Back-Catalog Dispatches #17: Exile

Upon a rainy October morning, I vented my woes into the receiver of a pay phone in Nagua. I had spent more than a month out of the capital and away from volunteer company for the first time in selective memory, and I had just begun to feel the bite. On the other end of the line was my friend Eric, listening patiently as he finished his breakfast in Windsor, Vermont. Ever the pragmatist, he heard my tale of banishment – painted in dramatic hues of anger and melancholy – and when I paused for a reaction replied, “So . . . basically it sounds like you’re in the Peace Corps now.” This brought a suitable end to my whining.

So it goes. With a special nod to my hardworking publicity committee, I must nonetheless reiterate the obvious: I screwed up. That stormy day in early September, I had not entirely expected to return to Santo Domingo and be immediately summoned to the office of Genghis Garza. I was burned out from an illegal jaunt up the tentpole known as Pico Duarte the day before, and I was a bit surprised to find myself immediately subject to the harshest disciplinary action available this side of tossing me into the nearest JetBlue with a one-way ticket to Newark and ignominy. My surprise may have been a tad unjustified.

But I do martyrdom well. I was pleased to wallow in self-pity for a little while. The strictures of my punishment left little maneuvering room: no capital visits, no travel beyond Nagua, no parties, no surfing, no . . . well . . . no spending all my money on Cuba Libres and El Pequeño Refugio, I guess. I was determined to cast myself as Bill Kurtz, buried upriver in the darkest jungle and conducting the requisite rites of progressive insanity. (That analogy fell apart when I realized that my neighbors couldn’t really be impelled to worship me, even if I bought them a few handles of Brughal. So much for Heart of Darkness II: Vuelta Larga.)

The sentence has passed by pretty quickly. Really, there’s been too much to do – between aqueduct completion and grad school applications – and there were few moments in which I was able to contemplate my lot. But the duration of such time in relative solitude (special thanks to Joe, Jill and Josh for making it “relative”) is ultimately nothing compared to the hours, days, years put it by our fellow volunteers in Malawi . . . hell, in Haiti for that matter. While I can make the case that the infrastructure and social life available in the DR have made me a more effective volunteer, it’s worth noting that we’ve got it pretty good here; it’s not without justification that PCDR has the lowest ET rate in Peace Corps. That October morning, Eric managed to remind me that the Peace Corps image in the States is embodied by isolation from civilization. Interestingly enough, it took disciplinary action to make me live up to that.

The moral – if one is to be taken from all this silliness – is the same one that failed to break its way into my skull through three months of training: The rules aren’t worth ignoring. Consequently, I have scrapped my plans for an amphibious invasion of Jamaica, a takeover of the Punta Cana cocaine cartel, and for the new brothel I was going to build on the Nagua waterfront. The rest of my service may be boring, but it’ll be within boundaries.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #15: Blowdown

Hiking back up the valley on Saturday evening was a trip. The Nagua river was still too deep to ford, so I took the high road along the northern ridge and got an eyeful. Scrambling over and under downed trees as I climbed to the first hill, I came to a vista where there hadn’t been one before. Looking upvalley, I got the impression that autumn had finally arrived, New England-style. The canopy of green that had previously blanketed the ridges and swept down to the river was peeled away, leaving the gray of shattered trunks and dying leaves. Mudslides had scraped the vegetation from the steepest slopes. A giant with a weedwhacker had passed through, perhaps.

Hurricane Jeanne was the third major storm in as many weeks to sidle up to the island of Hispaniola and get cozy. But unlike Frances and Ivan – who skirted the DR, then went on to further fame and fortune in Jamaica, Cuba and the US – Jeanne was content to kick the bejeezus out of one target and then fade away. The coastal city of Nagua was flattened by high winds, and the coasts East and North were flooded, leaving 30,000 homeless. This is to say nothing of Haiti, where nobody yet knows the extent of the damage because of cut lines of communication.

Vuelta Larga did a bit better. As I discovered in the walk back to my house, fully half of the old growth in the forest had been pushed over at the roots by the wind, but none had landed on any houses. This was a minor miracle given the under-the-canopy placement of most dwellings. Thursday night for the Vuelta Largans must have been like any September night in 1940 was for Londoners: listening and waiting for a bomb to hit the house. So the village was lucky. My own house, nestled between a pair of fifty-foot breadfruit trees, escaped damage; each tree fell away from the flimsy, tin-roofed shack.

