Travelling by cycle

I just aborted a ten day, 550 km trip by cycle from the capital of Korea, Seoul, to the second largest city, Busan, in the opposite corner of the country.  There is an amazing and perhaps globally unique system of car-free trails that shuttle the cyclist along two major rivers, keeping the trail mostly flat.  Lee Myung Bak, the last president, left it as a legacy to the country which shouted him out of office after a scandal involving free trade and American Beef.

All along the trail, I kept meeting people who seemed to think that the only important thing was completing the whole trail, or arriving at the destination.  I rarely met people who were allowing the weather, the terrain and the sociocultural interest level to dictate their pace of travel.

The Bicycle Museum is right on the actual path, but many cyclists arrive when it is closed.
 I stayed the night so I would be able to check it out, as last time I arrived after its opening hours.

I too, am guilty of not following my own travel ideal, which is sort of epicurean, maximize experience, and if possible, pleasureable experience at the cost of completion or thoroughness.  Honestly, if I had done it right, I would have completely skipped "LG valley, the entire city and outskirts of Gumi, which is 60 km north of third-largest city, Daegu, and serves as a giant Detroit full of flat screen makers and associated industry.  The skyline is mostly smokestacks and there are entire blocks along the river without a single dwelling or corner shop or anything, actually, except factories.

Abandoned factory in Gumi, on the bike trail

It's a spooky sight, especially on a Sunday, and I should just have taken a bus or train from the last good spot, Sangju, to the next, Waegwan, which is mostly interesting because of the tide-turning battle that took place there.  But as Ju-Won ("Juan with an American accent, he told me) put it, Korea is more often efficient than reasonable.  To translate that back to a cycling tour, there was no way to avoid the industrial ugly that is Gumi, without crossing a mountain range or two, because one of Korea's largest manufacturing centers was built along the second longest river in the country, and upstream from perhaps a fifth of its food producing regions.

I had hoped fervently to lead a tour of American cyclists on this miraculous trail from city to city, but it was in Gumi, looking at it honestly with a marketing eye, that I realize I would need some serious tweaking to make this happen in a pleasant way.  Most Americans, though we certainly have worse canker sores like the chemical processing areas in Louisiana, would be decidedly turned off to see where their LCD TVs were coming from.

For the most part, though, the trail winds through some pretty virgin and unspoiled areas, as witnessed by the fishermen we saw fly fishing in every quiet bend of the river, and as confirmed one night when we heard an Asian barking deer, which was barking pretty aggressively after having swum across a 900 meter wide river with a pretty decent current.  Dragonflies and sluggish grasshoppers were our constant companions, and small, annoying gnats which only seemed to exist in the shade, and only became a problem when laboring up a steep grade, which could approach 20%, about the same as most stairways in public places.

So what I'm trying to say here, is that maybe 'Muricans would be as impressed as I am, that nature still managed to struggle through the cracks left it by rapid Korean industrialization, and that despite all the out of control development in places like the endpoints of the trail, Seoul and Busan, there are still plenty of lovely rocks-and-trees-only type vistas, plenty of sleepy towns where the country mile/hour/effort system of guestimation applies.  (In fact, we gave up asking local people distances because they would vary as much as 4 times from person to person.)

So when I aborted my trip at the 350 km mark, still over 200 km short of the 'destination', it was with some sadness and even sort of partial capitulation to someone elses idea of 'victory' and 'defeat'.  I did it because quite simply this marathon of heat was becoming more and more an issue of survival and shrewd discipline and planning, and less about enjoying the countryside.  Even the gorgeous vistas became steamed up with haze so thick as to obscure nearby mountains before 11 in the morning, so that effectively, if one wanted to do this trip, it meant going to bed upon arrival in a town, ideally 8 pm, then getting up at four and hitting the road at 'civilian dawn', which means when ordinary people perceive that the night is ending.

Many people in a hurry miss all the great art center only meters off the trail...

Not my idea of fun, and with all the restrictions, you are only likely to meet really Type A, spandex-breathing Serious Athletes, who have no time to stop and shoot the shit, share a non-reccommendable bottle of booze or other performance killing things like cookies and whatnot, and actually, this will turn your lovely Vacation of Experience into a Grim Army of One.

Nothing quite like coming in sweating buckets to this cool museum

On the bus on the way back, our driver apparently cut off a trucker and really, really pissed him off.  We spent the next hour on the edge of death, as the truck in front tried to box us in the slow lane, swerving dangerously every time our driver attempted to get in the fast lane, and the driver in front consistently drove 20 km under the speed limit, so as to rub salt in our driver's wounds.  It went from being an obvious vindictive revenge, to a very very dangerous game of cat, mouse and chicken, from which I actually started believing was going to be my very last experience in this life.

