*Adapted from "Birth of the Titans," a poem by Fake Andrew (Jim Cahalan, James Doyle, Timothy Otte and Clara Swanson)
I was conceived in an earthquake, mud sliding around that first
dodge colt, perched on some precarious peak.
Every time my parents went to Ecuador, they got pregnant.
I was conceived in a village in the Andes Mountains, a village plundered and ploughed by an oil company, in the aftermath of a devastating 1987 earthquake. I was conceived in a house riddled by bullet holes, whose walls shuddered through the violent domestic conflicts next door. Jungle cats prowled outside at night and my parents had the only car in the whole village. If anyone needed to leave the village, my parents had to take them. It was a tiny little car that needed to be pushed over the peak half the time, with pregnant ladies in the front seat and the backseat full of laborers looking for work or visiting their families.
I was born the product of two mountains,
In a leftover cloud of volcanic ash.
My mother was born in California, but her parents were missionaries in the tiny town of Jumla, Nepal, nestled back into the Himalaya Mountains. (Later, I took baths in a pot on the stove in that same tiny town.) The Himalayas boast the highest mountain above sea level, a mountain that has sent many challengers to their deaths. My father was born and raised in the Andes Mountains, in the country of the mountain whose peak is farthest from the center of the Earth. They met at Bethel College in Minnesota, USA, and took walks around the lake while they sorted out their cultural differences and identity crises and questions about their parents’ religions. They spent their college years with the other confused, disillusioned missionary kids, who gathered at a cabin on a lake to give sermons in made-up languages, which someone else would translate into another made-up language.
I was born in Quito’s Hospital Metropolitano while overhead Pichincha spat clouds of ash out onto the city. As my dad says, I took my time coming. As my aunt Judy says, “Kathy was having way too good of a time to stop and have a baby right then.” I was born five days late.
Then, where the sea crashed, pulverized
Tons of quartz, I hid my eyes beneath
My own personal sunny-colored honey color,
Blew like palm trees in little breezes.
Grammi said my hair was honey-colored. Not brown, not dirty blond. Not ordinary.
We went to the beach, my mom and dad and me, my dad’s older brother and sister, sister-in-law and brother-in-law, my two older cousins Alex and Angela. My parents, protective of their firstborn, stopped to buy a hat to shield my newborn skin from the equatorial sun. It was buttercup yellow and far too big for my tiny head, but I wore it anyway and lay in the hammock while my parents took pictures of me and listened to the huge waves crashing on the sand.
I spoke in darkness, the first words of poetry,
Moony eyes refusing to close
After ten days of sleeping.
Nothing escaped my watchful eyes,
And I, quiet, created the first tiny worlds
Out of iron fairy dust.
When my dad held me for the first time, his glasses slipped off his face and shattered on the floor. He didn’t even get to see what I looked like for three days until his new glasses came in.
They brought me home from the hospital and I fell asleep almost immediately. I slept for ten days straight, so soundly that they had to wake me up to eat, after which I would fall right back to sleep. Everyone worried, but the doctor said I was fine.
After ten days I woke up and refused to sleep. I wanted to be in the middle of the action. I wanted to see everything and meet everyone. My theme song was Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” and I did not.
When I was older, my parents put me to bed and I would lie there in my crib, with Snowball the wide-eyed teddy bear face-down next to me so I wouldn’t see his eyes glowing in the dark. I used to sing my own little lullabies: “My eyes are sunny, my eyes are moony, my eyes are dark, I cannot see!”
I was playing dress-up as soon as I could walk. Or dress-down, as it were, running around the house in my plastic diaper cover, my dad’s shoes and aviators. Sometimes I hid in cupboards wearing nothing at all. My favorite toy was the MagnaDoodle. I lay on the floor for hours while I learned to write my name, and drew pictures of my imaginary friends (Fingerbopper, Poony, and the gang), who all looked like blobs with sticks for arms and legs.
I still draw people like that sometimes, for old times’ sake.
I was raised in a field of flowers
With a lioness to tend our blazing thirst.
When I was little my mom worked a series of odd jobs, first with Billy Graham and then later as a caterer at the Holiday Inn. She used to come home late at night smelling like scalloped potatoes, after Papa had fed us and bathed us and (theoretically) put us to bed – but I remember still being awake when she came home at least once, after a Scandinavian banquet full of drunkards and carriers-on.
I remember once when I had just finished with the chicken pox and everyone else was in the throes of it. Thomas and Maria were still too young to go to school and Asha was a babe in arms. In this memory, which seems too crazy to be true, Mama took all four of us to the grocery store on the city bus in the middle of a sleet storm. The overhead emergency exit on the bus was stuck open and sleet was sneaking in and drenching everyone. I knew the WIC office all too well, but I aced all my classes at Mississippi Creative Arts Magnet School and it never occurred to me that I couldn’t have whatever I wanted out of life.
I grew up among the tribal dancers
Of many villages, threw wishes on the fire
To watch them curl up in smoke
To the gods.
My first passport photo features a huge disembodied hand coming in from the side to hold up my tiny head. My parents got hurried through the diplomat line at an Asian airport when officials saw their golden-haired, golden-eyed baby. Bus passengers passed me around in Nepal at three months old and when I was three my best friend was named Lulah, because my baby brother couldn’t pronounce Elizabeth. At Luther Seminary in St. Paul, I played in the sandbox with Lena, whose family was from Croatia. They disappeared suddenly when I was five or six years old, leaving all their Legos and Barbies in plastic bins outside their apartment.
We left Minnesota when I was seven so my dad could take a call at two churches in St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands. We lived on Peter’s Rest and tried to sell homemade perfumes on the front steps with our next-door neighbors Al and Shelly, and learned to rollerskate on the linoleum living room floor. After our car exploded on a cliff in the middle of the island, we moved across the hills to La Vallee, where we salted slugs on the steep slanted driveway and made fun of Jordan, the little boy whose parents took care of the sheep that ran around our rutted road and tripped us when we tried to ride borrowed bicycles out to the street. Last time I saw it, the road was still black at the site of the explosion. But that was eleven years ago.
I learned to swim in crashing waves, to race.
At seminary our toys mostly came out of the dumpster. People were always moving in and out and so we often found pretty cool things in there, like decent training bicycles, and there were always loads of cardboard boxes for building houses and time machines. We made epic forts out of couch cushions and staged the Olympics on the blue backing of my baby quilt, which made a perfect swimming pool AND gymnastics mat. We reenacted scenes from “The Lion King” on the back of the couch, and the hallway rugs saved us from the lava bubbling across the tiles. One Christmas, my dad got homesick for the mantel at his parents’ house in Quito, so he drew out a fireplace on a huge roll of brown paper and all of us kids helped paint it. We stuck it up on the wall so we would have something to hang our stockings on.
My dad always loved the sound of waves crashing on the beach. He loved the sparkling blue of the ocean and the thought of what lay submerged beneath it. He loved snorkeling and bought us all prescription snorkeling masks so we could enjoy it together. I learned how to swim freestyle with little crests breaking my stroke; I learned to time my breaths to the side with the troughs between waves.
Later, in a swimming pool in Upstate New York, I learned racing dives and streamlining my breaths and what it feels like to pull against the kicking of the person in front of me in the lane.
I fell in love with rhythms and with fire,
Would throw myself on any thrumming pyre,
And Achilles could have, would and had his way with me.
I spent most of my life from the time I was eight until I started high school reading. I finished 100 books in a summer easily, blazed through half of every library and half of all available series and the Scholastic book catalogs they sent home with us every few months. I read the Arabian Nights when I was eight and grew up with Harry Potter, hoping for an owl every day after I closed the cover of The Sorcerer’s Stone. I imagined my lifelong romances with Madeleine L’Engle’s Adam, with Lee Jordan and Cedric Diggory, with Achilles and Sebastian and Duke Orsino. I watched Wishbone religiously until I discovered the Worldbooks in the living room. In tenth grade my friends and I started a book club and read A House Like a Lotus and Sophie’s World; we hosted Shakespeare readings and memorized sonnets. Our stint at Amsterdam High School was colored by characters and incidents from Romeo and Juliet reenactments, LOTF (Lord of the Flies), A Separate Peace, The Merchant of Venice, Mayor of Casterbridge, and Dorian Grey.
I believed in a life of adventure followed by happily ever after. Everyone always shook their heads at me, but I always knew I was going somewhere and while they called me a cloud-chaser, I think they secretly believed that somehow, in some way, I was right.
I fell asleep again,
Ten years later
And saw things in my dreams,
The ghosts of fairies
Rising from my palms.
I left the country alone for the first time when I was 15, and spent the next year at an international boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas, exploring my mother’s past. I built stage sets for her stories and staged my own stories in them, all over the hillside and the dorms and hallways of Woodstock School.
Two weeks after I graduated from high school, I passed my driver’s test, packed up my car (later named Cloudchaser in honor of its color and my dreams) and moved into my friend Deanna’s basement for the summer. At the end of August I packed up Cloudchaser again and drove halfway across the country with loaded memories, blind anticipation, and Subway sandwiches to keep me awake on the highway.
Back in Minnesota, I take new classes, look up old friends and family members. I uncover family histories and knit my past together with my present. My inventory of homes grows steadily larger. I go “home” for the summer to a house in India where someone else lived last time I visited, “home” the second summer to a brand new hotel in my country of birth. I go “home” for Christmas to an island off the coast of Canada, “home” for Christmas to a friend’s house in Amsterdam, New York, “home” with my roommate for Thanksgiving and Easter.
When I ended up at the gas station on top of the hill on Eustis St., I still could have walked the road between Luther Seminary and Peace Lutheran Church in a green velvet dress with lace on the cuffs and collars. I can get into my dorm after 8pm without even taking my ID out of my pocket. More than a few airports look intimately familiar to me, and all of them trigger different sets and combinations of images.
I die in peaces, my immortality, my loves and lucky charms
Live on in shreds and threads and photographs
Memoirs and breathing artifacts.
In class this summer Mario asked us what we hoped to leave as our legacies on earth after we die. I hoped to pass on my passion. There is a part of me, I said, that never needs to die. I live, and I try to make that life available to everyone I talk to and everyone I touch. It can be a pandemic.
My aunt Lisa bought me my first blank book when I was seven, but I started writing the story of my life long before that. I wrote it on the backs of pots and pans with spoons and spatulas and spelled it out in Legos and cardboard boxes. I started writing in my father’s three-day blindness and scrawled fragmented phrases on chalkboards for my wide-eyed siblings and playmates. I leave messages in my disappearing tracks across the globe, and I can only hope that they are legible and worthwhile.
In the beginning, all was void.
Then, from nothing, from the elements we rise
A race of titans strong and beautiful
To love the earth in all its chaos and turmoil
To love and hate and create each other
Our brothers, lovers and mothers
We rise!
29 December 2009
26 December 2009
in-flight entertainment
I can feel the momentum building in the huge jet engines, almost as though I’m moving even before the plane starts its taxi for takeoff. I can feel the potential energy of this massive mechanical beast before it becomes kinetic; it builds in my stomach like external anticipation.
We 300+ anonymous travelers become a single plane for the duration of the flight, until we reach our destination: Amsterdam-Schiphol International Airport. Since I am going almost to the exact other side of the globe, I could theoretically fly either way. But I always fly east, into the night. The afternoon dissipated, the sun set in a moment, and then the morning came too soon. Breakfast at Minnesota midnight?
***
I almost left Benginald in Mellby until February, but Spencer made me bring him along. He has been my travel buddy for the past 10 years and I thought he was getting old enough to stay at home by himself for a few weeks, but I was wrong. Spencer said he would get lonely, and that my leaving him behind showed that I didn’t care about him anymore.
When I passed through security, the officer checked my passport and boarding pass and nodded at Bengi. “Is this your boyfriend?” he asked. I laughed. “Sure is.”
The guard gave me a nice smile but looked surprised to see me. “Well hello there,” he said as though I was a fascinating but previously undiscovered species. “Thank you.” His eyes followed me out.
I saw Sarah Jacobson, whose parents live in Tanzania, shoving her carryon into the overhead compartment. I called out to her and she said how funny it was that she’d made it through MSP without seeing a single Ole, and then here I was two rows back. The people in the rows around us smiled too, and a few of them caught my eye.
I blame it on Benginald. He’s good news.
***
The Ericksons are interested in traditions. My family doesn’t have any.
I’m looking for traditions. Two years ago, almost to the day, I started making my own. I remember perching on the edge of the couch, feeling self-conscious about my cheap and unthoughtful Christmas gifts, because my mom told me that her family goes in for giving talents. “Give them poetry,” she suggested, so I didn’t spend any money on material things until I got to Cortes and saw the pile of nicely wrapped gifts under the tree.
So I did both. I spent some time copying poems out of my book with Sharpie onto brown paper bags and wrapped my mediocre presents with them. I remember perching on the edge of the couch and reading it out loud, duet, the first spoken-word piece I’d ever attempted.
Like everything else, it’s about being in love.
***
It’s Friday night. I’m standing in the doorway still wearing my coat, hat, scarf and boots, facing him wearing only his boxers. I’m just standing there scuffing my feet, watching him meticulously pull of each piece of tape so he doesn’t ruin the wrapping paper. Not one single word. He wants to read them later.
I tell him I won’t be offended if he rips it, but secretly I savor the fact that he wants to keep it. He wants to read it. He loves my wrapping paper probably as much or more than he will love his presents.
***
The woman at the end of my row is reading Twilight in paperback. I smile thinking about how many people I’ve seen reading it without the slipcover, trying to hide the fact that they are actually reading Twilight. It’s like a secret cult, with everyone who has read it knowing exactly what the uncovered cover looks like and exchanging looks that say, “I read them too – in a public place, without the dust jacket.” It’s like the early Christians who would draw half of a fish in the sand with their toe while they talked to someone new. If the other person drew the other half of the fish, both knew that the other was also a Christian, and they could worship together.
I laugh every time I reference Twilight in everyday conversation, but it’s actually been relevant multiple times. Vampires DO exist, and sex is immortal. To me it reinforces the fact that in order to live forever we must be cold and hard as marble… or eat the brains of the living and mortal.
If that’s immortality, I’m not interested.
***
In June, right after my junior year, I was sitting in the first row of business class on a flight from Munich to Paris with my friend Alisa and her father. Before economy class boarding, the flight attendants came around with a stack of free magazines. I didn’t speak German or French, so I tried to pick something with good pictures.
When the rest of the passengers started boarding, they all snickered at the two wide-eyed 16-year-old girls flipping through copies of Playboy, pretending to read the articles (which were all in German) and instead being visually assaulted by glossy full-page photos of enormous, unrealistic bosoms bouncing around on a muddy soccer field like skin-colored footballs.
***
At the beginning of that year, I sat in the Toronto airport with Ella and Katie, pretending to be engrossed in our crossword puzzles and conversation while in reality our eyes were peeled for our fellow travelers, especially a bushy-haired girl we’d never seen before. Her name was Nicole. According to her email, she would be wearing hot pink capris and looking confused.
On the plane, I sat next to her and we wrote notes back and forth to Gus and Paul, the two boys from Connecticut who sat diagonally behind us. Paul had a guitar and told us what Valium was, and why he fell asleep almost immediately. Gus carried on the conversation after that but we didn’t really know what to say to each other so the chat eventually petered out.
In the simulated evening, when the cabin lights went out, the woman in front of us (who had a very unhappy baby) turned around and asked the girl next to me to please shut off her reading light. She was engrossed in the newest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, so I offered her my flashlight.
***
After the interminable boarding process at Amsterdam-Schiphol, I found my seat in the exit row, between a distinguished Sikh businessman and a distinguished Indian gentleman. They were engaged in conversation, and I blazed in wearing skinny jeans, high tops and a cutoff T-shirt, threw Benginald the Stuffed Moose down on my seat and hefted my backpack into the overhead compartment. They both looked at me and commented that my travel companion needed a seatbelt, and then continued their conversation behind my head.
The pilot came on to make an announcement that the flight was being held for several passengers on an incoming flight, and the gentleman on my right got up to take a turn about the cabin. While he was gone, a bright-eyed young English woman flew in and sat down in his seat. The Sikh, who introduced himself to me as Hipi, told her, “There is a gentleman sitting there already.” As soon as she got up to sort out the confusion, the gentleman came back, and then the British girl returned with a flight attendant who told the gentleman he had been moved up to first class.
It pays to be a frequent flyer.
***
The girl’s name is Amy. She had come straight in from London Heathrow and headed for Delhi to travel with her longtime boyfriend Seb. If they had missed this connection, they would be stuck in Amsterdam until after Christmas, so she and the nine other passengers from London are very grateful that KLM held the flight.
They have few plans but hope to visit Jaipur and Goa, hope for a Christmas dinner in Delhi, hope their mothers don’t worry too much about them while they update their travel page on getjealous.com. We enlighten each other on the British and American education systems, and she tells me about career life in the UK, about Seb and the adventures they have had together. She says that all the photos she’s seen of India feature cows, piles of trash, bright colors, and signs that don’t quite work in English. I laugh and say that seems pretty accurate.
My calculations put her at about 30 years of age, but her chic short red hair and huge blue eyes make her seem much younger. She is very talkative and a little nervous to sally forth into the world with only Lonely Planet to guide her. I gave her my phone number and told her to call if she runs into any trouble.
***
If it took everyone three days to get home, I wonder how many of us would still go home for Christmas on a regular basis. By the time I reach my house, I have been wearing the same clothes for four days. I am completely exhausted, covered in the dirt of countless cities, and have been en route for 36 hours (only six of which I have been asleep). The date is three days after the date my flight left MSP – 4:00pm on Christmas Eve. It is the second time in my life that I have gotten home at the last minute before Christmas, and the first time in three years that I have been “home” for Christmas at all.
The first time I barely made it home for Christmas, I was seven. I had been in the hospital with a raging chicken pox infection and my parents picked me up in the middle of a blizzard at 8:30pm on December 24. The home videos from that Christmas tried desperately to catch glimpses of my spotted face, while I tried desperately to hide it.
That was 1996, the year Tickle-Me-Elmo was the gift of choice. Alisa told me once that all she knew about the US, she learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie Jingle All the Way. “But I know people don’t actually fight over toys for Christmas…”
I told her how my nurse in 1996 had somehow managed to get hold of a Tickle-Me-Elmo, which she planned to give me for Christmas until someone stole it from her hospital locker. She was heartbroken, and even though I didn’t miss the actual Tickle-Me-Elmo very much, to this day I am struck by disbelief that someone would steal a toy from a nurse in a hospital on Christmas Eve.
