Snow in the Mountains

Westerly

2010-05-26T22:00:00.002-04:00

Down to a merciful 70 degrees at 10PM. Walking the dog down the wet sidewalk, I passed a neighbor sitting on her porch, smoking a cigarette. She also couldn't remember a Westbound storm on the edge of the lake. The one that just rolled through kicked up house-sized dust devils from the dry soil, pushing a 90-degree day in front of it like this were some suburb of Atlanta.

When I visited friends in Atlanta one summer years back, my Northern sensibilities weren't prepared for the amount of sweat I could produce on an early morning run. I felt those conditions again this morning: heavy and humid underfoot, leadening my legs. And while it's a cliche, in Georgia we sat on porches and grilled slowly in the evening light, moving just a little, a Southern adjustment to the heat. I could taste it again this evening as the thunderheads built.

Beer in hand, I rested on the picnic table behind our house, waiting for steaks to grill through. I had them on low flame, and wondered if they would cook just as well on the sidewalk. I idly chewed on scallions from the garden, the one crop that's fully up at this odd pivot point. It's the end of May in Burlington, and the beans are only six inches tall, the garlic hasn't scaped, the lettuce is thumbnail-sized and only the weather seems to think that it's the end of July. Everything in it's right place but the mercury.

Walking down the dark street tonight was almost total silence, but for my sandals and my dog's heavy breathing. Lightning flickered in the clouds as they moved over the valley to the South and West, and stars burned overhead. As I re-entered the house, an Easterly breeze moved the lilies by the door, breaking the stillness.

Ode to a Legendary Peace Corps Volunteer

2010-03-04T11:51:00.002-05:00

I no longer remember why I decided to frame this as a eulogy; the volunteer who inspired this character neither died nor was "Teminated" from PC service. But man, did he leave a trail of stories behind. I think he continues to do so, somewhere in the warrens of Charleston . . .

In Memoriam: Skoobs Tirrow, 2003-2005

Skoobs Tirrow was a great volunteer. There's no getting around that. The man himself will forever vacuum controversy in his wake, but his legend will always shine through as a sparkling example of how a human being can jump into the snakepit of life and wring a few minutes of gleeful fun out of a whole lot of pain. We all owe him a great deal.

I met Skoobs three weeks into pre-service training. We were in the same agroforestry group, but somehow in the rush of culture defibrillation we hadn't crossed paths until we were sent to visit two volunteers who lived close to each other. Perched on a ridge of the Cordillera Septentrional one night and taking long pulls from glasses of brugal and fanta, we listened to Skoobs expound his theories on the wealth of nations and how our places in life were dictated by the whims of fate. Then he pointed out that I was urinating on someone's low-slung clothesline. So my first impression of Skoobs was of a quiet brilliance tempered by great powers of observation.

Skoobs was a man of mystery. He seemed to have walked out of a fog-swathed Charleston night and straight into the Peace Corps. There were rumors of his days working as a longshoreman on the Boston waterfront, as a bouncer for a nightclub in Baton Rouge, and even hushed whispers that he had parachuted into Beiruit with the 82nd Airborne. His polymorphous accent would bounce without a hiccup from a Long Island brogue to a Carolina drawl. His tattoos were in three different languages. As we got to know him through training, the pieces of his past became ever more fragmented, yet what he told us himself was never related with anything less than breathtaking honesty.

His service in the Dominican Republic was tumultuous, trackable by the changes in his hair color. Perhaps it could be said that a precedent was set when his CBT doña – exasperated at her charge’s inability to enjoy her yuca/grease soup – attacked him with a frying pan. Indeed, the culmination of Skoobs’ host-family misadventures came a year later when he returned to his site from capital business to find he had been evicted from his shack in the desert. Fortunately, the Jaragua took him in.

Midway through his service, Skoobs authored a controversial article that appeared in this publication under the title “The Chameleon.” While it inspired more late-night, brugal-fueled discussions than can be here related, the essay’s premise – that cultural adaptation can go too far – quickly became secondary to the truth hidden between the lines: that Skoobs himself was capable of adapting to any environment, society or point of view. The district of Polo is in Skoobs’ debt for his work with coffee cooperatives, Monteada Nueva thanks him for the wildflowers he scattered across hill and dale, and Leonel Fernandez owes him one for that thing in the place with the guy that time, but Skoobs’ gift to Volunteers was his Chameleon Ethic.