So where was I during this storm of the decade? I was watching the rain from the deck of a hotel in the inland city of San Francisco de Macoris, having been evacuated by the peace corps along with all other volunteers in the region. We played pool for two days. When the power went out I took my shots with a flashlight clenched between my teeth, and everyone speculated on the storm damage. We were allowed to go back to our sites on Saturday.

Yesterday was a blur of work (rare for a Sunday in the DR), as everyone in Vuelta Larga set to reopening the main path to mule traffic. My machete is now blunted from a half-hour battle with a one-foot-thick branch of some unknown ironwood, and my palms are perforated by the trunk of a mapola tree; honestly, who would have thought hardwood bark could have a million tiny thorns growing out of it?

So it is that I’ve come to Nagua today in search of a chainsaw. The electricity is unsurprisingly absent here, but the familiar roar of generators is the soundtrack as people nail their roofs back down and shovel the mud out of their houses. It’s gonna be a long week.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #14: Increments

I used to run a lot. The autumn before my arrival in the DR was a good competitive season; I logged respectable finishes in a dozen regional road races and survived the Philadelphia marathon. Still uncertain of my future at that point, I was able to delude myself into thinking I could be a successful amateur on the Vermont circuit. Then the fateful Peace Corps invite arrived and I shipped out to the tropics, hoping that I would find a way to keep up the momentum.

But it’s hot here. And that’s only one of the obstacles to running, as so many of us exercise-addicted volunteers have discovered. The culture – despite having a resident world 400m-hurdles champion – is chronically averse to non-work-related sweat. Unfriendly dogs proliferate on all suitable roads. The few organized races start hours late, foiling any attempts at warming up.

I encountered these difficulties as I continued to run through pre-service training, but my site presented a whole new dimension of challenge. Due to a quirk of local topography and drainage, the only path in my village (excluding those that climb out of the valley at a twenty percent incline) winds its way alongside the Rio Nagua, crossing it every few hundred meters. Adding to the difficulty was an annual rainfall of two and a half meters, which churns every stretch of trail into knee-deep mud for ten months at a time. It is not a location conducive to running.

But I was determined. In my first week I measured the nearest section of trail between river crossings (425 meters!) and set out to train for the 2003 Hispaniola half-marathon through a regimen of laps. Twelve lengths was a safe five kilometers, twenty-four made 10K, and fifty approximated a half-marathon. When conditions got muddy, I continued slogging. When my schedule forced me to roll miles under the midday sun, I would pound two liters of water and pass out immediately after finishing.

My mind would work curious tricks under the gun of such unpleasantness. The monotony of the terrain (“There goes that rock again”) lent itself to tangential thinking punctuated by a cruel, recycling algebra. While running, I would try to plan projects, write letters and formulate schedules in my head. But at the same time I would be dogged by the increment count: Three down, twenty-one up. One-eighth finished. Two seconds off pace. Fourteen down, ten up. So it would go.

After two months of this I went to Santo Domingo and ran the race, clocking my slowest-ever time in a half-marathon. Clearly my training method was not working. Resolving halfheartedly to continue, I dragged myself through the laps until – one soggy day in November – I broke. The rain had started as soon as I had laced my shoes, and it was on roughly the 2000th squishy footfall of the afternoon that I stopped in my tracks. Running wasn’t fun this way. It wasn’t even rewarding anymore. In that moment I realized that the athleticism I had hoped for was not compatible with my Peace Corps experience, and I walked away. I returned to my shack, dried off and sat down with a copy of Lake Wobegon Days, leaving my shoes to gather mold in the corner.

* * *

I will not be the first volunteer to equate the tour of duty with the running of a marathon. Endurance. Pain. Monotony. Hell, even the numbers are the same: 26.2 months and 26.2 miles. But in the running of those laps in the campo, I often noticed another point of similarity: incrementalism [an invented word]. Much in the same way that I would constantly apprise myself of the percentage completed and that left to go while running, I would track the days gone by and the days remaining in my Peace Corps service. Five months down, two discounting training. Twenty-two months to go. One-twelfth of the way through. I suspect it’s unhealthy to be so constantly aware of one’s place in the stream of time. It doesn’t amount to the vaunted state of “Living in the moment,” but rather it’s an acute fixation with past and future. I hope that I am one of only a few who have suffered from this in the Peace Corps, though I know it afflicts many in the realm of endurance sports.

But there is another way to stride through either. Athletes will speak in hushed, reverent tones about “The Zone” – about the state in which you don’t notice the passing of the miles, the pain in the legs or the sun overhead. It is a meditation in motion, buoyed by serious physical preparedness and mental acuity. It is not easily invoked, and it has not happened to me very often in running. However, there came a point in my Peace Corps service when I realized that I was in that same Zone – when I awoke one day to find that more than half my time here had already rolled by, and the remainder would not only be tangible but fleeting. It was an accident, but a fortunate one.