***
Benginald managed to get through international security and onto the plane without a passport. Once we got settled in seat 9B, he started flirting with the flight attendants. Everyone wants to know if he has ever been to India before. I tell them yes. In fact, he has been my travel buddy for 10 years and has been to India twice before. He is getting old enough to stay at home alone, but I felt bad about leaving him there for Christmas. Besides, he sometimes gets into trouble with Kenyon’s stuffed unicorn.
No one suspects that such an adorable, charming character like Bengi would be capable of the kinds of shenanigans they cause together. He puts everyone in a good mood, and sits nicely in my lap while we watch movie after movie on our personal video screen. He is the only one who always knows what those movies make me think about, and the only one who knows my complete back story. I don’t even have to tell him, and he sees it far more clearly than I ever could.
But Bengi lets me figure it out on my own.
We 300+ anonymous travelers become a single plane for the duration of the flight, until we reach our destination: Amsterdam-Schiphol International Airport. Since I am going almost to the exact other side of the globe, I could theoretically fly either way. But I always fly east, into the night. The afternoon dissipated, the sun set in a moment, and then the morning came too soon. Breakfast at Minnesota midnight?
***
I almost left Benginald in Mellby until February, but Spencer made me bring him along. He has been my travel buddy for the past 10 years and I thought he was getting old enough to stay at home by himself for a few weeks, but I was wrong. Spencer said he would get lonely, and that my leaving him behind showed that I didn’t care about him anymore.
When I passed through security, the officer checked my passport and boarding pass and nodded at Bengi. “Is this your boyfriend?” he asked. I laughed. “Sure is.”
The guard gave me a nice smile but looked surprised to see me. “Well hello there,” he said as though I was a fascinating but previously undiscovered species. “Thank you.” His eyes followed me out.
I saw Sarah Jacobson, whose parents live in Tanzania, shoving her carryon into the overhead compartment. I called out to her and she said how funny it was that she’d made it through MSP without seeing a single Ole, and then here I was two rows back. The people in the rows around us smiled too, and a few of them caught my eye.
I blame it on Benginald. He’s good news.
***
The Ericksons are interested in traditions. My family doesn’t have any.
I’m looking for traditions. Two years ago, almost to the day, I started making my own. I remember perching on the edge of the couch, feeling self-conscious about my cheap and unthoughtful Christmas gifts, because my mom told me that her family goes in for giving talents. “Give them poetry,” she suggested, so I didn’t spend any money on material things until I got to Cortes and saw the pile of nicely wrapped gifts under the tree.
So I did both. I spent some time copying poems out of my book with Sharpie onto brown paper bags and wrapped my mediocre presents with them. I remember perching on the edge of the couch and reading it out loud, duet, the first spoken-word piece I’d ever attempted.
Like everything else, it’s about being in love.
***
It’s Friday night. I’m standing in the doorway still wearing my coat, hat, scarf and boots, facing him wearing only his boxers. I’m just standing there scuffing my feet, watching him meticulously pull of each piece of tape so he doesn’t ruin the wrapping paper. Not one single word. He wants to read them later.
I tell him I won’t be offended if he rips it, but secretly I savor the fact that he wants to keep it. He wants to read it. He loves my wrapping paper probably as much or more than he will love his presents.
***
The woman at the end of my row is reading Twilight in paperback. I smile thinking about how many people I’ve seen reading it without the slipcover, trying to hide the fact that they are actually reading Twilight. It’s like a secret cult, with everyone who has read it knowing exactly what the uncovered cover looks like and exchanging looks that say, “I read them too – in a public place, without the dust jacket.” It’s like the early Christians who would draw half of a fish in the sand with their toe while they talked to someone new. If the other person drew the other half of the fish, both knew that the other was also a Christian, and they could worship together.
I laugh every time I reference Twilight in everyday conversation, but it’s actually been relevant multiple times. Vampires DO exist, and sex is immortal. To me it reinforces the fact that in order to live forever we must be cold and hard as marble… or eat the brains of the living and mortal.
If that’s immortality, I’m not interested.
***
In June, right after my junior year, I was sitting in the first row of business class on a flight from Munich to Paris with my friend Alisa and her father. Before economy class boarding, the flight attendants came around with a stack of free magazines. I didn’t speak German or French, so I tried to pick something with good pictures.
When the rest of the passengers started boarding, they all snickered at the two wide-eyed 16-year-old girls flipping through copies of Playboy, pretending to read the articles (which were all in German) and instead being visually assaulted by glossy full-page photos of enormous, unrealistic bosoms bouncing around on a muddy soccer field like skin-colored footballs.
***
At the beginning of that year, I sat in the Toronto airport with Ella and Katie, pretending to be engrossed in our crossword puzzles and conversation while in reality our eyes were peeled for our fellow travelers, especially a bushy-haired girl we’d never seen before. Her name was Nicole. According to her email, she would be wearing hot pink capris and looking confused.
On the plane, I sat next to her and we wrote notes back and forth to Gus and Paul, the two boys from Connecticut who sat diagonally behind us. Paul had a guitar and told us what Valium was, and why he fell asleep almost immediately. Gus carried on the conversation after that but we didn’t really know what to say to each other so the chat eventually petered out.
In the simulated evening, when the cabin lights went out, the woman in front of us (who had a very unhappy baby) turned around and asked the girl next to me to please shut off her reading light. She was engrossed in the newest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, so I offered her my flashlight.
***
After the interminable boarding process at Amsterdam-Schiphol, I found my seat in the exit row, between a distinguished Sikh businessman and a distinguished Indian gentleman. They were engaged in conversation, and I blazed in wearing skinny jeans, high tops and a cutoff T-shirt, threw Benginald the Stuffed Moose down on my seat and hefted my backpack into the overhead compartment. They both looked at me and commented that my travel companion needed a seatbelt, and then continued their conversation behind my head.
The pilot came on to make an announcement that the flight was being held for several passengers on an incoming flight, and the gentleman on my right got up to take a turn about the cabin. While he was gone, a bright-eyed young English woman flew in and sat down in his seat. The Sikh, who introduced himself to me as Hipi, told her, “There is a gentleman sitting there already.” As soon as she got up to sort out the confusion, the gentleman came back, and then the British girl returned with a flight attendant who told the gentleman he had been moved up to first class.
It pays to be a frequent flyer.
***
The girl’s name is Amy. She had come straight in from London Heathrow and headed for Delhi to travel with her longtime boyfriend Seb. If they had missed this connection, they would be stuck in Amsterdam until after Christmas, so she and the nine other passengers from London are very grateful that KLM held the flight.
They have few plans but hope to visit Jaipur and Goa, hope for a Christmas dinner in Delhi, hope their mothers don’t worry too much about them while they update their travel page on getjealous.com. We enlighten each other on the British and American education systems, and she tells me about career life in the UK, about Seb and the adventures they have had together. She says that all the photos she’s seen of India feature cows, piles of trash, bright colors, and signs that don’t quite work in English. I laugh and say that seems pretty accurate.
My calculations put her at about 30 years of age, but her chic short red hair and huge blue eyes make her seem much younger. She is very talkative and a little nervous to sally forth into the world with only Lonely Planet to guide her. I gave her my phone number and told her to call if she runs into any trouble.
***
If it took everyone three days to get home, I wonder how many of us would still go home for Christmas on a regular basis. By the time I reach my house, I have been wearing the same clothes for four days. I am completely exhausted, covered in the dirt of countless cities, and have been en route for 36 hours (only six of which I have been asleep). The date is three days after the date my flight left MSP – 4:00pm on Christmas Eve. It is the second time in my life that I have gotten home at the last minute before Christmas, and the first time in three years that I have been “home” for Christmas at all.
The first time I barely made it home for Christmas, I was seven. I had been in the hospital with a raging chicken pox infection and my parents picked me up in the middle of a blizzard at 8:30pm on December 24. The home videos from that Christmas tried desperately to catch glimpses of my spotted face, while I tried desperately to hide it.
That was 1996, the year Tickle-Me-Elmo was the gift of choice. Alisa told me once that all she knew about the US, she learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie Jingle All the Way. “But I know people don’t actually fight over toys for Christmas…”
I told her how my nurse in 1996 had somehow managed to get hold of a Tickle-Me-Elmo, which she planned to give me for Christmas until someone stole it from her hospital locker. She was heartbroken, and even though I didn’t miss the actual Tickle-Me-Elmo very much, to this day I am struck by disbelief that someone would steal a toy from a nurse in a hospital on Christmas Eve.
***
Benginald managed to get through international security and onto the plane without a passport. Once we got settled in seat 9B, he started flirting with the flight attendants. Everyone wants to know if he has ever been to India before. I tell them yes. In fact, he has been my travel buddy for 10 years and has been to India twice before. He is getting old enough to stay at home alone, but I felt bad about leaving him there for Christmas. Besides, he sometimes gets into trouble with Kenyon’s stuffed unicorn.
No one suspects that such an adorable, charming character like Bengi would be capable of the kinds of shenanigans they cause together. He puts everyone in a good mood, and sits nicely in my lap while we watch movie after movie on our personal video screen. He is the only one who always knows what those movies make me think about, and the only one who knows my complete back story. I don’t even have to tell him, and he sees it far more clearly than I ever could.
ATTENTION: FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT WILL BE ENDING SHORTLY.
06 December 2009
have (no) fear?
I have developed an ear for fear.
It all started with a short reflection paper that ended up with more potential than kinetic energy... About how the language used to discuss fear and sex are similar and what that has to do with the fact that they are both forces used to control populations.
I didn't even know where to begin, so I sidled up to the front desk where Khashi was bent over a notebook and said, "Hey Khashi, can we just talk about fear real quick?" Hoping that he would say something I could easily apply to sex so I could just churn out those two pages before dinner.
What was I thinking? Suddenly as I tried to sort out my thoughts everything came flooding in from where I'd unthinkingly stashed it: inspirational quotes I had never truly understood until that moment. Stage fright. Worrying for my loved ones and dealing with them worrying about me. The fears that have kept me from doing things in my life, and the ways I have fought them and tried to escape their limitations. The way people use fear to control and manipulate each other. Terrorism. Feeling vulnerable in certain situations because of my gender or the color of my skin. The sheer terror of falling in love.
It was such a massive topic that I spent the whole two pages hacking a path through the tangled mess of background information, weighed down constantly by all the baggage that comes with it. So I started talking about it. And the more I talk about it, the more pervasive it seems. I had thought fear was too heavy and too loaded a topic for people to feel comfortable discussing it; but I've tallied a mention in almost every conversation I've had over the past few weeks. It's everywhere. There's no escaping it.
And as I'm coming to realize, I don't really want to anyway.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT?
The Discovery Channel and my Psych 125 textbook teamed up to tell me how some monkeys show fear toward snakelike objects, associating them with the poisonous cobras that have threatened their lives for centuries. The physiological fight-or-flight response prepares us to save ourselves -- and any member of our species who does not develop this reaction may try to befriend a man-o-war, an angry grizzly or a masked man with a gun. Evolution votes that guy off the island.
These days we surround ourselves with alarm systems, seatbelts and safety features -- but we still find plenty to be afraid of. The world can be a terrifying place, and we walk a fine line between a healthy fear of snakelike objects and an unreasonable fear that locks us in and keeps us from finding beauty in the thrill of being alive.
CONQUER YOUR FEAR!
"Only those who risk going too far ever find out how far they can go." (That was on our fridge, holding up grocery lists and Christmas cards from people we hadn't seen in ten years.) Push your limits. The next step might be impossible, but you won't know until you try it. And then you'll know it's time to take the other road.
But that can get dangerous: what happens if you go too far? What if the next step is the last one you ever take?
The idea is: most people are capable of much more than they think they are. Most people never live up to their full potential and end up feeling unfulfilled because they were too scared to do what they really wanted to do -- too scared to ask out someone who could have been the love of their lives, too scared to leave their little towns, too scared to compete for a really good job.
My Grampi is 82 years old and every time he has a birthday he tries to do something he's never done before. When he turned 80, he traveled to India for the first time. Just this past summer I convinced him to climb up almost to the very top of Quito's Basilica, to cross a catwalk in the ceiling of the cathedral and climb up a wrought-iron ladder to look out over the entire old city. He has stepped into the unknown over and over and over again throughout his life, and he still hasn't gone "too far."
But in this phrase lies an assumption that fear is negative. It limits us and shows our vulnerabilities. We don't like weakness. We don't like being vincible.
COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG
Cartoon Network more of less made me want to choke, this show included, but it tapped into an unusual truth.
In my days of filling my AIM info with inspirational quotes about making the most out of life and not caring what anybody else thinks, I came across this:
Last spring Fake Andrew, my poetry group, put on a show with real advertising and even an opener: the illustrious Triple Threat. I have not been a performer -- I get shaky reading someone else's poetry to ten people at Open Mic Night. So as the show approached, my apprehension built to almost unbearable levels.
Finally, I blurted out, "You guys, I'm really nervous."
All three of them stopped and stared at me. "No reason to be nervous," James laughed. From Jim: "You got this, babymomma, you know this."
After a pause, Tim said, "That's fine." We locked eyes.
And while my nervousness by no means dissipated (I still spoke too fast and stood too stiffly in the stage lights), I looked it in the eye and acknowledged it. It settled in my stomach instead of clenching in my chest.
When I told this story to Khashi at the desk, I realized that my fear helped me connect to my audience. They understood it and they understood me; they saw me shaking and heard me stumbling, and they still clapped and cheered. Perhaps more than they would have if I was calm and flawless.
Patrick Swayze's cameo in Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights is justified, if for no other reason, by his advice to Katey when she stubbornly declares that she is not afraid of Javier's sensuality. "That's too bad," he says. "If you can't move through your fear and connect with yourself, there's absolutely no way you are going to connect with your partner."
Partners and audiences: people who receive our invitation to judge, to whom we make available some intimate art and a part of ourselves. Performance can be like rolling over to show off our soft underbelly without knowing if it's about to be stroked or stabbed. Thus stage fright, performance anxiety, and the popular glossophobia: fear of public speaking.
A Woodstock teacher once did a meditation about his fear of public speaking. He loved it when he was young, he said, giving speeches, making people laugh, presenting an idea or representing a group. When a good friend died, he was the natural first choice to speak at the funeral, and he struggled through his grief to find a way to do justice to his friend's memory. When the day came, he couldn't do it. He couldn't speak. He just stood there, tears streaming down his face, until someone took the microphone away from him and pushed the ceremony forward.
From that day on, the mere thought of public speaking sent him into a cold sweat. And as he stood there in front of us, the whole school, he cried.
MEDITATION ON MEDITATION
Khashi introduced me to the intensely cool Ian, sophomore psych major, diver and Buddhist. Ian once spoke publicly about his fear of public speaking and how he deals with it. As he described the meditative process of breathing deep into his chest and his stomach, he breathed deeply into his chest and his stomach. As he explained how focusing on his breath slows down his racing thoughts and fears and makes the anxiety fall away, his thoughts slowed down and his anxiety fell away. Essentially, he lassoed the physiological fight-or-flight response and transformed it into a positive mental force and energy he could use in his speech. By getting in touch with his body's responses to fear he connected with the fear itself, started learning why it is there and how he can use it to be more real.
When we try to eliminate or conquer our fear, we deny an important part of ourselves. That denial pushes the fear in front of us; it becomes a wall separating us from our purpose and our audience. The fear intensifies, builds up. It separates us from things we love or things we could love but are too afraid to discover.
THE DATING REVOLUTION
Last winter someone I'd met three or four times asked me on a date. Suddenly terrified, I tentatively accepted. Sensing my worry, he responded, "Let me define date. A date is when two adults go to a specific place or function with the intention of getting to know each other better and finding out whether they are better suited for friendship or for a romantic relationship."
I was instantly more comfortable with the idea, and I understood the Caf Date in the context of the dates I used to have with my dad, with ex-boyfriends and old friends. I started to see a date as a time I set aside to focus on one person, to really get to know him or her and how we fit together in the overall scheme of things, and to enjoy one another's company without distraction.
The catch? My newfound definition of a date is an atypical one. If I were to ask random people on dates, they would surely misinterpret my intentions. Would I have to clarify what I meant every single time I asked an interesting person to join me for a meal? The prospect was daunting. Exhausting.
I finally started being hilariously up-front: "Hey, I think you're really interesting. We should get a meal sometime. It would be cool to get to know you more." I have yet to be turned down, and I have no doubt that all parties now have a few more really enriching experiences under our belts.
Ian uses his meditative tactics to talk to girls. "It sounds selfish," he said, "but when I'm talking to someone I'm interested in, I try not to focus on what she's saying. I just focus on my breathing. Then my thoughts slow down and I find that what she's saying just falls into my mind and I can communicate with her much better." Otherwise, he worries about what she thinks of him and fudges to make her like him better. In the end, he feels as though he's betrayed himself; she never met the real him and he suspects that she didn't open up in return. They never get over that awkward first-meeting superficiality and never know for sure how well they could actually get along.
A lot of people respond really well to our honesty and openness. They pick up on it and feel more comfortable with being honest and open in return, less worried about whether we are judging them, and more certain that we are exactly as we present ourselves. And yet it is a difficult habit to start.
AFRAID TO OFFEND
Some people pray. They find solace in the idea that God will give them the strength they need to face their fear and deal with the situation. Some people talk to pets, who neither judge nor respond. Talking to other people is sometimes harder because we think and respond and make judgments. We hold the capability to offend and hurt each other, and none of us wants to hurt or be hurt. We might sound stupid or make somebody else feel stupid, and we might open ourselves to betrayal by offering confessions. We might be wrong. So it can be very hard to express ourselves honestly to another human being.
Over dinner Khashi explained to me the Baha'i ideals for positive communication. First, both parties must find complete unity, "absolute love and harmony." They must ask for divine assistance, because humans are fallible and frail and we cannot do it alone. Then they must both strive to be completely frank with the other person and say exactly what they mean without worrying about offending the other person. And in turn, they must be willing to forgive any offenses spoken in honesty.
Being afraid to speak the truth only drives a wedge into the pair. Give it up to God. Say what needs to be said, fix what needs to be fixed, do it out of love and don't be afraid to do so.
