Peru Chronicles
Trauner for Congress Chronicle
Adventures in Cambodia
Hi Friends,
It's important to smoke when abroad in the developing world. While there is very little chance that a six-foot white male will ever blend into crowd in Asia, smoking does make you part of the in-crowd here. Smoking also reinforces the illusion that nothing can harm you. It feels adventurous and reckless which - I am now coming to believe - is a really good substitute for genuine recklessness. And by ignoring the certain knowledge that you are destroying your lungs, skin, and heart, you reclaim a sense of the not-so-distant past where Americans smoked in business meetings, or a time before that when Camel sent 500,000 free cigarettes a week to our boys on the front (and later to army hospitals), noir heroes lit up at every opportunity (only to suffer various diseases later), and all the nagging doubts about the wonders of American hyper-capitalism were tucked away in the corner of our national brain to be dealt with once the hippies, yuppies, and Gen-Xers came along. As most of Asia is moving fast in that same direction, it's nice to ignore the consequences.
I'm sitting thirty feet from the beach in Southern Cambodia right now in an internet cafe that bears out the promises of the capitalist gospel. Thanks to the American know-how that created the internet, I could type in a few search terms and come up with step-by-step instructions of how to sterilize and sew shut a child's gaping leg wound. Or I could download a gigabyte of pornography. The beach itself is lovely, relatively trash-free, and pretty much what you would expect a tropical paradise might be like. For $10 a night, I have my own bungalow with a hammock on a porch that looks out over the Gulf of Thailand. Sinoukville, the city here, is in that pivotal stage of development where the night sky still doesn't have the neon and and halogen glare city lights. Most of the guest houses are still owned locally, and Marriot, Hilton, and the other megahotels haven't yet bought up all the land and replaced the dirt with styrofoam and skyscrapers. But there are rumors of a deal in the works.
I flew out to Cambodia last week to visit my friend Loki, who was taking five days at the end of nearly five-months abroad to see Phnom Penh, Ankgor Wat, and whatever else he could squeeze in. We met in Phnom Penh, a city on the move and it feels like a beehive at full tilt. The parts of the individual bees in this case are played by motorbikes. I gave my cabdriver the address of our guest house and he stared at me blankly. Then I told him 'Spring Guesthouse' and he started driving with confidence. It turns out that addresses mean almost nothing to anyone in Phnom Penh. The streets are technically labeled, but by 'technically,' I mean 'only on a map,' and by 'only on a map,' I mean 'not on most maps.' Instead there are only road signs on about six streets in town and the others you have to navigate by guesswork or prior knowledge.
Loki was waiting for me at the guest house and looked to be in the kind of shape you might expect someone traveling for five months would be in. He was dirty, unshaven, and sunburned a pastel pink as the result of not one, but two bouts with Indian vendors selling him hand cream in a sunblock bottle. We checked in for the night, walked to the river, sampled some revolting and bizarre southeast Asian fruit, visited Wat Phnom - the Buddhist temple at the north end of the city - and then, feeling we had done our duty as tourists set down in an outdoor cafe by the Mekong river to some rather serious drinking.
Here's a tidbit: a 250cc motorbike has a maximum speed of about 100 kilometers per hour. This is important to know if, for some reason, you decide to rent motorbikes in Cambodia to drive from Phnom Penh to Siem Riep and back. You need to know because a working speedometer is rare here and it was absent on both of our bikes. The people at Lucky Lucky Bike Rental also did not sell or rent helmets - requiring us to buy our own across town - and seemed a bit frustrated that we made them go through the additional hassle of filling out the paperwork required to insure the bikes and ourselves against catastrophe.
We left Phnom Penh at 10am, as we were assured that a bike could reach Siem Riep, 317 kilometers away, in just over five hours. This was definitely a lie. Or rather, it was certainly misleading. A bike probably could reach Siem Riep in five hours, but only if the reckless and fearful drivers were being hunted for sport by snipers just on their tail. As it was, it took us two-and-a-half hours to reach the small town of Skuon, otherwise known as 'that place in Cambodia where they eat spiders' about 80 kilometers away.
The buzzing pattern of the motorbike drivers that I watched on the way into town turned out not to be a pattern, but just chaos. Traffic in Cambodia works on a theory of deterrence: you don't wants to get hit by a bigger vehicle but no one worries much about smaller things in the street like pedestrians. Thus a truck has no qualms about running a bike or car off the road while passing on the two-lane highways. If you are on a motorcycle, you are the smallest vehicle out there and defensive driving becomes a survival skill. To turn left in this mess, motorbikes tend to pool together in the hope that even a truck won't squash more than a few bikers for fear of nicking the fender.
On the road to Skuon, only one car hit me and the collision was relatively harmless. I escaped with only a bruised elbow and the car with some superficial paint damage. The procedure after an accident here is somewhat different from in the US. Whereas US drivers tend to pull over after a collision, exchange insurance information, and get the phone numbers of witnesses, Cambodian drivers simply run into you and then tear off down the highway. This procedure cuts through the red tape and has the additional advantage of avoiding an awkward post-accident conversation. It's a fine solution and we would do well to consider it.
In Skuon we briefly attempted to find some fried spiders in order to say that we had eaten fried spiders. Sadly, where we stopped the vendors served as a grocery store rather than a restaurant; when we asked for spiders they insisted on showing us live samples. I rarely have a vegetarian's qualms when it comes to seeing a live version of something I plan to eat. Cows and lambs have not developed a very good evolutionary response to slaughter. They are, essentially, walking hamburgers and their cuteness doesn't really stop me from enjoying them. A better strategy might have been for cows to evolve a hairy black eight-legged exterior. We managed to find some fried spiders on our return voyage (they taste like crab) but if they had tasted like filet mignon with a mushroom gravy, I still don't think I could bring myself to eat them regularly.
The road from Skuon to Siem Riep is substantially less crowded than from Phnom Penh to Skuon, so we made better time. On the relatively empty two-lane roads, we could put the bikes in sixth gear, leave the clutch open and the gas revved all the way and tear down the open stretches of road with our helmets blaring white noise from the wind until we came to another truck.
The trucks were tough. Trucks here are, without exception, either empty or overloaded. The empty trucks don't really need to be passed, but the overloaded ones move at about the speed of a fast jogger. Staying behind them slowed our progress to a crawl and passing them felt like a death wish. Most bikers pass these massive vehicles on the dirt shoulder to the right of the road. The flaw here is that even the dirt shoulder of the road has its fair share of traffic. Cambodian farmers still use oxcarts and Cambodians who don't want to bother with a truck will load up the back of a moped with anything from a few dozen chickens to a cart full of bricks to - in one particularly impressive instance - a full-sized armoire balanced on the back of a moped. These moped drivers frequently don't bother to drive in the same direction as the rest of the traffic, so if you choose to try passing a truck on the right there is the possibility that you might find yourself suddenly faced with a piece of furniture bearing down on you at speed. To add to the fun there is the certain knowledge that Pol Pot and his cronies spent the bulk of the last 30 years littering the sides of Cambodian roadways with land mines on the ill-founded theory that it would undermine the government rather than merely maiming a few thousand rural children. The net result of all this is that Loki and I arrived in Siem Riep with quivering hands, shattered nerves, and a need for a bed, a stiff drink, and - if possible - horse tranquilizers.
