Back-Catalog Dispatches #8: Traverse

It’s 5:30AM. I wake to the scrape of a match as Andrew searches for light in the cabin. My eyes open slightly , I slide out of the mosquito net and stumble out the door to greet a morning colder than I had thought possible, stars high and bold in the predawn. Andrew is already brewing ginger tea.

We sip mostly in silence before lacing shoes, rolling packs, and bidding our hostess goodbye. Then down the path and up the road towards the black-to-gold of the mountain morning, vapor upon our breaths.

The sun hasn’t crested the ridge as we plod to Beckett’s crossroads and weigh our chances of a hitchhike. A silence hangs over the breaking chill. Godot doesn’t show as we sit on our packs and await the hints of fate: the far-off whir of a motorcycle engine. A machine bound from country to town, with space for a traveler just behind the driver.

Here the day’s journey begins on someone else’s whim – the shopkeeper who sold me a fifth of cheap whiskey last night pulls into view on his cycle, and Andrew clambers on with a directive to meet me in the city. My own ride is not long in coming; a loaded pickup looms upon the junction in minutes, and I hop on the tailgate.

Movement begins in earnest. We are bound for Christmas in the mountains – Andrew and I – some hundred miles distant.

*

The early morning sun glints off of DR highway 1, upon my tired eyes and cramped body in the overloaded minibus between La Vega and Santiago. But we arrive, monuments overhead and people all around, with our packs burdening our shoulders yet not quite fitting the appearance of tourists.

Sequestered in a call center, I am ripped off for an hour’s conversation about mostly nothing with my parents. Then I pay fifty cents to leave a message on an answering machine in the south island of New Zealand. Communications completed, I listen to music while sitting on the stoop outside, watching the masses on street and sidewalk.

“A million footsteps, as left foot drags behind my right, but I keep walkin’ from daybreak ‘til the fallen light.”
Sting

“. . .And miles to go before I sleep.”
Robert Frost

“They are that that talks of going, but never gets away.”
Robert Frost

Then the wassail is prepared, gifts loaded into already-fat packs, to bring to the lord of the mountains at his lodge in the high forest. Good wine and liquor, chocolate and peanut butter, and even a softporn magazine in English, because he does read the articles. The supermarket seethes with us late-shopping masses, and we fight to bring our haul to the front, staying connected in the same building via cell phones.

The bus pulls slowly from the stop as I entreat the driver to wait just ten seconds more. Andrew frantically makes up his mind between red and green fleece hats at the market stand close by, then pays and jumps to the door as we pass, a green one clutched in his hands as the prize of the day. We have heard rumors of true cold in those mountains, and my companion is taking no chances. The last bus pulls away from Santiago. I have elbowed a woman in the face in order to secure my cramped seat thereupon.

The last city on the line and it is five PM. The sun recedes behind a now-thick sheet of low clouds. Sabaneta is in the same landscape as my other home in the valley: not quite in the shadow of the mountains, but not far from their reach either. One last futile check for Santa hats in the town and we flag down motorcycle taxis for the ride up. The view expands as we fly along on shockingly-well-maintained, winding roads, and the glades of pine begin to appear on the hillsides. An hour of wind in our hair and we pull to a stop at the lodge, pay our overcharging drivers and slump heavily down on the porch. No one’s home, but our host is soon in coming. Through smiles and hugs, we greet the Christmas season.

I pull my jacket on in the new night and hope for a frost.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #7: Year's End

Saturday began early. Yeury was up at five, harnessing the mule for the trip to town. At eight years old, he is the youngest of Ramon’s - my host’s - grandchildren, and has thus earned the privilege of being sent on the long journeys for vegetables and rice, neither of which grow very well in the valley. My dog Zeke (unpronounceable to my neighbors, so they just call him “The German” as the result of an unfortunate taxonomic misunderstanding) was up at that hour as well, yipping his head off at the activity. The family began stirring soon thereafter, so I rolled out from under my mosquito net, slid on my sandals and stumbled outside to behold the complete lack of anything resembling morning. No birds were singing. The waning moon shone through a thickening bank of clouds but no other light was evident; in this land without daylight savings time, the winter sun rises at about 7:30.