LOVE & FEAR
"Love is always accompanied by fear," Khashi says, quoting the Ruhi workbooks.
That one threw us for a loop. Love? Frightening? Ha. What an uncomfortable idea.
We'd already talked about how scary approaching someone can be, but how could love, once you've found it and discovered it, still be scary? If love is supposed to be unconditional, you can't lose it, right?
There is something definitely scary about falling in love. Something terrifying in the realization that someone depends on you, someone has expectations for you, and that someone might actually live up to your expectations. Or, for the first time ever, it doesn't matter if he does or not (live up to your expectations), because for some reason you don't actually care. There is something terrifying in the apprehensive idea that you might, someday, have to hurt this person you are starting to care for so much.
And who really believes it is unconditional? What if this next confession you make is the one condition? How do you know it really is unconditional, when in fact it is only unconditional until you get fat and wrinkles and you lose your job or get kicked out of your apartment? You don't. It's all about faith.
And what is faith but realizing there is something to be afraid of and deciding despite your fear that it (whatever IT is) is true, real, or worthwhile anyway, hoping all along that you don't get thrown into the mud?
BULLETPROOF
It's amazing and frustrating to me that fearing physical or mental disorder oftentimes brings on the very symptoms we worry about. We fear death and the dark and the unknown. We fear falling victim to crime and we fear our loved ones falling victim. We fear regretting things and dying unfulfilled. We are afraid that we will always be alone. We are afraid of bees, spiders, snakes and bears; ghosts, zombies and vampires. We are afraid of conspiracy and terrorism (which, incidentally, is called terrorism for a reason -- and exploitation of fear). We are afraid to love and afraid to never love, afraid to die and afraid to never die, afraid to fail and to succeed, afraid to be... or not to be.
I could go on forever. I could come to conclusion after conclusion; I could talk about any of these topics for five pages, and a whole slew of other topics I didn't even touch on yet. Maybe I am just 20 and indomitable -- maybe I am just "being free, being wild, being bulletproof," as Bomshel puts it in their country song 19 & Crazy. Maybe I will be shoved yet into oblivion and uncertainty.
But for now, I'll leave the last word to Holiday (Mathis). On November 10 she wrote in the Star Tribune:
It all started with a short reflection paper that ended up with more potential than kinetic energy... About how the language used to discuss fear and sex are similar and what that has to do with the fact that they are both forces used to control populations.
I didn't even know where to begin, so I sidled up to the front desk where Khashi was bent over a notebook and said, "Hey Khashi, can we just talk about fear real quick?" Hoping that he would say something I could easily apply to sex so I could just churn out those two pages before dinner.
What was I thinking? Suddenly as I tried to sort out my thoughts everything came flooding in from where I'd unthinkingly stashed it: inspirational quotes I had never truly understood until that moment. Stage fright. Worrying for my loved ones and dealing with them worrying about me. The fears that have kept me from doing things in my life, and the ways I have fought them and tried to escape their limitations. The way people use fear to control and manipulate each other. Terrorism. Feeling vulnerable in certain situations because of my gender or the color of my skin. The sheer terror of falling in love.
It was such a massive topic that I spent the whole two pages hacking a path through the tangled mess of background information, weighed down constantly by all the baggage that comes with it. So I started talking about it. And the more I talk about it, the more pervasive it seems. I had thought fear was too heavy and too loaded a topic for people to feel comfortable discussing it; but I've tallied a mention in almost every conversation I've had over the past few weeks. It's everywhere. There's no escaping it.
And as I'm coming to realize, I don't really want to anyway.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT?
The Discovery Channel and my Psych 125 textbook teamed up to tell me how some monkeys show fear toward snakelike objects, associating them with the poisonous cobras that have threatened their lives for centuries. The physiological fight-or-flight response prepares us to save ourselves -- and any member of our species who does not develop this reaction may try to befriend a man-o-war, an angry grizzly or a masked man with a gun. Evolution votes that guy off the island.
These days we surround ourselves with alarm systems, seatbelts and safety features -- but we still find plenty to be afraid of. The world can be a terrifying place, and we walk a fine line between a healthy fear of snakelike objects and an unreasonable fear that locks us in and keeps us from finding beauty in the thrill of being alive.
CONQUER YOUR FEAR!
"Only those who risk going too far ever find out how far they can go." (That was on our fridge, holding up grocery lists and Christmas cards from people we hadn't seen in ten years.) Push your limits. The next step might be impossible, but you won't know until you try it. And then you'll know it's time to take the other road.
But that can get dangerous: what happens if you go too far? What if the next step is the last one you ever take?
The idea is: most people are capable of much more than they think they are. Most people never live up to their full potential and end up feeling unfulfilled because they were too scared to do what they really wanted to do -- too scared to ask out someone who could have been the love of their lives, too scared to leave their little towns, too scared to compete for a really good job.
My Grampi is 82 years old and every time he has a birthday he tries to do something he's never done before. When he turned 80, he traveled to India for the first time. Just this past summer I convinced him to climb up almost to the very top of Quito's Basilica, to cross a catwalk in the ceiling of the cathedral and climb up a wrought-iron ladder to look out over the entire old city. He has stepped into the unknown over and over and over again throughout his life, and he still hasn't gone "too far."
But in this phrase lies an assumption that fear is negative. It limits us and shows our vulnerabilities. We don't like weakness. We don't like being vincible.
COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG
Cartoon Network more of less made me want to choke, this show included, but it tapped into an unusual truth.
In my days of filling my AIM info with inspirational quotes about making the most out of life and not caring what anybody else thinks, I came across this:
Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is taking action in spite of your fear.I didn't understand it completely, stored it away but passed over it in favor of "Live like you're going to die today"... Until I talked to Khashi, and suddenly it clicked into place for me.
Last spring Fake Andrew, my poetry group, put on a show with real advertising and even an opener: the illustrious Triple Threat. I have not been a performer -- I get shaky reading someone else's poetry to ten people at Open Mic Night. So as the show approached, my apprehension built to almost unbearable levels.
Finally, I blurted out, "You guys, I'm really nervous."
All three of them stopped and stared at me. "No reason to be nervous," James laughed. From Jim: "You got this, babymomma, you know this."
After a pause, Tim said, "That's fine." We locked eyes.
And while my nervousness by no means dissipated (I still spoke too fast and stood too stiffly in the stage lights), I looked it in the eye and acknowledged it. It settled in my stomach instead of clenching in my chest.
When I told this story to Khashi at the desk, I realized that my fear helped me connect to my audience. They understood it and they understood me; they saw me shaking and heard me stumbling, and they still clapped and cheered. Perhaps more than they would have if I was calm and flawless.
Patrick Swayze's cameo in Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights is justified, if for no other reason, by his advice to Katey when she stubbornly declares that she is not afraid of Javier's sensuality. "That's too bad," he says. "If you can't move through your fear and connect with yourself, there's absolutely no way you are going to connect with your partner."
Partners and audiences: people who receive our invitation to judge, to whom we make available some intimate art and a part of ourselves. Performance can be like rolling over to show off our soft underbelly without knowing if it's about to be stroked or stabbed. Thus stage fright, performance anxiety, and the popular glossophobia: fear of public speaking.
A Woodstock teacher once did a meditation about his fear of public speaking. He loved it when he was young, he said, giving speeches, making people laugh, presenting an idea or representing a group. When a good friend died, he was the natural first choice to speak at the funeral, and he struggled through his grief to find a way to do justice to his friend's memory. When the day came, he couldn't do it. He couldn't speak. He just stood there, tears streaming down his face, until someone took the microphone away from him and pushed the ceremony forward.
From that day on, the mere thought of public speaking sent him into a cold sweat. And as he stood there in front of us, the whole school, he cried.
MEDITATION ON MEDITATION
Khashi introduced me to the intensely cool Ian, sophomore psych major, diver and Buddhist. Ian once spoke publicly about his fear of public speaking and how he deals with it. As he described the meditative process of breathing deep into his chest and his stomach, he breathed deeply into his chest and his stomach. As he explained how focusing on his breath slows down his racing thoughts and fears and makes the anxiety fall away, his thoughts slowed down and his anxiety fell away. Essentially, he lassoed the physiological fight-or-flight response and transformed it into a positive mental force and energy he could use in his speech. By getting in touch with his body's responses to fear he connected with the fear itself, started learning why it is there and how he can use it to be more real.
When we try to eliminate or conquer our fear, we deny an important part of ourselves. That denial pushes the fear in front of us; it becomes a wall separating us from our purpose and our audience. The fear intensifies, builds up. It separates us from things we love or things we could love but are too afraid to discover.
THE DATING REVOLUTION
Last winter someone I'd met three or four times asked me on a date. Suddenly terrified, I tentatively accepted. Sensing my worry, he responded, "Let me define date. A date is when two adults go to a specific place or function with the intention of getting to know each other better and finding out whether they are better suited for friendship or for a romantic relationship."
I was instantly more comfortable with the idea, and I understood the Caf Date in the context of the dates I used to have with my dad, with ex-boyfriends and old friends. I started to see a date as a time I set aside to focus on one person, to really get to know him or her and how we fit together in the overall scheme of things, and to enjoy one another's company without distraction.
The catch? My newfound definition of a date is an atypical one. If I were to ask random people on dates, they would surely misinterpret my intentions. Would I have to clarify what I meant every single time I asked an interesting person to join me for a meal? The prospect was daunting. Exhausting.
I finally started being hilariously up-front: "Hey, I think you're really interesting. We should get a meal sometime. It would be cool to get to know you more." I have yet to be turned down, and I have no doubt that all parties now have a few more really enriching experiences under our belts.
Ian uses his meditative tactics to talk to girls. "It sounds selfish," he said, "but when I'm talking to someone I'm interested in, I try not to focus on what she's saying. I just focus on my breathing. Then my thoughts slow down and I find that what she's saying just falls into my mind and I can communicate with her much better." Otherwise, he worries about what she thinks of him and fudges to make her like him better. In the end, he feels as though he's betrayed himself; she never met the real him and he suspects that she didn't open up in return. They never get over that awkward first-meeting superficiality and never know for sure how well they could actually get along.
A lot of people respond really well to our honesty and openness. They pick up on it and feel more comfortable with being honest and open in return, less worried about whether we are judging them, and more certain that we are exactly as we present ourselves. And yet it is a difficult habit to start.
AFRAID TO OFFEND
Some people pray. They find solace in the idea that God will give them the strength they need to face their fear and deal with the situation. Some people talk to pets, who neither judge nor respond. Talking to other people is sometimes harder because we think and respond and make judgments. We hold the capability to offend and hurt each other, and none of us wants to hurt or be hurt. We might sound stupid or make somebody else feel stupid, and we might open ourselves to betrayal by offering confessions. We might be wrong. So it can be very hard to express ourselves honestly to another human being.
Over dinner Khashi explained to me the Baha'i ideals for positive communication. First, both parties must find complete unity, "absolute love and harmony." They must ask for divine assistance, because humans are fallible and frail and we cannot do it alone. Then they must both strive to be completely frank with the other person and say exactly what they mean without worrying about offending the other person. And in turn, they must be willing to forgive any offenses spoken in honesty.
Being afraid to speak the truth only drives a wedge into the pair. Give it up to God. Say what needs to be said, fix what needs to be fixed, do it out of love and don't be afraid to do so.
LOVE & FEAR
"Love is always accompanied by fear," Khashi says, quoting the Ruhi workbooks.
That one threw us for a loop. Love? Frightening? Ha. What an uncomfortable idea.
We'd already talked about how scary approaching someone can be, but how could love, once you've found it and discovered it, still be scary? If love is supposed to be unconditional, you can't lose it, right?
There is something definitely scary about falling in love. Something terrifying in the realization that someone depends on you, someone has expectations for you, and that someone might actually live up to your expectations. Or, for the first time ever, it doesn't matter if he does or not (live up to your expectations), because for some reason you don't actually care. There is something terrifying in the apprehensive idea that you might, someday, have to hurt this person you are starting to care for so much.
And who really believes it is unconditional? What if this next confession you make is the one condition? How do you know it really is unconditional, when in fact it is only unconditional until you get fat and wrinkles and you lose your job or get kicked out of your apartment? You don't. It's all about faith.
And what is faith but realizing there is something to be afraid of and deciding despite your fear that it (whatever IT is) is true, real, or worthwhile anyway, hoping all along that you don't get thrown into the mud?
BULLETPROOF
It's amazing and frustrating to me that fearing physical or mental disorder oftentimes brings on the very symptoms we worry about. We fear death and the dark and the unknown. We fear falling victim to crime and we fear our loved ones falling victim. We fear regretting things and dying unfulfilled. We are afraid that we will always be alone. We are afraid of bees, spiders, snakes and bears; ghosts, zombies and vampires. We are afraid of conspiracy and terrorism (which, incidentally, is called terrorism for a reason -- and exploitation of fear). We are afraid to love and afraid to never love, afraid to die and afraid to never die, afraid to fail and to succeed, afraid to be... or not to be.
I could go on forever. I could come to conclusion after conclusion; I could talk about any of these topics for five pages, and a whole slew of other topics I didn't even touch on yet. Maybe I am just 20 and indomitable -- maybe I am just "being free, being wild, being bulletproof," as Bomshel puts it in their country song 19 & Crazy. Maybe I will be shoved yet into oblivion and uncertainty.
But for now, I'll leave the last word to Holiday (Mathis). On November 10 she wrote in the Star Tribune:
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): You can sleep easy. Your fears are unfounded. Your friends won't betray you, your children won't disappoint you. Create a mantra for yourself along these lines: "I am safe and my relationships support me."
03 December 2009
i
Handwriting analysts draw conclusions about their subjects' self-image just by examining the way they form their I's. Embellished cursive I's with lots of curlicues and decoration indicate a pompous writer, or one who feels the need to overcompensate for low self-esteem. The writer of a single-stroke I is likely independent, efficient, and down-to-earth. No self-respecting writer can get lower than a lowercase i, which means low self-esteem. The same goes for an uncapitalized signature. And, even in emails, an uncapitalized greeting signifies disrespect or disregard for the addressee.
Like every other element of graphology, these cues must be taken in the context of other cues and of the setting of the writing itself. Still, for a single letter to bear the weight of such consequential judgments about a personality...
In 7th grade English class with the illustrious Mrs. Morse, we learned The Rules. Always capitalize those I's, names, and salutations. Even on instant messenger, because otherwise you will get into the habit of writing with that horrible jargon and it will ruin your writing 4eva--forever. And from that moment you can give up all hope of ever being respected by anyone. Ever.
About the same time, I was burning through Madeleine L'Engle's tower of writings. I was collecting the material that I needed to form my own identity -- to this day my atomic personality structure contains a lot of L'Engle quotes as bonds and atoms. One of those bond-atoms went like this: "You have to learn the rules before you can break them." Not surprisingly, this put my cocky little 12-year-old self somewhat at odds with Mrs. Morse. (Madeleine L'Engle also went to a British boarding school, where they don't use periods after the title abbreviations. I still run into conflict when I try to leave out my abbreviation punctuation.)
So who dares to break that rule? Who dares to risk their self-respect for such a mundane artistic choice as arbitrary lowercasing?
In the most recent reading for my Theology and Sexuality class, Marvin Ellison quoted a feminist writer named bell hooks. I was immediately flooded with rage, and corrected the typo that made her (very important) name into a couple of insignificant words. When it came up again a few pages later, I remembered the brief section of high school history or English where we talked about some famous feminists, and sheepishly flipped back to erase my correction. bell hooks was christened Gloria Jean Watson and used the pen name bell hooks when she played her part in changing the world. The beauty of that choice is that it does melt into the rhythm and fabric of the writing. "What are those two random nouns doing in the middle of this sentence?" we wonder, and do not realize until later that they are a name. The bell rings and the hooks reel us in, and yet you remain unaware until it's too late. You think you've been reading common knowledge until that point. And far from damning her to disrespect, bell hooks gives a whole other dimension to the point that Gloria Jean Watson made throughout her life. She is beautiful, belle, but the missing e sharpens the edge of the ell.
Edward Estlin Cummings' popular name has become a tribute to his contribution to the reformation of word-ing in the early 20th century. (Why we don't rearrange his now-name to become e. cummings e. I don't know; if it was lowercased in order to reflect his famously unique style, why not take it the extra mile?) Although my friends do not see his influence in my own work, I consider him a great gift to wordsmiths of our time. I have always loved the look of his lack of caps, how every of his books in libraries worldwide has at least one kind of tape on the spine holding it together (and yes, I have looked). Poetry is one place the grammatical rule-breakers of the world can openly rebel, and e.e. cummings was a king in that movement. (Or a comrade?) He played with the very tinker toys of our language, not only grammar, capitalization and punctuation but the words themselves, and sentence structure. This has been a very valuable lesson to me: play. And take that very seriously.
On one hand, I just get lazy. I am particularly unmotivated to capitalize my I's in text messages, and I rarely do so in instant message conversations. It takes a fraction of a second longer to hit the shift key. I don't have time for that!
I recently asked someone why he capitalizes his I's, without fail, even when he doesn't capitalize the first word of his responses or even use punctuation half the time. I don't remember his exact response, but basically he said it was important. It was strange that I asked him, because it comes so automatically.
I am inclined to defend myself.
I am not lazy all the time, and since I apparently spend so much time thinking about this stuff you'd think I might put in a bit more effort to make a point. I remember consciously avoiding capitals in my poetry for a period of time, and that included my i's. At that time it was an exercise; my work then probably resembled e.e. cummings' more than at any other time. Later on it became a statement: yes, I was humble! What of it?
Now? I definitely discriminate. Sometimes within the same poem I am both capital and lowercase. Sometimes I am humble and sometimes self-important. I decide (often subconsciously) what is important for a certain image or statement. Sometimes I must dominate the image as The Subject. Sometimes every element needs equal weight, when the scale must be absolutely balanced. "I" am no more or less important than every other piece of the picture, every other letter in the line. I love the consistency and subtlety of the little i slipping in between the other short stout letters, the little dot floating above the line (even when it's spoken) like a little red balloon. It looks pretty.
On a very basic level, the big I's are much less cute.
Like every other element of graphology, these cues must be taken in the context of other cues and of the setting of the writing itself. Still, for a single letter to bear the weight of such consequential judgments about a personality...