* * *

The Hispaniola half-marathon happened again this year, on August 7th, and I ran it alongside two other volunteers who had given in to my wheedling pleas for company. I was in awful shape, but it was worth it. I did count the kilometers zealously, and I was constantly aware of the increments of the course. But I consider it one payment on a plan that will return me to the Zone one race in the future. For now I am content to be swiftly and pleasantly rolling the remaining days of my tour in the DR.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #13: Midsummer Traverse

Going to San Francisco. Not San Francisco CA but San Francisco de Macoris, at the center of the Dominican Republic. The trip there from Nagua is one of life’s great pleasures, sitting in the bed of a pickup truck with Paul Simon’s Graceland playing on my headphones. The sun is brutal and there’s no shade, but speeding through the endless rice paddies at sixty mph provides enough of a breeze to make it comfortable.

Public transportation in the DR is strange but efficient – a polyglot of minibuses, sedans, pickups and motorbikes, organized in such a way that any passable road has a standard driver or two. On the highway between Nagua and San Francisco, a transit syndicate runs a truck every fifteen minutes. Fifty pesos to ride in the cab and forty to ride in the bed, which – sunburn and dust notwithstanding – is a much better deal. The buses – battered, monoxide-wheezing and mostly not air-conditioned – ply the same road, but their ultimate destination is the city of Santo Domingo. One may also encounter dump trucks without engine housings, flatbeds moving gigantic John Deere rice threshers and the sparkling SUVs of the rich. Dodging through it all are dozens of motorbikes, roaring without mufflers, carrying multiple passengers and sacks of grain. The exhaust is sometimes potent.

It seems as though the battles of Christianity are fought on the road. Where vehicles in the US are sometimes lettered with “No Fear” or “Who’s Your Daddy,” the public buses and trucks in the DR are boldly labeled “Christ’s Chosen,” “God is with me – don’t attack me” and “Jesus my Lord.” As I swivel to look at the bus bearing down on my truck’s tailgate, I see that it is called “The Distinguished One – with more faith!” I can’t help but wonder, how much more faith? Fifteen percent? Fifty percent? The bus roars by before I can pose the question to the driver.

There is something about being squished into a single bus seat with three other people that provides a sense of a common goal. Something about riding three to a rickety motorcycle reinvigorates a latent sense of spirituality. And despite the raccoon-eyes that come from an hour’s ride in the bed of a pickup wearing sunglasses, going to San Francisco is always worth it. I am paid back by the big sky and the freedom of the road.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #12: Encounters

A few weeks ago I was in the mountains outside of Jarabacoa – a village called La Cienaga that serves as the jumping off point for 3,000 - meter Pico Duarte. At least, it’s the most-used trailhead. I was there because of an idea hatched nearly a year ago: to blitz the highest peak in the Caribbean in one day. After batting around the statistics and consulting with potential partners Byron and Pat, it came across as completely feasible.

However, the signs were bad as I arrived in La Cienaga the evening before the trip. An afternoon downpour had given way to a cold drizzle, Byron had already canceled on extenuating circumstances, and night was descending as I arrived at the house of Pat’s host family to find that he was not yet back from a trip to the capitol. But all was well. He pulled in on the last truck of the day, and we crashed early to be ready.

*

It actually worked out as we had expected – better, even. I moronically forgot to turn the alarm on even after I had set it for 3 AM, but my internal clock made up for it. Tossing around in my borrowed sleeping bag at an unknown hour, I neurotically checked my watch to find that it was already 3:52. A rush to get out of the house put us at the trailhead a little after four. Dawn found us hiking through moss-draped pines ten kilometers in, already mudded to the knees thanks to the short beams of our one-battery flashlights.

We did a respectable pace, and my sweat glands responded by ensuring that my clothes were soaked despite the September-in-Vermont chill of February- in-the-Caribbean. Pat took the lead as we crested the first fifteen hundred meters of climbing and passed the trickling source of the North Yaque River. We stopped briefly at the sub-summit station to chat with the low-on-supplies and conversation-starved ranger, with whom we shared a feed of bread and cheese, then we set into the final six hundred meters.