It all came out well in the end, but it reminded me that I had at least attempted another of my bucket lists, to ride, ride ride until the very end, whether real or fake.

bundled against the x rays of the sun, posing for a shot with the mothership

Jail Cake

     Most would say that jail is not their idea of an adventure.  However , there are certain circumstances under which I would always choose jail as the preferred experience.  For example, if you had a chance to be jailed with other key civil rights protestors in the 1960's, or even in Selma with Martin Luther King, in South Africa with Nelson Mandela, wouldn't you jump at the chance?  Well, we cannot always be so lucky, or so righteous, or persistent, as to have those kind of moments, but I cannot but maintain that this jail experience I had was the best possible use of my tourist self at the time.

     My Jail story really began in Guatemala, where I had been living in the hills of Huehuetenango.  I had gone to Chi Chi (Chichicastenango) for a Mayan festival.  I had been hoping to see some shamanic rituals that I heard about, that might or might not have been related with the ancient Classic Maya and their calendar, whose hieroglyphs I was studying at the time.  It was there that I met Thomas Lang, the war reporter.

     Tomas (Spanish spelling) was a hard drinking, hard playing, down to earth war reporter originally from Chicago, where he had learned his predilection for siding with the underdog.  Working in the mostly black South Side at the time, he had realized that he could transcend his race and become accepted by the locals, which is how he worked his magic as a reporter.  Previous to working in El Salvador as a stringer for an Illinois small city paper, he had covered the Beirut beat, which according to him was far, far more dangerous.
     Tomas said he wouldn't even have made friends with another American, but that I spoke to him for the first time in Spanish (which I confess was more whim than habit), and we shared a small bottle of El Venado aguardiente ('Deer brand' 'firewater', the local hooch, which we all lovingly nicknamed Envenenado , or 'poisoned'), which naturally had to be diluted with coca cola and friendship.

     After passing many of Tomas's litmus tests, such as having lived on the South Side of Chicago, having been the only non-Jewish WhiteBoy in an otherwise 'All-Black' high school, speaking Spanish and a smattering of Maya, but most of all, being able to metabolize Envenenado, he invited me nonchalantly to come to El Salvador, more specifically the capital where he was based.

     "C'mon down to El Salvador, you'll like it.  Especially the parties..." he said , leaving me just enough of a worm wriggling to intrigue me.  Guatemala was really beautiful and deep with indigenous culture, but I had been a little bored recently, I felt the need to move among my own and socialize a little.  I had been cooped up in the hills for far too long.

     So although I had now been living in Guatemala for a full year, making occasional trips to Mexico for Visa purposes, with no definite end in sight, I now started to slowly make plans to tie up loose ends and continue my journey, which had been stagnated by my love of Guatemala.  In fact if it had not been for this catalyst, I might never have reached Argentina, or even Colombia.

    When I got to El Salvador, I checked into a hotel, which is still one of my favorite travel memories, because the ground floor was used as a tobacco curing shed, and the aromatic, heavenly smells of drying tobacco wafted up through the floors and into all the rooms.  Tobacco is not an unpleasant plant; it makes me wonder how much chemical wizardry goes into making it smell as bad as cigarettes do.

     After a week there, Tomas found me a friend's empty house to stay in, and he proceeded to show me the party life I had dreamed of living up in the hills.  It wasn't sophisticated, no cocktails, nothing but beer, the people were great but not exactly what I would call 'my crowd'.  What set the party apart was that it was taking place during a civil war.  Eat Drink, and Be Merry, for tomorrow some of us could be dead.  Not a cute quip, but a reality in that time and place.  Everything seemed to have more meaning because of it, colors were sharper, sounds more crisp, food more tasty.

     Of course after a few weeks of partying like this, even this began to get a little old, and I yearned for more indigenous folklore, some local culture, and there was this town called La Palma in the hills near the border of Honduras and Guatemala, that was apparently worth it, for the entire town had been turned into this art village by this one visionary artist.  He had this unique and yet teachable naif style of painting that he taught to the villagers, and the entire village was just devoted now to churning out this painting style in a variety of handicrafts; gourds, wall hangings, clothes, etc.

     Unfortunately, travel around the country was simply not a matter of getting a ticket and going.  More than half of the country was more or less in the hands of the guerrilla, and in a losing battle with the hearts and minds of their own people, the government was restricting travel to these areas.  Any place within walking or even horse riding distance of guerrilla territory required a travel permit issued by the Salvadorean High Command, or  salvoconducto, as it is called in Spanish.

      Applying for and successfully receiving a salvoconducto often took more than a week, and often two weeks.  Unfortunately, I was at the end of my visa and wouldn't be able to wait that long.  But Tomas simply told me a little trick:  " These things are always changing, according to the situation of the army and the guerrillas.  So just get on a bus, and sit at the front where you are clearly visible.  If you are not allowed in the area without a salvoconducto, they will pull you off the bus and make you go back to the capital, and if not, if the situation is all clear, they'll allow you to go through.

     So we did just that....because by now I had recruited another person, a very blond looking Norwegian dude, in this adventure plan.  We both sat side by side, doubling our apparent foreignness, in the very front seat of the bus, where the soldiers at the roadblocks could clearly see us.  We passed more than five roadblocks in five hours, and at the end, we couldn't believe that we were entering La Palma, village of artists.