In retrospect, it would probably have been a good idea to just figure a way to get the bikes back to the rental place and charter some sort of heavily armored vehicle for the rest of our trip.
The next best thing was a slow day in a Tuk Tuk - a moped with a passenger cart attached to the rear - visiting the ruins of the vast Khmer empire that ruled a substantial portion of southeast Asia for five hundred years. If you do a Google search for Angkor Wat, you'll end up with a fair number of images of the place that don't really do justice to its size. It's big. Really big. Really really big. And it's a temple. And it was probably pretty hard to build. So that's the cultural part of this email.
After a day-and-a-half at Ankgor Wat and the surrounding temples, we got back on our bikes with all of the enthusiasm of soldiers heading back to the trenches. That said, the journey back to Phnom Penh was substantially less harrowing than the ride out. We took the first half of the trip one afternoon and the next half a day later. We were getting the knack of the highways: it was kind of exciting when a truck forced us off the road. Here's where we got stupid.
There is something about testosterone or maleness or maybe just humanity or society that makes it really hard for two men to admit what they are doing terrifies them. We arrived in Phnom Penh at about 11 am and wanted to head down to the beach in Sianoukville. Rather than returning the bikes and taking a bus, we took the bikes. This was a bad idea. An early omen that this was a bad idea came when a moped in Phnom Penh pulled out in front of Loki and he tumbled off his bike into the street. Loki is a third-year medical student and after a quick self examination he determined that he was OK or that, if he wasn't OK, then he had probably only fractured his right kneecap and that was no reason not to continue.
We left Phnom Penh at about noon and the accident happened around 1:30. I didn't actually witness it, but Loki described it to me as he supervised the nurse in the rural Cambodian clinic who was stitching up his arm. Loki was on the shoulder of the road, sent there by a truck, and a moped heading in the opposite direction of the traffic made a beeline course for him. This happens all the time when two people are walking opposite directions: one person steps left at the same time as another person and then they both step to the right and then they laugh and pass by. It was just like that but minus the laughing and passing and plus Loki flipping over the handles of his bike and skidding stomach-first, superman style, across the gravel.
From my perspective, I saw the bright-yellow dot of Loki's T-shirt. It wasn't moving much and a bunch of other light brown dots surrounded it. So I turned back.
There was quite a lot of blood, though Loki was standing and swearing, which was a good sign.
"Just give me a second before we go on," were his first words.
My response captured the moment with both pathos and poetry: "Oh man. That's a bummer."
"I think I'm going to have to get this arm stitched up before we go on." Loki correctly believed that our trip was the historical equivalent of the battle of Okinawa and that the Island would be lost if we did not continue.
"Yeah. That's probably a good idea," I said.
We followed some locals to a health clinic and Loki realized the bike had landed on his foot and that a) his shoe was destroyed and b) a few foot bones might be broken.
"I really liked those shoes," he said, putting his priorities in order.
After some time, and the realization that Loki's foot would not actually operate the gear shift on his bike, we took it to heart that perhaps it was better to head back. It was a sad moment, but then retreat is sometimes inevitable.
In preposterous bit of good fortune an enormous truck designed to carry motorbikes came by the instant we needed it and agreed to take us to Phnom Penh. The driver realized we liked excitement and so smoked like a chimney and finished four beers on the way back to Phnom Penh just to keep things interesting. He also demonstrated the Cambodian method of truck driving when your truck is empty, which involves driving almost exclusively in the lane designed for oncoming traffic. At one point, after nightfall, as I clutched the seat cushion and the ceiling with a pale expression of terror on my face he explained "One light OK. Two lights bad." I.e. one light means a bike, two a car. Having recently been one of those lights, I was inclined to disagree.
We made it back and had the next day in Phnom Penh before Loki flew out. Knowing my duty to the itinerary, I took a bus down to Sinoukeville where I have spent the last day or two playing volleyball and sitting by the ocean.
Tomorrow I leave this tropical paradise and head back to Phnom Penh (via bus) and then back to New York, a city I love, but also a place where the air feels a lot thicker and life is a hell of a lot more stressful. I'll get back into my routine of heading to the gym every day and quit my one-week affair with smoking and work towards a place in the suburbs with two-and-a-half children. For tonight though, I think a stroll by the ocean, and the still-visible stars of the tropical sky.
I hope you are all well. I am,
Nick
Walk through England - 9/26/07
The time, once more, has come for me to send what are becoming annual travelogues. The idea here is to encourage you all to keep in touch while I am away so that I get to occasionally hear friendly voices while I am traveling in all the scary places that are not America.
This time around that won't work. It turns out that I am only gone for two weeks and that I will have e-mail access almost not at all. So this particular travel update is here to encourage you all to keep in touch once I get back to New York, one of those scary places that very definitely is America.
Britain is, as anyone who has ever seen a movie about it will know, a rainy country. It would have been a real shame if we had not experienced any of the rain while we were here: like not seeing canals when visiting Venice. I am happy that we have had rain. We have experienced it in its misty variety, its downpour variety, and its windy sideways variety. We have seen all manner of British settings in the rain. I feel like I have had the experience. Now I want some goddamn sun.
I should explain that the rain is particularly frustrating because the purpose of this trip is to walk from one coast of Britain to the other with my family and two family friends. We started out in a small town called St. Bees and we are finishing in an equally small town called Robin Hood's Bay. Walking, sadly, means spending the bulk of each day outside, which is where the rain is.
It has rained for five of the seven days we have walked and I am wet. There is nothing I have, in fact, which has remained dry. My passport is wet; my socks are wet; my backpack is wet; my Snicker's bar is wet; my extra socks are wet; my water bottle is wet; and my shirt - actually each of them - is wet. Everyone else on this trip brought rain gear. I brought a jacket and two pairs of jeans. Jeans dry slowly, so I am always at least a little wet. But since it rains constantly, I am usually completely wet. My boots are waterproof, but that doesn't matter since they are filled with water. After three days of constant waterlog, I finally washed some laundry at one of the hotels, only to discover there was no dryer and no time for air drying, so now everything I have ever-so-slightly cleaner, wrinkled, and still wet.
The British use the word 'walk' in the same way we might say 'hike' or 'backpack' or 'technical climb,' so while you might think of our trip as an afternoon stroll through the grounds of Cambridge, it is actually more like a forced march through the Alps. Each day we have a Bed and Breakfast reservation some distance away, and each day we have no choice but to make that distance by foot. Our shortest day has been nine miles, our longest twenty one, and the terrain has been unfriendly.
As walkers go, you could hardly have selected a worse group than my family. We are not a group for whom balance comes naturally. In fact, we tend to fall over without much provocation on flat ground. But we are not walking on flat ground. The terrain for these walks has been fells and moors, which are fancy British ways of saying hills and swamps. The fells we have climbed have been somewhere between 20 feet tall and 2500 feet tall. The moors are usually between six and ten inches deep. Here, we wobble like boxing dummies even when we are not actively falling. Fortunately, we spend most of our time actively falling.