*

It's cooler now. The rain continues falling consistently. I am reminded of the cusp of autumn in Vermont, just before the plunge into the actual cold of late September. But it is not really cold here in this village, tucked in a folded corner of a large island in the Caribbean. I would say only that it is no longer ungodly hot. The locals – now mostly clad in flannel shirts, heavy pants and the occasional wool hat – would argue otherwise. Anything under seventy-five degrees is COLD, no matter what the gringo says.

*

The coming of light found me climbing yet another slope planted with cocoa trees; the angle was such that I would have wanted a belay if it had been rock. But with plenty of branches to grab, it posed few problems to Ramon, Chepi or myself. We were back on the harvest, taking advantage of a forecasted break in the rain. The work of cocoa is something I’ve gotten better at; the depths of my initial inexperience have been surpassed, such that I can now consider myself equal to one-half of a Dominican harvester. I hope to work my way up to two-thirds by the time I leave here. Ramon and his son-in-law were talking about the imminent arrival of the holiday visitors, and where they could be housed. They didn’t mention it, but my bed is occupying prime space in the house’s annex shed, and they could otherwise put a family of five in the 9'x12' room. As such, I hope to be elsewhere by the time that truly turns into a dilemma. Say, spending the 24th-25th surfing on the North shore or hanging out with Peace Corps volunteers who have their own houses.

*

And so Christmas comes. This season looms large on the heavily-Catholic Dominican radar as a time when relatives return – a time when sons, daughters and grandchildren make the trek back from the cities where they had moved in search of work, the sort of migration that can be found the world over. Its a time when the constant sound of explosions can be heard in the remoteness of the jungle (gunshots of rebel insurgents to my excitable perception), as the children set off physics-experiment-looking contraptions involving peanut cans full of some combustible minerals, sealed with pieces of inner tube - A good substitute for holiday fireworks. It is also a time when rum sales skyrocket.

*

Having slung squishy sacks full of cocoa beans to the valley floor and tied them to the waiting horse, we slogged back to the village proper just as a hint of midafternoon sun lit the world. The morning’s product was quickly laid out on tarps to dry - perhaps even to toast a bit for better flavor - and we sat down to our respective two pounds of rice and beans. It may be the only real meal of the day, but there is no danger of starving. Lounging in the comfortably warm evening, I let my mind wander to Decembers gone by, and of course this led into the ongoing speculation as to the whereabouts and activities of friends and family. Eligio - another of Ramon’s sons - was listening to a horribly-garbled holiday merengue tune on his dying radio, and I was tempted to ask him to turn it off and let the peace return. Then I thought better of it – since I’m the same way with a recognized song; no amount of static ultimately matters when memory can fill in the blanks. So I countered with my portable shortwave and came up with a scratchy BBC broadcast of Sinatra singing Winter Wonderland. Not quite the holidays as I used to know them, but close enough for the current circumstances.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #6: Letter

Distinguido Señor,


From Georgia, Iraq, Tribal Pakistan and even Haiti I hear a rumor of war over the airwaves. Social and political upheaval. Great changes afoot. Here in the Dominican Republic, however, I merely smell a rumor of barbecued chicken. Pollo al carbón. It’s a damn good smell, almost enough to break me out of my newly established vegetarian status. But in this case, I’m speeding by the roadside barrel-and-rebar grill in the bed of a public pickup truck, and it doesn’t stop for anything. I share the cramped space with a father-and-son painting crew, two rice farmers and a migrant Haitian carrying a bucket of watches and second hand clothes for sale. His t-shirt begs to inform me that his name is Ralph and that he’s a member of the Elmhurst bowling league, but I doubt he’s aware of that, per se.

That was this morning, anyway, on my trip back to the boonies.

