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.
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.