We are family though, so we pull each other through the difficult moments. Today, for example, my mother offered to lighten my load. We have hired a van to carry our bags between hotels, and I usually carry whatever my mother needs for the day. This morning, my mother offered to ease that burden by leaving her rain pants for the van. Admittedly, I had to provoke this offer with the good-natured comment: "Jesus, Mom! I have been carrying these for you for six days now and you never wear them, are you honestly ever going to use them or do you just make me take them as some sort of cruel joke?"
Witnesses accused me of being a little grumpy. It was early, I was tired. Who could blame me? Whatever was said, though, my mother was kind enough to leave the rain pants behind thus lightening my load. I thank her for this.
Sadly, today was our first full day of moor-walking and it came at the same time as our first day of forty-mile-an-hour winds combined with heavy rain. My father came up with the fun game of comparing the hours spent mucking through swamp with other unpleasant moments. He felt that it was somewhat preferable to being beaten with reeds, but worse than stomach flu, where I felt it fell somewhere less unpleasant than adolescence but worse than a fierce kick to the groin.
Mom had a different fun game to pass the hours. Her game involved mentioning things she wished she had with her, which included rain pants. It was all gentle teasing and she was probably comfortable enough, though I will admit it was probably particularly unpleasant to be wearing cotton pants after she mistook a floating dirt clod for solid ground and found herself waist-deep in freezing water. Some have suggested the resulting near-hypothermic state was somehow my fault. History will judge...though apparently so has mom. She has told me she will be packing my bag tomorrow and I suspect it will not only contain rain pants but also some large rocks.
Despite the rain, England is a magical place. The valleys are remarkably beautiful and while I am not certain that Hobbits actually live in this country, it's clear where the Lord of the Rings would have been set in its maker's mind.
And everything in England was clearly named by fairies. I know this because I, like any imaginative youngster, am able to easily recognize names that are simply too preposterous for human ears. On our first day, we walked from St. Bees past Rodington Beck, the Pattering holes, Fleswick bay, Sandwith (a name that left me mysteriously hungry), Demesne, Scalegill, Moor, Cleator, up the peak of Dent, back down through Raven Crag, through the Nannycatch gate, past the Kinnisade stone circle, and finally to Ennerdale Bridge. In total: around fourteen miles, 1800 feet of vertical gain, and three otherworldly Elfin dimensions.
Fantastical as they are, none of these names is as wonderful as Reekie's Thistle of Grasmere, the store Teal and I passed. The spirit of journalism compelled me to investigate its contents, but then the spirit of indifference took over and I instead went to the next place, which promised food in big letters. It's just as well, since there is little chance that it could have lived up to my expectations. From the outside it appeared to be a sweater store of some variety, but I imagine that inside is some terribly magical device with truly wondrous properties. Perhaps a wizard's amulet, or a gauntlet of some lost Roman proconsul. Or, perhaps, that rarest English treasure of all: a beam of sunlight untainted by rain. I am very wet.
I hope you are all well. I am. Stay healthy and keep in touch,
Nick
Taxi Ray - 7/5/07
There was no meter in the taxi, but it took us a while to notice. The cab itself was a museum piece: a car you would see in a 1940's reenactment of New York. Or maybe 1970's. It was clean and yellow with no chips or scratches. The man driving this machine was much older than us, maybe sixty, maybe seventy.
My date - a girl named Vanessa - shouldered me to get my attention. I looked and she raised her eyebrows. "Who is this?" was the implied question, with the implied follow-up "and is he dangerous?" The cab slowly decelerated for a red light.
"How long have you been doing this?" I asked the driver. I could feel martinis splashing around in my head.
"You guys got lucky tonight," the driver said. He sounded a little too much like Robert DeNiro. The word 'lucky' didn't help. And, yes, he was old. But age does not discriminate when it comes to Taxi-driving maniacs.
We waited too long to respond, so he continued: "I'm Taxi Ray."
"Oh...Good," I said.
Because I am easily intimidated, I started to imagine what would make 'Taxi Ray' so famous that I should recognize his name. I don't read the crime blotter, but I started imagining killers with epithets. Could Ray be short for 'rape.' That seemed unlikely. People don't usually shorten one-syllable words. Maybe the 'Taxi' was for taxidermy. Organ harvesting was also a possibility.
The taxi cab next to us honked. Ray leaned out of his window and yelled "It's just a red light. No wonder everyone thinks cab drivers are such jerks."
We breathed easier: psychopaths don't object to noise pollution.
Vanessa dared a question: "How long have you been driving this cab?" she asked.
"Since Roosevelt was in office," Ray said. "I'm eighty."
"Wow," I said.
"Yeah, I've been driving taxis forever, that's why I'm Taxi Ray instead of just Ray. You know I met the mayor in this cab once, but before he was mayor. Boy, I remember when I started driving there were no busses here, now their everywhere. You know I've had a lot of pregnant women in this cab over the years."
Ray clearly wanted to explain himself a bit. He handed us a clear plastic folder filled with newspaper clips. On the folder was a bumper sticker that said "Taxi Ray for president."
"I have been around for quite some time" Ray said. "That," he pointed to a yellowed black-and-white photo "was my first cab. Made in 1940." He pointed to it like someone might point out a grandchild or a new baby. Ray didn't have any family photos in the car.
"This current cab was built in 1980," Ray said.
Later that night, I argued with Vanessa that Ray was a personification of the loneliness that so many New Yorkers feel; that he never really knows anyone but meets and interacts with hundreds of people every day.
Vanessa pointed out, correctly, that it was a four martini night and I was probably not in my clearest state of mind.
"You must really know the city, Ray," I said.
"Greatest town on earth," he said.
The car rolled to a halt at our corner: you could sort of tell that enduring honking was a regular part of Ray's life. He drove like... well, a very old man in a very old car. We waited expectantly.
After a moment Vanessa asked, "how much?"
Ray looked back at us. "Oh, whatever you feel like passing on," he said.
Vanessa was feeling generous and handed him a twenty. "You know the boys used to have to pay on a trip like this," he said. "I suppose things change. You two have a good night."
Des Moines - 2/26/07
"Well, Alex was the love of my life. And he was from Des Moines so we moved here and I started my company," Stuart, the gay Scottish decorator we had hired, said to me.
I was in Des Moines as part of a team organizing a town-hall meeting with a presidential candidate. Never mind the year or the candidate.
"That's wonderful," I replied. I was distracted. Partly, it was Stuart's accent, but the other, larger part was his decorating scheme. We were cutting baby-blue chiffon as part of Stuart's decorating scheme. In a few days, a presidential candidate was going to stand in front of this chiffon and say "I should be the new commander in chief of the US armed forces." We wanted to tell people 'our guy is a strong, powerful leader,' but our coloring scheme said 'it's a boy!' I was thinking about this when Stuart said "Then three months ago, the bastard died on me."
He said it like you might say "It's fifty-seven degrees outside" or "I think Jack Nicholson's a hell of an actor." It was without any inflection of sorrow: a statement of fact. Nonetheless, when someone says "The love of my life died," you can't respond, "We should reconsider your color scheme."