*

So I’ve been thinking. I occasionally get moments of ebullient geographic enthusiasm when I feel I can apply things I learned in college. When I can knowingly think, “Yes. Of course. That explains it perfectly. I am still ready for grad school!” For instance, when I see a machete-wielding Dominican coconut vendor chase a Haitian coconut vendor from his street corner turf in Santo Domingo: surely, here is urban-to-rural migratory pressure. Here is the essence of global class conflict; the poor of one nation versus the poor of another, with the rich somewhere nearby, chortling over cigars and brandy (not that I can see them; it’s the idea that counts). Then I continue on my bus ride to Peace Corps headquarters as the cops break it up before any limbs are chopped off.

But I have not been assigned to a global flashpoint. The DR is an extremely chill place. So chill, in fact, that I am forced to recall the unfortunate “studies” done by Ellsworth Huntington regarding climatic influences on civilization, or lethargy plotted against latitude, if you will. While Mr. Huntington will forever remain in my righteous-liberal esteem somewhere between Cecil Rhodes and Adolf Hitler, I can’t help but notice some differences between – at the very least – the cultures of the inhabitants of Hispaniola and those of the Americans among whom I lived prior to coming here. Some of these differences, seen by the theory-seeking eye of the aforementioned early-20th century imperialist, may have been motivators for that misguided attempt to classify work ethic by hemisphere.

I’ve heard a lot about “Latin Time” and the religious zeal with which the siesta is observed, but there’s a deeper undercurrent involved when a road engineer says the backhoe “should” be there on the appointed day and he really means “definitely won’t.” It is still occasionally disheartening to find that the workday is –on the average – about four hours long, and offices in the cities are only occupied between 10AM and 4PM, with two hours off for lunch. Additionally, the only members of the service industry who don’t need to be actively flagged down are the motorcycle taxi drivers, who will generally chase you around trying to convince you of the insanity of walking to your destination. Nor is it possible to schedule any meetings in rural areas without the assumption that half of the committed attendees will find reasons to stay at home, whether the aqueduct needs repairs or not. Personally, I might be inclined to blame the weather for these facts of Dominican life; it is true that the sun is unbearable during the early afternoon, and that the sun falls quickly at six and leaves the world in darkness but for the candles. I’ve always been pretty lazy myself, and it hasn’t been such a stretch to adapt to the slow pace; I consider my avoidance of the sun at midday to be an avoidance of potential melanoma and heatstroke. But I’m not willing to cave in wholeheartedly to Huntington’s assumptive reasoning.

The problem is with locating alternative explanations. I find myself wildly questioning the possibility of inherent Catholic fatalism as the cause of what can only be described as sluggishness in the department of the daily grind. Perhaps an ingrained sense of helplessness – the result of a thirty-year dictatorship – is to blame. Perhaps national pride is more of a feeling than a driving force, especially in the face of globalization pressures. Perhaps I don’t have the slightest idea why people in a foreign country could possibly act any differently than the narrow demographic among which I had spent twenty-two years. If you have any theories, I would be most pleased to hear them.

But another hurricane seems to be winging its way in at the moment, and I’ll spend the next few days trying to keep my things dry. I hope that the snow you folks seem to be receiving is forming that idyllic blanket that I miss so much, and that the students are rightly terrified of impending finals. Good times and happy holidays to you; I hope you’ve found a use for the wine I brought over last Thanksgiving. It was a decent vintage.

Sincerely,

Bill Boykin-Morris

PS. Please inform Prof. Meyer that I have not yet dug any latrines, but the village could damn sure use a few of them.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #4: Clumsy Banditry

Here I sit in air-conditioned Santo Domingo, typing with my left hand because my right is currently in a cast, wrist sprained but fortunately not broken. I will likely soon be found by the Dominican constabulary and disavowed by the US embassy. For those of you who are interested and have the time, I herein relate the explanation. For those of you who don’t have the time (which most likely includes half the people on this list, given that classes have just started at Middlebury), I convey my apologies for the length of this email. Get to it during October break, dangit.