     Once we had gotten off of this magic bus, we sought out a hotel in the center of town, threw our packs down, and headed off to the market to search for dinner.  We found a lovely little vendedor selling pupusas and beer, and we joked about being the whitest guys on the bus and how it had worked like a magic talisman for opening up this lovely city to us.  Once we were here now, most of what there was to do was to go souvenir shopping, and possibly to visit with people and see how the art had affected their lives.  With all these plans, we finished our beers and went back to our hotel to get an early night in, so we could be fresh in the morning.

     When we opened the door of the room, there were three milicos (military police) sitting on our beds, going through our bags.  They looked up at us, without any apology or remorse.  "Good evening, gentlemen" said the one with ray bans, who seemed to be in charge.  "Do you have your salvoconducto to be here?"

     So we explained the whole deal , about how we really wanted to see La Palma, which is internationally famous, but that the salvoconducto required too much time, and how our friend had recommended the method of sitting at the front of the bus.  The commander shook his head when he heard how lazy the roadblock guys had been at doing their job.  We should have been stopped immediately out of the capital if things had been working well.

     He went on to say that this was a restricted area, and that we were actually in a little danger here, and so for our own safety, he insisted, before we could object about all the casual, safe looking people we had seen strolling around the market, 'for our own safety' we would be taken to the military base, and then in the morning, back to the capital by military transport.

La Palma today, reflecting not guerrillas but urban criminals.

     When we got our first look at our new digs for the night, the military base just outside of town, we were a little agog, for the entrance had bullet holes and divots right at about head level, all around the entrance.  Maybe people had even been killed in this deadly entrance.  The entry was not straight, but protected by a bullet pockmarked wall, and behind that wall, where the other walls were higher, there were other pockmarks to show how ill advised it would be to stick your head up during a fight.

    Once inside the base, they took us to a room no larger than a closet, and locked us in there.  It didn't take long for us  to realize that there were no windows, just the locked steel door, no hope of escape , and possible danger of asphyxiation or being dehydrated to death if it got too hot in here.  We wasted no time nor oxygen in going to sleep. As it turns out, there was just enough air in there for two men to pass a very short night.  In the morning, when they opened our door, we stumbled out, dizzy from lack of oxygen.  It took me all that day to recover my brain function, which I then used to realize how lucky we were they hadn't killed us through incompetence and negligence.  This was how cheap life had become here, apparently.

     They loaded us on the back of a Datsun pickup, with a mounted 50 mm machine gun, the sort of weapon you see now in a lot of middle eastern conflicts, an improvised weapon that is cheap and mobile, and easily switched out with another cheap Japanese pickup when the Datsun breaks down.  The ironic thing about this is that we were now being used by the military as human shields to pass unhindered through what was surely guerrilla territory.   To top it off, the men who were escorting us were out of uniform to increase the confusion for guerrilla snipers. All that day we fantasized that a really talented sniper would pick off the military guys, freeing us and beginning a fantastic adventure.

     But it was a quiet and uneventful ride. The green hills were more like the kind of touristing that we had originally signed up for; only now, we were leaving all of that verdure peace for the bustle of the Big Smoke, where the large and mostly empty prison of the Treasury awaited us.

     My cell was padded and right next to Ulf's as I'll call the Norwegian travel buddy, to protect his real name, in case he is now a cabinet minister or some other politician.  We could communicate by shouting through the little barred windows in our padded doors.  At first I thought we might have mistakenly been taken to some mental institution, the walls were very thick and it would be pretty difficult to hurt yourself by running at them.

    Looking around the cell, I found the answer.  There was a bloody handprint, at about eye level, and the fingers were smeared downward, as if someone had been thrown there.  This was a torture cell, and the padding was to muffle the screams, for as I found out later, this prison (like so many others) was located within earshot of a residential district.

     It was a chilling sight, and steeled my resolve to take this experience seriously.  I was an American passport holder, I reasoned, and so if I didn't give them any reason to kill me, it would be difficult for them to kill me with impunity (poor reasoning, as I found out later, since they killed over two dozen journalists during that conflict, possibly for having seen something they shouldn't have).  Ulf and I kept each other company that first night by shouting back and forth through the bars; both of us were afraid that we might be the last living witness of the other's demise, and it made us uneasy in a way we had no words to express, so we traded stories and Ulf even sang a Norwegian Viking dirge for me.

     The next day, it was time for the military to sort us out.  We had been dumped here by the army, but the actual prison was owned and operated by the Treasury department, which put it in some sort of legal loophole, or at least off of the usual journalistic radar.  It was perhaps for these reasons that this particular prison was actually a locus for torture of suspected communist sympathizers, thus explaining the padded cells and the blood stains.

     My cell door opened, and an interrogator in civilian clothes walked in.  He spoke English.  At that point my Spanish was certainly good enough to travel with, but I think they wanted no mistakes when it came to taking my statement, since the results of that could determine whether they let me live or not.