"The thing is," Stuart continued "immigration is a nightmare here, and we obviously couldn't get married - or whatever you want to call it - so Alex and I put everything in his name. It was simpler. I ran the business, but he helped out occasionally. I guess he was a kept man, in a way." He laughed.
I nodded. Stuart was loading the chiffon into a bin in order to carry it up to the catwalk above our heads. Chiffon is a sheer fabric. The words 'sheer fabric' and 'strong leader' don't usually fit in the same newspaper article.
When it comes to tragedy, I have the emotional maturity of a seven-year old; that is, if someone feels bad, he should get a lollypop. If someone feels really bad, he should get more... say a four thousand dollar contract to decorate a presidential event. I said nothing and thought: 'The conversation will move on to something else, then somehow maybe we can make the baby blue look tough and manly.'
"Alex was a wonderful person, just as kind as could be, but his parents... I hate to judge but, well, trailer trash is the only way I can describe them.
"The way the law works they were the next of kin, so they took everything. They hadn't dealt with Alex being gay, and when they came to the house after he died, they just told me to get out."
He said all of this in that same just-the-facts tone. He would have made Joe Friday proud.
At this point, if Stuart wanted to put pink bows surrounding a huge banner that said 'Anarchist Pederasts for Terrorism!' behind our candidate, I would have been OK with it.
Across the room, my boss, let's call him James, saw the huge strips of blue Chiffon and was walking fast towards us, glowering.
"Then they locked the door to the warehouse where I kept all my fabrics and my equipment. I don't think they wanted the business, but they didn't want to give it to me. So, I lost the business, I lost the house... but I still have some clients and, well, you borrow money and do what it takes to keep going. It's like breathing, you know? If you stop, you just die."
Stuart, in this situation, was unfairly poetic. The Scottish accent made him sound both tragic and polished and the wording was perfect. He reminded me of Braveheart without the war paint and broadsword, but with a Dolce and Gabbana belt and an armful of chiffon instead: Braveheart after queer eye for the war guy.
James arrived. He did not look happy.
Stuart looked at him, "This will look beautiful with some blue up-lights on it," he said.
James beckoned me away, then said: "Nick, I don't think Stuart is going to work out."
He was completely right. There was no question Stuart was wrong for this event. "I think we should keep him," I said, "maybe this will look good with some blue up-lights on it."
When James fired Stuart, I wasn't there. I left expressly for the purpose of being not there. When I saw Stuart packing up his materials, I said "thanks for your help" without making eye contact.
"It was a pleasure meeting you, Nick" he said. He was smiling, impossibly optimistic.
Of course, I have no idea what he was thinking, but I like to imagine that he was looking forward to his next job: a wedding or baby shower he would execute perfectly. It would get his business rolling and it would be the beginning of a long recovery that would start with a new house and owning his own business again. Years down the line he might even fall in love and maybe finally get citizenship. In the meantime though, the bride at Stuart's perfectly planned wedding would look around and see the day she imagined since childhood. The cake would be perfect; the groom tall, dark, and handsome; and the guests dressed in elegant gowns and tuxedos. She might even stand in her own brilliant white gown with the man she loved and think how beautiful and just and fair the world can be.
New Orleans - 2/13/07
"Ow, goddammit!" The words fill the air like the song of some ill-tempered bird. This is the call of the amateur carpenter, a species usually native to the suburbs, that has migrated in flocks to New Orleans over the past year-and-a-half. Since joining the flock, I have been hearing the squawks all morning. It is day five of a weeklong trip to New Orleans to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity building houses. I am here with my parents.
"I think I'm going to lose my goddamn thumbnail," the man says. It is the third or fourth time today he has hit his finger. Each time he says 'Ow, goddammit' a little bit louder. A few days ago he said this and I made the mistake of looking over instead of paying attention to my own hammer. Goddammit.
Thankfully, Habitat for Humanity doesn't let volunteers use nail guns. We would almost certainly hurt each other. We are mostly office types who are no more qualified to use a nail gun than we would be to run a marathon, perform an emergency tracheotomy, or go outside without first lathering in SPF 40 sun block. This morning, my mother accidentally nailed one of her work gloves to an interior wall without the help of a nail gun. I didn't tell anyone about this since she is still embarrassed from cutting off the corner of our work table with a circular saw two days ago, which she also told me not to tell anyone about. Discretion is one of my strengths.
As volunteers go, my parents and I are about average craftsmen. If anything, we are maybe a little better than the average volunteer. My father takes every opportunity to point this out to our supervisor, Dan. Dan is a guy in his twenties who works for Habitat. My father has had a very successful career and is a full forty years older than Dan. Still he insists on pointing out every success to Dan. 'Did you see that, Dan?' he said after we made a mildly clever cut in a piece of siding that saved maybe a square foot of material, 'That's advanced carpentry right there.' Dan could not have cared less if he'd been in a coma. 'I bet your other volunteers didn't cut siding like that, did they?' Dan may have nodded. He may also have fallen asleep.
About half of our time here is used actually building something. The other half we use to tear something down that was built incorrectly. For those of you counting, this should end in a wash. If Sisyphus were given a choice between his work and ours, he would probably just keep pushing the boulder.
Somehow though, we seem to be accomplishing something. On Monday, we finished putting the siding on the front of a house. On Tuesday, we sided the back. Wednesday I put up F-channel to brace the soffit under the eaves. Thursday I learned what the words 'F-channel' and 'soffit' meant and then installed a door and four windows. Today we are back to siding.
The neighborhood we are working on is called Musicians' Village. 'No,' one of the Habitat representatives said to a group of us on day one 'that doesn't mean that only musicians live here. We don't require that.' There was no laughter. One of the volunteers nodded. 'I guess that makes sense,' he said. Habitat volunteers tend to use their good intentions as a buffer against humor.
The Habitat houses fill one entire square block of Musician's Village. If you look at them side by side, you might think they were designed by a pastel-loving six-year-old. They are boxy and square and they look like a rainbow would in a Norman Rockwell painting.
If you were to turn 180 degrees from these new volunteer built houses, on the other side of the street you would see a more common sight in the new New Orleans. Most of the houses there may once have been bright, but almost all are now abandoned. They have sinking doors, speckles of shingles still hanging to their roofs, and rotting porches. New Orleans lost about half of its population after Katrina, but in this neighborhood the number appears to be much closer to 80 or 90 percent.
This is depressing enough, but to add to my own sense of the mess New Orleans has become, the New York Times published an article yesterday about how returning refugees are now getting up and leaving again, disgusted by the city's continuing crime; the impossibly slow city services - including police and ambulance services that frequently show up 12 hours after they are called; and the generally depressing nature of a city that seems, at times, to be in its death spasms.
Still, Mardi Gras will continue this year in its usual insane fashion; New Orleans refugees still seem to be trickling back in; and in almost all of these dismal looking blocks, there is at least one house being ever-so-slowly built by a flock of amateur carpenters. 'Ow, goddamnit!' is hardly a cry of hope, but it's better than silence.