The Background:

The village of Vuelta Larga is located just within the boundaries of the Mount Guaconejo Scientific Reserve. In 1999, the newly-formed department of the environment put the area under state protection for its fairly remarkable biodiversity, but the locals had already earned a regional (the region being primarily a bastion of slash-and-burn) reputation for being “Crazy bastards who keep their trees” (Although perhaps something is lost there in the translation). Point being, there exists a goodly amount of rare old growth around town, and the people are pretty careful with it.

But really, they just want a road. The 225 citizens of Vuelta Larga have spent twenty years petitioning the government for access into the Nagua river valley, but the excuses from the public works office have only become more creative (“Um . . . a woodpecker hijacked the backhoe?”). Crops have been lost, people have died because of medivac impossibility, and the inexorable migration to the cities continues, three or four families per year.

Enter gringo power. Perhaps (i.e.: assuredly) it was a stroke of luck, but when I found out that a road was the village’s priority, and began making inquiries at the regional planning offices, the engineers were happy to help. A battle-scarred, exhaust-belching bulldozer – driven by a large man with a generally bitter disposition – arrived in August, and has to date plowed four kilometers of undulating road just uphill from the river; by following an old herd path, it mostly avoided any protected trees. A grader is promised to follow. What has not been promised, however, is a bridge to span the wide tributary stream called the Arroyo Bellaco (If one takes anthropomorphism to heart, it’s worth noting that this translates to “The Deceitful Villain”).

Calling a meeting last Friday night, Jacinto – the village’s “Go-To” guy – outlined a plan for building a bridge with local materials: some big trees. The forty men in attendance were hugely enthusiastic for the plan, although the several handles of rum also present were most likely to blame for that. Still, they all agreed that work would begin the following morning; it was uncertain if anyone actually knew how to build a bridge, but come hell or high water (both likely) they’d damn well try.

I stood silently in the back for most of the meeting, trying to piece together an argument for not using any protected wood, but I simply discovered that I didn’t know my own stance on the issue. Ethics escaped me. I was horrified that they would take down any tree protected by law, but I started thinking of some darn valid justifications. The government would only help so much before you had to bribe them, so this was simply local initiative at work to solve a problem. They would only take twenty trees in a forest of thousands, and from dispersed locations. Moving into overanalysis, I though that protecting land without alleviating the pressures of poverty was foolish of the department of the environment to begin with. But ultimately I was still just the foreigner trying to fit in, so I showed up to work the next morning alongside the hungover farmers.

The day of tree-jacking did not go well for me.

The Brief Aside:
There comes to every life certain moments where the negative overload produces a blessed influx of bleak comedy. I reference the new year’s eve spent as a waiter at a less-than-fine dining establishment. A buddy and I had both reached a critical mass of tables served simultaneously, customers pissed off by the wait and champagne corks fired at unsuspecting chandeliers; we were frazzled, spines compressing under the weight of the trays we bore into the dining room. When the cheap-hire band – dipping deep into their drying reservoir of material – broke into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” we exchanged a look of despair breaking rapidly to laughter. Dark humor was the only mood possible.

The Incident:
So it was concerning that morning. By the time the logs were downed, squared and ready for moving, I had already smashed a neighbor’s axe handle to bits on a particularly resilient bit of heartwood. I had already been growled at for bringing up the nagging point that the forestry service might notice if we took two trees from any one spot. I had already floundered fully-clothed into a neck-deep pool while running a log down the river. I had even performed some show-stopping acrobatics, slipping downhill on an exposed root, flinging my unsheathed machete out of the way and landing on my ass, rapidly jumping to my feet while shouting “I’m okay!” and promptly slamming my head into a low cocoa branch. My reputation as the accident-prone gringo was being steadily solidified.

The next evolution found me holding up the back end of a half-ton section of protected tropical hardwood, straining along with seven locals to bring it to the construction site. The others suddenly let go, thoughtfully leaving me the entire weight, which promptly floored me. When I got out from under the log and found I couldn’t move my right wrist, the only thing to do was laugh.