In 7th grade English class with the illustrious Mrs. Morse, we learned The Rules. Always capitalize those I's, names, and salutations. Even on instant messenger, because otherwise you will get into the habit of writing with that horrible jargon and it will ruin your writing 4eva--forever. And from that moment you can give up all hope of ever being respected by anyone. Ever.
About the same time, I was burning through Madeleine L'Engle's tower of writings. I was collecting the material that I needed to form my own identity -- to this day my atomic personality structure contains a lot of L'Engle quotes as bonds and atoms. One of those bond-atoms went like this: "You have to learn the rules before you can break them." Not surprisingly, this put my cocky little 12-year-old self somewhat at odds with Mrs. Morse. (Madeleine L'Engle also went to a British boarding school, where they don't use periods after the title abbreviations. I still run into conflict when I try to leave out my abbreviation punctuation.)
So who dares to break that rule? Who dares to risk their self-respect for such a mundane artistic choice as arbitrary lowercasing?
In the most recent reading for my Theology and Sexuality class, Marvin Ellison quoted a feminist writer named bell hooks. I was immediately flooded with rage, and corrected the typo that made her (very important) name into a couple of insignificant words. When it came up again a few pages later, I remembered the brief section of high school history or English where we talked about some famous feminists, and sheepishly flipped back to erase my correction. bell hooks was christened Gloria Jean Watson and used the pen name bell hooks when she played her part in changing the world. The beauty of that choice is that it does melt into the rhythm and fabric of the writing. "What are those two random nouns doing in the middle of this sentence?" we wonder, and do not realize until later that they are a name. The bell rings and the hooks reel us in, and yet you remain unaware until it's too late. You think you've been reading common knowledge until that point. And far from damning her to disrespect, bell hooks gives a whole other dimension to the point that Gloria Jean Watson made throughout her life. She is beautiful, belle, but the missing e sharpens the edge of the ell.
Edward Estlin Cummings' popular name has become a tribute to his contribution to the reformation of word-ing in the early 20th century. (Why we don't rearrange his now-name to become e. cummings e. I don't know; if it was lowercased in order to reflect his famously unique style, why not take it the extra mile?) Although my friends do not see his influence in my own work, I consider him a great gift to wordsmiths of our time. I have always loved the look of his lack of caps, how every of his books in libraries worldwide has at least one kind of tape on the spine holding it together (and yes, I have looked). Poetry is one place the grammatical rule-breakers of the world can openly rebel, and e.e. cummings was a king in that movement. (Or a comrade?) He played with the very tinker toys of our language, not only grammar, capitalization and punctuation but the words themselves, and sentence structure. This has been a very valuable lesson to me: play. And take that very seriously.
On one hand, I just get lazy. I am particularly unmotivated to capitalize my I's in text messages, and I rarely do so in instant message conversations. It takes a fraction of a second longer to hit the shift key. I don't have time for that!
I recently asked someone why he capitalizes his I's, without fail, even when he doesn't capitalize the first word of his responses or even use punctuation half the time. I don't remember his exact response, but basically he said it was important. It was strange that I asked him, because it comes so automatically.
I am inclined to defend myself.
I am not lazy all the time, and since I apparently spend so much time thinking about this stuff you'd think I might put in a bit more effort to make a point. I remember consciously avoiding capitals in my poetry for a period of time, and that included my i's. At that time it was an exercise; my work then probably resembled e.e. cummings' more than at any other time. Later on it became a statement: yes, I was humble! What of it?
Now? I definitely discriminate. Sometimes within the same poem I am both capital and lowercase. Sometimes I am humble and sometimes self-important. I decide (often subconsciously) what is important for a certain image or statement. Sometimes I must dominate the image as The Subject. Sometimes every element needs equal weight, when the scale must be absolutely balanced. "I" am no more or less important than every other piece of the picture, every other letter in the line. I love the consistency and subtlety of the little i slipping in between the other short stout letters, the little dot floating above the line (even when it's spoken) like a little red balloon. It looks pretty.
On a very basic level, the big I's are much less cute.
24 October 2009
root system
It’s 11:00pm and Delilah’s hosting Friday Nite Girls’ Night on 102.9FM. Kenyon and I are driving south on Highway 35, singing along at the top of our lungs to Shania Twain and Uncle Kracker and all the other old-school love song dedications. It’s been a long night since we left the Hill at six, thinking we’d be back in an hour and a half to get groceries, make dinner and watch a few episodes of Sex and the City.
Instead, we’d gotten lost multiple times in and around the Twin Cities, driven Josh to the edge of madness with our burning hunger, and ended up pulling into a gas station on Eustis Street to ask for directions back to 35W, heading south.
“No way,” I breathed, craning my neck to peer down the hill into the darkness. “I used to live right down that hill. This is my ‘hood. This is where I lived when I was little.” I was struck by the sudden familiarity of the landscape, struck by how everything came flooding back despite all the years that have passed. More than years, some incredibly thorny and breathtaking landscapes, situations, and people have filled the space between then and now. And I felt incredibly lucky to be driving through my old ‘hood with my roommate, all of those odds and ends stashed away in the same old brain. The past and the present looked each other in the eyes, startled. Blinked, and walked on, shaking their heads. For a split second, Then and Now slipped over each other and became the same moment, a solar eclipse in the vast universe of one single and very short life, and I didn’t even have time to put on my sunglasses and look right at it before it was gone.
***
Kenyon and I throw ourselves into the booth at Perkins with two immense sighs of relief. We examine the menu with full recognition of the magnitude of the decision it presents, laughing at how different this eleven o’clock is from the one we’d imagined.
Where else could we be? At 7:30 we could have been at Econofoods, planning our meals for the rest of the weekend. Or we could have been on the road, three hours outside Chicago, on our way to Columbus for the weekend. At ten we could have been cuddled up in our room, watching a chick flick, full and satisfied and ready for an early bedtime. Or we could have been looking at the Chicago city lights, looking for our turnoff to Olivia’s aunt’s house where we would stay the night.
In my first econ class this semester, Bruce, my professor, explained the concept of opportunity costs, which basically refers to the value of whatever you could be doing or spending your money instead of what you’re doing or spending your money on. I remember laughing out loud, incredulous, trying to fathom what my life would be if I thought about opportunity costs at every step. Unhappy, I thought. I would be so unhappy if I spent all my time thinking about what else I could be doing with my time instead. What a ridiculous idea, I thought.
So Kenyon and I look at each other and laugh, knowing full well that this Perkins late-night breakfast tastes so much better than it would have three hours earlier.
***
I come from “the Dirty.” That’s what they call it, Rug City of old whose two-family immigrant houses sag sadly along all the main roads and whose rich history now resides in the gaping broken windows of old factories and churches built for laborers who spoke different languages. When I came to St. Olaf, a month passed before I got used to going to Target, Econofoods and Walgreen’s instead of Walmart, Price Chopper and Eckerd. One year later, Amsterdam built a Walgreen’s on the corner of the old Sanford Farms, and an old friend wrote me, “The new Walgreen’s finally opened, but I haven’t been yet.” Target finally filled the empty plaza vacated by K-Mart years before. Eckerd got bought out by Rite Aid and Memorial Hospital got bought out by St. Mary’s, which brought the Dirty’s grand total to five McDonald’ses, five Stewart’ses, three Rite Aids, and two St. Mary’ses. Two projects and six Catholic churches and three Lutheran churches. Population 18,000. A town of monopolistic competition, Bruce explains.
I come from the Dirty. My friends there would surprise my friends here. They are really smart and really cynical, and a bunch of them go to the same schools and still hang out with each other when they all carpool back to town. That landscape, in darkness or daylight, is impressed on the inside of my eyelids and on the soles of my bare feet. In the Dirty, we hang out in the parking lots of churches that nobody goes to anymore, or in school playgrounds, or pitch a tent in the backyard and invite boys over. In the Dirty, we only talk about our dreams when it’s dark and we can’t see each other’s faces. We all want to leave, but we all come back eventually.
***
I come from Limbo. I was born a mere half-hour drive from the place where you can straddle the bulging belt of the Earth. I was born the product of two mountains, in a leftover cloud of volcanic ash. My mother grew up in the mountain range that contains the mountain whose peak is the farthest from sea level, and my father grew up in the mountain range that contains the mountain whose peak is the farthest from the center of the Earth. They met and fell in love a mere half-hour drive from where I am now.
My dad had a conversation with someone once about missionary kids who go back to the United States for college. She said that MKs from Latin America seemed to have more violent identity crises than those from Asia. My dad figured that had something to do with the fact that Asian students he knows at Woodstock tend to submit to authority rather than question it. The North Americans don’t question authority because as long as nobody questions the system, each individual person can go on living. But in Ecuador, he said, lucha is the word of choice. Fight. They question authority. They rebel against governments and create new ones, rebel against the Church and create liberation theology, because their security lies in their communities, and communities take a lot of work to stay functional.
Ecuador and its neighbors and its neighbors’ neighbors have been fighting since the beginning of time. The Incas took over all the smaller scattered tribes and created a golden empire. Then the Spanish arrived to baptize and kill the Incas, and after a few more centuries the Latin American Spanish rebelled against the Spanish Spanish. Ecuador gained independence two hundred years ago, and since then a series of governments, militaries and presidents has ruled the country. Quito’s streets bear the names of important dates in the various fights for independence: 10 de Agosto, 6 de Diciembre, 9 de Septiembre, 12 de Octubre.
That lucha has seeped up through my roots and into my xylems and phyla. That lucha is in my blood and my bones and in the sometimes stubborn set of my lips. You know the one. And that lucha has been luchando with the quiet unquestioning majesty of that other mountain range, the majesty that waits for cows who stop to eat in the middle of crossing the street and talks to their neighbor when they’re stuck in a traffic jam. That lucha has beef with waiting for that Ecclesiastical Time to come along. And that accommodating spirit, though it doesn’t really have beef with anything, waits for the lucha to come along and then waits for it to go on its way. Meanwhile it sips its tea, sharing gossip and watching the sun come up over the latest landslide and the smoggy winterline.
I finally accommodated the lucha and found a peace with Limbo. I found my sea legs so that I can straddle the Earth and I can straddle mountain peaks and faultlines and tides.
***
Kenyon and I burrow into the pile of blankets and pillows on top of our mattresses, newly heaved onto the floor next to each other in front of the TV, still shaking our heads at the course of the night. We talk about the things we are struggling with, we talk about our luchas; and we talk about our contentednesses, and sometimes they are the same. Sometimes they come to tears or wrinkled brows and sometimes they come to laughter, but in the comfortable quiet that follows we both agree that we are inextricably tangled up together forever. We both agree that this is beautiful, and that someday we will be able to face anything that comes because we are two-in-one. Our families are photo negatives of each other and our life perspectives are like two puzzle pieces next to each other in the big picture. We have learned, but never stop learning, how to get from negative to photograph, and how to get from a pile of puzzle pieces to a completed puzzle. We are not perfect, but we are comfortable in Limbo.
***
In the Amazon jungle there grows a tree whose roots are walls. The base is buttressed, with great triangles of thin wood extending far down into the ground and feeding the tree. The locals slice off the roots and bend them into huge bowls for mixing and cooking.
In the Amazon jungle there grows a tree whose roots send a resonant boom several kilometers into the jungle when you hit them with your machete. If you are lost in the jungle, someone will follow the boom and find you.
If I were a tree, my roots would extend clear out of the jungle and hug the Earth. My base is buttressed but torn, because passersby have sliced off my roots to make huge bowls for mixing and cooking ideas and relationships. If you are lost in the jungle, you can just find the little tips of my roots buried somewhere in your soul and follow them until you find me, standing somewhere in the middle of the jungle, smiling and wiggling my toes in the mud, content to wait until you get here.
Instead, we’d gotten lost multiple times in and around the Twin Cities, driven Josh to the edge of madness with our burning hunger, and ended up pulling into a gas station on Eustis Street to ask for directions back to 35W, heading south.
“No way,” I breathed, craning my neck to peer down the hill into the darkness. “I used to live right down that hill. This is my ‘hood. This is where I lived when I was little.” I was struck by the sudden familiarity of the landscape, struck by how everything came flooding back despite all the years that have passed. More than years, some incredibly thorny and breathtaking landscapes, situations, and people have filled the space between then and now. And I felt incredibly lucky to be driving through my old ‘hood with my roommate, all of those odds and ends stashed away in the same old brain. The past and the present looked each other in the eyes, startled. Blinked, and walked on, shaking their heads. For a split second, Then and Now slipped over each other and became the same moment, a solar eclipse in the vast universe of one single and very short life, and I didn’t even have time to put on my sunglasses and look right at it before it was gone.
***
Kenyon and I throw ourselves into the booth at Perkins with two immense sighs of relief. We examine the menu with full recognition of the magnitude of the decision it presents, laughing at how different this eleven o’clock is from the one we’d imagined.
Where else could we be? At 7:30 we could have been at Econofoods, planning our meals for the rest of the weekend. Or we could have been on the road, three hours outside Chicago, on our way to Columbus for the weekend. At ten we could have been cuddled up in our room, watching a chick flick, full and satisfied and ready for an early bedtime. Or we could have been looking at the Chicago city lights, looking for our turnoff to Olivia’s aunt’s house where we would stay the night.
In my first econ class this semester, Bruce, my professor, explained the concept of opportunity costs, which basically refers to the value of whatever you could be doing or spending your money instead of what you’re doing or spending your money on. I remember laughing out loud, incredulous, trying to fathom what my life would be if I thought about opportunity costs at every step. Unhappy, I thought. I would be so unhappy if I spent all my time thinking about what else I could be doing with my time instead. What a ridiculous idea, I thought.
So Kenyon and I look at each other and laugh, knowing full well that this Perkins late-night breakfast tastes so much better than it would have three hours earlier.
***
I come from “the Dirty.” That’s what they call it, Rug City of old whose two-family immigrant houses sag sadly along all the main roads and whose rich history now resides in the gaping broken windows of old factories and churches built for laborers who spoke different languages. When I came to St. Olaf, a month passed before I got used to going to Target, Econofoods and Walgreen’s instead of Walmart, Price Chopper and Eckerd. One year later, Amsterdam built a Walgreen’s on the corner of the old Sanford Farms, and an old friend wrote me, “The new Walgreen’s finally opened, but I haven’t been yet.” Target finally filled the empty plaza vacated by K-Mart years before. Eckerd got bought out by Rite Aid and Memorial Hospital got bought out by St. Mary’s, which brought the Dirty’s grand total to five McDonald’ses, five Stewart’ses, three Rite Aids, and two St. Mary’ses. Two projects and six Catholic churches and three Lutheran churches. Population 18,000. A town of monopolistic competition, Bruce explains.
I come from the Dirty. My friends there would surprise my friends here. They are really smart and really cynical, and a bunch of them go to the same schools and still hang out with each other when they all carpool back to town. That landscape, in darkness or daylight, is impressed on the inside of my eyelids and on the soles of my bare feet. In the Dirty, we hang out in the parking lots of churches that nobody goes to anymore, or in school playgrounds, or pitch a tent in the backyard and invite boys over. In the Dirty, we only talk about our dreams when it’s dark and we can’t see each other’s faces. We all want to leave, but we all come back eventually.
***
I come from Limbo. I was born a mere half-hour drive from the place where you can straddle the bulging belt of the Earth. I was born the product of two mountains, in a leftover cloud of volcanic ash. My mother grew up in the mountain range that contains the mountain whose peak is the farthest from sea level, and my father grew up in the mountain range that contains the mountain whose peak is the farthest from the center of the Earth. They met and fell in love a mere half-hour drive from where I am now.
My dad had a conversation with someone once about missionary kids who go back to the United States for college. She said that MKs from Latin America seemed to have more violent identity crises than those from Asia. My dad figured that had something to do with the fact that Asian students he knows at Woodstock tend to submit to authority rather than question it. The North Americans don’t question authority because as long as nobody questions the system, each individual person can go on living. But in Ecuador, he said, lucha is the word of choice. Fight. They question authority. They rebel against governments and create new ones, rebel against the Church and create liberation theology, because their security lies in their communities, and communities take a lot of work to stay functional.
Ecuador and its neighbors and its neighbors’ neighbors have been fighting since the beginning of time. The Incas took over all the smaller scattered tribes and created a golden empire. Then the Spanish arrived to baptize and kill the Incas, and after a few more centuries the Latin American Spanish rebelled against the Spanish Spanish. Ecuador gained independence two hundred years ago, and since then a series of governments, militaries and presidents has ruled the country. Quito’s streets bear the names of important dates in the various fights for independence: 10 de Agosto, 6 de Diciembre, 9 de Septiembre, 12 de Octubre.
That lucha has seeped up through my roots and into my xylems and phyla. That lucha is in my blood and my bones and in the sometimes stubborn set of my lips. You know the one. And that lucha has been luchando with the quiet unquestioning majesty of that other mountain range, the majesty that waits for cows who stop to eat in the middle of crossing the street and talks to their neighbor when they’re stuck in a traffic jam. That lucha has beef with waiting for that Ecclesiastical Time to come along. And that accommodating spirit, though it doesn’t really have beef with anything, waits for the lucha to come along and then waits for it to go on its way. Meanwhile it sips its tea, sharing gossip and watching the sun come up over the latest landslide and the smoggy winterline.
I finally accommodated the lucha and found a peace with Limbo. I found my sea legs so that I can straddle the Earth and I can straddle mountain peaks and faultlines and tides.
***
Kenyon and I burrow into the pile of blankets and pillows on top of our mattresses, newly heaved onto the floor next to each other in front of the TV, still shaking our heads at the course of the night. We talk about the things we are struggling with, we talk about our luchas; and we talk about our contentednesses, and sometimes they are the same. Sometimes they come to tears or wrinkled brows and sometimes they come to laughter, but in the comfortable quiet that follows we both agree that we are inextricably tangled up together forever. We both agree that this is beautiful, and that someday we will be able to face anything that comes because we are two-in-one. Our families are photo negatives of each other and our life perspectives are like two puzzle pieces next to each other in the big picture. We have learned, but never stop learning, how to get from negative to photograph, and how to get from a pile of puzzle pieces to a completed puzzle. We are not perfect, but we are comfortable in Limbo.
***
In the Amazon jungle there grows a tree whose roots are walls. The base is buttressed, with great triangles of thin wood extending far down into the ground and feeding the tree. The locals slice off the roots and bend them into huge bowls for mixing and cooking.