South Africa - Part 3 - 12/16/06
Friends,
Earlier this week, I got back from a two week car trip across most of the country. We visited 8 of the 9 South African provinces and drove just over 7,000 kilometers - about the distance from New York to LA and back.
The social dynamic of the family car trip is universal. That's my thesis and here is my brief and only piece of evidence: I am 8000 miles from home with a family I met only two weeks ago and we have all comfortably settled into a pattern of interaction that exactly mirrors what you might find in a Chevy Suburban travelling across Wyoming on some hot July day. Dad is lost. Mom says that the map has our destination marked just ahead. Dad demands to see map. Mom says dad shouldn't look at map when he is driving, and besides which he is already endangering everyone by talking on the cell phone. One of the kids has to use the bathroom. Dad pulls car over and grabs map from Mom. "We're not on that highway" he yells "I knew we should have turned." Dad demands that the kid gets out to use the bathroom while we are pulled over. Kid says that the bathroom is really dirty and she would rather just pee in the car than use it.
If four lifelong technophobes from the jungles of Papua New Guinnea got into a small car, it would be a matter of time before one of the daughters screamed "Mom, stop him from touching me!"
In our particular performance of the family car trip the cast is as follows:
The middle child is played by Birgit Brammer. She is my host and will let no one else drive her car. Driving makes her miserable and when anyone points out that she is in a black mood at the end of the day she says "Well, you didn't have to drive the whole day." The first time she said this I made the mistake of pointing out that she didn't either and got a glare that would have made Medusa proud.
The youngest child is played by Birgit's sister Romi. Romi is an obsessive spotter of wild game. After leaving Bam's game farm, Romi, Birgit, Bam, and I took a day-long cruise in the Kruger national park, and saw Elephants, Rhinos, Hippos, and African Buffalo right by the side of the road - literally feet from the car. Romi was mildly impressed with these creatures, but was more concerned with spotting animals that were so impossibly distant that seeing them was like picking out an individual pixel on an IMAX movie screen. We didn't have binoculars, but for Romi these potential animals represented the true game park experience. Predators are particularly hard to spot in the Kruger park and Romi was obsessed with finding a Lion. This led to a number of conversations that went roughly as follows:
Romi: STOP!!! Stop. Back up... further... further.. OK stop. I think that's a Lion over there. Through the trees. The red thing in the grass.
Bam: I think it's a rock.
Birgit: It might be a lion.
Nick: Lion's move, and they aren't red.
Romi: Right there though, don't those look like ears?
Bam: So does that cloud. It's a rock.
Romi: I suppose it does look a bit Rockish. You can keep going if you want.
Then we would move the car forward another fifty or hundred feet before Romi yelled "STOP!"
Mom is Karen Brammer, Birgit's mother. She is a small woman who was brought up in an Afrikaner household. She speaks English, German, and Afrikaans very quickly and uses some unfortunate phrasing. Early in the trip, I lay down on a bench and she said "Oh! You are just like Romi, she is constantly on her back!" Two days earlier Birgit was having trouble crossing her legs under a low table, "Birgit just can't shut her legs," Karen said. Her daughters also told me about a really legendary slip up that occurred when she was teaching Afrikaans to a university class in Austria. She was casually chatting and wanted to tell the class, in her somewhat broken German, that her husband refereed for Rugby games on the weekend. But she got caught up in the fact that Rugby involves a whistle and managed to say "Jeden Samstag blaesst mein Man dreissig Maenner." Basically: "Every Saturday my husband blows thirty men."
Dad is Birgit's father Horst Brammer. He is a South African with a German upbringing and periodically yells at passing cars in German. Birgit, Romi, and I rode a separate car behind Karen and Horst, so we missed most of the really good mother father fights, but we could occasionally see Horst throw his arms in the air before slamming on the brakes and doing a U-turn, so I am fairly certain the standard yelling occurred.
I got to play the role of elder brother although I think if you were to ask the others, they might describe my part as 'retarded foreigner.' My own particular idiosyncrasy involves comparing everything to the United States. It's a bad habit and I try to avoid it, but any time any of my hosts say something about South Africa, it's as if I feel the need to defend the US. Birgit will say "South Africans have a twisted sense of humor" and I'll respond defensively with "so do Americans." This becomes particularly awkward when somebody says something like "There are a lot of lions here," and I respond with "we've got lions. Sure, there in cages, but there lions just the same and we've got them. Probably as many as you do. And our country walked on the moon first. And we invented tomatoes.... in your face."
It's a really unfortunate tendency and I don't know why I have picked it up, but I become a big fat patriot as soon as I am abroad. Just before we left for the car trip, I tried to demonstrate some patriotic enthusiasm by having a good thanksgiving dinner, but the closest I could find to Turkey was a buffalo chicken sandwich and in a desperate attempt to buy American I drank half a bottle of Jack Daniels and passed out on the floor.
But back to the trip: there were, obviously, many wonderful moments. We saw Cape Town from the top of Table Rock; We swam in False Bay, home to some of the largest sharks ever spotted; we toured wineries around Cape Town; we saw both the big tree, a tree that is big and 'the big hole,' a hole that, like the tree, is very big; we climbed through ancient caves; drove the garden route across South Africa's southern coastline; and swam in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. All of this was wonderful, good, etc. If you were to ask any of us though, the unmistakable highlight was visiting an ostrich farm.
Of course by 'any of us' I mean 'just me, everyone else thought the ostriches were dumb.' The others, in fact, chose to skip the ostrich farm altogether while I went in. I am alone in my conviction that the ostriches were the one unmistakable highlight of the trip. I stand by my conviction though. What makes an ostrich farm so great is that ostriches are without a doubt the greatest creatures in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is patently incorrect and, in all probability, a big jerk. They are like big natural practical jokes.
For one thing, they have eyes that are larger than their brains, which puts them in a category only with fish, Japanimation characters, and the occasional member of congress (zing!). But, and here's the real joy, they are potentially vicious creatures who can kick humans to death. It's like someone decided to give pigeons guns! And you can ride them!
Birgit and Romi didn't visit the ostrich farm because they said riding ostriches is terribly dangerous. The guide said the same thing while he explained the procedure for riding an ostrich should we wish to try. It works like this: you jump on the ostrich's back, grab him around the neck, and point his face in the direction you want to travel. When you are done, you fall off - there is no way to elegantly dismount - and run away from the ostrich, who is in a blind fury because someone just jumped on his back and jerked him around by the neck. You can get where he's coming from. When I was seven, I tried the same thing with my smaller sister Teal and she didn't take it well either.
"What do you do if you fall off and the bird attacks you?" A young mother on the tour asked the guide.
"Lie on the ground and the ostrich won't be able to kick you as easily," the guide said, then continued "then try to grab it around the neck and punch it in the head."
Several people laughed but the guide didn't smile. Apparently the actual, real, not-at-all-kidding standard procedure for dealing with ostriches is to grab them around the neck and punch them in the face. Strangely enough, it's the same procedure I used with Teal and it didn't work at all well. It's hard to imagine doing this to any other dangerous animal, though nature would be a much more interesting place if that was how you defended yourself from, say, a grizzly bear.
