountains and a star-filled sky at night and a high desert that smells, after it rains, like earth brand-new.  He hands my passport back to me, and I take it, but he doesn’t let go.  “God bless you,” he says, “and God bless your country for defending Kosovo.  God bless you and God bless America” and I find myself not knowing what to do with all these people asking God to bless me.

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Episode V: Life on Loop

The Peja to Podgorica to Kotor bus careens through the night, a corkscrew path on a narrow, snowy mountain asphalt road laid down in dynamited wadis, rock edge and tree branch seemingly inches from my window, an occasional car, to my astonishment, passing untouched between me and the rent earthen walls.  My sleep is arrested by the spectral blue halo around the small television screen showing infernal Balkan techno music videos on loop, an indecipherable chorus of coo coo, coo-ya ticky, cooya crooch cooya ticky.  Also, by thoughts of my Kosovar border guard.  A disclosure: I felt sheepish when he asked God to bless me.  He thanked all of America for helping his nation, his people, and after a hair-triggered response of warmth, of unconditional gratitude, I thought: what must it be like to fight for a country?  Not for an idea, or a cause, or as a proxy or a prophylactic or for resources or religion or politics or freedom or any of the other entries on the unending and ever-growing list of Reasons a Man Has Ever Killed Another Man.  I mean for a country.  For a home, for a piece of land where you can be left alone, unbothered to pursue your God or no god or grow a family or simply to stand on a piece of earth and say this is mine and it belongs to me and I will not let you move me from it.  What must go through a man’s head when he is threatened, when he hears the monsters coming and that he must decide, just one moment to decide, run or stay and fight.

The road straightens perceptibly, the mountain ranges backed up now and I stare at the ridgeline, the jet black mountain (Crna Gora, Montenegro, Black Mountain) discernible from the jet black night sky only by a burlap-thick blanket of stars, Orion so big and so low I think he might pounce rather than shoot.  Slowly the stars recede, coo coo, coo-ya ticky, and now that middle-light, the grayness that closes in just before you pass out, revealing surreal soft edged, fragmented rock formations on the sides of the road, piles emerging from the ground like a stone prairie dog field.  The bus drives over one last pass, darkness gone but the sun not quite out, and before me the translucent teal blue water in the Bay of Kotor.  It fills an ancient riverine canyon; from the top the bay looks like a headless angel, wings spread slightly not in flight but in pronouncement, but from the shoreline the limestone scarred cliffs surround it so steep and high a claustrophobic would be searching for the exit door.  The old town at the base of one side is Brothers Grimm handiwork, here in some form since two hundred years before Jesus died, and though it is still the center of community life, it is seven-thirty a.m. and I am told we are not open until nine.  I walk, a mile or so, around the far peninsula and sit on a concrete pier, watching sunrays come over the ragged mountain like searchlights, dust in the morning sun.  A single fisherman sits, untangling his nets, a single pink fish at his side.

On my walk back towards town a new Mitsubishi SUV pulls over, a youngish man in a baby-blue hooded sweatshirt and giant designer sunglasses offers me a ride into town.  He is Bosko, a Business Tourism and Economics professor in the next town over, but here today for his other job as the president of Kotor’s Young Social Democratic Party.  I ask about the economy (“the man is the sailor, the voman spends the money, there is nothing else”) and about his politics (“I am a Democrat, Social is for pocketbook only”).  We park just outside the city walls and walk towards the five-hundred year old north city gate.  Bosko is talkative and insanely kind, he has already promised me internet access, tea, and a phone call to his friend who owns a nice apartment for rent just outside the gates.  I now notice his sunglasses are decorated with costume jewelry; his pants, crisp navy denim, are too tight for his prematurely pear-shaped body, and he carries what could never be mistaken for anything other than a purse.  We walk through the gate and into the first courtyard, scattering one dog and forty or so cats like pigeons from a charging child.  “She,” Bosko says in English and pointing to a woman hosing down a sidewalk in front of her store and feeding the felines, “is the Cat Voman.”  They exchange hellos, Bosko shifting to his native tongue and then quickly back to me in English, speaking continuously, right hand flailing, making lefts and rights in narrow cobblestoned alleys, me following him like a May-December Charlie and Willy Wonka.  I have no idea where I have come from nor where I am going.

Then, a magic door: A violin from an open window behind me (the music school), Bosko turns the keys and we are inside.  A clean, red-heavy office that Bosko tells me is sinking, the whole town is sinking or sucking water up; pictures on a bulletin board of public service events Bosko and his fellow Young Social Democrats have sponsored; a giant flag of a rose, presumably their party logo.  Bosko immediately brings me tea, handing me a small lemon I’m supposed to eat whole before taking a drink (me: “what do you call this little lemon?”  Bosko: “we call it a little lemon”), then biscuits, then the internet.  A woman sticks her scarf-covered head into the door, deferential; Bosko dismisses her, turning to me and saying “Gypsy voman, she makes too many children.”  He then brings me a bottle, displaying it like a proud waiter, telling me it is Pelinkovac, a regional liquor that smells to me too much like Jagermeister, then pouring it into a dentist office spit cup.  “This,” says Bosko, “is delicious,” and I think I might be either drunk or a skin shirt by noon.