I’m uncertain whether it was the altitude or just accumulated fatigue, but I was in pain up the final stretch; we had been at nearly a jog for more than seven hours unrelenting, but our reward was the summit before noon. Over raisins and chocolate we pondered the weather. The clouds rolled over the saddle below, and we chose not to linger. On our rapid descent, we passed the day’s mule-borne tourists going up through the summit valley, just as a cold early-evening fog wrapped around us. The stars were beginning to prick the sky above La Cienaga when we reached the trailhead a little before seven PM; just enough energy remained in us to see to dinner and a large celebratory beer each, then we were passed out until long past the following dawn.

*

We were awakened a tad earlier than we would have liked by a knocking at the window. Pat’s landlord, Chano, had sent one of his daughters to collect the weekly laundry and to find out how it was possible that the two Americans had actually slept to the astonishing hour of nine AM. We had no good explanation, since our trip had been semi-illegal by our failure to secure the services of a guide – such as Chano, incidentally.

After the girl had departed, we set about consuming a morning ration of face-slapping black coffee and heavy oatmeal, relaxing on the porch and taking in the bright mountain morning while letting the lactic acid drain steadily from our legs. My ride back to Jarabacoa – the last one of the day – was supposed to leave around noon, so I packed and we walked down to the house of Chano and his family to wait.

Pat had boarded with them for his first few months in town, so there was a pleasant familiarity as we sat down on the porch and visited with Chano’s wife. A few of their children dashed around playfully tormenting us until Pat tickled them into submission. “Child abuse,” I chortled. As I sent several kickball pitches to a toddler, Pat set to discussing the Spanish version of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” with fourteen-year old Janely, another daughter. A neighbor – still in her morning curlers – dropped by to harangue Pat with a well-worn line about his coldness toward Dominican women.

It was standard insanity as we waited for the truck.

*

Thinking back, I now suppose that I sensed vague background music as we watched the spiffy rented dirtbike pull up to the porch. It was the Wicked Witch of the West theme from the Wizard of Oz, undoubtedly.

Chano dismounted from the back of the bike and greeted us with a hearty “Buendia!” that seemed to subtly indicate that he knew damn well where we had been the day before. The bike’s operator – a burly, middle-aged Caucasian guy – instead began with “Hey. How’s it goin’.” We interpreted this arrival to mean that Chano was prepping a potential trek client by having him over to the house for coffee. For Pat and I, however, it was an opportunity to jive with another American.

For reasons unknown, we never introduced ourselves as the conversation began in thick English. I shall therefore refer to the interloper as “Guido.”

We gave Guido our typical schpiels regarding our jobs and lives in the DR, in which I mentioned that my site was near Nagua.

“Yeah. Nagua,” interjected Guido in a telling way. “I spent some time over there. Some people actually got heads on their shoulders in that town. Not like the rest of this country. People are so goddam stupid here.” He delivered this line with a smile, and I felt a palpable speedbump in our still-untracked road to rapport.

It only got better from there, as he began to let loose a torrent of Too Much Information. Guido, it seemed, was from California, but he’d spent most of the past six years out of the country. He’d done everything: sales in Southeast Asia, English teaching in Japan, and now he was touring the DR (for dubious reasons, given his lame-waddling control of Spanish). He said he was wandering around for a few months, and had decided to check out La Cienaga for the day.

At this point, he became distracted by the not-unattractive neighbor still in her curlers. “Wow, man,” he said to Pat. “You live here? Have you done her yet?” Pat shifted uncomfortably and tried to maintain the “humor.”

“Not for lack of her trying, dude.”

“Oh hey; you should get on that,” continued Guido. “I bet she’s really tight!” We had jarringly entered the locker room and were initially determined not to flinch first. Pat’s neighbor was wearing a quizzical smile and hoping someone would be polite enough to offer her a translation, but we kept our mouths tactfully shut as Guido went on.

“Seriously, though; this country’s great for tight pussy. I’ve been doin’ women all up and down the North coast, and it ain’t like the states. Back home a woman has a kid and she gets all loose and floppy. Here a chick can turn out two, three babies and still be really tight. I’m tellin’ ya, you should do her.”

It was at this point that Pat began scanning the bushes for candid cameras. This guy could not possibly be for real.

But over the next half-hour, we sat mostly speechless, the recipients of a straight talk deluge. Guido was especially keen to offer his insights on life in the U.S. A sampling:


- “I’d never put my kids through public school in the West. The goddam Mexicans have flooded the whole system.”

- “These days I can’t even tell a housewife in Wisconsin that she looks sexy. I’d get arrested for harassment.”

- “Most people just can’t do sales consulting, but I’m great at it. I won’t let anybody fuck with me.” He refused to elaborate.