At the heart of the matter, it could be said that Skoobs Tirrow was more than simply a man. He was an era. For years to come, the PCDR community will be recalling events of unabashed insanity utilizing him as a reference point. We are already hearing it: "Jeez, what would Skoobs do in this situation?" "Man, do you remember that time in Azua when Skoobs got us free drinks and lapdances . . . um . . . I mean pretzels?" His influence around this little island will not expire anytime soon (Avenida Tirrow in Barahona, for example), but those of us fortunate enough to know and love him find comfort in knowing that he is now in a better place.

-Bill Boykin-Morris

Agroforestry

Vuelta Larga, Nagua

Unsettled

2010-01-16T23:33:00.006-05:00

There was an odd split to my focus today.

It was beautiful in Burlington. Our first weekend back after nearly a month of travel to friends and family all over the country, and the snowpack was melting in 40 degrees of sunshine. Families flooded the farmers market, smiling; we visited friends outside the city and skated on a frozen marsh. Our dog chased some cows. Katlyn talked pregnancy shop with friends - with some of the many others who know damn well that this is the place to raise a child. This is why I want to be here, now and always.

But I also want to be in Haiti. The facebook news feed reads like an airport terminal at the start of a war - one friend from Peace Corps departing New Orleans for Port-au-Prince, another departing from D.C. for Jacmel. Three friends of mine from PCDR attended a technology-focused brainstorming session in D.C. today - how to help the relief effort with database coordination, satellite imagery interpretation, etc. - and I couldn't tear myself away from the computer for hours this morning, hoping to get a call for help with the mapping at least. I registered for Peace Corps Response yesterday, though I think this might be the worst possible time for me to pick up and head South without pay for a few months.

Another friend blogged today about how sick he is of hearing people talk about going to Haiti to help - how "It isn't like a community trash clean up project with rubber gloves and bottled water." I spent time with him around Cap Haitien four years ago. He knows what he's talking about. Haiti doesn't need hangers-on, however well-intentioned. But the thing is that I can help. The people in Port-au-Prince still need water, and I've built aqueducts in that very environment. Aid agencies need information on navigating the new landscape of rubble and roadblocks, and I'm a satellite imagery analyst. I could be useful, but from here I'm useless. It's infuriating.

I start a PhD in agroecology on Monday. I become a father in June. I've never felt so restless before in my life, and it has nothing to do with the usual suspects like fear of commitment or trepidation about parenthood. Where does this lead? Burlington? D.C.? Ouanaminthe?

Dreams of Ice

2009-12-31T16:59:00.007-05:00

It's raining on Cape Cod, right at the elbow near Harwichport. Chilly but not unpleasant, it's a coastal drizzle. But recently I've been waking up with thoughts of snow and ice. Of Antarctica. Of the wideness and cold described by a fictional glaciologist as "Claustrophobia and agoraphobia in the same place."

This morning it was thoughts of Lake Willoughby in Northeast Vermont, in deep winter. Reminiscent of a long Scandinavian fjord, it's wholly inhospitable when frozen over. Steep cliffs are covered with ice, and winds tear down the lake between them. I've dreamed of this place before, but now in the context of the past. Arriving with the French 400 years ago, it would have seemed beyond sublime; terrifying, without shelter. This is comforting, for reasons I can't identify.

Five years ago, from my cabin in the Dominican Jungle, I planned to go to grad school in Colorado. I would spend summers on the Greenland ice cap working the rounds of paleoclimatology, and winters in Boulder, sitting in front of computer screen and venturing out to boot up the front range in search of pistes. That fell away, but Vermont is a fine place. Often frozen, sometimes claustrophobic and agoraphobic. Crisp and brilliant now, though holiday travels bring me away.