Bosko directs me to the main square while he attends to party business, I sit in the sun and drink a coffee and contemplate the kindness of strangers.  In Peru, a man and his young daughter picked up Mac and me, our thumbs extended on a whim upon our realization we were miles from where we needed to be and out in the heat of the sun.  The man’s daughter had to roll down the window and open the door from the outside, balding tires and vinyl back seat cracked, speeding asphalt exposed through the rusted floor boards.  America too: in Denver, a stranger gives two of us a late-night ride home when there are no taxis; in Tucson, a Honda CRX pulls over for us, two drunks walking, plus a guitar, plus a giant dog, a multi-species clown car.  Kindness universal.  Coo coo, coo-ya ticky.

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

The towering mountains immediately behind Kotor are nearly perpendicular and dominated by 9th century fortress walls; it, in turn, dominated by a closer to perpendicular mountain behind it.  I want to climb to the top, and ask Bosko if it is possible.  “You cannot do it,” he says, “the steps are wet and it is not safe.”  But Bosko has a purse, and “it is not safe” is rarely a reason not to do something.  The passageway from the Old Town is easy to find, and the next morning I begin my climb, walking first under a tightrope clothesline, shirts dangling in the shadows, then through an open wrought iron gate, then through a thick, waist-high stone channel.  My Sub Pop t-shirt grants me entry past three modern-day Montenegrins, still guarding the fortress walls.  All are smoking, two have the long stringy hair and despondent, black sheen of gothic youth, they share a forty ounce malt liquor.

“Are you from Sub Pop?,” the first asks.  “I fucking love the Fleet Foxes!”  I tell him I am not from Sub Pop, but that I too love Fleet Foxes, and we begin to swap bands.  We both know Gomez, and Band of Horses; I tell him Seattle is a great city and that he could hear all sorts of incredible music there.  He leaves me with The Middle East and I leave him with Visqueen, music an international language, along with math and football, the non-American kind, and love, of course, and this brief exchange has made up for all the awful discothèque house music I’ve been subjected to over the last week.  I continue up the path, stopping now and again to take in the cloudless views of the Bay of Kotor.  There are, I read, 1,350 steps leading to the San Giovanni castle at the top of the fortress walls, and I step on as many of them as I can find.  The view from the top is spectacular, but checked by thoughts of men carrying rocks up earlier versions of the trail I just climbed.  What man had a vision to create castle walls on perpendicular slopes, and what men built them?  What forces were so dastardly, so fearsome, that it prompted a minor king to build a miracle to protect his kingdom?  My Kosovar border guard again; this fortress so inconvenient, so cumbersome, and seemingly protective of so much nothing, that I think men must have built just to build, have attacked just to attack, defended simply to defend.  There is a book titled War is a Force That Gives us Meaning and I think that yes, perhaps war is a force that gives us (some? most? men?) meaning, it allows us to say this is mine and it belongs to me and I will not let you move me from it.   The ties that bond men during conflict, Chris Hedges writes, are so strong as to bestow upon those fighting a meaning for life; the communal feeling gained from shared violence, from the preparation for war to the threat of death is a power even bigger than living simply to live, and I think that I must be standing upon the manifestation of this idea.  There seems to me no good reason to build a fortress here, and no good reason to attack it, yet these walls exchanged projectiles and changed hands from the 6th Century all the way until the end of World War I; this mountain upon which it sits ready, history tells us, to change hands once a man, again, decides here is where he would like to stand.  Coo coo, coo-ya ticky, war on loop.

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Albert Pujols, the Poverty Line, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Being excited about Major League Baseball in the first week of May is equivalent to being excited about your one boring friend’s New Year’s resolution to “really spice things up this year.”  But what if he really meant it?  What if he did something to prove it?  What if he jumped out of an airplane, or decided to walk across Utah, or invented heelies for adults and then cruised around the mall?  Forget the creepy factor – would you stay and watch?  Would you congratulate him for his bravery?

You would if you were Kansas City and your boring friend was the Royals.  For game one – a Monday night in KC (a school night!) – 22,000 fans not only stayed the duration to watch Zach Grienke pitch a 6 hit, 10 strikeout, complete-game shutout against the White Sox, but gave him a standing ovation both after the 8th inning and before the ninth and didn’t sit down until he finished getting hugs and high-fives from his teammates after the game.  Grienke threw his second-to-last pitch 95 miles an hour, prompting the crowd to erupt once again and putting a smile on my face that didn’t leave until I headed for my car.

This is baseball.  I can admit that it might not be a sport (if you can smoke and play it, it’s probably a recreation.  Plus it’s a haven for professional athletes possessing that rare combination of fat and weak – google Bartolo Colon, Matt Stairs, Sidney Ponson, David Wells, Antonio Alfonseca, John Kruk), but watching the game being played correctly – seeing a diving grab up the middle, a back handed flip for a double play, a hitter absolutely baffled by a change up, a ball hit so hard you know, you just know, it’s gone as soon as it comes off the bat, well that’s a beautiful thing.  A thing so beautiful it brings me together with Emo teens sporting awful forward swept hair dos and wearing spandex-laced denim jeans and converse All Stars; young couples wearing matching Royals jerseys, “Soria” scrawled across the back; old women using walkers with punctured tennis balls cushioning the supports; that girl wearing the “shuck me, suck me, eat me raw” t-shirt; and kids, kids everywhere – that is a beautiful thing.  A necessary thing.