In the Amazon jungle there grows a tree whose roots send a resonant boom several kilometers into the jungle when you hit them with your machete. If you are lost in the jungle, someone will follow the boom and find you.
If I were a tree, my roots would extend clear out of the jungle and hug the Earth. My base is buttressed but torn, because passersby have sliced off my roots to make huge bowls for mixing and cooking ideas and relationships. If you are lost in the jungle, you can just find the little tips of my roots buried somewhere in your soul and follow them until you find me, standing somewhere in the middle of the jungle, smiling and wiggling my toes in the mud, content to wait until you get here.
09 September 2009
following dante out of limbo
According to jungle legend, there was a time when the Living and the Dead lived together in the same land. After some time the chief, Kumokums, had to build another village on another bank of the river so that there would be space for everyone. Before long these two towns got so crowded that he made a deal with the chief of the underworld to allow the Dead to go live with him, and make room for the Living in Kumokums' domain.
But when Kumokums' daughter died and went to live in the Land of the Dead, he was devastated, and he went to the porcupine to ask how to get her back. "Look, dude," the porcupine said. "You made the dead go live down there; you deal with it." But Kumokums couldn't live with it, so he set off on a heroic journey to reason with the chief of the underworld and get his daughter back.
At first the chief of the dead agreed with the porcupine, but after listening to Kumokums beg for what seemed like forever he said, "I'll tell you what. You can take your daughter back to the Land of the Living, but you have to just lead her by the hand and not look back until you see the sunrise, or she will have to live with me forever."
So Kumokums thanked the other chief and took his daughter by the hand, and they started walking. As they walked the sky got lighter and lighter, and he felt the skin and flesh coming back to his daughter's hand. She was back to normal just in time for the sun to rise, but before it had crested the horizon, he looked back...
And saw nothing but a pile of bones turning to dust and blowing back toward the Land of the Dead.
***
Ovid tells almost the exact same story in Latin, about Orpheus, king of the Kikonians and possibly the Macedonians. Orpheus, though, goes to the Underworld to bargain with Hades for his wife instead of his daughter. Like Kumokums, he cannot hold his excitement until sunrise. As he turns to gaze lovingly at Eurydice, she slides back into Hades, never to be seen again.
***
My time is coming to ascend (or descend, or sidle, depending on which way you turn the map) out of my Hemispheric Limbo. I have recently climbed out of (or into) Citizenship Limbo, with passports in-hand from both my country of birth and my country of residence (although residence is kind of a limboistic term too, since I don't really have a fully-functioning address anywhere). This summer has given me a sense of solid ground to put my sea legs on after years of rowing across the Styx. I may have just been kicked out of the boat for running out of money to pay my way, but I'm not complaining.
I have chosen to follow Dante out of Limbo because he seems to be the only one to leave his companion, who happens to be an angel, in one piece. Also, since he is descending into the Inferno, sliding down wouldn't be such a bad way to go. It might actually be easier. And he eventually comes out into Paradise on the other end, after a very educational journey through the Circles of Hell. (I actually found the Inferno more entertaining than Paradiso, so I can't see any disadvantage to taking this route.)
The descent happens to be gorgeous. We watch the mountains unrolling in front of us on our way out of Quito toward the jungle on Friday -- the windshield magnifies the same scenery from "Proof of Life" showing on the wobbly little TV screen right above it. Three hundred meters above sea level we get into a long, covered motorboat that makes me feel like I've just jumped into "Amazon Trail," and then around another bend our hotel rises straight out of the river and the jungle in front of us: La Casa del Suizo.
***
It wouldn't take much to believe the story about Kumokums after a few days of exploring the river settlements and learning what the people have always known. We learn first-hand the genius of building rafts out of rope and surprisingly light balsa logs, the medicinal properties of dragon's blood (which comes from a tree called the drago), and how to make the grass roof of a hut last 20 years or more just by burning a fire 22 hours out of the day. We taste the different vintages of chicha: yucca fermented for 7 days tastes like bland coconut milk, while the 12-day variety tastes like wine. A big bowl of that in the morning keeps the workers satisfied all day when there is nothing else to eat, not even the roasted palm tree grubs that taste like chicken skin. ¡Qué rico! One of our guides, Ruben, demonstrates a traditional dance to a tune played by hitting his palm against the waxed open end of a turtle shell. He comes from a family of shamans, so we stop in a clearing in the forest while he sings and sweeps away our impurities with a noisy brush made out of leaves. Freddy weaves a crown for Megan out of a palm leaf and gives her a bright red lip-like flower (labios ardientes) to send flying kisses to the cameras.
We visit an animal rescue center with cages full of naughty monkeys, noisy birds, capybaras in danger of being eaten by the locals ("giant cuy") and an ocelot whose smelly spray easily reaches two meters -- Katie, trying to take a close-up photo, got it full in the face. Later on that afternoon we take turns swinging on a rope from the slippery rock out into the water. Some of us are more glamorous than others: Jose manages a full flip in the air, while I can hardly keep my feet from smacking the water on the way out. We spend the last morning sifting for gold with a wooden basin. Freddy explains that some families can make $1000 in a day of working, but that they often come down with rheumatism from bending over the water in the hot sun all day. In half an hour we came up with a decent flake or two and a lot of gold dust sparkling in the black iron sand.
Freddy invites us all out one night to a little bar on someone's property, and it is empty when we arrive. I have to start the party, and by the time the locals start showing up all of us are dancing our feet off. After awhile police sirens cut through the music, the lights come on, and a big man in a tan uniform walks to the center of the dance floor and yells, "Anyone underage needs to leave now!" In the US we would have been gone, but we stay, sitting quietly in the corner waiting for the music to start up again. Some middle-aged drunk guys surrender themselves to the power of the law, but the cop ignores them and walks outside, where he stays parked with his lights flashing, talking to his friends at the party.
We spend the last night in Termas Papallacta, easily the nicest hotel of my life, lounging in the hot pools. The air is crisp and cool and the freezing waterfall thunders down the rocks meters away from our rooms, but we are cozy in the steaming spring water and the woolen blankets in our rooms.
***
Then it's goodbye, and I spent Wednesday sitting in the hotel thinking about all my friends meeting each other in the Miami airport. I'm halfway between my new friends and my old friends, soon-to-be new again, looking forward to being with one or the other, back in my comfort zone, out of limbo.
I'm starting to realize that maybe living in limbo is the way it's supposed to be, or at least that when we leave one limbo we end up jumping straight into another one. I just need to get comfortable with jumping from limbo to limbo bent over backwards (without cheating!) just like I've gotten comfortable with whizzing across thousand-foot gorges in metal baskets, floating down potentially anaconda-filled rivers in a tube and a life jacket, letting go of my harness to fly upside down over mountainous jungle, riding up to the top of active volcanoes in little cable cars or in a bus swaying back and forth over slippery precipices... Life is an adventure and I wouldn't have it otherwise, and even the things I do that don't make my heart batter my ribcage are worth it, whatever "it" happens to be.
To be perfectly honest, I'm ready to have a slow-and-steady heartbeat for awhile. Only a few days remain to get my adrenaline kicks! My plan? Climb to the top of the un-guardrailed Basilica tower and look over my 'hood: the city where I was born.
But when Kumokums' daughter died and went to live in the Land of the Dead, he was devastated, and he went to the porcupine to ask how to get her back. "Look, dude," the porcupine said. "You made the dead go live down there; you deal with it." But Kumokums couldn't live with it, so he set off on a heroic journey to reason with the chief of the underworld and get his daughter back.
At first the chief of the dead agreed with the porcupine, but after listening to Kumokums beg for what seemed like forever he said, "I'll tell you what. You can take your daughter back to the Land of the Living, but you have to just lead her by the hand and not look back until you see the sunrise, or she will have to live with me forever."
So Kumokums thanked the other chief and took his daughter by the hand, and they started walking. As they walked the sky got lighter and lighter, and he felt the skin and flesh coming back to his daughter's hand. She was back to normal just in time for the sun to rise, but before it had crested the horizon, he looked back...
And saw nothing but a pile of bones turning to dust and blowing back toward the Land of the Dead.
***
Ovid tells almost the exact same story in Latin, about Orpheus, king of the Kikonians and possibly the Macedonians. Orpheus, though, goes to the Underworld to bargain with Hades for his wife instead of his daughter. Like Kumokums, he cannot hold his excitement until sunrise. As he turns to gaze lovingly at Eurydice, she slides back into Hades, never to be seen again.
***
My time is coming to ascend (or descend, or sidle, depending on which way you turn the map) out of my Hemispheric Limbo. I have recently climbed out of (or into) Citizenship Limbo, with passports in-hand from both my country of birth and my country of residence (although residence is kind of a limboistic term too, since I don't really have a fully-functioning address anywhere). This summer has given me a sense of solid ground to put my sea legs on after years of rowing across the Styx. I may have just been kicked out of the boat for running out of money to pay my way, but I'm not complaining.
I have chosen to follow Dante out of Limbo because he seems to be the only one to leave his companion, who happens to be an angel, in one piece. Also, since he is descending into the Inferno, sliding down wouldn't be such a bad way to go. It might actually be easier. And he eventually comes out into Paradise on the other end, after a very educational journey through the Circles of Hell. (I actually found the Inferno more entertaining than Paradiso, so I can't see any disadvantage to taking this route.)
The descent happens to be gorgeous. We watch the mountains unrolling in front of us on our way out of Quito toward the jungle on Friday -- the windshield magnifies the same scenery from "Proof of Life" showing on the wobbly little TV screen right above it. Three hundred meters above sea level we get into a long, covered motorboat that makes me feel like I've just jumped into "Amazon Trail," and then around another bend our hotel rises straight out of the river and the jungle in front of us: La Casa del Suizo.
***
It wouldn't take much to believe the story about Kumokums after a few days of exploring the river settlements and learning what the people have always known. We learn first-hand the genius of building rafts out of rope and surprisingly light balsa logs, the medicinal properties of dragon's blood (which comes from a tree called the drago), and how to make the grass roof of a hut last 20 years or more just by burning a fire 22 hours out of the day. We taste the different vintages of chicha: yucca fermented for 7 days tastes like bland coconut milk, while the 12-day variety tastes like wine. A big bowl of that in the morning keeps the workers satisfied all day when there is nothing else to eat, not even the roasted palm tree grubs that taste like chicken skin. ¡Qué rico! One of our guides, Ruben, demonstrates a traditional dance to a tune played by hitting his palm against the waxed open end of a turtle shell. He comes from a family of shamans, so we stop in a clearing in the forest while he sings and sweeps away our impurities with a noisy brush made out of leaves. Freddy weaves a crown for Megan out of a palm leaf and gives her a bright red lip-like flower (labios ardientes) to send flying kisses to the cameras.
We visit an animal rescue center with cages full of naughty monkeys, noisy birds, capybaras in danger of being eaten by the locals ("giant cuy") and an ocelot whose smelly spray easily reaches two meters -- Katie, trying to take a close-up photo, got it full in the face. Later on that afternoon we take turns swinging on a rope from the slippery rock out into the water. Some of us are more glamorous than others: Jose manages a full flip in the air, while I can hardly keep my feet from smacking the water on the way out. We spend the last morning sifting for gold with a wooden basin. Freddy explains that some families can make $1000 in a day of working, but that they often come down with rheumatism from bending over the water in the hot sun all day. In half an hour we came up with a decent flake or two and a lot of gold dust sparkling in the black iron sand.
Freddy invites us all out one night to a little bar on someone's property, and it is empty when we arrive. I have to start the party, and by the time the locals start showing up all of us are dancing our feet off. After awhile police sirens cut through the music, the lights come on, and a big man in a tan uniform walks to the center of the dance floor and yells, "Anyone underage needs to leave now!" In the US we would have been gone, but we stay, sitting quietly in the corner waiting for the music to start up again. Some middle-aged drunk guys surrender themselves to the power of the law, but the cop ignores them and walks outside, where he stays parked with his lights flashing, talking to his friends at the party.
We spend the last night in Termas Papallacta, easily the nicest hotel of my life, lounging in the hot pools. The air is crisp and cool and the freezing waterfall thunders down the rocks meters away from our rooms, but we are cozy in the steaming spring water and the woolen blankets in our rooms.
***
Then it's goodbye, and I spent Wednesday sitting in the hotel thinking about all my friends meeting each other in the Miami airport. I'm halfway between my new friends and my old friends, soon-to-be new again, looking forward to being with one or the other, back in my comfort zone, out of limbo.
I'm starting to realize that maybe living in limbo is the way it's supposed to be, or at least that when we leave one limbo we end up jumping straight into another one. I just need to get comfortable with jumping from limbo to limbo bent over backwards (without cheating!) just like I've gotten comfortable with whizzing across thousand-foot gorges in metal baskets, floating down potentially anaconda-filled rivers in a tube and a life jacket, letting go of my harness to fly upside down over mountainous jungle, riding up to the top of active volcanoes in little cable cars or in a bus swaying back and forth over slippery precipices... Life is an adventure and I wouldn't have it otherwise, and even the things I do that don't make my heart batter my ribcage are worth it, whatever "it" happens to be.
To be perfectly honest, I'm ready to have a slow-and-steady heartbeat for awhile. Only a few days remain to get my adrenaline kicks! My plan? Climb to the top of the un-guardrailed Basilica tower and look over my 'hood: the city where I was born.
27 August 2009
lost and found in limbo
YOU HAVE THREE WISHES! booms the genie in my head between the time I crawl into bed and the time I fall asleep. (Apparently Grandma Helen falls asleep at the exact moment that the pillow meets her head; but I got the Swanson genes of lying awake and thinking for a long time before the Sandman takes me.) WHAT’LL IT BE?
“Great!” I say to myself, “I’d like to be independent, and… exercise more.”
I must be the kind of fairy tale junkie that misses the moral of the story: “be careful what you wish for.”
On Friday night after most of our classmates had set off for weekend beach excursions, six of us girls set out to find a specific club which supposedly had several different locations within a radius of the hotel. We never ended up finding it, though we stopped for directions about 5 times, and after trying out a couple of other locations ended up eventually right back where we’d started, in the same bar we always go, with the bartender we know.
Wish numbers 1 and 2 got me lost three times this week. Trying to save Grampi the (short) trip to the Carcelen Supermaxi, I rode the Carcelen bus all the way to the end of the line, which happened to be behind the basketball courts of a more run-down barrio than I’d walked around in to date, and a run-down barrio that I could not locate on my mental map of Quito. After making a few phone calls, I jumped on a bus that I assumed was going back into town, to get off at Supermaxi after all… When I realized the bus wasn’t going where I wanted to go, I hopped off onto a graffiti’d cement street and felt the grey walls and street and sky pushing my panic buttons. My hit-or-miss sense of direction (also inherited from my dad) started me walking up the hill the way I wanted to go, and there it was: Terminal Carcelen, right at the bottom of the street where Grampi lives. “I’m extra-happy to see you,” Helen laughed as I walked in a few minutes later, and nudged me toward the cookies.
The next morning I went to church with Grampi and the pastor spoke like a poet, with all the pauses, breaths and emphasis of a great word-speaker. He spoke of finding time and making time for God, drawing from the New Testament poets Paul and Jesus the way Fake Andrew draws from Shihan, Shane Hawley, Sage Francis and each other. I felt comfortable again, I found a fellow speaker of the word.
Later on in the house I found more words, this time printed and leather-bound: a shelf full of classics with publication dates like 1921 and old owners’ autographs pencilled onto the title page in the precise curly script of the last century.
Back in the city on Monday, I set out with an address copied from a guidebook, my passport, and $10 to renew my soon-to-expire 90-day tourist visa. Feeling determined and capable, I took the bus to exactly the right place only to be told that I was at the wrong place, and the right place was mere blocks from my home base, on my own turf, in my own ‘hood! So I took the Trole bus back, crammed so full of people we didn’t even have to hold onto anything in order to stay standing, to the address they gave me. And there I was directed across the street and to the following morning, to an office only open from eight to noon three days a week. Feeling discouraged but at least better-informed, I trudged back home in another gathering storm. This time the heavy clouds promised refreshment, but the iron gates in front of the hotel were a welcome sight.
I have power-walked back and forth to that office at least 5 times this week. Twice I’ve been the first one there and spent two whole mornings tapping my feet waiting for my number to be called, waiting to be told what other documents I needed to fill out and what other payments I needed to make. Finally I think I did everything, but I have to go back again to pick up the final visa, my passport and other necessary documents. I am frustrated and finally understand why everyone hates bureaucracy. Fabian said, “Now you know what it’s like for us getting visas to your country.” That’s not even the beginning of it. By the time I shell out the exit tax at the airport, I will have paid a dollar a day just to exist within a space defined by invisible borders.
Sick of getting my exercise under extremely stressful conditions, I did a graffiti tour of the town with Taylor yesterday, and set out this afternoon with Brad and Katie to Parque Alameda to take a turn in the rowboats. Quito’s buildings are covered with spray painted political messages, not as artistic as some North American displays, but definitely more politically aware than a lot of the shows I’ve seen. Or rather, more aware of mainstream politics: “Pobre país en los manos de naños listos,” a reference to President Correa and his brother, who are making a lot of changes and a lot of enemies.
Parque Alameda has been on my destination list since my second week here. It boasts an old observatory with astronomical, meteorological, seismological instruments dating back over 100 years, and one of the oldest functioning telescopes in the world. We finally rented a rowboat ($1.50 for half an hour) and took two laps around the lazy river carved into the park. On its banks people nap or read; beyond them buses and cars belch black smoke into the air between the towering office buildings framing the valley on one side and the mountains on the other. And above that, sunshine, finally.
I have had a great run in this country and even without a genie I’ve had lots of wishes come true. But when this genie comes back to ask for my third wish, I’m going to say, “Genie, I want to go home.”
“Great!” I say to myself, “I’d like to be independent, and… exercise more.”
I must be the kind of fairy tale junkie that misses the moral of the story: “be careful what you wish for.”
On Friday night after most of our classmates had set off for weekend beach excursions, six of us girls set out to find a specific club which supposedly had several different locations within a radius of the hotel. We never ended up finding it, though we stopped for directions about 5 times, and after trying out a couple of other locations ended up eventually right back where we’d started, in the same bar we always go, with the bartender we know.