I've thrown another log on the fire. Changes are apparent. The New Yorker magazine this week reports that glaciers on the Antarctic peninsula that were unbroken thirty years ago are now fragmented and discontinuous, stony ridges poking up between them. This summer NASA satellites beamed images of Arctic sea ice covering 25% less area than the established average. Mountain glaciers retreat. The American Northeast has held mostly steady, but even there the retreat of winter has been noticeable in my scant three decades.

The ice is fading.

The Pantheon

2009-05-01T13:16:00.005-04:00

I used to fancy myself a writer. Really, I was just a Peace Corps Volunteer with tons of free time on my hands, seeing wondrous things that begged to be described. There's always been an inverse correlation between my working life and my writing life: as I got into more rewarding development work in the Dominican Republic, my writings about it all dropped away to near nothing.

But I like what I put on paper from my shack in the jungle, so I've revisited most of it on this blog . . . back-dated to the ancient days of 2003 - 2005. Check out the archives for the thoughts of an innocent abroad.

-Bill

A Wintry Mix 2008

2008-12-09T22:46:00.004-05:00

Hello Fair Friends,

It is time again for tunes, and I hope you've gotten your CDs without trouble. I've listed the tracks below; they trend toward the mellow and contemplative, which fits both my mood and the economy these days. I managed to keep it secular last year, but gol-dangit there's some good music about Christmas. I'm all over the carols this year.

May you all be well this Winter!

******************************************
A Wintry Mix 2008

Martin Sexton - Do You Hear What I Hear?
Kent Gustavson - Bethlehem
Sufjan Stevens - For the Widowers in Paradise, For the Motherless in Ypsilanti
American Analog Set - Ice King
Nina Simone & Postal Service - Little Girl Blue
The Killers - Don't Shoot Me Santa
Pearl Jam - Someday at Christmas
Snow Patrol - When I Get Home For Christmas
Sixpence None the Richer - Carol of the Bells
My Morning Jacket - Xmas Time is Here Again
John Fahey - God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Molloy, Brady, Peoples - The Rainy Day/The Grand Canal
Loreena McKennitt - Snow
Low - Long Way Around the Sea
Susan McKeown - Through the Bitter Frost and Snow

Carpooling - New York City and Points South

2007-04-05T16:05:00.000-04:00

It is our hope that those who do the long haul do it in good company. If you are planning to drive from the NYC area or from even further in the deep South (like New Jersey!), please post your driving plans/needs in the comment section below. With any luck, you'll be exposed to insane iPod mixes and marathon games of dictionary! Useful directional-type info:

DRIVING FROM THE NEW YORK AREA

Take I-87N from the city about 120 miles to Albany, Take I-787N from Albany for about 9 miles to the junction of route 7, Take the RT-7E exit 9E (to Troy/Bennington), Follow Route 7 about 20 miles to the Bennington bypass/route 279, Take the bypass about 4 miles to the junction of US route 7 (not to be confused with NY route 7 from Albany), Turn left onto US-7N, Continue about 25 miles on route 7 to Emerald Lake State Park on the left (site of the Friday night barbecue). Twelve miles North of the park is the White Rocks Inn, on the left at the prominent red barn. If you reach Wallingford you've gone too far.

The hotels are also on route seven, about ten miles North of the White Rocks Inn on the left.

Carpooling - Burlington

2007-04-05T15:59:00.000-04:00

And to the fine folk who choose to fly into the Burlington airport (closer than Boston, cheaper than Albany), you will be treated to the finest views ever devised to accompany two lanes of asphalt! Please post your driving plans/needs in the comments section below, and we hope everyone will be able to cut down on costs and time. Relevant Info:

FROM BURLINGTON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

Head Southeast From Airport Dr, Continue across the Williston Rd on Kennedy Dr 1.5 miles to I-189S, Follow I-189 1.3 miles to the exit for US route 7, Take route 7 South for about an hour and a half through Shelburne, Middlebury and Rutland (where the hotels will be on the right as you leave town) to the village of Wallingford, Continue on route 7 about 1.5 miles beyond where it crosses School St/route 140 in Wallingford. The Inn is at the gigantic red barn on the right!

The Friday night barbecue will take place at Emerald Lake State Park, about twelve miles south of the White Rocks Inn on route 7.