On the way out of town, driving I-70 East on a straight shot towards St. Louis I listened to a man call in to the Kansas City am radio sports station and share how he listened to the game with his son, them sitting in his truck outside his house because his “line of work keeps us right above the poverty line” and am radio was the only way he could experience a game; sharing that moment with his son and explaining to him what it meant for Zach Grienke to pitch a complete game shut-out, what it meant for 22,000 fans to not leave their seats on a Monday night – a school night! – in the first week of May, what it meant to him to have that moment of serendipity, bliss, and nostalgia because that’s what he did with his own dad, sit on the tool box in the back of his dad’s truck on his boyhood farm and listen to George Brett or Hal McRae hit bombs, listen to a crowd roar when Dan Quisenberry came in to finish the game.  This is baseball.

There is a man in St. Louis named Albert Pujols, and aside from the unfortunate pronunciation of his last name, he is revered by Cardinals fans as, perhaps, the second coming.  There are not many like him in the sport – Derek Jeter in New York probably; Barry Bonds a few years ago in San Francisco maybe – who command the respect and adoration of an entire city.  Albert Pujols, because of what he can do to a baseball, because he can spot the rotation of the threads on a ball less than three inches in diameter coming at him from 60 feet away at 90 miles an hour and can not only tell exactly where that ball is going to cross the plate but can hit it, absolutely murder it, sending it over the outfield fence and causing thousands upon thousands of people to leap from their seats in synonymous joy.  What is this?  What void does Albert Pujols fill in those lives, what is this thing he possesses that brings together people, old and young, bad clothes and good?  What is this thing that causes Bob from St. Louis to give me, unsolicited, $90 tickets along the third base line so I too can hang around for three and a half hours in order to share in this thing, watching Albert Pujols crush a baseball 370 feet in the bottom of the ninth inning, game out of reach but no one leaving just so they – we – can talk about him on the way back to our cars or busses or trains?

In the early 1940’s Abraham Maslow posed a theory that human beings have stratified needs, psychological needs causing you to first meet the necessities of life, air and food and water and sex and sleep, and not until these were met could you move onward and upward to things like security and health and friendship and intimacy, confidence and self-esteem, and not until you met these needs could you move to the top, to spiritualization and religion and morality.  But I disagree.  I don’t think it’s a pyramid, I don’t think it’s a scale.  There is something to Albert Pujols, to baseball, to watching Zach Grienke pitch a complete game shutout the first week of May, to sharing the roar of a crowd and the success of your home team as you sit in your old truck on your dirt farm with your son at your side, school night be damned, there is something fundamental to this feeling, this necessity, on par with the very necessities of life.  This is baseball.

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The High Life

The Gateway Arch rises from the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, implausible and angled and silver and alien, instantly evoking in me memories of The White Mountains, a favorite childhood book about extraterrestrials come to subjugate Earth’s youth.  Designed in 1947 by Eero Saarinen (he of the TWA terminal at JFK; Washington Dulles Airport; and the “Tulip Chair.” Like on Star Trek.  You know the one) and built from 1963 to 1965, it is as wide at the base as it is tall, and it’s the tallest monument in America – at 630 feet about 80 feet taller than the Washington Monument and almost twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty.  Here I met a days-old college grad, on his way from Pennsylvania to California to be a back country guide at Yosemite; spied a cigarette smoking and Diet Coke drinking Amish couple; and chatted (listened, mostly) to a uniformly khaki and polo-dressed couple from St. George, Utah, returning to the Arch twenty years after their honeymoon (“the trees have grown so big!”).

You can stand on the ground, immediately under the Arch and staring upwards with your head rocked back so far it’s impossible to keep your mouth closed, or you can ride to the top in surreal, miniature and plastic sterile pods, folded up in a windowless egg with a man about my age wearing a flannel shirt, too-tight jeans and a Donald Duck wristwatch.  It truly is a marvel, and standing in the 17’ wide top of the Arch, looking down on the flooded river and surprisingly sleepy downtown, provides the proper motivation to think bigger than you really are, or should be.

So on my way east, in the beginnings of an off-and-on three day rainstorm and mulling over my doctor friend’s posit that “veterans and heroin addicts are impossible to kill,” I called the Cincinnati Reds office and asked them for a press pass for that night’s game.  I am a writer, no?  No, no, not a “blogger.”  A writer.  A reporter on life, just taking a little baseball and hotdogs and apple pie (and Guantanamo, and bailouts, and the False Reports of the Secularization of America! and right-to-life and Iowa Negotiated Hog Report and the Fairness Doctrine – the Midwest has a lot of a.m. radio) middle-of-America trip and thought I’d stop by your nice little stadium and then write a story about it. I have, like, 60 readers. Or so.

An optimist would assume the worst one could say is “no,” but Josh from the Reds, he no optimist, offered a much, much more thorough response.  “We don’t credential bloggers.  And you’re coming tonight?  You wouldn’t just show up at someone’s house and expect to be let in, would you.”  Not a “would you?” less Josh indicate an interrogative and an opportunity to respond, but would you as in who do you think you are and who do you think you’re talking to? And we don’t credential BLOGGERS.