So I chortled at the bleakness, splinted the wrist and sat out the afternoon heat with the farmers in the shade by the side of the road. There I observed the bulldozer – on cleanup duty after the logs had been taken down – lose a half-hour battle with the stump of a hundred-year-old tree, and I continued the laughter well out of the driver’s earshot.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #3: Unrest

The sun tends to burn hot into the valley mornings. The Nagua river loses its blanket of mist an hour past dawn, but the hanging trees will be dripping with dew until midmorning. Then the gathering heat will be mercifully pushing the mosquitoes back into their refuges and the roosters will finally stop crowing. Really, everything tries to take cover from nine AM onward, but the first hours of the day are when the whole valley stretches and shrugs off the accumulated weight of the night.

When I leave the village of Vuelta Larga - where I live and work as a Peace Corps volunteer – it’s by this first light. My reasons for visiting the nearby coastal town of Nagua usually involve communication or business with the local environmental NGOs, but the trip always requires an early start. It’s best if I’ve finished the downriver hike to the road by seven o’clock, because the truck that waits for passengers there leaves as soon as it’s full. This usually implies seven people up front and ten or so in the bed.

In the land of crappy roads and an agro-dependent economy, the man with the extended-cab Toyota pickup is king. Daniel - the local driver - is well aware of this, and yesterday morning he was bearing his paunch as regally as ever when I emerged from the trail and took a seat above the rear wheel well, settling down to wait. Eight o’clock rolled around - the longest he could wait - and his disappointment was evident that he didn’t have a full load; only nine of us altogether, most headed to market. We took off down the runoff-excavated road, occasionally stopping to pick up sacks of rice from the farmers who work the paddies of the outwash plain. At the maximum thinkable speed for such conditions, Daniel was hard-pressed to swerve without losing anyone when a moped cut suddenly in front of us in the early traffic. The driver had two large boxes of avocados perched behind him on the seat, and we watched with awe as he nearly toppled and then regained his balance, cursing fluently.

The sun was gaining as Daniel dropped off near the center of Nagua, and all was quiet. Several cops with assault rifles lounged on the corner of a deserted street. I could see smoke rising from several points in the market area, and as I walked toward the town offices I found burning tires set in the middle of half a dozen intersections, Atlantic wind sending the dense, black fumes inland and into my face. The handkerchief I breathed through soon had a dark patch precipitated on it where it covered my mouth.

I didn’t see a soul until I walked into the office of an agronomist I work with. By way of explanation, he told me that the previous night there had been protests against the country’s new accord with the International Monetary Fund. The police had broken it up by dawn. Leaning in the doorway and looking at the disheveled street, I told him that I had missed out on the protests in Seattle and Quebec. He seemed to know what I was talking about.

So I went about my business as best I could and took the truck back to the mouth of the valley when Daniel headed out at day’s end. I found my way back upriver by the combined glow of my dying flashlight and the thousands of nine-volt lightning bugs under the forest canopy. My neighbors greeted me warmly as I walked by their candlelit houses, but they quickly went back to their conversations. From what I could hear, the subject was global economics.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #2: Rain

Life unfolds in Vuelta Larga . . .

The other day I stopped at the one store in town (sugar, rice, rum) to
talk weather with the boys. Marino gave a look to the sky, saw the dark
clouds billowing over the ridge from the south, and told me flatly that
there would be no rain, because the rains only come from the North -
from the Atlantic, forty miles away. He’s a local, and I trust his
experience.

But only with the disaffected confidence of one to whom a bit of rain
means no great change in the day’s schedule. Morning: tend the garden.
Afternoon: avoid the heat. Evening: visit. It rained just in time for
the evening.

Yesterday that comfy state of affairs was thrown a curveball by the
arrival of tropical disease A. And tropical storm B. And the
continuing maintenance of tropical export C. As in Cocoa. That
morning, Leóncio and his sons were putting on their boots and
sharpening their machetes, getting set to run up the slopes and finish
the most recent cocoa harvest before the rain could soak the beans. I
laced up my own boots and got ready to join them, wishing that I hadn’t
promised my help before the unidentified flu had shown up to drain my
batteries.