     He was holding my passport in his hand, and began with a classic itinerary interrogation.  Years later, I would study interrogations in detail for my master's thesis, and though I couldn't have known it at the time, this is one of the oldest and simplest gambits for a cop to catch someone lying.  You have the record of their comings and goings, and you simply jump around on the calendar, hoping they will slip up.  The main problem with this is that over a period of years people's memories are not so perfect.

     "So in April you entered Mexico at the border of Zapotal, Chiapas?"
     I thought for a second.  April was nearly a year ago.  I had left HueHue to get my visa renewed, that time had been a quick crossing just to reset the visa clock.
     "I believe so, yes"
     "And then in July, you re-entered Guatemala from Belize?"
     I was trying to figure out his game.  Was he just trying to get me to slip up on itineraries, or was he referring to my pattern of travel in Guatemala, which had been, just before leaving, to go to remote jungle zones, which just happened to be Guatemalan guerrilla country.  Indeed, that time, instead of turning around and coming right back, I had made a loop through Palenque, Aguas Azules, and the Yucatan Peninsula before returning to Guatemala through the Peten, which is where most of the guerrilla operate.
   "Oh, yeah, maybe I confused that with another time", I said.
     The interrogator furrowed his brow.  Clearly he had just caught me in a slip up, but something else seemed to be happening. He clearly seemed bored with this routine, and this line of questioning was not leading where he wanted it to.
     "So, earlier, it looks like actually a year earlier, you left Mexico and re entered from the U.S. border.
     "Yes".   (trying to recall this distant event)
     "So what were you doing that time?"
     "It must have been Nogales, Arizona.  I went to visit my friends in Tucson"
     "You have friends in Arizona?  Is that where you were living ?"
     "No, actually I was living in California before that.  San Francisco."
     His posture relaxed, and his demeanor shifted.  He parked one leg cross one knee, and said conversationally  "So how is California?  Are there plenty of jobs nowadays?"
     I could barely believe my ears.  The government itself is abandoning the country, I thought. This war is completely lost, I felt my head thinking autonomously.
     Seeing my chance, I shifted my gears also and began making polite conversation, following his lead.  Do you have relatives in California? I asked, knowing that it was a popular place for Salvadoreans to immigrate to.  How are they liking it?  I continued, trying to draw the attention away from me and my travels.
     We continued that way for another twenty minutes, and by now his mood had lightened considerably.  He went away, leaving the door open for the longest time, a really deadly pause, during which I considered, are they doing this so I'll attempt escape, and they can shoot me down as target practice?- thoughts which I later discovered were not so fantastic or out of touch with the reality of that grim time.
     After this long pause, with the door swinging on its hinges in the late afternoon breeze, not knowing whether this serendipity had bought my life or not, he then reappeared with a generous slice of cake with pink and white frosting.  I wasn't particularly in the mood for cake, but like so many other offered gifts from tribes and what not, I knew there was no option to refuse or even to put off eating it till later.  I don't know how to evaluate cake, but eating it there, with all the padding and blood stains around me, it tasted like absurdity.
     Ulf, the Norwegian, was released that day, but I had to spend another night, because even though there was no Norwegian embassy at that time, the Norwegian Charge D'Affairs businessman came and got him as soon as he was informed; whereas my American attaché; of whatever department is responsible to come and sign for Americans abroad imprisoned by accident, decided to stay at a Saturday night cocktail party a little later and come for me on Monday instead, because as it turned out, it was a weekend, and so the pink 'jail cake' had been given me on a Saturday.
     Walking out of that place, I decided the best way to decompress from the whole experience was to sit down at some café or restaurant, have some coffee or food, and get my bearings slowly, while feeling what it was like not to be in a blood-stained, padded eight by eight cell for a while.  I found a nice little street place directly across from the prison, and the woman was pleasant, taking my order for pupusas and eggs and sausages.  Pupusas are like giant, fat steaks of the corn masa that is used all over Central America for making tortillas.  They sometimes come stuffed with cheese or meat, but they are the emblem of El Salvador, a unique cuisine that stands in for the nation, like Kimchi does for Korean nationality.
     After she brought me my food, the lady was bored and a little curious, since I was her only customer, and a foreigner.  From her face I could tell she hadn't had many foreign guests in her little café. Between eggs and pupusa, I stopped to give her an explanation.  "I just got out of there", indicating the jail across the street, and then I saw the clouds of confusion cross her face, so I gave her a brief rundown of my weekend activities at the Torture Hotel.
     When I tried to pay, she said "No charge!" and held up her hands strongly as if Elvis himself had just eaten from her menu and it was an honor she would treasure forever.  As I would later find out from other Salvadoreans, I was one of few people ever to walk out of that place.

     Years later, while married to a Korean, I would end up living in one of the Salvadorean enclaves in Los Angeles, and as I chatted to my neighbors in Spanish, I wondered if I should bring up the story of the ride to La Palma, the Prison cake, and the free Pupusas...better not, I thought, it would bring up bad memories for most; my good fortune in having this adventure would be made absurd and  meaningless by all the horrors of war that had gone on.  While remembering this story, I did some basic research on the civil war, and it remains one of the most horrific conflicts a country has survived in modern times.