Not credentialing bloggers is good policy, no doubt, but advance warning is necessary?  Seriously?  Are there no Mormons in Cincinnati?  No Jehovah’s?  No Girl Scouts, no Little League, no Amway?  I would – do – expect to be let in if I just showed up at someone’s house, and most people I know would probably let you in.  But lesson learned: prior to watching Bronson Arroyo give up 9 runs in three outs (that’s called karma, Josh from the Reds), I emailed the White Sox and changed my approach.  Not a blogger, but a writer for a website, and here’s my link, and I’m seeing five games in five nights, the last night in Des Moines (Des Moines!), and I don’t want access to players but maybe hang out with real writers and see what they do and how they do it and it would make a good story and there’s a war on, don’t you know?

I did not, in fact, invoke the “war clause,” but it was unnecessary, as Ray Garcia and Scott Reifert are not only optimists but are also Major League Baseball’s finest Vice President of Communications/Coordinator of Media Services and Champions of the Little Man and . . . they gave me a ticket.  And a media package, and access to batting practice where I could size up Carlos Quentin (he’s big) and A.J. Pierzynski (bigger) and even stand next to Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of both the White Sox and the Chicago Bulls and the 52nd richest man in America.  And I paid them back by ruining Mark Buehrle’s Perfect Game.

Not “perfect game,” as in the sun is shining but it’s not too hot and it’s not crowded so we can hang our feet over the seat in front of us and the beerman knows us by name and we can see perfectly Ichiro’s laser throw to third holding the runner at second and there’s a beautiful human being at your side and we just can’t stop smiling but perfect game as in Perfect Game.  As in

 

scorecard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and no walks and no errors and not even a sniff of Detroit’s batters figuring out Buehrle’s speed and timing and location.

Athletes in general are a superstitious lot, baseball players particularly so, and a Perfect Game is an untouchable, an unspeakable.  It has happened just 17 times in the 132 years of the sport; they are magical and to see one, to be in the presence of greatness, of such infinitesimal rarity would feel like that first time you were twelve was it? maybe eleven and jumped off a cliff, it seemed so high and you were so scared but you jumped anyway and plunged into the water, kicking like a madman to get to the top but doing your best to appear nonchalant, so nonchalant when you yelled at your buddy still on the cliff it’s easy don’t be a baby – just like that but better and I know I shouldn’t but I had to send a text to a friend anyway to let him know i’m in chic watching a perf game thru 6 and he rightly, rightly responded you just effed it up go get a beer.

But it’s a text! A text is not spoken, a text should not violate the rule, but the very next hitter hit the ball on a rope to the first baseman – he caught it for an out – and the next batter hit a double into the gap and then Buehrle walked two batters and the bases were loaded.  And I ruined Mark Buehrle’s perfect game.

Major League baseball stadiums are cathedrals and Perfect Games are unspeakables and Jerry Reinsdorf is the 52nd richest man in the United States but if it’s Middle America that you seek, you need go no further than the High Life Lounge in Des Moines, Iowa.  There are decent chain restaurants in just about every city in America, chain restaurants with good service, and good food, and a good atmosphere, places like The Rock Bottom Brewery or Old Chicago’s, but chains are, after all, by nature impersonal.

But there are also pseudo-chain, shadow-chain back-alley, dark corner, cracked sidewalk establishments in every town, disconnected commercially but a veritable network emotionally, spiritually, celestially, where it’s not that you don’t want to be seen, but rather don’t want it to seem like you want to be seen yet relish that moment when you can just let it slip out that you’re in the know: let’s meet at _____ and it’s that much richer if the invitee needs directions.  Bob Dobb’s in Tucson and the Cap Lounge in DC and the Beach Tavern in Tacoma and – you know the one in your own town.

The High Life sits on the corner of 2nd and Market in Des Moines and the $2 PBRs taste like holy water after shelling out $8 for keep the change beers at Kauffman, Busch, Great American, and US Cellular stadiums.  There is shag carpet on the floor and dirty brown formica covering the bar and black naugahyde stools pushed up to it.  It has eight taps visible, one each Old Style and Pabst Blue Ribbon, two Lite, three Miller High Life and one Guinness, off by itself at the end of the bar like an accountant at a teamster’s party.  The décor is late 70’s and the clientele not much later, and I wish I could tell you it’s been a Des Moines staple for that long, but it’s been around since . . . 2005.

Yet, it was a good beginning to the Iowa Cubs, because if the Cubby Bear on Addison puts you in the proper mindset for Wrigley, the High Life Lounge puts you in the proper mindset for AAA baseball.  Though just one step down from the bigs, and for many organizations just an hour or two down an interstate, the atmosphere at AAA baseball is closer kin to your kid’s little league game.

This is truly a family affair.  I heard a little girl in line next to me tell her mommy that man is wearing a purse (it’s a man-purse, honey, and don’t point at the man); bought a $12 ticket that let me sit anywhere in the park (even the cheapest $4 tickets are within foul ball souvenir territory); envied old couples bundled up in shared blankets; and watched eleven – eleven – First Pitches: two small children, a local congressman, three people appearing on behalf of the local ALS, a local boy-makes good with the World Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, and four others who threw out their First Pitches so quickly and anemically I failed to either hear their names or write them down.