Wish numbers 1 and 2 got me lost three times this week. Trying to save Grampi the (short) trip to the Carcelen Supermaxi, I rode the Carcelen bus all the way to the end of the line, which happened to be behind the basketball courts of a more run-down barrio than I’d walked around in to date, and a run-down barrio that I could not locate on my mental map of Quito. After making a few phone calls, I jumped on a bus that I assumed was going back into town, to get off at Supermaxi after all… When I realized the bus wasn’t going where I wanted to go, I hopped off onto a graffiti’d cement street and felt the grey walls and street and sky pushing my panic buttons. My hit-or-miss sense of direction (also inherited from my dad) started me walking up the hill the way I wanted to go, and there it was: Terminal Carcelen, right at the bottom of the street where Grampi lives. “I’m extra-happy to see you,” Helen laughed as I walked in a few minutes later, and nudged me toward the cookies.
The next morning I went to church with Grampi and the pastor spoke like a poet, with all the pauses, breaths and emphasis of a great word-speaker. He spoke of finding time and making time for God, drawing from the New Testament poets Paul and Jesus the way Fake Andrew draws from Shihan, Shane Hawley, Sage Francis and each other. I felt comfortable again, I found a fellow speaker of the word.
Later on in the house I found more words, this time printed and leather-bound: a shelf full of classics with publication dates like 1921 and old owners’ autographs pencilled onto the title page in the precise curly script of the last century.
Back in the city on Monday, I set out with an address copied from a guidebook, my passport, and $10 to renew my soon-to-expire 90-day tourist visa. Feeling determined and capable, I took the bus to exactly the right place only to be told that I was at the wrong place, and the right place was mere blocks from my home base, on my own turf, in my own ‘hood! So I took the Trole bus back, crammed so full of people we didn’t even have to hold onto anything in order to stay standing, to the address they gave me. And there I was directed across the street and to the following morning, to an office only open from eight to noon three days a week. Feeling discouraged but at least better-informed, I trudged back home in another gathering storm. This time the heavy clouds promised refreshment, but the iron gates in front of the hotel were a welcome sight.
I have power-walked back and forth to that office at least 5 times this week. Twice I’ve been the first one there and spent two whole mornings tapping my feet waiting for my number to be called, waiting to be told what other documents I needed to fill out and what other payments I needed to make. Finally I think I did everything, but I have to go back again to pick up the final visa, my passport and other necessary documents. I am frustrated and finally understand why everyone hates bureaucracy. Fabian said, “Now you know what it’s like for us getting visas to your country.” That’s not even the beginning of it. By the time I shell out the exit tax at the airport, I will have paid a dollar a day just to exist within a space defined by invisible borders.
Sick of getting my exercise under extremely stressful conditions, I did a graffiti tour of the town with Taylor yesterday, and set out this afternoon with Brad and Katie to Parque Alameda to take a turn in the rowboats. Quito’s buildings are covered with spray painted political messages, not as artistic as some North American displays, but definitely more politically aware than a lot of the shows I’ve seen. Or rather, more aware of mainstream politics: “Pobre país en los manos de naños listos,” a reference to President Correa and his brother, who are making a lot of changes and a lot of enemies.
Parque Alameda has been on my destination list since my second week here. It boasts an old observatory with astronomical, meteorological, seismological instruments dating back over 100 years, and one of the oldest functioning telescopes in the world. We finally rented a rowboat ($1.50 for half an hour) and took two laps around the lazy river carved into the park. On its banks people nap or read; beyond them buses and cars belch black smoke into the air between the towering office buildings framing the valley on one side and the mountains on the other. And above that, sunshine, finally.
I have had a great run in this country and even without a genie I’ve had lots of wishes come true. But when this genie comes back to ask for my third wish, I’m going to say, “Genie, I want to go home.”
18 August 2009
la patria: playing limbo for family, country and home
“So, I just have to ask,” says Steve Macdonald through the phone from Vancouver, in the middle of his third confirmation call, “are you Canadian?” I laugh. “No, I’m from Minnesota. Not too far off.” I imagine him shaking his head. “Normally I pride myself on being able to pick out accents, especially Canadian accents… But yours had me stumped!”
This is a common problem: “Where are you from?” someone might ask, intending to spark some pleasant small talk. I inevitably hesitate, calculating which town or country would make most sense to this person and which one I would most easily be able to explain in ten words or less. During this pause, my companion’s smile falters as they wonder what kind of space cadet they are talking to.
Fortunately I have invented a simple formula for such situations. When someone thinks I’m Canadian, I’m actually from Minnesota. When I meet members of the North American university crowd I strike up a rousing chorus of Um Yah Yah, and I make people laugh through bitter Minnesota Januaries by speaking with an Upstate New York accent. If I can get a national discount for being Ecuadorian, I whip out my cédula, and as far as street cred goes, in my favorite restaurant 4 Ases, I’m a legit quiteña.
On August 15, my family dresses up in their Indian best to sing Jana Gana Mana with the subcontinent’s 1.15 billion. But as Ecuador’s Bicentennial passes (el 10 de agosto), I find myself more tightly wrapped in the yellow F.E.F. jerseys and close-toed shoes of my country of birth.
I spent most of el Día de la Independencia on a bus with my friends, on our way back from a weekend in Baños. We slept most the afternoon, but just before we got into Quito I looked out the window between the curtains and lost my breath. In the soft pre-dusk light everything looked sharper – the road and the trees unfolded in front of us like pages of a pop-up book, the mountains exploded navy purple against the cloudless sky, snowcaps glinting pink in the falling sun. The sun itself shot a crown of rays through the sunset clouds and the valleys and then we crested a hill and the snakelike city of Quito spread out beneath us. I felt very patriotic, at home between walls of sierra.
Baños reeled me in with its pungent park and glowing steeples, $1 earrings and Andean street bands and cuy (an equatorial cousin of the guinea pig) roasting in front of shops. The main drag sported restaurants, bars and heladerías, and little sweet stalls piled high with fresh-pulled taffy, rich berry syrup, dulce de leche and fruit paste. Tourists roar past on ATVs and dune buggies while Mama Tungurahua looks down over it all with a stern but loving eye, crowned at our arrival with the clearest rainbow I have ever seen.
Stationed at the headwaters of the Amazon, Baños is surrounded by waterfalls. I knew the gorge from a ten-year-old memory. From the one-bus suspension bridge I peek out the window and look straight down hundreds of feet to the river crammed between two sheer rock faces. On the other side some of the students find their inner Superman on the zipline across the canyon, while below them I inevitably miss the next rock in my trail and fall into the river. We visit three more waterfalls and take a metal basket tarabita across one of them, singing the Indiana Jones theme song with the wind whipping through our hair. The last of them is so massive it is called el Pailon del Diablo, or the Devil’s Cauldron. We get soaked within meters of the falls, whose deafening mass crashes down on top of another rainbow.
We eventually rustled up $15 for a cuy, and ended up taking more sensationalist photos with its head and claws than eating its dark meat. José came back from his biking excursion with cuts all across his face, and on Dana’s birthday one of the bartenders whipped up some flaming shots and colored bendy straws “solo para las chicas!” The blue-lit church steeple tempted me to Mass (I resisted in favor of dinner), and Hannah made me cry with a song she’d written about how we too often stop believing in things as we grow up, we have to be in control of our selves and our emotions, and the ways we try to get that hope back. It struck a nerve, and she has a beautiful voice. Unlike the parrot in the backyard, whose squawks beneath our window never failed to make me jump. A bright green hummingbird also took up residence in the tree just outside, sipping from white flowers.
I am in awe of these miracles. Last week we took a field trip to a flower factory where they grow roses at high altitude and in direct sunlight to export to florists around the world. A lot of the mountain towns sell only one thing: Cayambe, aside from the flowers, specializes in a crunchy bread snack called bizcocho, while Pelileo sells denim and Quisapincha all kinds of leather. On top of the TeleferiQo at 4100m with Grampi and Matt, I check out the distantly visible socioeconomic spectrum of Quito’s barrios through the telescope. We take turns at the oxygen bar, a lab-like set of tubes with different colors of liquid bubbling inside them. They slip a tube over our head and into our noses and we breathe scented oxygen while looking down at the city and the cable car gliding up and down the mountain. (Grampi testifies to the supervisor about how the oxygen bar glorifies God, and she nods along until the 15 minutes are up.)
In the cloud forests of Mindo we step into a netted jungle, a butterfly breeding ground populated by at least 12 species of different sizes, shapes and colors. The tube guide of Mindo is dark with golden honey eyes, muscles rippling like the river as he pulls and pushes seven tubes tied together over rocks and rapids with eight or nine people on top. Our canopy guides hook each of us onto the ziplines to soar over the jungle with our lives in their hands and a playful smile. In another moment of identity crisis I become a butterfly, flying upside-down, arms and legs stretched out, over the jungles, under the sky, between the peaks. Around the fire at our campsite that night, somebody stumbles upon a huge wolf spider with an equally huge egg sac at her abdomen. We take turns petting her before Xavier the bug expert sets her free in the dark with the fireflies.
My cousin Matt just graduated from high school in Chapel Hill, NC, and spent a month in the jungle and a week in Quito before heading off to become a Sun Devil at Arizona State. He looks the part, tall and very blond, his face pink from the sun and his shoulders tanned from being on the river all summer. That week we saw the crime-fighting cuy in Fuerza-G and toured the Voice of the Andes – the HCJB radio station and Hospital Vozandes, with a personal tour from jungle doctor Wally Swanson. On Matt’s last night in town some of our jungle cousins surprised us at the hotel. We all went out to 4 Ases, where a ten-member band and a German with dreadlocks burst in drumming, making handicrafts out of beads and wire and singing raucously over their cheap Ecuadorian beers. The lead singer, a wiry little man with long black hair, started giving shout-outs to all our patrias, to Ecuador, Germany, Colombia, Bolivia… Matt told them he was Swiss, and I said I am from Quito. They didn’t believe me at first, but then they laughed and asked my name. “Ah, you are Clarita, and she is Oscurita!” one man chortles, pointing at the cheery little Bolivian woman in the corner. She waves, I catch the eye of the clear-faced German, and everyone starts singing again.
I am all of this; I am what I say and what I make: the Tour d’Eiffel earring stand for Natalia’s growing collection of arretes, the gringuito fish and potato wedges for dinner, apple oatmeal for breakfast. I am a presentation about xenophobia and a poem about love. I am from many places and many people: my Swedish great-grandparents, the gathering of Latin American presidents in the Estadio on August 10, my two sets of missionary grandparents. I am ROLLING in social capital. I am independent, interdependent, a cynic and a believer, a crier, a laugher, a lover and a liver. I’m LILLY, I am the QUEEN, and I like EVERYTHING!
This is a common problem: “Where are you from?” someone might ask, intending to spark some pleasant small talk. I inevitably hesitate, calculating which town or country would make most sense to this person and which one I would most easily be able to explain in ten words or less. During this pause, my companion’s smile falters as they wonder what kind of space cadet they are talking to.
Fortunately I have invented a simple formula for such situations. When someone thinks I’m Canadian, I’m actually from Minnesota. When I meet members of the North American university crowd I strike up a rousing chorus of Um Yah Yah, and I make people laugh through bitter Minnesota Januaries by speaking with an Upstate New York accent. If I can get a national discount for being Ecuadorian, I whip out my cédula, and as far as street cred goes, in my favorite restaurant 4 Ases, I’m a legit quiteña.
On August 15, my family dresses up in their Indian best to sing Jana Gana Mana with the subcontinent’s 1.15 billion. But as Ecuador’s Bicentennial passes (el 10 de agosto), I find myself more tightly wrapped in the yellow F.E.F. jerseys and close-toed shoes of my country of birth.
I spent most of el Día de la Independencia on a bus with my friends, on our way back from a weekend in Baños. We slept most the afternoon, but just before we got into Quito I looked out the window between the curtains and lost my breath. In the soft pre-dusk light everything looked sharper – the road and the trees unfolded in front of us like pages of a pop-up book, the mountains exploded navy purple against the cloudless sky, snowcaps glinting pink in the falling sun. The sun itself shot a crown of rays through the sunset clouds and the valleys and then we crested a hill and the snakelike city of Quito spread out beneath us. I felt very patriotic, at home between walls of sierra.
Baños reeled me in with its pungent park and glowing steeples, $1 earrings and Andean street bands and cuy (an equatorial cousin of the guinea pig) roasting in front of shops. The main drag sported restaurants, bars and heladerías, and little sweet stalls piled high with fresh-pulled taffy, rich berry syrup, dulce de leche and fruit paste. Tourists roar past on ATVs and dune buggies while Mama Tungurahua looks down over it all with a stern but loving eye, crowned at our arrival with the clearest rainbow I have ever seen.
Stationed at the headwaters of the Amazon, Baños is surrounded by waterfalls. I knew the gorge from a ten-year-old memory. From the one-bus suspension bridge I peek out the window and look straight down hundreds of feet to the river crammed between two sheer rock faces. On the other side some of the students find their inner Superman on the zipline across the canyon, while below them I inevitably miss the next rock in my trail and fall into the river. We visit three more waterfalls and take a metal basket tarabita across one of them, singing the Indiana Jones theme song with the wind whipping through our hair. The last of them is so massive it is called el Pailon del Diablo, or the Devil’s Cauldron. We get soaked within meters of the falls, whose deafening mass crashes down on top of another rainbow.
We eventually rustled up $15 for a cuy, and ended up taking more sensationalist photos with its head and claws than eating its dark meat. José came back from his biking excursion with cuts all across his face, and on Dana’s birthday one of the bartenders whipped up some flaming shots and colored bendy straws “solo para las chicas!” The blue-lit church steeple tempted me to Mass (I resisted in favor of dinner), and Hannah made me cry with a song she’d written about how we too often stop believing in things as we grow up, we have to be in control of our selves and our emotions, and the ways we try to get that hope back. It struck a nerve, and she has a beautiful voice. Unlike the parrot in the backyard, whose squawks beneath our window never failed to make me jump. A bright green hummingbird also took up residence in the tree just outside, sipping from white flowers.
I am in awe of these miracles. Last week we took a field trip to a flower factory where they grow roses at high altitude and in direct sunlight to export to florists around the world. A lot of the mountain towns sell only one thing: Cayambe, aside from the flowers, specializes in a crunchy bread snack called bizcocho, while Pelileo sells denim and Quisapincha all kinds of leather. On top of the TeleferiQo at 4100m with Grampi and Matt, I check out the distantly visible socioeconomic spectrum of Quito’s barrios through the telescope. We take turns at the oxygen bar, a lab-like set of tubes with different colors of liquid bubbling inside them. They slip a tube over our head and into our noses and we breathe scented oxygen while looking down at the city and the cable car gliding up and down the mountain. (Grampi testifies to the supervisor about how the oxygen bar glorifies God, and she nods along until the 15 minutes are up.)
In the cloud forests of Mindo we step into a netted jungle, a butterfly breeding ground populated by at least 12 species of different sizes, shapes and colors. The tube guide of Mindo is dark with golden honey eyes, muscles rippling like the river as he pulls and pushes seven tubes tied together over rocks and rapids with eight or nine people on top. Our canopy guides hook each of us onto the ziplines to soar over the jungle with our lives in their hands and a playful smile. In another moment of identity crisis I become a butterfly, flying upside-down, arms and legs stretched out, over the jungles, under the sky, between the peaks. Around the fire at our campsite that night, somebody stumbles upon a huge wolf spider with an equally huge egg sac at her abdomen. We take turns petting her before Xavier the bug expert sets her free in the dark with the fireflies.
My cousin Matt just graduated from high school in Chapel Hill, NC, and spent a month in the jungle and a week in Quito before heading off to become a Sun Devil at Arizona State. He looks the part, tall and very blond, his face pink from the sun and his shoulders tanned from being on the river all summer. That week we saw the crime-fighting cuy in Fuerza-G and toured the Voice of the Andes – the HCJB radio station and Hospital Vozandes, with a personal tour from jungle doctor Wally Swanson. On Matt’s last night in town some of our jungle cousins surprised us at the hotel. We all went out to 4 Ases, where a ten-member band and a German with dreadlocks burst in drumming, making handicrafts out of beads and wire and singing raucously over their cheap Ecuadorian beers. The lead singer, a wiry little man with long black hair, started giving shout-outs to all our patrias, to Ecuador, Germany, Colombia, Bolivia… Matt told them he was Swiss, and I said I am from Quito. They didn’t believe me at first, but then they laughed and asked my name. “Ah, you are Clarita, and she is Oscurita!” one man chortles, pointing at the cheery little Bolivian woman in the corner. She waves, I catch the eye of the clear-faced German, and everyone starts singing again.
I am all of this; I am what I say and what I make: the Tour d’Eiffel earring stand for Natalia’s growing collection of arretes, the gringuito fish and potato wedges for dinner, apple oatmeal for breakfast. I am a presentation about xenophobia and a poem about love. I am from many places and many people: my Swedish great-grandparents, the gathering of Latin American presidents in the Estadio on August 10, my two sets of missionary grandparents. I am ROLLING in social capital. I am independent, interdependent, a cynic and a believer, a crier, a laugher, a lover and a liver. I’m LILLY, I am the QUEEN, and I like EVERYTHING!
01 August 2009
sea level: the hemispheric limbo world record
"Hey Brad," Paul shouts over the waves buffeting the hull of our little boat, "what altitude do you think we're at right now?"
I look around at the unbroken ocean and grin over my shoulder at him, "Probably sea level." A few minutes later I am deathly ill over the side of the boat, and he and Brad both grab my waist to keep me from plunging overboard into the spray. The tiny boat has been riding ocean swells like a rollercoaster for almost two hours, and I've had enough. For me, who has hardly survived any boat ride without getting sick, two and a half hours across the open ocean in a pinprick launch is hell.
But a gorgeous one at that. The water glitters clear cerulean, a color I have not seen in probably at least five years and a color that I love. I survive the trip to our glass-front hotel, separated from the beach by a narrow dirt road, and spend the afternoon bodysurfing, watching for sharks in the crests of waves. No sharks, but the silhouette of a sea lion darts through the thin green wall of water fifteen feet away from us.
I am surely more mermaid than sailor.
***
We take rolls of film full of iguanas, splayed out on the rocks to absorb heat or swimming across an island lagoon, a dragon-like head barely visible above the surface of the water. Watch flamingos and herons and fragates and boobies of all colors and sizes, lean precariously over the shark resting area, where at least four white-tipped tiburones hide from the midday sun, over the side of the boat to catch a glimpse of a sea turtle soaring alongside. Three times we snorkel with sea turtles and twice with a baby sea lion, darting around our group and even accompanying us to the shore when we head in to take off our mask and flippers.