  

I dedicate this story to all the martyrs of that conflict and to the longsuffering Salvadorean people in general.

Hippy Roots

My Hippy Roots.

The legend goes that if you dance long
and hard enough, the Fire Faerie will appear

It's been the fashion to make fun of hippies pretty much since the first time someone dodged the draft for peace reasons (which would be maybe 1770 something) or smoked hemp (again, the same period), or put flowers in their hair (since maybe 1000 A.D., when it fell out of fashion), or claimed that the government is involved in a conspiracy to enslave the people (since the invention of democracy, because before that time, the slavery was transparent).  But there's an aspect often overlooked about hippies, that they perform an important function as the heart and conscience at the root of our culture.

Recently I had a chance to revisit my hippy roots (not so deep, since I was raised as a Southern Baptist, went to John Birch Camp, and my parents actually denounced Reagan as a liberal) in a 'gathering', as they are called.  Many people think that gatherings are just gigantic drug fueled orgies of people out of control.  That's pretty much the propaganda that's been around since Charlie Manson first inspired other hippies to stick forks in pregnant ladies bellies (yes, that actually happened).  Dirty, dangerous, out of control.
But this gathering was unique, since it was completely drug free, unless of course you consider alcohol to be a dangerous drug, which most do except the government of South Korea.  Korea is an Alcoholic Nation, and other drugs are simply not available.  So what does a hippy gathering do without drugs?  They spread different manifestations of love; hugs, music, dance, gifts, and most important to the process, the rhetoric of love.  When one feels love for a fellow human, they need to change most of the language structures and habits that are common to 'normal' discourse.  Many of the things we say to each other are said without love, and are cynical, critical, and ultimately un-self-loving.
Now this is usually the point when my more cynical or analytical friends are quick to point out the many contradictions and hypocrisies that hippies are well known for: smoking (a herb) while talking about air pollution or the many toxins in our foods, claiming that appearance is immaterial and then being clearly biased about people wearing suits or other 'conformist' clothing.  Most people just think of hippies as people who don't bathe enough and are clearly full of shit.  Which is fine, even though I have adopted them since about the age of 18 as my people, my family, my tribe; because even hippies themselves have recognized the problem among themselves and have coined a word for the most egregious trespassers on the sum of our common senses: trustafarians, a new portmanteau of 'trust fund hippy' and 'rastafarian' to signify a new breed of douchebag who uses dreadlocks as a ticket to trample upon every one else around them, and generally act entitled.  In other words, the outward appearance of hippies is far too easily mimicked, just as the word 'natural' is too easily hijacked and subverted by the food industry.
Taking all of this into account, I realize it's dangerous to my social standing to even be associated with these people - but at the same time, I cannot but help standing with them, because even though they often fail at their stated goal of peace and love, though they be infiltrated with lazy, useless, parasites who are seemingly rotten to the core, at the very least they are people attempting to make the world a better place, in their own imperfect way.  I honestly don't want to live in a world where people are simply following the Adam Smithian copout of "self interest economics dominates all", which is ultimately based on incomplete observations of the world, and as we are now learning, doesn't jibe with biology, either.
What's even more important to me, is to look at the history of the world since 1960 and realize that actually most of the things that hippies advocated for, which were considered weird, ridiculous, and just plain obscure, are now a standard part of our world; organic foods, whole grain products, almost all things that are now acknowledged to be 'healthy' were things that were 'fringe' and 'bad science' in the 'better-living-through-chemistry' era that spawned them.  Judged by the standards of those times, we'd all have to admit that 90% of us would be considered hippies by at least one of the things we eat, believe, or language that we use.
So I'm not saying you should stop making fun of hippies, who were actually so used to the public ridicule in the 1960's that they rejected the word 'hippy' in 1968, rebranding themselves as 'freaks' (sort of like the activist use of 'queer') and even holding a funeral for the 'hippy' , complete with a coffin and procession down Haight-Ashbury.   By all means, if you need an easy target, go ahead and make fun of these imperfect futurists, because your children will all be just like them eventually, and it may be your last chance to make fun of your own family.
But what I had really hoped is that you might entertain the notion that they actually have a function in our society; that they play an important part in helping us to regain what was lost in the industrialization and fragmentation of our societies over the last few centuries.  I'm sure many anthropologists would have a lot to say about this crude analogy to tribalism, but then again, who has ever met a happy anthropologist? Hypocrites who enjoy the tribal hospitality, only to travel back to the world that is crushing their subjects out of existence, write a book about it and make some coin or further their career...I don't see any of them being called 'lazy idealists', and mostly they are respected because they maintain a distance between the observer and the observed.
Imagine now, for a minute that we are all anthropologists, and that we are living among tribes, only one of which is the hippies.  Other tribes are the sportists, those whose temple is a surfboard and a wave, churchists, those who find communion with others in a building and some magic words, even cynics must be acknowledged as a tribe, since they gather wherever an open conspiracy theory is proposed, stamping out the fire of ideas with their words.
I don't know where this essay is going, so you could just put that inability to finish down to the classic crazed and fruitless hippy way of being, or accept my 'square' version when I say that I'm a little run down and have just run out of coffee.