Carpooling - Boston

2007-04-05T14:51:00.000-04:00

Everyone flying into Boston or starting from around there, please post your plans/needs in the comments section of this entry. We hope to have people sharing rides and cutting down on rental/fuel costs. Applicable Information:

DRIVING FROM THE BOSTON AREA

Take I-93N from Boston about 60 miles, Turn onto I-89N just south of Concord, NH, Follow I-89 to White River Jct, VT (another 60 miles), Take exit 1 to US route 4 West (to Woodstock and Rutland), Follow Route 4 through Quechee, Woodstock and Killington to Rutland, Turn left onto US route 7 South, Follow route 7 for about 11 miles (You'll pass the hotels on your right as you leave Rutland), White Rocks Inn is at the big red barn on the right!

The location of the Friday night barbecue - Emerald Lake State Park - is also on route 7, twelve miles south of the White Rocks Inn.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #16: Haiti

2005-05-10T13:12:00.002-04:00

In the split second after the gunshot, I wasn’t sure if ducking was a sufficient response. It seemed to work for the dozens of people around me, though. As the heavily-armed soldiers hustled to the source of the noise and I was deciding whether or not to panic, my eyes settled on the culprit: a wheelbarrow – overloaded with at least five hundred pounds of rice in white sacks – that had hit a stone in the road. The tire, rather than hissing its way flat, had exploded from the pressure. The crowd exhaled simultaneously and went back to its flowing confusion. The wheelbarrow’s owner scratched his head. This all happened in an instant as I stood by a river called Massacre.

* * *

It took me two years of living next door in the Dominican Republic to finally buckle down and go to Haiti. All that time I’d been hearing stories filtering across the border and combining them with statistics I’d read: that Haiti is the poorest country in the Hemisphere and has a life expectancy of 49 years; that the DR, not without its own severe poverty, boasts a per-capita income five times higher than that of its neighbor; that Somalia and Haiti are the most commonly-invoked examples of failed states. When a coup ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide last spring, the peace corps pulled the plug on its program in Haiti and since then no volunteers have been permitted to go there, though most of us worked with migrant Haitians on a daily basis in the DR. The state department warning is still dire in its recommendation that no American citizen travel to Haiti for any reason, despite the presence of a seven-thousand strong UN peacekeeping force. I’d never been in a country occupied by the blue helmets - what more temptation did I need?

As it happens, the troops were wearing blue baseball caps instead of helmets.

* * *

Reflecting on his travels in Africa, Paul Theroux wrote that the only way to really feel a border is to cross it on foot.

A week ago I was standing on the West bank of the Massacre river, having walked across on a bridge choked with Haitians going to the twice-weekly market in the border town of Dajabón. On the DR side was a gigantic gateway and a few Dominican cops. On the bridge a squad of Spanish peacekeepers with automatic rifles nervously scanned the crowds for who-knows-what and occasionally switched off with other soldiers waiting in the shade of a UN tank parked nearby. On the Haitian side was a single policeman, directing the flow of traffic and casting distracted glances at the three grungy Americans standing on the side of the road. I was there waiting for a ride to the interior with Jason and Piper – two fellow peace corps volunteers – when the above-mentioned wheelbarrow temporarily raised our pulses.

We had crossed without a word from officials on either side, and I guessed that could be attributed to 1.) The important-looking peace corps IDs hanging from our necks, 2.) The UN blue of my over-bleached Middlebury College baseball cap, or 3.) The fact that confidence is all you need to avoid undue attention on open-border market days. Jason and I spoke very little Haitian Creole (our collective vocabulary amounting to “Good afternoon,” “Thank you,” “Beyond mountains are more mountains” and “Short pants, please”), but Piper had spent a year as a volunteer in Haiti before the evacuation sent her to a new assignment in the DR, and she spoke like a native. She was also running a solar electrification project in her old host village – unbeknownst to our superiors – and we were helping her carry a load of battery cells in exchange for her services in getting us safely to Cap Haitian, the largest city in the North of Haiti.