And all of them, every last one, even the little girl who took a full two minutes and the announcer’s public encouragement to just throw it to the man in blue standing behind the plate, everyone of them was applauded roundly.  Is this baseball?  Or is this Iowa or anywhere else in the Midwest or America for that matter?  Every half inning had a contest, a throw-it-through the tires or musical chairs in the oversized blow-up baseball gloves or a scholarship raffle or little kids racing wearing huge, baggy clothes and both t-shirts and hotdogs shot out of a compressed air gun – hot dogs, and more hot dogs and more hot dogs and this is America.

All American sporting events start with the Anthem, but it is endemic to baseball.  It is usually performed well, sometimes especially so.  But occasionally, I think, it is superlative, and if done correctly it can do to you what that Perfect Game does to you, what that first post-cliff dive gulp of air or that random where did that come from? memory of that first really, really good kiss can do to you.  On this day, a cloudy, windy, slightly cold night in Des Moines, Iowa, a young fellow – challenged, I think; touched, exceptional, mentally retarded – played the American anthem on his Casio keyboard.  And it was beautiful.  And no one, not a soul, not a breeze, not a flap of flag or drop of cup or cough or awkward laugh escaped during this mistake-ridden rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, and I, after five days of baseball, and America, and occasional loneliness,            just             felt             good.

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Going Hemingway

Quito to Baños and Back Again/8-12 April, 2008

Is there a more harrowing opening scene in modern cinema – outside Saving Private Ryan – than the first ten minutes of Alive?  Is there one among us who didn’t experience an empathetic tightening of the glutes, an involuntary clenching of teeth, a collective release of breath once that doomed plane skidded and tumbled to a snowy stop?  The 1972 crash – loaded with an Uruguayan high school alumni rugby team – resulted in 29 dead and 16 survivors spending 72 days high in the brutally cold Andean cordillera before they were finally rescued.  In addition to the 1993 movie, the post-crash events spawned the delightfully macabre bumper sticker Rugby Players Eat Their Dead, which is, in fact, how those 16 survivors lived to tell their grizzly story.

As I readied for my two-week trip to Ecuador and Peru, my own desperate thoughts of how I might live should my TACA Air airplane crash-land in the Andes had taken refuge in my traveling companion for the total of my nine flights over a two-week period: Mac would provide me plenty of much needed sustenance, if need be, because he’s a good friend, and because I could – I would – eat him.  I would.  Mac is a big man.  Or at least he was.  It seems Mac is in love – to a vegetarian, to boot – and he’s a good twenty pounds lighter than the last time I saw him.  Fortunately about every third Latino getting on our flight carried a box of fried chicken,[1] so I wouldn’t have to eat Mac after all.

Mac and I had but two goals for our trip to Ecuador and Peru – to see a soccer game and to see Macchu Piccu.  The rest would be unplanned, allowing us the freedom and flexibility to go where we wanted when we wanted, to stay or go, to take the backpacker-highway or the road less traveled, to drink heavily or not at all.  We opted for each.

Ecuador: Land of Little People

Our first stop is Quito, the capital of Ecuador and at 9,200 ft, way too close to the sun.  It takes me less than a day to get a solid base burn that lasts throughout our trip (none of my Latino DNA, apparently, is in my epidermis, and by the end of the trip a cloud of dead skin sloughs off me each time I remove my fleece).  But our first afternoon starts overcast, so we kill time with a bowl of ceviche and the first of our many, many Pisco Sours.  Bitterly and legally disputed over, Pisco is a native drink of both Peru and Chile but served everywhere in the region.  During Spanish colonial rule, imported grapes were the beginnings of what became a hugely successful wine industry.  But in 1641, King Philip banned the import of wine, causing the Peruvians (or was it the Chileans?) to find an alternate, yet still alcoholic, use for their grapes.  Voilà, Pisco.  Add some egg whites, Simple syrup, lime juice and a dash of bitters, and you have the Pisco Sour.  Though it tastes like a more acidic Margarita, it sneaks up on you like jungle juice at a frat party.  I blame it on the altitude, but the three drinks we had as we waited out the rain, sounding all the world like machine-gun fire as it fell on the fiberglass covered courtyard, left us both feeling adequately prepared for our two-weeks in South America.

It did not, however, adequately prepare us for our first South American riot.  There are a lot of cabs in Ecuador – far more cabs and buses, it seems, than private cars – some government owned and operated, some not.  The drivers of the some not, on this Tuesday afternoon, are restless, and express their displeasure by clogging the streets and hurling rocks, bottles, fists and feet at every passing yellow cab.  There are thousands of men chanting and kicking yellow-cab ass as the cars accelerate through the gauntlet of protesters, and Mac and I get close enough to film but far enough away to stay out of the way of the frequent errant projectiles.  We stand safely, we think, next to the sole police officer we see, who is acting on the situation largely by looking the other way and texting messages on his cell phone.  An ice-cream truck drives by, “Jingle Bells” drifting lazily from its loudspeaker.