It was a quick slog up above the riverbed to the low cocoa understory.
The storm was turning the trail into a clay-lined creek as we passed a
trio of Haitian migrant workers. They were smiling through the wetness,
and when we could no longer see them, we could still hear the rhythmic
thudding of their machetes separating the fruit from the tree, the shell
from the beans.

Leóncio’s plot was on a steep slope, and I began to work at one of the
stances created by a toppled coconut tree. The rain came on. I was
beat. When I gave a few coughs, Javier came over and looked closely at
me. “Take a rest over there,” he said, indicating the trunk of a palm.
As I crouched, leaning against the tree, I looked out and saw the sheets
of rain driving a few feet away. Under the wide fronds, though, I was
drying out.

On either side of the river, dozens of farmers were bringing in their
crop, in the same way as Leóncio, whose eighty-year face had grown a
stubble that I could see was collecting raindrops. I, the gringo, was
feeling vaguely like a sick, wet wombat. I knew there’d be days like
these when I signed up for the Peace Corps.

My respect for my new neighbors grows by leaps on days like these.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #1: Chocolate

The article was fascinating. It expounded - in terms both academic and playful - upon the mature work of a renaissance Venetian architect, and how his legacy lives on in the drive for spatial happiness today, such as with the good old Feng Shui. While reading, my eyes were occasionally drawn to the sidebars, with their ads for hip new books on religious criticism and dating services admitting only the ivy-educated. In all, this issue of "Harper's" was wonderful food for the mind; I think my father had sent it to me because it included a great article by Bill McKibben on the new dehumanization. But this story is more about the complete irrelevance of architectural conjecture - and even my much-beloved culture of cynicism - in my current reality.

I put the magazine down and took a good look around, letting my surroundings come washing back. Dominican Republic. Not Italy. Certainly not Middlebury.

Francisco and Ramon were exhibiting the timeless interplay of grumpy old men, duking it out in rapid Spanish over the differences in fertilizer requirements for bananas and plantains. In the heat of the day, they were shirtless, showing off wiry statures as they sat in their wicker chairs under the oven of the tin-roofed veranda. Ramon's son Eligio was plucking out a song on his maniacally-mistuned guitar. In the shade of the nearby cocoa trees, two malnourished, mangy dogs were chasing some inadvertently-free-range chickens. Ramon's wife, as usual, was cooking at her smoky woodstove. Feng Shui indeed.

Going from one world to another, I tried to keep some objectivity, some detachment. But the truth was hard to avoid when I got here: this village of three hundred, three miles of wading upriver from the nearest road, was unlike any world I was used to. Even now, no amount of reading - Harry Potter or Herodotus - can separate me from my surroundings.

But I mentioned cocoa. That's what I'm really discussing here: the product that fuels Ben, Jerry, Unilever and Willy Wonka's fabled factory. Yesterday, in the regional capitol, I went to a meeting of cocoa farmers. I managed to bum a ride from Stefan, a German development worker, who drove his Japanese-made truck at excessive speeds on the Dominican road that was built with Italian funds. A Canadian health volunteer was also with us, along with some of the aforementioned local farmers. We were sort of a microcosm of globalization, and when we arrived, the scene was made complete by the presence of a Belgian cocoa buyer and a Berlin-educated Bolivian representative of the World Bank.

The farmers seemed unfazed by the rainbow of worldwide . . . well . . . whiteness. They listened dutifully as the Belgian told them - in no uncertain terms and in decent Spanish, utilizing the most dazzling PowerPoint technology - that their product was of insufficient quality for the European organic market. As such, they were subjected to a wonderfully-informative quality control seminar.

It matters not one whit to me that the accusation of inferior quality is mostly true; the farmers certainly don't wash their hands as often as the average Belgian. What matters is that while the enforcement methods have changed over four hundred years of the chocolate industry, the message to the "colonies" is the same: You work for us, so you adhere to our laws.