By minor miracle, we managed to hitch the forty miles to the city in a jeep with three UN policemen from Québec. It speaks to the quality of the road that the trip – in a rain squall but with four wheel drive – took three hours. Along the way we passed queues of rust-eviscerated trucks and converted rattletrap buses (known in Haiti as Tap-Taps) unable to clear the mud pits. We plowed through runoff pools barring the way to all but the steady procession of mostly-gleaming UN vehicles going to and from the border. Passing a Tap-Tap packed full with Haitians – another dozen of them riding on the roof, looking wet and miserable – Jason remarked how much harder life seemed in comparison to the DR. The Canadian in the driver’s seat responded “Yeah, but somehow they always keep smiling.” As he spoke we passed by a man standing beside a flooded house, his arms raised in anger and yelling furiously at us. Ten minutes later we flew by another laden Tap-Tap and plastered the occupants with mud from our tires. I sensed the potential for karmic payback in the future.

* * *

We traveled Haiti like vacationers, but with our eyes as wide open as possible. In Cap Haitian we met up with Becky, Byron and Katherine – three other DR volunteers who had flown in via Port-Au-Prince that day – and we stayed at a hotel filled with Red Cross employees. We ate steak for dinner and fell asleep on turned-down sheets. Outside, the peacekeepers knocked off work at six and caravanned back to their fortified compounds, leaving the street corners to their night residents, whether armed gangs known as Chimeres, or working Haitians looking for the least dangerous route home.

We spent the next day at a beach northwest of the city at a site used as a day resort by Royal Caribbean cruise lines. The Atlantic was transparent blue and Guinness was available for a dollar a bottle. A dozen Chilean soldiers on their day off snorkeled around and generally avoided the few rich Haitians who could afford the three-dollar beach entry fee. One soldier we talked to – as he sat on the dock collecting a sunburn – told us he was looking forward to the end of his deployment in another month; R&R notwithstanding, it was evident that he would rather be in Chile. We wished him luck and swam off to look for conch shells.

That night we stayed at a nearby village accessible only by boat but accustomed to tourists, where we ate fried plantains to the blast of Guns N’ Roses from a generator-powered stereo. When Byron and I set up a slackline (a tightrope-style activity employed mostly by bored rock climbers), we attracted every kid in town to view the spectacle. One of the older onlookers decided that Byron was employing some sort of magic to walk the ten-yard length of webbing with such balance, and asked him to do it again without his hat on, just to be sure.

The moon rose full and yellow as we fell asleep to the drone of mosquitoes. Cap Haitian – a city of half a million people just over the ridge behind our hotel – cast no glow on the night sky.

* * *

The next day, the girls opted to stay at the beach while Byron, Jason and I headed for the primary (first on a very short list) tourist attraction of northern Haiti: Citadel La Ferrier.

While technically a republic, Haiti has a long history of dictators, beginning with Henri Christophe, self-proclaimed emperor of the island following the revolution of 1804. When he heard news that Napoleon himself was planning to re-take the former French colony, Christophe set his nation of ex-slaves to work building a fortress on top of a three-thousand foot karst pinnacle in the mountains south of Cap Haitian. The construction began in 1811 and was still incomplete when Cristophe committed suicide in 1820, though by then 365 cannons and 10,000 rounds of ammunition had been installed there, costing the lives of as many as 20,000 workers. The fort – still the largest of its kind in the western hemisphere – never came under attack; the French had lost interest. It is with no small amount of irony that the Citadele was finally completed in the time of Haiti’s last full-time dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier, who built a beautiful cobblestone pathway to the top of the peak in anticipation of hordes of tourists who never materialized. Duvalier fled to France in 1986 and the military ruled in Haiti until the first free elections in the country’s history elevated Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency in 1990. The Citadele is something of a mix of symbols: a bastion of determined resistance to colonialism; a monument to what Haitians can create when they work together; or perhaps an ironic testimony to the only power that ever seems to accomplish anything – totalitarianism.

The three of us were the only tourists on the summit that afternoon. We took in the view and dutifully snapped some photos before descending quickly to catch the last truck back to Cap Haitian.