After realizing that I could punch it in the head, riding the ostrich was actually anti-climactic. You basically just hop on and bounce around a bit and then fall and run away. I didn't get to see an ostrich punched, though now that I know it's possible it's going on my lifetime list of things to see just above the Tree of Life, but below bird-eating spiders, which I hear exist in Australia.
Yesterday, Birgit and Romi took me on a guided tour to Soweto, the region southwest of Johannesburg (Soweto is an acronym for 'southwest township) where blacks were kept segregated from the rest of Johannesburg's population. It is where Bishop Desmond Tutu lived and also where Nelson Mandela lived before he was imprisoned on Robben Island. It's the only place in the world where two Nobel peace prize winners lived right across the street from one another.
During the day we ran into Winnie Mandela, Nelson Mandela's ex-wife; I got a picture with the South African Cricket team (One of the team members asked me where I was from. "Chicago," I answered. "So, you really don't care about us, do you?" he said. "I hear cricket's a very exciting game..." I said, not making eye contact. "Sport," he said, "It's a sport."); we visited one of the 'townships' which used to be called 'informal settlements' and are best described as 'shantytowns'; and I saw a billboard advertising 'Debbie Does Dallas: the musical' in the Johannesburg civic theater. This last one alone is reason enough for me to want to plan a return trip. What could they possibly be singing about? All in all it was a pretty action-packed final day.
I'm not entirely sure I am ready to leave, but I'll be back to the US soon and I hope you all get in touch with me to chat. I'll have my cell phone on as of Monday morning. Before that, I'm doing one small final African road trip this afternoon. Birgit is going to drive me from her apartment in Pretoria to Oliver Tambo International Airport (formerly Johannesburg International Airport formerly Jan Smuts International Airport). Then I have a horrible 32 hour hell ride back to Washington Dulles Airport via Zurich. We'll head down the tarmac, speed past the tall grass then up and over Pretoria across the Kalahari and over central Africa to the Sahara and then Europe. It's a miserable ride, but I'll have a window seat and four thousand miles of grassland below me. I'm hoping to spot a lion.
Be well, stay healthy, and keep in touch,
Nick
Africa - Part II - 12/1/06
Friends,
Everything I own is wet. Everything. A really damp mildewy shoved-in-a-backpack-without-giving-it-a-chance-to-dry wet. The kind of wetness that ends up smelling wet. Really wet.
This is all the result of some poor planning on my part. The first part of that was choosing not to pack any rain gear and the second part was (you guessed it!) going out in the rain.
We spent this past weekend at a farm owned by Birgit's friend Bam, an onomatopoeic fellow. Bam is distinguished by a proclivity for dreadful puns and for having a great uncle who accidentally shot Jock of the Bush, who is basically the South African version of Lassie . He also speaks like you (or at least I) imagine British explorers talked a century ago: a British accent marked mostly by an unflappable calm. This unflappable calm extends a little far for me. It stretches into areas where you or I or anyone with a shred of sanity might well think it is appropriate to be flapped. For example when there is a good possibility you are being stealth hunted by leopards during the night, but more on this later. Bam is also vehemently against Malaria tablets in any form, claiming they mask malaria symptoms and just give extended bouts of diarrhea, hallucinations, and a generally depressing demeanor. He is right on all accounts, of course, but when one of the symptoms the pills mask is prolonged and painful death, they don't seem so unreasonable.
When Birgit told me we were going to visit Bam's farm, I thought of a nice little homestead with plowed fields, rusty tractors, and a porch swing. The kind of place your grandmother might sit in a rocking chair and contemplate the mysteries of her long life. This image was dead wrong. Bam's farm is more like Jurassic park. If you brought your grandmother here, she would be eaten. My first hint that things were not as I imagined came when we switched from Bam's car into a World War II army jeep about 4 kilometers (the silly units that the rest of the world insists on using to describe 0.65 miles) from the farm's gate. The gate itself was a ten-foot electrified fence with a sign that read 'Danger': a sure sign, I felt, of Raptors waiting on the far side. After crossing through the gate, over a few rivers, and over about 8 Kilometers of obstacle-filled dirt roads through fairly dense jungle, we arrived at the 'farm-house.'
Farm, by the way, apparently means 'game farm' out here. The 'farm house' is less of a log cabin than a white Victorian structure that looks like it was built from old picket fences and cemented together with liquid quaintness and nails forged of old world charm. While I am not entirely certain, it is possible that the African housekeeper came built into the house. Something to do with colonial architecture, I'm sure. The four of us - or at least I - felt terribly guilty about having her around since in my mind having a maid there somehow made me part of the apartheid system. This makes no logical sense, but I felt it nonetheless.
The farm actually employs quite a few native people. Many of them are involved in the local political system. Some are even political activists. Bam mentioned, for example, that back in the late nineties a number of the farm's hired hands were upset with the local magistrate. In the time honored tradition of Democratic societies everywhere, they marched to the magistrate's mansion and showed their displeasure with his policies by... kidnapping him, wrapping him in barbed wire, and leaving him on a high mountain to die. Yeah Democracy!
The magistrate was discovered before he died and returned to his home and the kidnappers were never charged with anything. Bam never mentioned whether the kidnapping changed his opinion on whatever issue the locals were angry about, but I can only assume that he continued to argue his side of the debate through hired killers, an angry mob, or one of the countless other outlets for reasoned argument that any good democratic society engenders.
The farm house has no power or screen doors, but there was running water. There were also plenty of bugs. Bugs here come in many fun forms. There are the standard mosquitoes and flies plus fist-sized flying insects and a whole range of millipedes, centipedes, brontopedes, and somnolonarcopedes - the last two of which are distinct both because the bugs put you to sleep with their hypnotic stares and because I made them up.
Outside the farmhouse is a large fire pit and a river where game - mostly baboons, bush bucks, and impala - come down to drink periodically.
There are a number of potentially wonderful hikes to take from the farm, if it is not raining outside. If it is raining outside there are a number of vicious hell-slogs through an unending river of muck to take from the farm. We embarked on a few of these out of sheer pigheadedness.
Those trips were fairly unpleasant, but generally safe and fairly reasonable. But when you get together four twenty-somethings in a vacation house in the wilderness, stupidity will occur. It's almost a natural law. The highlight of our stupidity came on an ill-fated jeep ride that was meant to take us to the highest point on the farm to see the sunset. Never mind that even when we embarked the clouds were too heavy to have possibly seen the sun. Bam assured us that the place we were going had quite a view and that, worst case, we could still bring along a few beers and enjoy the view-that-might-have-been.
Birgit, in her infinite wisdom, suggested that maybe we should bring the tarpaulin to cover the jeep just in case there could, just possibly, be some rain.
There is of course only one possible end to this story which is that not only did it rain in buckets, but the jeep also broke down 10 km from the farm house. "Maybe we're out of gas" Bam suggested, "Let's just have a few beers then I'll walk down and get a tank." So we pulled the tarpaulin over the vehicle and crammed inside in the hopes of staying mildly dry.
"It smells like gas" Birgit's sister Romi helpfully observed.
"Yeah, that's odd," Bam counter-observed. "Hand me a cigarette, would you?"