- “People are crazy with all these new laws back home. You can’t even touch a kid in the schools there. I tellya, I woulda been thrown in jail for the stuff I did with the kids in Japan. They’re just crazy in the states.”


As an illustration of this last point, he had – throughout his near-monologue – attracted a maelstrom of children by absent-mindedly dispensing candy from his backpack. Janely had gotten a bit to close, and Guido “playfully” grabbed her shirt. She was thus unable to bolt, though she gave it a valiant effort, perhaps realizing that the situation was not the safest.

I became annoyed. “Hey, give it a rest, man.”

“Seriously,” said Pat. “You’re gonna rip her shirt.”

“So what?” replied Guido, grinning. “I’ll just buy her a new one.” He finally let go and Janely darted around the corner of the house, thereafter to maintain her distance.

Chano and his wife had been sitting nearby, smiling politely throughout - perhaps sensing our growing discomfort but unaware of precisely what was being said. For my part, I was becoming deeply disturbed by Guido, who was quite unlike anyone I had ever thought existed outside of daytime TV. My adrenaline was up, and so was Pat’s.

It was therefore to all of our good fortunes that Guido soon accepted our suggestion to check out the park further up the road. With an unwelcome “See ya,” he climbed back on the bike and rode off.

After a brief silence, I said in Spanish, “That was a bad example of an American.”

Pat and I had already spent fifteen minutes discussing the freakiness of the visit when Guido returned, almost exactly concurrent with my ride.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #10: Changing Gears

A premonition of middle age came upon me a few weeks ago, in the slow days between the visits of good friends from home. This was mostly sparked by the passing of my one-year-in-the-peace-corps anniversary, and the concurrent cataloging of all the things I have not accomplished – all the work left to be done. I had this realization as I walked a ridgeline above the valley under the noonday sun, pausing occasionally to scan the hedges for ripe pineapples. A hot day – moving out of the too-brief-too-wet winter – and in the half haze you could see all the way to the Atlantic. A good day to get out the kinks of cabin fever and make some bold leaps toward productivity.

*

My work has changed around a bit. Several side projects are still running, but the wreckage of the rainy season and the polite but firm aid-agency proposal rejections have finished my work toward a road in Vuelta Larga. The costs are simply too high and the existing channels too uninterested. I suppose this is a branding of reality and I should be consciously savoring some disillusionment, but I have no shortage of windmills at which to tilt.

By virtue of my ability to operate a global-positioning-satellite receiver (GPS) and make a map, my local Dominican coworkers reached the somewhat rash conclusion that I am capable of building an aqueduct in the town of Los Guayuyos, located just upriver from Vuelta Larga. Even in my wildest resume fabrications I never though to put down “Civil Engineer,” but this particular job has proven remarkably feasible. After a crash course in hydrodynamics in Santo Domingo, I set about the planning of a gravity-fed system capable of providing 300 people with potable water. The designs are nearly done, the funding mostly secured, and the shovels sharpened. Theory and reality are soon to collide spectacularly.

*

But on that new spring day I was still working out the basics. Wandering Los Guayuyos, I was using a Peace Corps GPS to mark coordinates and elevations of potential faucet sites. Perhaps you can appreciate the impact of a sunburned gringo stumbling about a village, stopping occasionally to press some buttons and elicit some beeps from a black plastic object the size of a paperweight. Whereas in the US I would have been either 1.) arrested, 2.) shot or 3.) both, the locals in this case frequently emerged from their houses and shady front yards to ask me if I was having any luck finding reception on my new cell phone. Many offered me water as well, doubtlessly saving my life. As I chatted, trying to explain the significance of georeferencing their aqueduct design, it was not lost on me that the water I was drinking had been carried by hand in buckets from streams up to a mile away. I suspect it was not lost on them, either, but Dominican generosity knows no limits. I turned down six offers of coffee on that day alone.

But as I reached the last house on the ridge, I met a woman cooking lunch who proceeded to ask me the casually probing, painfully personal questions I so often get as a corollary of that generosity. When she finished with my love life and got around to asking me how long I’d been living in the valley, I was surprised to find that I didn’t know the answer in exact months, weeks, days and hours, as I had when I first arrived back in days of antiquity. She marveled nonetheless that nearly a year had rolled by for an American in the jungle. “But time moves pretty quickly around here,” she added.

Through the days of rain stuck inside, the headaches of communication and the interminable traveling required of every activity, I never would have thought to call this life “quick” until she mentioned it. Yet so it has been, and so it will most likely continue. I thanked the woman for the unexpected wisdom, and continued down the path until I was back under the trees, breathing deeply and trying to slow down a bit.