Dana and I, sunning ourselves on the front of the boat, ask the boatdrivers if there are pirates in these islands. No? Mermaids? (The Spanish word is sirena, which makes me smile asking, thinking of Odysseus.) "Yes -- two," he replies, grinning at us. They invite us and our ten friends out dancing to Bar de Beto that night. A son of theirs, who bears the magnificent name "El Capitan Junior," becomes a great friend and important landmark on helado-hunting excursions into the tiny town for snacks and ice cream.
The afternoons pass us on the beach, reading, napping, chatting, or bodysurfing. After a shouted exchange with some guys with a soccer ball, they invite us to play and we gather a team. While we duck waves to cool off, my teammate Gabriel and his compañero Luis introduce themselves and invite us to a discotek for islanders. "Bar de Beto is full of Americans," they say, scoffing -- tourists themselves, from Quito and Guayaquil respectively. In these islands, people actually believe that I am ecuatoriana.
We try to do both. The girls all put on dresses and makeup and nurse expensive drinks while the guys hit on the bartender, a gorgeous 18-year-old from Texas. I still don't know how she got there... We girls leave early and leave them to their flirting, and on the way home decide to take a naked dip in the dark ocean.
On our last day on Isabela we hike up a volcano. We start at the bottom in needlepoint drizzle, at first tiptoeing around the mud on the path until we realize it is probably safer to run, and by the time we reach the top our legs are covered in splattered volcanic soil. The sun gradually burns off the mist so we can see into the crater. The clouds moving through it create the odd impression that we are being sucked into the crater, full of four-year-old volcanic rock, and a rainbow crowning the great canyon gives us the impression that unicorns and leprechauns could emerge at any moment.
The next day we have to madrugar to catch the Launch from Hell at 5:30am. I survive this trip by holding a high stakes conversation with Brad and Dana, covering nearly every possible topic and every possible side of the issue. This time, the rolling waves feel more like a thrill ride and we make it to harbour without incident.
...And promptly onto another boat, a yacht cruise called Poseidon, for the day. We are all so sunburnt from Volcán Chico and so tired from waking up so early that we pass out on the upper deck. At one point I awake under the table surrounded by Brad, Jason, and Paul, all of us sprawled on the floor wherever we could find space. Today we take a few hour-long jaunts around tiny unnamed islands, where I see more carcasses than I ever have before -- of sea lions, iguanas, birds, crabs, and anything else you might imagine. We are also privileged enough to witness the mating dance of the endemic blue-footed booby, whose mating call sounds like the whistle that comes out when you blow on those serrated plastic straws from sippy cups. The boys all vow to try that tactic when they get back to campus in the fall, and I wish them luck. Sort of.
On Santa Cruz we visit a ranch for breeding Galápagos land tortoises. The path is full of guavas and the guide explains to us that someone brought them here and they now threaten the delicate balance of the ecosystem, because their seeds spread and their trees grow faster than they can be eradicated. Between guava trees a few Galápagos coffee trees show clusters of red and green berries, the seeds of which become the coffee beans sold at Starbucks worldwide. The next ranch is more of a country club, where we dance and play cards and sports until lunch. In the afternoon we pull a fast one at the Charles Darwin Research Station, breaking up into groups of three to avoid paying a guide for the afternoon. The Estación basically consists of a cluster of buildings used for researching conservation efforts, and is also the home of Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his species. He is pushing 150 years and refused to use his mating years, so he remains the lone member of his type, and holds the burden of extinction on his rapidly weakening shell.
That night we dressed up and went out for sushi, at an expensive beachfront hotel restaurant where I blew $30 on sushi and the best, creamiest piña colada of my life. A middle-aged American tourist approaches us with the typical traveling-students small talk, and explains that he made a "huge mistake" on his order and accidentally got 64 rolls of sushi, and did we want to help him eat some of it. He didn't even have to ask. We went home full and happy and in awe of the world's little miracles.
***
On one of our excursions we encountered the tree of the poison apple, which burns your skin at a mere touch. The squashed and fallen apples and their pits scatter the path and I can't help thinking as we walk along, "Is this Paradise? Is this the legendary Garden of Eden, the back of the Great Turtle?" The basis of fairy tales and the beginnings of religions, of species, of Evolution. All here in one place, the famed archipelago full of animals found nowhere else on earth, formed from the aftermath of volcanic eruptions, found on the latitudinal Center of the Earth, the impossible made visible and the world's miracles at our outstretched fingertips. It is, and is not, unbelievable.
I look around at the unbroken ocean and grin over my shoulder at him, "Probably sea level." A few minutes later I am deathly ill over the side of the boat, and he and Brad both grab my waist to keep me from plunging overboard into the spray. The tiny boat has been riding ocean swells like a rollercoaster for almost two hours, and I've had enough. For me, who has hardly survived any boat ride without getting sick, two and a half hours across the open ocean in a pinprick launch is hell.
But a gorgeous one at that. The water glitters clear cerulean, a color I have not seen in probably at least five years and a color that I love. I survive the trip to our glass-front hotel, separated from the beach by a narrow dirt road, and spend the afternoon bodysurfing, watching for sharks in the crests of waves. No sharks, but the silhouette of a sea lion darts through the thin green wall of water fifteen feet away from us.
I am surely more mermaid than sailor.
***
We take rolls of film full of iguanas, splayed out on the rocks to absorb heat or swimming across an island lagoon, a dragon-like head barely visible above the surface of the water. Watch flamingos and herons and fragates and boobies of all colors and sizes, lean precariously over the shark resting area, where at least four white-tipped tiburones hide from the midday sun, over the side of the boat to catch a glimpse of a sea turtle soaring alongside. Three times we snorkel with sea turtles and twice with a baby sea lion, darting around our group and even accompanying us to the shore when we head in to take off our mask and flippers.
Dana and I, sunning ourselves on the front of the boat, ask the boatdrivers if there are pirates in these islands. No? Mermaids? (The Spanish word is sirena, which makes me smile asking, thinking of Odysseus.) "Yes -- two," he replies, grinning at us. They invite us and our ten friends out dancing to Bar de Beto that night. A son of theirs, who bears the magnificent name "El Capitan Junior," becomes a great friend and important landmark on helado-hunting excursions into the tiny town for snacks and ice cream.
The afternoons pass us on the beach, reading, napping, chatting, or bodysurfing. After a shouted exchange with some guys with a soccer ball, they invite us to play and we gather a team. While we duck waves to cool off, my teammate Gabriel and his compañero Luis introduce themselves and invite us to a discotek for islanders. "Bar de Beto is full of Americans," they say, scoffing -- tourists themselves, from Quito and Guayaquil respectively. In these islands, people actually believe that I am ecuatoriana.
We try to do both. The girls all put on dresses and makeup and nurse expensive drinks while the guys hit on the bartender, a gorgeous 18-year-old from Texas. I still don't know how she got there... We girls leave early and leave them to their flirting, and on the way home decide to take a naked dip in the dark ocean.
On our last day on Isabela we hike up a volcano. We start at the bottom in needlepoint drizzle, at first tiptoeing around the mud on the path until we realize it is probably safer to run, and by the time we reach the top our legs are covered in splattered volcanic soil. The sun gradually burns off the mist so we can see into the crater. The clouds moving through it create the odd impression that we are being sucked into the crater, full of four-year-old volcanic rock, and a rainbow crowning the great canyon gives us the impression that unicorns and leprechauns could emerge at any moment.
The next day we have to madrugar to catch the Launch from Hell at 5:30am. I survive this trip by holding a high stakes conversation with Brad and Dana, covering nearly every possible topic and every possible side of the issue. This time, the rolling waves feel more like a thrill ride and we make it to harbour without incident.
...And promptly onto another boat, a yacht cruise called Poseidon, for the day. We are all so sunburnt from Volcán Chico and so tired from waking up so early that we pass out on the upper deck. At one point I awake under the table surrounded by Brad, Jason, and Paul, all of us sprawled on the floor wherever we could find space. Today we take a few hour-long jaunts around tiny unnamed islands, where I see more carcasses than I ever have before -- of sea lions, iguanas, birds, crabs, and anything else you might imagine. We are also privileged enough to witness the mating dance of the endemic blue-footed booby, whose mating call sounds like the whistle that comes out when you blow on those serrated plastic straws from sippy cups. The boys all vow to try that tactic when they get back to campus in the fall, and I wish them luck. Sort of.
On Santa Cruz we visit a ranch for breeding Galápagos land tortoises. The path is full of guavas and the guide explains to us that someone brought them here and they now threaten the delicate balance of the ecosystem, because their seeds spread and their trees grow faster than they can be eradicated. Between guava trees a few Galápagos coffee trees show clusters of red and green berries, the seeds of which become the coffee beans sold at Starbucks worldwide. The next ranch is more of a country club, where we dance and play cards and sports until lunch. In the afternoon we pull a fast one at the Charles Darwin Research Station, breaking up into groups of three to avoid paying a guide for the afternoon. The Estación basically consists of a cluster of buildings used for researching conservation efforts, and is also the home of Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his species. He is pushing 150 years and refused to use his mating years, so he remains the lone member of his type, and holds the burden of extinction on his rapidly weakening shell.
That night we dressed up and went out for sushi, at an expensive beachfront hotel restaurant where I blew $30 on sushi and the best, creamiest piña colada of my life. A middle-aged American tourist approaches us with the typical traveling-students small talk, and explains that he made a "huge mistake" on his order and accidentally got 64 rolls of sushi, and did we want to help him eat some of it. He didn't even have to ask. We went home full and happy and in awe of the world's little miracles.
***
On one of our excursions we encountered the tree of the poison apple, which burns your skin at a mere touch. The squashed and fallen apples and their pits scatter the path and I can't help thinking as we walk along, "Is this Paradise? Is this the legendary Garden of Eden, the back of the Great Turtle?" The basis of fairy tales and the beginnings of religions, of species, of Evolution. All here in one place, the famed archipelago full of animals found nowhere else on earth, formed from the aftermath of volcanic eruptions, found on the latitudinal Center of the Earth, the impossible made visible and the world's miracles at our outstretched fingertips. It is, and is not, unbelievable.
23 July 2009
visiting the hemispheric limbo stick
Queridos,
T-minus 1 day to Galápagos takeoff! And what a week it has been in preparation for it. I sleep less and less every night and have less and less time to do the things I need to do… Es la vida. And I am young, strong and ready for anything!
The Past Week’s Itinerary
Friday: Parque La Carolina for a rousing game of futbol. Most of us had forgotten either water or sunscreen and it was a very hot day – needless to say, we turned a nice spectrum of pinks, in a matter of hours. It was hard to believe that we were playing a game of soccer at 9000 feet, beneath a huge cross, the cupped fingers of the mountain range around us, and jets casting ominous shadows over the buildings towering above us as they took off minutes away from our field.
I walked home with a few of the students and we got juice and food, and set out to find Guápulo, famous for astounding vistas and artsy houses, and a church, which we did not encounter. We climbed up into a beautiful neighbourhood of modern homes and suddenly the ground fell out below us to unfold a series of little valleys full of houses, the city spread out before us like cinnamon sugar toast.
Saturday: Mitad del Mundo con mis abuelos. Grampi picked me up around 11, after calling at least four times to say he was on his way, he accidentally went home, he was 5 minutes away, he was lost, he was outside. We did eventually make it home, had a nice lunch and then I dug up the photo albums while he took a nap and Helen tried to Skype her friend in Poland.
I love the photo albums, hidden in the little tables on either end of the couch. The first few cover the babyhoods of me and my older cousins, but the deeper I venture into the stacks of books the older they get. A good chunk of them relate my dad’s college years, when he was perpetually flushed and wore huge brown-tinted glasses and short shorts. My favourite series documents a trip to the beach that my parents took with my dad’s two sisters. They wear buckets on their heads and stage sword fights with driftwood, my mom barricaded up in a massive sand castle making home improvements while some unclear division defends her and the royal family of crabs. A few of the albums, the dustiest ones, are full of black and white photographs of the missionary years: my uncle Tod decked out in Shuar gear, spears and headdresses and weapon belts; Jeff consistently looking put together, posing suavely for every shot; Lisa the wide-eyed baby, Lori with her wide gappy 8-year-old grin, and my dad always with a pout plastered onto his face.
We eventually made it up to la Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, or the City at the Center of the Earth. The village huddles around the monument laid by the Spanish explorers to mark the position of the Equator, but as it turns out they were much farther off the mark than the Incas, whose equatorial monument is across the road a little way. A group of children in brightly coloured masks and headdresses performed a wild dance involving fighting and flirting in the central plaza, which we passed on our way to the museum of Ecuador’s tribes. Starting at the top, we wound our way down the stairs, and when we reached the jungle tribes Grampi got excited. “Wait a minute,” he said, stopping in front of the Shuar and Huaorani exhibits. “Let me just see if I know any of these people.” Sure enough, the big greyscale photograph of a Huaorani man turned out to be a good friend of his, and the old woman reclining on the wall across from him was in the original group to make contact with the missionaries, and not kill them. “I knew them!” he exclaimed, and started telling stories.
Monday: The alternative health market tour, Mercado Artesanal, and the mall with the girls. In the morning we had our first field trip, catered to our discussion theme of health and medicine. Rocío gave us a tour of the market with special focus on fruits with medicinal properties and an intensive study of the health shop ladies, whose stalls are full of plants and oils and incense. Brent, the sick one, was also the most sceptical. He wanted to go to a “real doctor.”
Megan, Katie and I spent the afternoon shopping, for gifts and clothes to wear in the Galápagos. Before we left Megan said, “I have a feeling this is going to be a hundred-dollar day.” She was right. Katie and I bought hats and dresses, for Katie’s sailor-themed week, and Megan bought art. We didn’t get home until 8:30.
Tuesday: La policía, and Natalia turned 12. Our second field trip took us to the Matriz to interview Major Marcelo Cortez about his personal and institutional views on the death penalty and policies on carrying firearms. In Ecuador both are illegal, but as it turns out most of the people I talked to were in favour of both.
In the afternoon Lori and Juan Miguel had the whole Ecuador family plus Taylor over for pizza. Juan Miguel’s sisters and mother all showed up while I was setting the table and immediately started gushing and telling me that I have the same little face as always, that I look exactly like my mom, and asking what my dad is doing now. I also met an old playmate, Rosita, a cousin of the same age as me. Apparently we used to play together when I was three, and we joined forces with the kids to make a movie about a mean-spirited millionaire whose assistant wants to make off with her dough. Rosita speaks very fast Spanish, but I understood most of what she said. She likes to read philosophy, and though she wouldn’t admit it she was definitely the directora.
Wednesday: La Chispa and los mercados populares. After class Taylor and I had lunch at a Peruvian restaurant called La Chispa, or the Spark, and took the Ecovia downtown to buy cheap Colombian shoes. Rocío had just finished telling our class how the people from the malls buy their goods from these popular markets at $3 or so a pop, and sell them for ten times the price in the fancy stores in the mall. The clothes in those shops are imported from Colombia, which means they are high quality and we got them at the people’s prices. A pair of wedge sandals for $16!
At this point we are so close to the Galápagos that it’s hard to focus on anything, hard to do anything, but this morning I have to give an oral presentation on immigration. I’m sharing the topic with the son of an Ohio lawyer, and my presentation consists of stories of people I know. We’ll see how our takes fit together. Tomorrow we all have to be at the airport at 6am, heading off for a week in a hotel 20 metres from the beach, a few yacht cruises, snorkelling near sharks, hiking up a volcano, and learning about tortoise mating patterns. I could not be more excited. And after class today, it’s all Galápagos all the time. I’m going with the girls to get our nails done, and we have decided we’re going to have a very cute week in the sun, by the clear Caribbean-blue water. It’s been too long since I’ve seen that colour.
I’ll see you on the other side.
Besitos,
Clarita
T-minus 1 day to Galápagos takeoff! And what a week it has been in preparation for it. I sleep less and less every night and have less and less time to do the things I need to do… Es la vida. And I am young, strong and ready for anything!
The Past Week’s Itinerary
Friday: Parque La Carolina for a rousing game of futbol. Most of us had forgotten either water or sunscreen and it was a very hot day – needless to say, we turned a nice spectrum of pinks, in a matter of hours. It was hard to believe that we were playing a game of soccer at 9000 feet, beneath a huge cross, the cupped fingers of the mountain range around us, and jets casting ominous shadows over the buildings towering above us as they took off minutes away from our field.
I walked home with a few of the students and we got juice and food, and set out to find Guápulo, famous for astounding vistas and artsy houses, and a church, which we did not encounter. We climbed up into a beautiful neighbourhood of modern homes and suddenly the ground fell out below us to unfold a series of little valleys full of houses, the city spread out before us like cinnamon sugar toast.
Saturday: Mitad del Mundo con mis abuelos. Grampi picked me up around 11, after calling at least four times to say he was on his way, he accidentally went home, he was 5 minutes away, he was lost, he was outside. We did eventually make it home, had a nice lunch and then I dug up the photo albums while he took a nap and Helen tried to Skype her friend in Poland.
I love the photo albums, hidden in the little tables on either end of the couch. The first few cover the babyhoods of me and my older cousins, but the deeper I venture into the stacks of books the older they get. A good chunk of them relate my dad’s college years, when he was perpetually flushed and wore huge brown-tinted glasses and short shorts. My favourite series documents a trip to the beach that my parents took with my dad’s two sisters. They wear buckets on their heads and stage sword fights with driftwood, my mom barricaded up in a massive sand castle making home improvements while some unclear division defends her and the royal family of crabs. A few of the albums, the dustiest ones, are full of black and white photographs of the missionary years: my uncle Tod decked out in Shuar gear, spears and headdresses and weapon belts; Jeff consistently looking put together, posing suavely for every shot; Lisa the wide-eyed baby, Lori with her wide gappy 8-year-old grin, and my dad always with a pout plastered onto his face.