A word on the smoking here: Noir characters are health freaks by the standards of these people. When Birgit and Romi arrived at the farm at 8am after driving three hours on the pre-dawn highways, the first thing they wanted was a cigarette. After hiking - on our first day at the farm - until we were exhausted and sweaty, Birgit and Romi had a cigarette to refresh their constitution. Birgit has a history of severe asthma and a few years ago her lung collapsed and she was hospitalized for several days. After that ordeal, what she really felt would calm her was, yes, a cigarette.
So there was nothing incongruous to Bam, Romi or Birgit about smoking in an enclosed area that stunk of gas vapors. I got out of the car and figured I would just live with being wet.
Fortunately, nothing exploded. And honestly, the tarp was so filled with holes, that I'm not sure I was much more wet than the three who stayed under it. We stood around saturating ourselves in rainwater and drinking beer for a bit then Bam hiked down and picked up a can of gas, only to discover that our problem was apparently not that we were out of gas.
In order to preserve the dignity of males everywhere, Bam and I responded by opening the hood of the car and pointing to possible problems.
"The engine's not working" I helpfully observed.
"Yes," Bam agreed. "Maybe it's the fuel line."
Bam may have had some notion of what he was talking about. I'll even acknowledge that he probably did. I am, on the other hand, as familiar with the workings of a jeep engine as I am with the reproductive organs of a blue-headed jellyfish. So I stood for a few minutes and then said, "Maybe we should push it."
This engendered a great deal of enthusiasm all around, due in part to the beer, and we thought we would start the jeep by pushing it backwards down a hill and then turning the key.
Bam was in charge of starting the car so the three of us pushed and successfully launched him backwards down the dirt road and into a fairly major tree branch. But after some swearing and relatively minor concussion, Bam did indeed get the engine to turn over and start. It was like I thrust my hand into a section of tentacles and successfully grabbed the ovaries. I was very proud.
We spent a good part of the ride home congratulating ourselves and to celebrate Romi, Bam, and Birgit lit up a cigarette. I sat and watched the night get darker until the jeep once again broke down and in their frustration, Bam, Birgit, and Romi lit up a cigarette. This time round it was too dark to see so we walked the rest of the way to the farm house. Birgit was terrified of leopards, which are known to hunt at just the time we were walking, but I assured her that the overwhelming reek of burned tobacco would keep any sane creature away. She thanked me for the reassurance and I said 'your welcome' and then asked if she might move downwind a bit.
The next day we discovered that the fuel line had broken and was busy leaking into the cabin of the vehicle and everyone exchanged a nervous laugh about how close we had come to detonating ourselves with a misplaced piece of burning ash. For the night though we were simply exhausted and collapsed into bed unbothered except by an occasional large bug, the stench of our rapidly mildewing cigarette saturated clothing, or the howl of what, I am fairly certain, was a raptor in the thick of the hunt.
I hope you are all well and that your individual Thanksgivings went swimmingly. I am now in Capetown and headed for wineries. I'll send another mail regarding Elephants, Ostriches and wine in a week or two. Keep in touch and good health. Cheers,
Nick
PS Some corrections from the last e-mail: I referred to people as Afrikaans; apparently they are Afrikaners. Also: South Africa does not have the highest AIDS rate in Africa. It's in a close second or third behind Botswana and maybe Namibia. It might also be behind another country or two. My research is haphazard at best. The health minister here assures people though that home remedies will cure AIDS if you just let them. The health minister is a first rate jackass.
Africa Update - Part I - 11/21/06
Friends,
It's been two weeks since we lost the closest congressional race Wyoming has had in thirty years by just over a thousand votes. Some might say that blaming Wyoming voters is sour grapes. Those 'some' in question can screw themselves. As can the voters of Wyoming. Let's move on.
I am now in South Africa after a week visiting my sister at Oxford. On the possibly invalid assumption that it encourages correspondence, I am going to try to send the occassional e-mail update over the next few weeks. Please let me know if you don't want to be involved in said update and I will remove you from the list and then resent you forever. Just so you know.
As an American, I tend to feel that culturally we can hold our liquor. It turns out that I am wrong. The boozefiends in Oxford would put any tequila soaked UVA frat boy to shame. In part this is because they have, over the past several hundred years, developed a culture conducive to concealing alcoholism and in part it is because they don't appear to actually do any studying. Through minimal research and shoddy investigation, I have concluded that most of an Oxford education comes from chatting about world issues at a pub over 'a pint,' which is what the British call a beer.
The last time I was in the UK was when I was fifteen and so it was fun to rediscover the silly words that the British continue to use for things. 'Pint' it turns out, is just the beginning. There is also 'Snog,' which I assume is some sort of animal, and 'knickers,' which is probably a sport. I'd ask about these terms, but over the years I have learned that willful ignorance of foreign culture is a big part of our American national identity, so I am just going to stick with making assumptions.
Willa, my sister, has fallen fully into the culture of drinking 'pints' with friends and has - I can only assume through this extensive boozery - become uncomfortably smart. As her older brother, one of my responsibilities is to always be right whenever I am having an argument with her, and she is making that much harder. Fortunately, I still had trusty old comebacks like 'shut up' and 'I know you are but what am I' to rely on and before she could become too smart, I managed to escape to South Africa where I can nurse my ignorance in comfort.
I am staying here with two sisters that I knew in high school. The eldest, Birgit, was my classmate in eighth grade and has since gone on to study history and South African tourism. This is, obviously, convenient since she knows a lot about history... and South African tourism.
We spent the first couple of days here - this may become a theme in these updates - drinking heavily. South Africans, too, take a great pride in an ability to seriously damage their livers. On two separate occassions, I have been told of a South African man pulled over a few years ago with a blood alcohol level that the police said made him legally dead.
Unlike the Oxford folks, the South Africans have more traditional reasons for drinking: their country is a mess right now. They will be the first to tell you this, and most of them actually take a strange pride in what a complete civic disaster their society is turning into. Apart from having the highest percentage of AIDS infected people in all of Africa, the country is also number one in the world for car hijackings. Their vice-president (and we think we have good scandals) was recently indicted on rape charges; their are still Afrikaans clusters of the country where apartheid is the de-facto way of life; and all of the native creatures here want to kill you.
Birgit told me that the police here encourage women driving at night not to stop at red lights for fear of carjackings, and police in certain parts of the country encourage homeowners to shoot intruders on sight and then fire a second shot in order to later tell the courts they fired a warning. There are also some amusing, though probably useless, signs that warn that certain highway exits are 'hijacking hotspots.'
On my second day here, Birgit took me to the Apartheid museum, which - at least in terms of how you feel after visiting - is remarkably similar to a Holocaust museum. A quick history: South Africa is a hugely divided nation. There are a dozen official languages here, and the cultures vary hugely from place to place. Among the whites here, most are either English or Afrikaans (descendents of Dutch settlers). The apartheid government was generally administrated by the Afrikaans.