* * *

With our assignments in the DR beckoning, we headed back to the border the next day. In the confusion of mud and crowds at the Tap-Tap depot in Cap Haitian we made the decision to jump in the bed of the first truck leaving for Ouanaminthe on the frontier, and promptly found ourselves in karmic backlash for the ideal ride we’d had in the other direction. The rain clouds had long since parted, and a full sun beat down on us in the packed, uncovered truck. As we left the city, the pitted asphalt gave way to a one-lane dirt road reminiscent of a newly-exploded minefield. Past the point of no return, the driver let us in on the fact that the back left wheel was missing all but two lug nuts, so he would be proceeding at less than ten mph for the duration of the trip in an effort to avoid losing the wheel in any of the thousands of potholes.

There were conflicting explanations for the condition of the road – the primary commercial artery for northern Haiti. The Canadian cops said that it had been contracted for paving, but when Aristide went into exile he took the public works cash with him. Piper said it was in the best condition she’d ever seen. A man sitting on top of the truck’s cab wondered why the UN wasn’t doing something about it. Of course there was ample time for such pondering: the trip took five hours at a crawl.

Despite Byron’s warnings about talking politics in a volatile location, I couldn’t help asking some fellow passengers – most of them fluent in Spanish – their opinions on the things we’d seen. Mention of the name Aristide brought an immediate clamor of argument in Creole from several people, in which I could discern the words “Americans,” “dollars,” “justice” and “magic.” I caught Byron glaring at me as if to say, “I told you so; now they’ll never find our bodies.” When things settled a bit and switched back to Spanish, I discovered that the former president had few friends in the north of the country – not surprising, considering the fact that last year’s uprising had originated in Cap Haitian. One man told me pro-Aristide gangs were running the lucrative cocaine trade in Haiti. Another related a tale of how Aristide had escaped an assassination attempt by turning into a large bird and flying away.

A businessman sitting next to me had holdings in both Haiti and the DR; he was initially reluctant to offer any opinions, but he needed no prodding to tell some stories about colleagues losing everything to the chimeres, who would ransack shops with impunity. I asked him if the blue helmets could do anything to help, but he shook his head and said, “They only confiscate the weapons they see.” Nervously looking at his watch three hours into the ride, he jumped off the bed and flagged down a passing motorcycle, then shelled out the money required to arrive at the border long before the rest of us. No one else seemed to have the cash to do the same, so we continued chugging toward our destination, breathing the dust kicked up by occasional convoys of SUVs bearing the markings of UNICEF or Plan International.

Arriving in Ouanaminthe with the tension of the long ride on our shoulders, we blitzed back across the border with tunnel vision. I didn’t notice the crowds, the peacekeepers, the vendors or the motorcycle taxi driver I shortchanged. I almost didn’t notice the little girl trying to pick my pocket until she discovered I had nothing there and moved in front of me to try her luck with Byron. When we were on the Dominican side and five blocks from the gate, I started seeing things again. Byron had to remind me to breathe.

* * *

Haiti doesn’t show up on the radar much these days. Not long ago, Haitian police forces in Port-Au-Prince killed five demonstrators at a pro-Aristide rally, and it was mentioned in three sentences among the back pages of the New York Times. Elections are slated for this autumn, but the UN peacekeeping force admits it will not be able to maintain the necessary country-wide security. No one outside of Washington – and least of all in Haiti – seems to support the interim government of Gerard LaTortue. The country is losing its grip on even a provisional stability, and just across the border in the DR I heard no news. It took me two years to break peace corps policy and see the other half of the island for myself, and it was with morbid fascination that I observed the contrasts.

A world that can hide a broken circumstance like Haiti within its folds and margins is larger than any one person can imagine. I have been privileged to get a small glimpse of the size of this world, but I don’t have the slightest idea of what to do with the knowledge. Those in charge of Haiti’s future seem vexed with the same helpless perspective.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #17: Exile

2004-12-15T13:25:00.000-05:00

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

2004-10-01T13:27:00.001-04:00

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

2004-08-20T12:57:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-01T12:54:00.000-04:00

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

2004-05-01T12:50:00.000-04:00

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

2004-03-15T12:44:00.001-05:00

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.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #9: Flight Duality

2004-01-10T12:38:00.001-05:00

New Year’s day. Midmorning. The sun is doing it’s best to break the grip of the Atlantic system on the North coast of Hispaniola. Occasional light shafts play on the green of the flat horizon; a Winslow Homer or a Frederick Church. The wind tears onto the beach at an angle and casts sand at squinting lids and sunburned forearms; it also blows the waves high and messy. The near shore is more of a chop than a break, and the experienced are merely watching the show from the high ground.