The average height of a Brazilian male, says www.shortsupport.org,[2] is just about 5′7″.  The vast rain forest and towering Andes Mountains separating Ecuador (and Peru) from Brazil must include a genetic decline, because Ecuadoreans seem to me to be much, much shorter.  Mac and I look like genetic freaks, never more so than when we fold ourselves and our backpacks into public transportation, be it the hilariously miniature Daihatsu cabs – we frequently bottomed out over speed bumps and potholes – or the back seat of the Quito-Ambato-Baños bus we took after our third day in Ecuador.  The four-hour journey began with a Tourettic DVD salesman pacing the aisle of the bus for the entire first half of the trip, talking to no one in particular but repeating the same sales pitch with the dedication and regularity of a time-condensed call to prayer coming from a minaret.  He would start at the back of the bus, dropping cellophane covered DVDs on each passenger’s lap, making his way to the front.  A passenger indicated his interest by picking up the DVD – no matter if you were picking it up simply to give it back.  On the salesman’s return trip, untouched DVDs went back into his canvas bag, touched DVDs invited the hard sell.  He warmed to us after he found we were American, and we learned from him that a) Columbian women were hot; b) he had family in Florida; c) Columbian women were hot; d) Columbia was the third largest country in South America; e) Columbians liked war; and f) Columbian women were hot.

We rolled into Baños around ten at night, and our desire to both get us into a beer and out of the rain prompted us to break routine and follow the first teenage hucksters accosting us.  They took us to the Hostel Freddy, where we were given two rooms – mine smelling like farts and cigar smoke –  for $5 each, a pretty good deal until I was woken by the sounds of the bus station, just a block from my single-pane windowed room.  Mac, no doubt, slept through the night, lulled by the sounds of his own snores.  Five dollars a night might compensate for farts and cigar smoke, it does not make up for unwanted wake-up calls.

Baños, named for the natural mineral baths spread throughout the town, is hemmed in by towering mountains and the Tungurahua volcano, active enough that this city is still clearing eruption residue covering a part of the only paved road leading to town.  Mac and I climbed to the top of one of the ranges, braving muddy trails, no trails, thirty degree inclines with no trails, jungle-thick flora, fifty-cent piece sized spiders, diving vultures, and an overzealous guard dog (after starting down the wrong trail, we asked a local woman how to get to the “antennas.”  Her prophetic answer: “take a cab”).  We walked the road back down, unsuccessful in our attempts to hitch a ride from either of the two cars passing us, pausing only to accept the offer of a local farmer to take one of his granadilla, a fruit looking like an orange on the outside and a pomegranate on the inside, but with the consistency of mucus.[3]

We spend the afternoon as the only customers in a vitriolic Dutch woman’s café, listening to her espouse her theories on American politics and calling George Bush a “fucker.”  Her Ecuadorean husband walks past us hangdog, and I am grateful I am not him.  On our second and last night in Baños, we visit the mineral baths, where we account for all four hundred something pounds of gringo, our board shorts looking like Capris in comparison to the locals’ Speedos and boy shorts.

The morning brings us symmetry: As we get into our cab taking us to the two and a half hours to the Quito airport, the radio plays Europe’s The Final Countdown, that traveler’s anthem we’ve heard in Mexico and all over Scandinavia.

la vaquera

[1] KFC is the Starbucks of Ecuador, but every box of chicken on our flight was an unknown brand.  If anyone knows this phenomenon, please let me know.

 

[2] Short Persons Support’s mission is to a) Support and provide reference material to persons of short stature; b) Raise awareness of the social and economic issues facing short people; and c) Provide inspiration to short people to help better their lives and attitudes.  All I want them to do is tell me the average height of an Ecuadorean male.

[3] Later, in Lima, we explained this story to some other travelers in an attempt to recall the fruit’s name.  “It’s not fruit,” stated a sassy Canadian.  “Don’t tell me it’s not fruit,” I answered, “it was sweet, it had a peel, it had seeds on the inside.”  Or something like that.  “No,” she answered back, “it’s snot fruit.”

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Call to Macchiato


Addis Ababa, Ethiopia/March 16, 2007

It’s 5:15 am and I’m woken by the call to prayer being blasted outside my window. Though spoken in Amharic – a language uniquely Ethiopian – it sounds remarkably similar to a Native American chant as I fade in and out of sleep. My Malarone-inspired dreams take me out of Addis Ababa and back to the Nevada desert where I sit and watch a tribal counsel quickly go from group chant to an argument over one guy’s Marine Corps jacket. This dream is only slightly less bizarre than the one I had the night before where Lisa Bonet and I were firmly entrenched in a life of domestic wedded bliss. But that’s for another time – the call to prayer has gotten louder – and so I’m awake for my first full day in Addis Ababa.

This is the poorest country I’ve ever been to. At 6:45 a.m. our part of the city was already awake and moving, and the early sun filtered through the mix of dust and pollution gave a look of a war-torn country. Beggars are everywhere, matched in numbers by the homeless lined in neat rows along the sidewalk, still sleeping. There are piles of garbage scavenged over by mangy dogs, and sewage drains double, apparently, as toilets. But the city is alive and well, and it has all the characteristics of fast-paced city life. There are 7 million people in Addis and its suburbs, and it seems like most of them are out walking. The taxis are mini-busses, and they pull over toward the sidewalk at designated stops, slowing enough to allow the guy hanging out the window to scream the destination to no one in particular. You can hear them coming and going, bus after bus driving down the road with a man standing outside the passenger window like your dog letting his ears flap in the breeze. The streets are lined with stores, shop after shop selling car batteries, then shop after shop selling rebar, then shop after shop selling tires – it continues on and on. My instinct says they need a mini-mall, but then there would be no reason to ever leave your own neighborhood, thusly losing your connection with the rest of the city.