Now that apartheid has ended, many of the Afrikaans have reacted the way some Southeners reacted at the end of segregation, i.e. by turning to white supremacy groups. To be fair, many of them have also moved on, but those who haven't are surprisingly willing to admit to things that would be completely socially unacceptable in the US. I have, for example, met two very open Nazi sympathizers here (the line between white supremacy and Naziism is here, as elsewhere, somewhat vague), one of whom lives next door to the apartment I am staying in and who, Birgit informs me, has a large and prominent Swatzstika displayed in his living room.
Yesterday, we went to some very old caves - the Sterkfoontein (possibly misspelled) caves. Sterkfoontein (literally 'strong fountain') is more famous for its insane asylum than for the caves though, so following the signs we accidentally ended up there, but then quickly found our way again and got a tour of the caves. The caves are where scientists found the earliest human fossils ever found. This fact was very impressive the first time the tour guide mentions it and less so each subsequent time. The trick is, of course, that regardless of what was discovered there, the caves are, essentially, caves. They don't really look any more anthropological than caves anywhere else, probably because scientists have removed all the fossils. But we did get to wander through the caves for a while and, as caves go, they were very nice caves. The guide said some other things about the caves, but most of the time I was dwelling on the fact that we were going through very spooky caves that were right next to an insane asylum and that if I were a pathological killer interred at said insane asylum and I managed to escape, I would probably hide in these caves. Then I thought that if I were to hide around one of the corners in the caves and jump out at Birgit she might think that I was an escaped pathological killer who had chosen to hide in the caves and then kill unsuspecting tourists.
For some reason Birgit was angry with me on the car ride home, but other than that the caves trip was a general success.
But I'm losing track of my point here: my point is, of course, to terrify my parents that I am going to do something foolish in this perilous place and kill myself. We are going on a road trip in a couple of minutes, but Mom and Dad here are a couple last minute promises: I won't get more than one or two souvenir blood transfusions here, I'll only sleep with the cleanest looking of the truckstop prostitutes, and I'll be sure to bring back a few souvenir photos of me punching hippos.
For the rest of you: be well and keep me posted of your whereabouts. I'll be checking e-mail somewhat regularly and will send another update in a week or two. Cheers,
Nick
News from the Trauner campaign
We are reaching the critical weeks when the only substitute for sleep is beer. So tonight we will need lots.
I have picked out a 40 ounce container of Olde English, which I am fairly certain is neither 'Olde' nor English, but will suffice for the moment. The task at hand is to adhere 2000 3" x 7" campaign door cards with stickers that declare the time and station the first of two debates between the candidates for Wyoming's lone seat in the US house of Representatives. Then we will hole punch each card and thread a rubber band through the hole. It is potentially mind numbing work, so we are preemptively numbing our minds.
Of course, the first of the two debates is not actually the first of the two debates. Life goes slow in the nation's least-populated state, so the producers of the debate decided they would record it a week ago on October 15th, but then air it just before the election on November 4th. The assumption is that nothing dramatic will happen between the taping and the broadcast, which is probably not unfair. Except that something dramatic did happen.
I have now, by the way, reached the end of week three of my tenure on the Gary Trauner for Congress campaign.
Here are the basics: We are down by seven points - 44% to 37% - to a candidate with a disapproval rating of 45%. This is, according to poll nuts in DC, a very tight race.
For those of you looking for a reason to root for us in this race, let me give you a few:
1. We are running an ultra-positive campaign. We have yet to run an attack ad. 2. Gary knocked on 15,000 doors statewide and talked with a lot of people. 3. Gary pretty much agrees with you on whatever particular issue you care about. 4. Gary is Jewish and maybe you are too.
Last week we knocked on the door of a Pentacostal and he explained to Gary how important it was that people forgive the Jews for killing Christ. Gary agreed with him on this issue.
My position on the campaign has been as a driver, though I am too proud to put this on my resume. I have suggested the title of 'sidekick.' I bought some sweet cowboy boots to fit the part. Officially, Gary disapproves and has title authority. But I'm writing my own resume and I'm betting nobody checks.
'Sidekicking' mostly involves driving - so you can see Gary's point - but there are other important duties. For example: I help prepare Gary for the debates ("30 seconds: what's your favorite type of Sandwich and how does it matter to the country?"), I write drafts of speeches ("I am here to say that Wyoming needs a representative who is willing to sit down and have a sandwich with people"), and I keep us on schedule ("Can we stop for a sandwich when we get to Rawlins?").
I also listen to Gary talk about campaigning in Wyoming and the characters he has met. He has a disconcerting habit of comparing people to rodents. "That guy is a total Gerbil," he will say or "He's a complete Hamster." I have no idea what he means. I also have no idea if it's positive or negative. Maybe this is Wyoming code for something.
Mom once had a friend who came back from a week in France after a lifetime in the US and picked up her ski poles and said "How you say in English 'les batons'?" I hope I don't do this with Wyoming. If I refer to someone as a Guinnea pig, I hope my friends have the kindness to beat me into juice and then tell me that they have no idea what I'm talking about.
Two days ago, we had the second of two debates, which, of course, will appear to be the first of two debates. Our opponent, six term incumbent Barbara Cubin, is - and I don't speak for the campaign in any way here - a vicious hag who probably has bat wings and webbed feet. She has yet to run a positive ad about herself and while I detest a rumormonger, I am willing to forgive him if he is me. So I'll throw a few of the juicy ones out there:
First, Barbara Cubin baked penis-shaped cookies for the Wyoming legislature. A burly union man told me this at a party and I thought he was coming on to me. But it turns out it's true.
Second, she played 'guess whose crotch' with the same legislature. Somehow she printed color photos of every male legislator's crotch and then made everyone guess which photo belonged to who.
Third, for those of you obsessed with substance, she has consistently voted for basically everything American-ruining and horrible you could name including death-to-the-environment bills, tax cuts to the uber-wealthy, and Clay Aiken.
The campaign has been fighting this freakish creature for 10 months now and it has been a surprisingly uphill battle. Wyoming runs 2-to-1 Republican with fewer independents than Democrats, so if everyone in the state voted and everyone who wasn't a Republican voted Democrat, the Republicans would still win in a landslide.
I mentioned something dramatic happened and here it is: We have run an optimistic, positive, issue-driven campaign that we get constant admiration for. Nonetheless, however brilliantly we campaign, there is no substitute for a brutish and stupid opponent. Yesterday Barbara Cubin told the libertarian candidate, a veteran in a wheelchair who cannot move anything below his neck, "if you weren't in that chair I would slap your face." Though I am by no means a strategist, I am guessing this was a bad move. __
The beer has kicked in now. It's midnight and we have rubber-banded the bulk of the flyers. Gary has left me in Casper for a few days to help with field work while he fundraises elsewhere.
I will be walking from door to door for the next few days to encourage voters to come out for us. I suppose it's possible that people don't pick up on Cubin threatening a paraplegic and that they will still vote for her, but things certainly look rosier right now than they did a few days ago.
In the meantime, my head has numbed and I am beginning to feel the pull of sleep. Sure it's early. Sure, I am young and theoretically hardy, but my eyelids are drifting and that means time for bed. I guess that makes me kind of pathetic, maybe even inadequately devoted to my cause. Hell, you might say I'm a bit of a hamster.
Oh God, it's started.