New Years’s day. A hungover eight AM. The world is pale. A dully glowing ball holds close to where the Southern horizon should be, and an inspection of the surroundings reveals a thousand flecks crossing diagonally to the ground and cutting visibility to thirty yards. They are already collected there freshly at knee height. It has been snowing since long before dawn, and will not stop until the next day. A whiteout.

My shirt is too tight upon my upper body – which fell from grace in this rockless country long ago – but the brand label bears my name, “Guillermo,” so I wear it as one of those unnecessary tokens of luck employed by people who go on the sea. My soccer shorts are incongruous. My toe knuckles wink through worn holes in my borrowed water shoes. I am a sight. I hold my rented longboard under my right arm and stabilize it against the wind with my left. The blown sand adheres in clumps to the damp waxed surface.

I stare at my gloves as I knock them together for warmth. They have seen four seasons patched with duct tape, and before that, years on my father’s hands as he worked on the woodpile. The chairlift seat is cold through my nylon pants and even through my two jackets. My ears have the only claim to warmth, tucked inside a well-insulated helmet. My nose feels its legacy of frostbite and begins a revisitation as the wind scrapes my skin. The goggles I pull down into position turn my view green. I offer a clack of the freeheel skis hanging from my boots as the top of the line comes into half-formed view.

Andrew struggles with the wind as much as I do; we traverse the beach to the only spot with an appreciable channel. He is serene as we wade out, plant our boards on the water and wash them clear of sand. He maintains a focus as we begin to paddle, and he is soon far ahead. As I flounder in the shoulder-high breakers and swallow my beginner’s share of seawater, I catch a glimpse of him drifted to my left. He sits up on his board in a confusion of waves, looking for something rideable.

Chris’s neon yellow helmet is impossible to lose in the swirl of snow as we disembark the lift and skate across the summit flats with long diagonal strides. The red cross on his ski patrol jacket is just visible as I pull to a stop behind him at the top of the chosen slope. He is on one knee, locking the buckles of his forward boot and staring off down the pitch, choosing his line.

In my fight to clear the foam and break, I see Andrew – for just a moment before the next wave rolls across my view – paddling hard toward the shore at the top of a swell. He pushes fast into a standing position on his board and is lost in front of the wave as he drops in. Riding to glory, I’d like to think.

With a whoop almost lost to the wind, Chris kicks off down the slope. Dropping into the telemark stance, he shuffles through three tight, arcing S-turns, and is over the edge of the first cliff, out of my sight. The trace of his passage is still written on the snow, but the only sound is the wind.

Though I don’t really know what I’m looking for, I turn in front of a likely swell and begin a flailing run to catch the break. I feel the rise and see the foam begin to fleck the crest of the ridge on either side, as I pass the critical point and gravity has me. I haul myself to my feet. The water drops out from below.

With nothing more than a lean forward, I’m flying down the pitch with the snow spitting away from the drive of my knees. Two turns – neither as smooth as Chris’s – bring me to the drop, and with a quick push of the legs I’m airborne. Is this what It’s like to fly?

*

It could be said that I miss skiing. It could be said that I feel the absence of the active rush, of the reflex-reliant technique, and of the fellowship. It could also be said that I’ve been shown something of each in surfing, but with the beginner’s mind and the sensation of discovery and improvement. Far from home and experience, the integration of past and present becomes more important every day. The transition between gravity sports has been the most prominent connection for me, but I wonder what other ways exist for rediscovering flight.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #8: Traverse

2003-12-24T12:27:00.003-05:00

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

2003-12-20T12:23:00.000-05:00

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

2003-11-26T12:13:00.004-05:00

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#5: Natalia

2003-11-01T12:05:00.001-05:00

I first laid surprised eyes on her during a time that was not among my finest. I was down with giardia, wishing ambitiously that I were in Vermont golfing instead of gradually dying in a tropical hellhole. But hey; it had been a rough week.