We eventually made it up to la Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, or the City at the Center of the Earth. The village huddles around the monument laid by the Spanish explorers to mark the position of the Equator, but as it turns out they were much farther off the mark than the Incas, whose equatorial monument is across the road a little way. A group of children in brightly coloured masks and headdresses performed a wild dance involving fighting and flirting in the central plaza, which we passed on our way to the museum of Ecuador’s tribes. Starting at the top, we wound our way down the stairs, and when we reached the jungle tribes Grampi got excited. “Wait a minute,” he said, stopping in front of the Shuar and Huaorani exhibits. “Let me just see if I know any of these people.” Sure enough, the big greyscale photograph of a Huaorani man turned out to be a good friend of his, and the old woman reclining on the wall across from him was in the original group to make contact with the missionaries, and not kill them. “I knew them!” he exclaimed, and started telling stories.
Monday: The alternative health market tour, Mercado Artesanal, and the mall with the girls. In the morning we had our first field trip, catered to our discussion theme of health and medicine. Rocío gave us a tour of the market with special focus on fruits with medicinal properties and an intensive study of the health shop ladies, whose stalls are full of plants and oils and incense. Brent, the sick one, was also the most sceptical. He wanted to go to a “real doctor.”
Megan, Katie and I spent the afternoon shopping, for gifts and clothes to wear in the Galápagos. Before we left Megan said, “I have a feeling this is going to be a hundred-dollar day.” She was right. Katie and I bought hats and dresses, for Katie’s sailor-themed week, and Megan bought art. We didn’t get home until 8:30.
Tuesday: La policía, and Natalia turned 12. Our second field trip took us to the Matriz to interview Major Marcelo Cortez about his personal and institutional views on the death penalty and policies on carrying firearms. In Ecuador both are illegal, but as it turns out most of the people I talked to were in favour of both.
In the afternoon Lori and Juan Miguel had the whole Ecuador family plus Taylor over for pizza. Juan Miguel’s sisters and mother all showed up while I was setting the table and immediately started gushing and telling me that I have the same little face as always, that I look exactly like my mom, and asking what my dad is doing now. I also met an old playmate, Rosita, a cousin of the same age as me. Apparently we used to play together when I was three, and we joined forces with the kids to make a movie about a mean-spirited millionaire whose assistant wants to make off with her dough. Rosita speaks very fast Spanish, but I understood most of what she said. She likes to read philosophy, and though she wouldn’t admit it she was definitely the directora.
Wednesday: La Chispa and los mercados populares. After class Taylor and I had lunch at a Peruvian restaurant called La Chispa, or the Spark, and took the Ecovia downtown to buy cheap Colombian shoes. Rocío had just finished telling our class how the people from the malls buy their goods from these popular markets at $3 or so a pop, and sell them for ten times the price in the fancy stores in the mall. The clothes in those shops are imported from Colombia, which means they are high quality and we got them at the people’s prices. A pair of wedge sandals for $16!
At this point we are so close to the Galápagos that it’s hard to focus on anything, hard to do anything, but this morning I have to give an oral presentation on immigration. I’m sharing the topic with the son of an Ohio lawyer, and my presentation consists of stories of people I know. We’ll see how our takes fit together. Tomorrow we all have to be at the airport at 6am, heading off for a week in a hotel 20 metres from the beach, a few yacht cruises, snorkelling near sharks, hiking up a volcano, and learning about tortoise mating patterns. I could not be more excited. And after class today, it’s all Galápagos all the time. I’m going with the girls to get our nails done, and we have decided we’re going to have a very cute week in the sun, by the clear Caribbean-blue water. It’s been too long since I’ve seen that colour.
I’ll see you on the other side.
Besitos,
Clarita
14 July 2009
doing a death round of hemispheric limbo with the conga ants
Well friends,
I have returned alive and in one piece (with maybe a few small chunks missing) from my WILD JUNGLE ADVENTURE! Which turned out to be one of the most relaxing adventures of my life, and full of cousins.
We picked up Matt from the airport on Friday evening and took him back to Cumbayá for a lovely family spaghetti dinner. Grampi and Helen came too, and Grampi was in a very silly mood -- he kept on making weird faces and once pretended to fall off his chair, nearly giving Lori a heart attack! We had a regular laughing yoga session though, which lasted almost until our abuelos had to go home.
On Saturday morning there were crèpes, and then at the last minute we decided to carry one of the kitties to Venecia as a gift for Myriam, so we had to take one last photo with the four cousins and the four kitties, then assemble a double-box system with plenty of padding and load him into the truck taxi with the rest of the stuff. He meowed for the first hour, but then found his way back inside the box and napped in there until we reached Tena. Matt was very concerned that he would remain nameless, but we left it to Myriam who eventually started calling him Bugsy. If it were my cat, I would have called him Pilsener after the box he rode down in. Pil for short?
The Field Station is a rockin' place. On Saturday the students were in and out, but as usual it was full of kids, a whole horde of cousins whose mothers cook and whose fathers work on building projects in the area. They are as wild as they come, but I thoroughly enjoyed having them around all weekend. They play a lot of cards, so we exchanged a few games and dealt many decks over the course of the evenings.
On Sunday morning Matt and I spurred into action a hike into the Coto Cachi reserve. Coto Cachi means "Howler Monkey Lake" in... Kichwa? I didn't catch it. In any case, we saw and touched a cacao tree, an Amazonian skunk cabbage, a red root hardwood, a rare mahogany with seed pods for planting, among others. I caught sight of a red-bellied salamander on the path, but it squirmed out of sight before I could prove it. The best part about the hike was squelching the mud underneath my boots.
In the afternoon we got a group together to go tubing down the river. Everyone was a little bit scared, of anacondas in the water and of the massive whirlpool and of the so-called "penisfish," a very painful parasite that follows a urine stream up to 20 feet, crawls into the urethra and puts out barbs, so that it must be surgically removed. As it was, the rapids were relatively tame and mostly avoidable. The accident-prone member of our group fell behind and disappeared into the whirlpool. A hush fell over the group, and we had almost floated around the corner before his head became visible again. The anaconda did not rear its head. Fortunately. We emerged in Misahualli thrilled and dripping, threw our tubes in the truck and bought ice cream sandwiches to eat while we waited. The first run took longer than we expected, though, so we ended up standing on a street corner across from the famous monkey square, in bathing suits and lifejackets, barefoot, in the rain. A nearby store started blasting reggaeton and of course we had to dance. We had an audience, and were glad when the truck showed up. We piled eighteen people into the bed of the truck on the way home, the tubers plus the Cousins who went everywhere. And a few more in the cab.
The next morning school started up for the students again. Although I, unlike most college students, do not even drink coffee during finals, I had two cups of coffee every day this weekend, just because it was so good! It did help me stay awake through the lecture on psychoactive plants and mental health that Matt and I sat in on. It was interesting, but very long. I picked up a few trains on natural treatments for diagnosed mental illnesses. We'll see if they go anywhere yet...
In the afternoon we went into Tena with Eliza, Sindy and Mela, the trio of teenaged girl-cousins. They took us to a zoo called La Isla, which is, indeed, on an island. You have to walk across the bridge to get there -- and I got the first use out of my brand-new Ecuadorian ID! A $1 discount! La Isla is probably the coolest zoo I have ever visited. It's also the most disorganized. The first thing we saw coming off the bridge was an ostrich, and Eliza told us they call her dad an ostrich because of the way he runs in soccer -- which brings a hilariously undignified view of my uncle to mind. We said hi to the toucan, with his heavily blue-rimmed eyes. I learned that "toucan" is an unfriendly name for girls that come back from the city with too much makeup. And then we saw a huge tapir, just walking around on the paths. He looked like a cross between a pig, an anteater and a hippopotamus, and was probably three or four feet high. Matt thought he was going to charge us, but he was too busy snuffling around for something to eat. On our way to the next cages we almost stepped on a monkey who had burrowed into the roots of a tree. Either he escaped, said Eliza, or he's sick. We also saw these jungle pigs that make the grossest noise I have ever heard, which sounds like a scream in the midst of retching. Mateo said it sounded like the mandrakes in the Harry Potter movie. My favorite things were the jungle cats: a jaguarundi with a long body and long tail, and an ocelot, which is probably the most beautiful animal I have ever seen. Fortunately, those ruthless predators were well-secured.
When we'd had our fill of jungle screeching and tapirs running loose, we went for pizza at a famous Tena pizzeria. It was probably some of the best pizza I've had since coming here, and I had it with tomato juice, which wasn't bad. Not as good as tomate de arbol, but fresh juice is fresh juice. Most of the time. Matt wanted to look at shoes, which was probably a mistake on his part since I can't walk into a shoe store without trying on several pairs of delicious heels. It turned into quite a girly outing, and Sindy and Mela spent a lot of it teasing Mateo about being a girl. He took it rather well, though I think we can partly attribute that to the fact that he wasn't paying much attention to any of us. He got into it when we decided to buy bracelets of a matching style, so I think we can cut him some slack.
On the way back I got to be a pro at riding in the truck bed with the girls. Eliza turned on her Walkman-phone to some heavy beats and we passed around a Red Bull while bouncing over speed bumps and staging a mini dance party in the back of the truck. I think that was my official initiation into the gang, because after that I was the fourth. We bought a ton of junk food at a community store and hung out for the rest of the night.
The evenings were always interesting. Last night we visited a shaman, who drank some iowasca (which I think is a hallucinogen) before performing a healing ritual on two members of the group, as well as a general blessing. It was interesting, but my favorite part of the night was walking back with the girls and our music, choreographing so we wouldn't be afraid of snakes along the side of the road. Back in the dining area someone was showing a Daniel Craig movie, so of course I had to stop and watch before heading off to bed.
The best night was the time we played telephone in Spanish with a bunch of the cousins, who all speak Kichwa. Needless to say it was interesting, especially with Santi's (rude) 12-year-old-boy antics (which had me giggling to death) and the little girls and a few of the students understanding hardly anything.
I left this afternoon, and would have missed the bus except that the bus itself was 15 minutes late. Fortunately...? Es que, in the morning I was waiting for my gang to show up so we could go tubing one more time, so I learned some local pottery techniques from some skilled traditional ceramic workers. As it turned out, the mothers wouldn't let their daughters tube down to Misahualli because of the rumoured anaconda, so we walked along the road up to Coto Cachi and tubed down to Eliza's house. As it turned out, this shorter course was more fun, mostly because I wasn't scared anymore, and because we held onto each other's tubes to go through bigger rapids, and actually flipped out a couple of times. Well worth it.
The bus ride was nice, and I made it back alive, with some sweet banana chips from a roadside vendor and some nice company in the form of a Quiteña woman who moved to the selva with her husband "for health reasons:" to avoid the city pollution, which is considerable. Even I am starting to feel it in my throat. Good thing I learned how to hack in India...
I apparently missed the beginning of a shift, so I'll have to make it up -- but I would not have given up the weekend for the world. I have not felt so relaxed since arriving in Quito, with nothing to do except whatever I want, and lots of kids running around doing whatever they want, laughing and enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived. I feel refreshed and ready to return to the world of expectations, unfulfillable and otherwise, office politics, class, and the world on a watch. I can do it, because That Place exists. In many places. That's just the closest. It's like a Portal into a Magical World...
Novel?
Besitos,
Clarita
I have returned alive and in one piece (with maybe a few small chunks missing) from my WILD JUNGLE ADVENTURE! Which turned out to be one of the most relaxing adventures of my life, and full of cousins.
We picked up Matt from the airport on Friday evening and took him back to Cumbayá for a lovely family spaghetti dinner. Grampi and Helen came too, and Grampi was in a very silly mood -- he kept on making weird faces and once pretended to fall off his chair, nearly giving Lori a heart attack! We had a regular laughing yoga session though, which lasted almost until our abuelos had to go home.
On Saturday morning there were crèpes, and then at the last minute we decided to carry one of the kitties to Venecia as a gift for Myriam, so we had to take one last photo with the four cousins and the four kitties, then assemble a double-box system with plenty of padding and load him into the truck taxi with the rest of the stuff. He meowed for the first hour, but then found his way back inside the box and napped in there until we reached Tena. Matt was very concerned that he would remain nameless, but we left it to Myriam who eventually started calling him Bugsy. If it were my cat, I would have called him Pilsener after the box he rode down in. Pil for short?
The Field Station is a rockin' place. On Saturday the students were in and out, but as usual it was full of kids, a whole horde of cousins whose mothers cook and whose fathers work on building projects in the area. They are as wild as they come, but I thoroughly enjoyed having them around all weekend. They play a lot of cards, so we exchanged a few games and dealt many decks over the course of the evenings.
On Sunday morning Matt and I spurred into action a hike into the Coto Cachi reserve. Coto Cachi means "Howler Monkey Lake" in... Kichwa? I didn't catch it. In any case, we saw and touched a cacao tree, an Amazonian skunk cabbage, a red root hardwood, a rare mahogany with seed pods for planting, among others. I caught sight of a red-bellied salamander on the path, but it squirmed out of sight before I could prove it. The best part about the hike was squelching the mud underneath my boots.
In the afternoon we got a group together to go tubing down the river. Everyone was a little bit scared, of anacondas in the water and of the massive whirlpool and of the so-called "penisfish," a very painful parasite that follows a urine stream up to 20 feet, crawls into the urethra and puts out barbs, so that it must be surgically removed. As it was, the rapids were relatively tame and mostly avoidable. The accident-prone member of our group fell behind and disappeared into the whirlpool. A hush fell over the group, and we had almost floated around the corner before his head became visible again. The anaconda did not rear its head. Fortunately. We emerged in Misahualli thrilled and dripping, threw our tubes in the truck and bought ice cream sandwiches to eat while we waited. The first run took longer than we expected, though, so we ended up standing on a street corner across from the famous monkey square, in bathing suits and lifejackets, barefoot, in the rain. A nearby store started blasting reggaeton and of course we had to dance. We had an audience, and were glad when the truck showed up. We piled eighteen people into the bed of the truck on the way home, the tubers plus the Cousins who went everywhere. And a few more in the cab.
The next morning school started up for the students again. Although I, unlike most college students, do not even drink coffee during finals, I had two cups of coffee every day this weekend, just because it was so good! It did help me stay awake through the lecture on psychoactive plants and mental health that Matt and I sat in on. It was interesting, but very long. I picked up a few trains on natural treatments for diagnosed mental illnesses. We'll see if they go anywhere yet...
In the afternoon we went into Tena with Eliza, Sindy and Mela, the trio of teenaged girl-cousins. They took us to a zoo called La Isla, which is, indeed, on an island. You have to walk across the bridge to get there -- and I got the first use out of my brand-new Ecuadorian ID! A $1 discount! La Isla is probably the coolest zoo I have ever visited. It's also the most disorganized. The first thing we saw coming off the bridge was an ostrich, and Eliza told us they call her dad an ostrich because of the way he runs in soccer -- which brings a hilariously undignified view of my uncle to mind. We said hi to the toucan, with his heavily blue-rimmed eyes. I learned that "toucan" is an unfriendly name for girls that come back from the city with too much makeup. And then we saw a huge tapir, just walking around on the paths. He looked like a cross between a pig, an anteater and a hippopotamus, and was probably three or four feet high. Matt thought he was going to charge us, but he was too busy snuffling around for something to eat. On our way to the next cages we almost stepped on a monkey who had burrowed into the roots of a tree. Either he escaped, said Eliza, or he's sick. We also saw these jungle pigs that make the grossest noise I have ever heard, which sounds like a scream in the midst of retching. Mateo said it sounded like the mandrakes in the Harry Potter movie. My favorite things were the jungle cats: a jaguarundi with a long body and long tail, and an ocelot, which is probably the most beautiful animal I have ever seen. Fortunately, those ruthless predators were well-secured.
When we'd had our fill of jungle screeching and tapirs running loose, we went for pizza at a famous Tena pizzeria. It was probably some of the best pizza I've had since coming here, and I had it with tomato juice, which wasn't bad. Not as good as tomate de arbol, but fresh juice is fresh juice. Most of the time. Matt wanted to look at shoes, which was probably a mistake on his part since I can't walk into a shoe store without trying on several pairs of delicious heels. It turned into quite a girly outing, and Sindy and Mela spent a lot of it teasing Mateo about being a girl. He took it rather well, though I think we can partly attribute that to the fact that he wasn't paying much attention to any of us. He got into it when we decided to buy bracelets of a matching style, so I think we can cut him some slack.
On the way back I got to be a pro at riding in the truck bed with the girls. Eliza turned on her Walkman-phone to some heavy beats and we passed around a Red Bull while bouncing over speed bumps and staging a mini dance party in the back of the truck. I think that was my official initiation into the gang, because after that I was the fourth. We bought a ton of junk food at a community store and hung out for the rest of the night.
The evenings were always interesting. Last night we visited a shaman, who drank some iowasca (which I think is a hallucinogen) before performing a healing ritual on two members of the group, as well as a general blessing. It was interesting, but my favorite part of the night was walking back with the girls and our music, choreographing so we wouldn't be afraid of snakes along the side of the road. Back in the dining area someone was showing a Daniel Craig movie, so of course I had to stop and watch before heading off to bed.
The best night was the time we played telephone in Spanish with a bunch of the cousins, who all speak Kichwa. Needless to say it was interesting, especially with Santi's (rude) 12-year-old-boy antics (which had me giggling to death) and the little girls and a few of the students understanding hardly anything.
I left this afternoon, and would have missed the bus except that the bus itself was 15 minutes late. Fortunately...? Es que, in the morning I was waiting for my gang to show up so we could go tubing one more time, so I learned some local pottery techniques from some skilled traditional ceramic workers. As it turned out, the mothers wouldn't let their daughters tube down to Misahualli because of the rumoured anaconda, so we walked along the road up to Coto Cachi and tubed down to Eliza's house. As it turned out, this shorter course was more fun, mostly because I wasn't scared anymore, and because we held onto each other's tubes to go through bigger rapids, and actually flipped out a couple of times. Well worth it.
The bus ride was nice, and I made it back alive, with some sweet banana chips from a roadside vendor and some nice company in the form of a Quiteña woman who moved to the selva with her husband "for health reasons:" to avoid the city pollution, which is considerable. Even I am starting to feel it in my throat. Good thing I learned how to hack in India...
I apparently missed the beginning of a shift, so I'll have to make it up -- but I would not have given up the weekend for the world. I have not felt so relaxed since arriving in Quito, with nothing to do except whatever I want, and lots of kids running around doing whatever they want, laughing and enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived. I feel refreshed and ready to return to the world of expectations, unfulfillable and otherwise, office politics, class, and the world on a watch. I can do it, because That Place exists. In many places. That's just the closest. It's like a Portal into a Magical World...
Novel?
Besitos,
Clarita
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