So I Bought a Little House Lion...

Taming HouseLions

.....So I bought a little HouseLion.  All my friends had one, it seemed.
HouseLions were popular for a reason.  They were very convenient in going about your daily business.  Having a HouseLion sometimes meant you could get twice as much done, especially if you had a lot of pesky-type errands to accompish.  Girls looked at you with that special look when they found out you had a HouseLion.  If you didn't know what that special look meant, then a HouseLion was totally wasted on the likes of you.

HouseLions were great on transport

     Now, some of you may object, saying that a house is no place for a lion, that cages are not good either, most people would just wash their hands of lions altogether, saying that lions and people should not mix.  Women, in particular, with their typical fears of everything from spiders to cheezy horror films, seemed to regard them with a mixture of terror and awe.  Remember, some of these girls were the same ones who had been eyeing us when they saw us going down the street with our new HouseLion, so this kind of ambivalence was only to be expected.  Guys with HouseLions tended to end up with the kind of women who had the ability to tolerate the HouseLion as part of their life, and the more fanatical scaredycats just went out of their life completely.

Now, the fans of HouseLions insisted that this is not the case, that HouseLions were made for people, and that people just needed to be careful, and there would be no problem.  At first, I guess I was one of the people sitting on the fence of this issue; it seemed to me that there were both safe HouseLions and unsafe HouseLions.  At the time, it seemed like a little HouseLion was going to be safer than a big one, and they were cheaper, so I bought a little one.  In fact, most of my friends were quite happy with their house lions.
   

HouseLions had all changed our lives, and we were proud of that fact.  So proud, in actuality, that we thought that it made us belong to a defacto brotherhood.  A club of sorts, where HouseLions were welcome to prowl around together , while we  drank and talked and laughed as if there were no tomorrow.  We laughed at all the people without HouseLions as if they were some sort of inferior species, and that we, the lucky ones, could see more clearly than they that a Life without HouseLions was not a life worth living.  Some of us even began wearing what looked like Clubhouse uniforms...

In fact, so zesty was this thirst for membership, that many of us drank deeply of this new, intoxicating idea.  Some of us began to include HouseLions as part of our core identity, as part of who we were as men.  It filled us up and made us into an improved and better man than all the rest.  But of course it did not end there, it never does.  When we saw others in the club get rid of their tiny HouseLions and get larger, sleeker, sexier ones, we envied them and counted the days until we could get our own.  It was considered the ultimate acheivement to wait until someone was leaving town for good, and then to buy their great big HouseLion at a discount.   All of of the HouseLion upsizing was accompanied by a new change of thinking; in fact, it was the tinier HouseLions that were more dangerous and difficult to domesticate; in reality, it was the bigger and more expensive ones who were easy and not really so dangerous.  True, they were bigger, but they just moved slower and so you (probably) had time to avert a disaster in case of the unthinkable happening....
     All of this was really difficult to verify or even discuss properly, partly because the statistics were so unavailable to us, or because it was sort of taboo for us to talk about it when in the presence of HouseLionClub members.  In fact, there didn't seem to be a reason to bring it up because everyone knew it was a really rare occurrence, anyways, and that there were other things more important to talk about, like who the latest HouseLionClub member was, and where he got his HouseLion, and whether it was a good deal or not, and whether it was the right kind of HouseLion for his lifestyle, what his wife thought about the HouseLion in the House, and so on....
     By this time, I was on my third, bigger and better HouseLion, and pretty proud of myself.  All my friends had either gotten bigger and better ones, and were also now higher status in the HouseLionClub, both as a result of their HouseLion status, and also the fact they had been members for so long.  Every now and then someone would drop quietly out, usually because they got married, or had kids, or were doing the usual thing of leaving town for good.  Sometimes people would drop out so quietly, that no one would notice.  We'd be sitting around the HouseLionClub and then someone would say, "Oh, I haven't seen B around with that HouseLion of his for some time now, does anyone know if he's still around?"  These sorts of observations were met with dead silence.  Sometimes, it might have been genuinely because nobody had seen B, but I think a lot of times, we were contemplating the sliver of the possibility that his HouseLion had gotten wild, and had gotten hold of him, and that was so terrible nobody wanted to go there.
     I remember the first time one of the HouseLion club members had his animal turn on him, and it was really something to remember.  Nobody could believe it; he was a strong, stalwart man in the prime of his life, no enemies of anykind, and so no one could believe his HouseLion had gone and done a thing like that.  It just made no sense, and what was worse, the memory of it stuck like a fart in an elevator, for years it was hard to go out in Public with your HouseLion without remembering that this was the same species that had done poor old T in.

Just an abstraction...