I would love to be able to draw the stretchy connection between the slavery utilized by the Spanish cocoa traders in the sixteenth century and the pressures exerted by today's global free trade regulations, but it would be too easy. Too poetic. Too "Newsweek." Instead, the message that I draw is that the complexities are only just unfolding. I see them in my new surroundings and my new neighbors. I think about them as I nonetheless crave a pint of "Chunky Monkey," because - dammit - I'm hot and hungry after a day of planting new trees and trimming old ones.

The Peace Corps has thus far represented a landscape of new perspectives, and the experience is only going to get more interesting.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #11: Frontier Rambling

The start of my two-year stint as a peace corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic consisted of three months of intensive language and agricultural training. This amounted to a good dose of culture shock concurrent with shovel-wielding bliss on a Caribbean island where every year has two growing seasons. For this formative phase of service, my six fellow trainees and I were sent to the village of La Peñita, located in fertile farmland on the Haitian border and surrounded by gently rolling mountains not entirely unlike the Greens.

The training was engaging, but I quickly came to the conclusion that our down time would be best applied to reaching one of the surrounding high points; a survey of my companions revealed a like interest in getting out for a good hike. The ridges to the West were appealing, but most of these were located in Haiti, and civil unrest – not to mention our lack of in-hand passports – precluded any designs we had for them.

We therefore set our ambition on the highest of an Eastward group of peaks, in the shadow of which sat the town of Montegrande. A few hours’ walk from La Peñita, it was the ideal jumping-off point, and we decided that one day would suffice for the whole trek provided we moved swiftly.

The opportunity presented itself on a mid-March Saturday when we had only an evening Spanish lesson scheduled, but our group began experiencing setbacks the night before departure. One trainee was on an emergency leave to visit her husband, another had contracted food poisoning, two were afflicted with unidentified rashes and – the greatest blow of all – our ablest rock climber was exhibiting the early symptoms of Dengue fever. This left myself and a trainee from South Carolina named Jason in sufficient health for the trek. So it was – having enlisted a local guide, Wilton, who neglected to inform us that Saturday was his fifteenth birthday – that our abbreviated party set out for Montegrande before dawn on the appointed morning.

The approach march went without a hitch, barring a minor directional dispute (in which – as would be expected – the gringos were dead wrong and fortunate to have a Dominican along), and so we arrived shortly after nine AM as the sun burned its way into the sky. Skirting the base of the mountain on a main road, we spied a likely route upon which to begin; crossing a pasture, we entered uninhabited territory and the battle began.

The next three hours were a blur of dense thickets, creek beds, burned-out ridges, elephant grass-encrusted saddles and illegal logging trails, punctuated by an eloquently-won argument on the comparative benefits of pants over shorts while bushwacking through thorns. We arrived finally at a spur at the base of what appeared to be the summit ridge, but we couldn’t know for sure – we could only stare upward into the thick tangle of trees and vines and curse ourselves for not bringing a machete or two. Our proximity, however, forced us to press on.

The very ground added to the difficulty; deadfall lay two feet deep in spots and produced an effect similar to climbing on new-fallen snow. This was augmented by the unfortunate tendency of the thorniest vines to attach themselves to arms and neck. Wilton and Jason – recognizing that the hour was growing late – took a break while I thrashed upward to scout ahead.

Frustration grew as the understory thickened and I crested several false summits, finally arriving at a small vantage from which I could see . . . The true summit a kilometer away via a gently curving, completely forested ridge.

So with the mantra “Fuck this!” now running cheerfully through my head, I crashed back down through the brush to rejoin my companions. Our retreat was uneventful, excepting such minor mishaps as our sudden arrival atop a thirty-foot cliff (“I don’t remember seeing that on the way up!”), and the fact that we had exhausted our water supply by noon. It was a bedraggled team that emerged from the woods and trudged back to La Peñita. We were only three hours late for Spanish class.