Ethiopia is the home of coffee, and they serve the best macchiatos I’ve ever had. Mark and I had four of them (for less than a dollar) while we stood outside on the street, watching daily life go by. I left my video camera running and almost every child that walked by made a face or smiled. This country has over four million orphans, and many of them seem to be on the street (part of this trip is to help some orphanages, so more on that later). We had dinner at the “expensive” western restaurant, which had average food but was remarkably nice and definitely western, replete with the ubiquitous older white male escorting the younger, really really hot brown girl (I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve been).

One story before I end: At dinner I met a friend of Mark’s, an Ethiopian woman who runs one of the orphanages. She’s actually from the northern part of Ethiopia, an area named Tigray, and left this country when she was eleven years old due to a civil war. She and her cousins (one parent died, and the other stayed behind) walked to Sudan (she doesn’t remember the distance, only that it took a few months) and then lived in Khartoum with an uncle and several other relatives in a single dirt-floored room. In Sudan, she was treated as a second-class citizen until she left, at 17, to go to Boston. She had never been to America, spoke no English, and had experienced neither electricity nor running water – let alone boarded an airplane and flown across the world. She taught herself English, did well enough in school to get a scholarship to a university where she ran track, and came back here to Ethiopia to help the children of this country. It’s an incredible story, but it’s commonplace here (at least up to the fly to America part).

More later – I wanted to send some quick thoughts – but it’s 5:45 here and time for a macchiato.

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Sudanese Refugees Got No Game

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia/ March 20, 2007

Can you get AIDS if you rub your eyes after you’ve handled a snot-nosed HIV-positive two year old? And is there irony in orphaned Ethiopian girls wearing t-shirts with the words FEELGIRL emblazoned across the front? Today was powerful, so I have to lead with sarcasm while I absorb it all.

My days overseas usually start with a hangover, but today started with a trip to Mother Theresa’s AIDS orphanage in Addis Ababa, where Sister Maria (she didn’t even know the words to “How do you Solve a Problem Like Maria”, the silly nun) has taken care of thousands of kids over the last ten years. She, her support staff and 400 kids – all HIV positive, with a few having full blown AIDS – live in an incredibly clean compound where the kids receive schooling, lots of attention, and medical care (they now get ARVs, and only four children died last year). Sister Maria runs the place like, well, a Catholic nun, and I witnessed her order three loan officers, there to check her books, to “not leave without making a donation.” We visited two other orphanages of varying quality, and were served macchiatos at each – I think I had seven today, and am clearly subsidizing my beer intake by sucking down as much caffeine as possible. The children are polite and well behaved, and seem much like kids anywhere, with the exception of the very young ones – they practically attacked me and the other males in the group. Orphanage staff is almost exclusively female, and toddlers, it seems, sometimes want to be held by men. I spend most of the day conflicted. Conflicted because I’m white; conflicted because I am, relatively, loaded; conflicted because I’m a foreigner (“forengee“); conflicted because trips like the one I’m on are almost always faith-based (“Jesus lovers,” I call them (me?), though the Ethiopians spell Jesus with a “G.” My name, of course, is Gay); conflicted because I’m not a Jesus-lover. The people with whom I’m traveling are incredibly kind, motivated, and genuinely concerned about these kids, and are clearly moved by a higher power. But I remember what Townes Van Zandt said about being a guitar player: if you truly want to be one, then that’s all you can be. You have to be willing to give up money, security, livelihood, a job – all the cholesterol in your life preventing you from mastering a blues scale.

So if you truly want to live your life for Jesus, then shouldn’t you do nothing else but live it? We roll into the orphanage, hold some kids, drop off some soccer balls, then roll back out for a post hand-sanitized macchiato. Does it really matter? Does it make a difference? Mull it over along with me.

I skipped the last stop of the day, a tour of the “Institute for the Destitute and Dying,” opting instead for a walk with a friend through the alleys of the Kaliti neighborhood. Kids literally run the streets, most in flip-flops, some barefoot, the older ones in better shoes and school uniforms. I saw a Britney Spears poster; an ad for Tupac’s latest (I think, I’ve lost track); tailors sitting outside, running old-school Singers; VW mini-vans and motorcycles flying through the streets (I’ve cursed exactly once on this trip – I swear – and it was when a motorcycle swerved to pretend to hit me. I yelled out “fucker,” which I immediately regretted after realizing the number of little kids constantly following us). We stopped at a gate reading Jesuit Refugee Service Center, and as it opened to let a car enter, I witnessed the most delightful image I’ve seen thus far – Sudanese refugees playing basketball. They were tall, lanky, incredibly dark, and awful at hoops. I mimed my 20% accurate set shot, and a young kid named Ricard waved us in. Matt and I spent the next hour at 7700 feet running up and down a concrete court with bent, net-less hoops; me on a belly full of pizza and macchiato trying to set picks on 6’8″ 130-pound Sudanese teenagers running from who knows what.

Africa is growing on me.