     The second time it happened, we all almost laughed it off.  It was a tiny little HouseLion that was responsible, hardly housebroken at all, and so the guy was fairly asking for it.  Sure, it was horrible and all, just not horrible AND senseless like the first, larger and shinier HouseLion had broken with the ranks.  Somehow the second HouseLion incident was easier to swallow, like a chaser at a bar.  The whole incident became abstracted, just as we had gradually come to abstract HouseLions themselves, they were no longer domesticated wild beasts, in fact they were just the idea of doing such a thing.  Most of us couldn't even draw a realistic picture of one if our life depended on it.
     The Third time a HouseLion attacked, it really took the wind out of our sails.  After telling a whole meeting of the elders of the HouseLionClub that I quit, I stormed out of the club and began making plans to get rid of my HouseLion in a humane, but orderly fashion.  The other HouseLionClub members looked at me as if I was Rasputin attempting to strangle the life out of the Czar.  It was simply not good form to renounce membership in the HouseLionClub. People did that quietly; they went away out of town, or they made quiet plans to relinquish their HouseLion on Craigslist, and then conveniently forgot to get another one.  But it wasn't the fact that three is a magic number, or even a number at all, it could have been three thousand.  It was when I received a photo of the incident that it really made me SEE for the first time what an Actual HouseLion looked like from a HouseLion perspective.  All this time I thought the HouseLions had been this separate animal, and only then did I realize that not only did it become part of your identity, it actually ATE you, from the inside out, and then was usually so hungry that it would eat everyone else around you as well.
RIP Lex.

Shipwrecked!

Although not my personal shipwreck, this google pic
 does sort of embody the moment.

     A freeze-framed moment. A handful of fragmented moments strung together....
     The moment of the car crash, after the bomb blast. Hollywood has recently gotten good at portraying this with editing techniques.  The moment the world comes undone, when mother adrenaline puts sticky nano-glue between all the microseconds, and reality reveals itself as flattened and two dimensional, as if you were looking down on Flatland.
    So I woke up in the middle of one of these moments.  I woke up, not from unconsciousness, not in the least bit blacked out, but that is the feeling you get if your short term memory tape just misplaces those last few seconds.  In the first few weeks after the accident, I began to get short pieces of that lost tape back: the missing five seconds between the following two events:
    First: I'm sitting on the boat, talking to the Argentine facing me across the narrow deck. Our knees are touching.  We are in heavy seas now, having left the harbor and the smaller winds, waves and storm.  We are now in open seas, and that means two meter swells, and what that means on a five meter long double outrigger canoe is that we are sometimes staring at a wall of water, before successfully riding it up (and slamming down the other side, usually).  Perhaps as a way of relieving the stress, Jose started telling me a story about the last time he was in rough seas in Honduras, and the boat flipped over.  This really wasn't helping, but to give the story a little more stress relieving action, he added that everyone on the boat, especially the captain, was drunk and high, and as an added bonus, it was a dive boat and they were all experienced divers.  No casualties, he said, it was all like a fun little silly accident for people who spent as much time in the water as they did out of it.
    THEN I'm sitting on top of the upside down canoe, straddling the hull with my legs, alone, and holding on to my bag, which is still dry, as am I.  I'm thinking about my ipad inside and the galaxy note 2 in the money pouch around my waist.  Then I notice the other six people below me, treading water like kittens.  We are all of us spouting abuse at the gods of fate for having put us here.  I begin to remember why we are here, then where we are, then oh shit....this is where we are? in the middle of the ocean, in one of the remotest places on earth?
   

Which one of these looks like a weird sea creature?

The odd shape even attracted
the attention of the
Dadaists...

 I had first wanted to go to Sulawesi because, well, it has a weird shape.  Some say it looks like a squid or octopus, some more land based creatures, but it is certainly a shape that doesn't come up much in the geography of large islands, which are mostly bits and bobs.  But the best part is when you tell people where you are going for the vacation.  "What is that?" they almost invariably say.  I mean, for me the boundary between exotic and mundane destinations is the question "WHERE is that?" so Sulawesi exceeds that by several orders of magnitude.

No Longer worth its
weight in gold...

     Of course, this is not just geographical obscurity, part of it might be that Sulawesi underwent a makeover.  It was quite well known in Magellan's time as 'Celebes', or the Spice Islands.  That's right, I had finally achieved what Columbus and countless other government-sponsored explorers had failed to do. (Assuming the main objective was not to actually enslave heathen, which they were pretty good at). And at some point, the value of cloves and nutmeg per kilo started to fall, not because of competition, but because the world correctly identified energy (and unfortunately for us,carbon based forms of it) as the source of civilization and not spices.  But back in the day, and that would be the Dutch Colonial Empire days,
there was a pretty tight lid on the place; originally the Dutch surrounded it and wouldn't let anyone else near it, so they could have the monopoly.  Long before the Dutch were kicked out, though, the monopoly was broken by the usual methods; smuggling plants out and planting them in less tightly controlled tropical areas, but I think it's safe to say that long before that, the Europeans lost their fascination with spices, though it's still interesting to see how these tropical spices (including cardamom) pop up in 'traditional' Northern European cuisine, even though none of these plants will grow even in Mediterreanean climates.
    But I diverge from the boat accident. and the water, and what happened after we all simultaneously realized we had been unceremoniously shipwrecked.  At this point, we didn't fear the boat turning over, we feared death, making the last concerns pretty ridiculous indeed.  Lucky for us, the two meter swells were about as bad as the waves got.  Sometimes you can have a freak wave , say four meters, that would completely destroy you once you are sitting there capsized and helpless.  And indeed, even those two meter swells kept tipping the boat on its side again, threatening to conk us all on the heads with the outrigger booms and pontoons (deadly much more than any amount of waves), so we had to be constantly wary.