Having dragged myself into Nagua for the regular planning meeting, I was sitting at a round table with a group of local agronomists – a cheery lot – and hoping that my presence wouldn't be missed when my shaky chair inevitably disintegrated and deposited me on the floor. Then I looked to the doorway, and noticed a newcomer speaking with the secretary there. It was a young woman, perhaps younger than I, with short brown hair and the appealing, freckled face of a fair foreigner and ; the sort of "look" that causes men such as myself to offer our hearts and all our worldly possessions in supplication. And her breasts! Their modest symmetry implied the descriptor "bosom;" a welcome change of pace from the standard Dominican variety, but I was finding her whole form captivating.

Apparently the other tecnicos hadn't noticed her. She had not noticed me. No one had noticed me noticing her, thank god. Worse, however, I had not noticed myself diverting power from my internal translator to my internal poet, only one of which can be operating at any given time. It's always a mistake to put the poet in charge; the translator is essential for functioning at these meetings, while the poet is more fond of seizing control of the vocal chords and emitting such gems as "Your eyes are as deep as the sea." He doesn't have a very good feel for the business.

True to form, the poet began prepping some pick-up lines before the inevitable hostile takeover of the larynx: "Fair lady, whilst thou come away with me?" "May we save each other from lives of loveless toil?" "Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee? It's no trouble, really." Fortunately, before any of these smooth starters could escape my mouth, she had turned and was gone. I hadn't caught her name. The poet retreated to his cerebral corner to do some sulking, and the translator got back on the job just in time to discover that I had committed to giving a series of workshops on avocado grafting.

* * *

A few weeks later I was back in my jungle gorge, working one day on a map for the school. My neighbor Francisco arrived around midmorning to visit, and he was a bit more jubilant than usual ("Usual" exemplified by shouts of joy when his cilantro is ready for picking). He asked if I wanted to head downriver to meet the Canadian visitors who were in town to see the nearby scientific reserve. Their presence was news to me. I said sure.

As we walked past other houses, I should have been tipped off to something by the way the bathing-averse campesinos were primping themselves like frat boys on a Friday night. As would be expected, I arrived at the host house to find seven Caucasian girls, all in the process of turning down marriage proposals from members of the gathering crowd. She was one of them, and was just as dauntingly beautiful as I remembered her.

I introduced myself to the group and found that they were from Quebec and that they all had good control of English. They were in my village on their weekend off; participating in a summer program of Plan Nagua, they were working with youth down in the city. The object of my affection went by the alluring, ambiguously-Russian name Natalia. Her English was flawless, with a strong, lilting French accent, and we set to talking while the group prepared to start hiking.

As it turned out, she lived not far from my town in Vermont, just across the border. She was twenty, studying in Quebec City for most of the year and spending her summer in the Caribbean to acquire some real-world experience. She was even familiar with my favorite Quebequois beer, and lamented that she hadn't brought any along. I lamented harder.

Then she set to asking me about Vermont, my family, and my job here. Elated, I was just about to launch into a poorly-inspired monologue on the loneliness of volunteer life when she asked, "So is it true that the Peace Corps is the smiley-face sticker on the tank of US foreign policy?"

Jesus! She knew how to sling a scathing metaphor! She could be simultaneously sarcastic and ironic! I would have dropped to one knee and proposed to her that instant if I'd had a ring handy.

"Um . . . yeah," I muttered instead. "Something like that."

The hike then went smoothly. I tagged along like a lovestruck puppy, once being afforded the knightly opportunity to refill Natalia's water bottle from mine when she ran out. But it went no further, alas. The gaggle of Canadian girls departed two days later, and I joined a host of bachelor campesinos in waving a tearful goodbye.

Back-Catalog Dispatches #4: Clumsy Banditry

2003-10-01T11:59:00.001-04:00

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

2003-09-01T11:55:00.001-04:00

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

2003-09-01T11:53:00.002-04:00

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

2003-06-01T11:45:00.002-04:00

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

2003-03-20T12:47:00.002-05:00

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.