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Thank You for Being a Goofy White Guy

Somewhere between Gulu and Jinja, Uganda/March 29, 2007

 I haven’t shaved in two weeks, I’m wearing my underwear inside-out for the third day in a row, and today is, at last, Africa hot. I’m in Uganda on the road from Gulu to Jinja and feeling totally irrelevant. I wish I could sufficiently describe to you the contrasts I’ve experienced since I wrote you last. This place is a cold-water blast of visual, emotional, and tactile sensations unlike anything I imagined. Bats as big as place mats, some charred and crispy, hanging from electrical wires like tangled kites; dirt-poor people always dressed immaculately; stern faces on Rwandan farmers that light up when you wave to them; kids in strikingly bright colored school uniforms, almost exclusively barefoot (especially in the country); and some of the coolest greetings you’ll ever see. Ethiopians shake hands and then touch their right shoulders together. Rwandans wave with two hands, raised up about shoulder level, smiles as big as their faces. Ugandans shake hands like I will when I meet Charles Barkley: first the standard white guy handshake, hold it briefly, then switch to the overhand so only thumbs are interlocked – again, hold it briefly – then back to the standard white guy shake. Eye contact throughout is mandatory.

I came here expecting to have my life changed, but it didn’t take long to realize that expectation was based on naivety and 30-minute clips from the National Geographic Channel. Africa is everything you imagine it might be and nothing like you think. In Rwanda I visited a church where in 1994 over 5,000 civilians – mostly women and children – were massacred by grenades, rifles, machetes, arrows and stones, all victims of a genocide that killed over 800,000 people in about 90 days. They came to the church seeking shelter, and when threatened refused to leave. Now their skulls are stacked neatly in rows in the rear of the church, while most of the remaining bones are thrown together into a giant pile under a dirty tarp. Just a few miles up the road from the church, in a huge grassy open meadow at the foot of an active volcano, we played soccer with about 100 orphans. They slipped in cow shit and laughed like any child should, calling us “barbaro” (it means “buffalo;” they apparently found our aggressive style of play a bit excessive) and even more hilarious, “freak.” A teenager named Fierce who was anything but scored after executing a sweet juke, to the delight of everyone, causing the other 99 to break into song.

I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere more beautiful than Rwanda, made all the more shocking when you remember this is the environment that produced “short sleeves” – cutting off arms above the elbows – and “long sleeves” – cutting off arms at the wrist. The government is still prosecuting participants in the genocide, using “gacaca” (ga-cha-cha) courts to allow the victims to determine the sentences of those who plead or are found guilty. Remarkably, most are given lengthy community service sentences rather than jail time. Could you look at someone every day, knowing they stole your car? What if instead they hacked off your brother’s limbs? Or killed your parents? Somehow this country seems to be moving on.

In Uganda I visited an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) Camp where I witnessed first-hand evidence supporting the stat that about 85% of all of Northern Uganda lives in these camps, and that Uganda is the youngest country in the world – they have an average age of 16. Because of a 20-year war between a rebel group (the Lord’s Resistance Army) and the government, hundreds of thousands of farmers have been displaced from their land, living instead in small, circular huts.

Parentless children are the most visible effect of the war. Most of the adults have been either killed or displaced by AIDS and/or the war, and as a result the kids are stacked into schools and orphanages (and the IDP camps) like cordwood. They seem far happier than anything I’ve seen in America. There are many westerners here doing many great things, but if you have time, check out www.invisiblechildren.com – it will sadden, humble, and inspire you. Because the LRA was essentially abducting children from their homes during the night and forcing them to fight and kill in the rebel army, thousands of kids started walking from their homes at dusk to come together to sleep in the city. They arrived at night, thousands of them, some having walked several miles just to avoid being abducted. They slept together, arms and legs intertwined like piles and piles of puppies, and then walked back home the next morning to either work or go to school. Three twenty-somethings from California captured their story on film and started a movement to get the kids back into the regular folds of society. Today they are helping to run a boarding school that houses over 1400 hundred students, about 80% of which are orphans. Until a new dorm is completed, girls live 50 to a room – there are over 400 of them living in two buildings, each about 150’ by 50’. Though they see white people – or “muzungu,” which essentially translates to “running around in circles” – on a daily basis, they rarely see white children, and a six-year old blonde girl on our trip was given minor celebrity status. Goofy white guys, apparently, cause less of a stir. People in Uganda say “thank you” an awful lot – thank you for walking today, thank you for wearing shoes, thank you for cleaning up your part of the sidewalk. I tried a “thank you for doing your homework,” but was met only with giggles and points.

My initial worries about being the sole agnostic amongst a sea of believers were totally unfounded, and I had some amazing conversations about the places we occupy in this world. On top of that, it turns out trying to introduce Jesus to Africa is a lot like trying to introduce soccer to South America – it’s already here, in full form. If anything, it was almost an afterthought. Far more interesting is some of the great t-shirts I’ve seen: “Jesus First, Then Comes Soccer”; “The Man” (arrow pointing upwards), “The Legend” (arrow pointing downwards); “Ann Arbor is a Whore” (couldn’t tell if it was a Michigan State or Ohio State shirt); and my favorite, “Grandma To Be” (on about a 25 year old dude).

So that’s it. No dramatic ending, other than I rafted Class V rapids on the Nile today – no crocs, but lots of spills. Hope to see you sometime soon.