Not the actual boat, but pretty darn close.

     So after a few minutes of shouting at the gods for our lost gear, which turned out to be about 10 thousand dollars worth collectively (no wonder the natives are convinced we are just cash cows walking around waiting to be milked....), we began to think more naturally of survival and just trying to get life started again. One of our group, Gayle of Australia, was a trained rescue swimmer, and she immediately began assessing the situation and the hazards therein. "Is everyone OK? she asked, after we had all finished with the Shit! word.  We all reported in, except Diana, the Argentine's wife, who said with a shaking voice, "I can't swim...".  She was all right for the moment, clinging to a board that had fallen out of the boat.  Gayle swam over and began cracking jokes, like the most natural thing in the world, as if she had just walked out on the stage in Vegas.  This amazed me, because it calmed Diana, and all of us, and then I remembered that Panic is always the main enemy in "Nature vs. Man" kind of situations.
     Gayle was so good at this, and at shepherding Diana to safety, that she completely left out any consideration to her own belongings, none of which had surfaced (in fact she returned to shore without a single possession, but later got all of them back).  By now about half a dozen bags were bobbing in the waves with us, and most of us began collecting them and shepherding them like little sheep, keeping them from drifting, or god forbid, sinking.  My own bag floated almost like a buoy; It had always been so heavy when I carried it, even I was mystified to see it bobbing on the waves.
     Later I discovered that one of my obsessions had kept the bag afloat; not through telekinetic will power, but hermetically sealed bags of green coffee beans.  A coffee freak friend of mine had mentioned that I was passing through one of the world famous coffee growing regions, Kalosi coffee, and so I had done a bit of investigating, and discovered this little grinding/roasting factory outlet there, and honestly, one of my best memories of my travels, olfactory wise, was the moment I opened a barrel of their roasted beans and stuck my entire head in and breathed, as the flavors and colors danced around me.....
     These reveries were really not happening at that time; these are all later reconstructions, in those adrenaline minutes, as we floated out there helplessly, there were a series of steps that we were taking, probably typical in the first minutes after a wreck:
1. People identifying the situation they were in. (In Diana's case, a life and death kind of thing; for us, figuring out how much immediate danger we were in (medium), how much likelihood our 'things' had in this situation (little to none), and how many game plans we had left (one or possibly two- we appeared to be drifting back towards an island, but there was no way of knowing which way the currents would take us)
2. Attempting to flip the boat back over- on the face of it, a splendid idea. But according to mariners I consulted, idiotic.  This outrigger seemed happiest when upside down, especially since our former roof was now serving as an excellent keel.  We wasted what could have been crucial energy and life force trying to rock the pontoons back to the upright position.
3. Standing on the struts and waving and yelling all at the same time- an excellent idea.  It didn't seem to work for the Gilligan's Islanders, but it worked wonders for us.  A boat about three times larger than our boat saw us, and came around in a large circle.  When they came near, THEY nearly flipped over, and judging by the captain's ashen expression, we had better haul our buns quickly aboard.  I added a few new barnacle razor scrapes to my already museum-quality collection as I scrambled aboard.
     When we got back to shore , to the small town capital of the Togeans, aptly named "Togean", there was a small crowd assembled to greet what may have been the first shipwreck that year (or possibly that month).  A kindly soul loaned us their house, and most importantly big barrels of freshwater to wash the salt out of our bodies, clothes, and belongings, and we turned their backyard into an impromptu drying rack.  Hundreds of paper folding money bills, weighted down by rocks, clothes laid out to dry in the sun, on racks, made for a bizarre scene something like what I imagine an airplane disaster scene after ten Obsessive Compulsive people had been at work there.

     As we toiled and grumbled about our recent misfortunes, we were looking at the very dock from which we had taken off; the Alpha of our disaster.  Like a dream, we saw the same people leading four MORE hapless foreigners, loaded down with backpacks, electronics , and possessions, into an identical boat to ours, as if they were preparing to make a new sacrifice to Poseidon, since the last had been thwarted.  We all dropped what we were doing, and frantically ran to the edge of the water, waving our hands and shouting at the new lambs.  "Hey, DON'T GET ON THAT FUCKING BOAT" is what I think most of us shouted.  The foreigners looked at us like we were crazy, and continued to load their things.