Jamitto and Charm followed me back from Utah so that we could all hang out in Austin for a few days. As is customary, as soon as we got off the plane, we immediately went for Mexican food, in this case tacos. In my opinion, the best tacos around are made with barbacoa. Barbacoa is made by taking a cow’s head, baking it slowly for many hours and then scraping off and shredding the meat. Add a bit of salt and you’re in business. Barbacoa tacos are elegant in their simplicity and they epitomize everything a taco should be: a big pile of greasy meat barely contained by a tortilla. In recent years, restaurants like Chipolte have been championing the burrito as the basic unit of Mexican food. I got to say, I cannot condone the burrito. Sure, they’re nice in a pinch, when no other Mexican food is available, but they should be eschewed whenever possible. They get thing wrong right from the start with their big, torso-sized flour tortillas. I mean what the hell? First off, tortillas are mode of corn, end of story (well, actually, they’re made of masa, ground up corn that’s been soaked in lye). Secondly, tortillas should only be about the size of your hand. I don’t want a freaking edible blanket here or some kind of sleeping bag for meat. The tortilla is supposed to be a small platform on which meat rests. The meat should be barely contained by the tortilla (if you two opposite ends of the tortilla together, your taco is definitely questionable) and the whole unit should have very precarious structural integrity. Your best tacos fall about after you’ve eaten about ¾ of them. They’re finger food, but their not dainty. Your hands should be covered in grease and salsa by the end, and there should be a serious danger of ruining your shirt. Mexican food is not for the faint of heart, you have to be willing to get down and dirty. My favorite taco joint, La Mexicana, knows how to do it right and we visited it at least three times while Charm and Jamitto where in town. Its part restaurant, part bakery, part grocery store, part Western Union office, and part jeweler. On top off all that, it’s open 24 hours. You really couldn’t ask for anything else in a commercial establishment.
Charm and Jamitto’s visit, indeed much of my time in Ausin in general, was focused around eating. I continually ran into a problem resulting from my eating habits in Vanuatu. In Vanuatu, I generally eat only one actual meal per day (sometimes less) and I really only get a good meal, like one that I’m actually excited to eat, maybe once a week. This means, that when good food presents itself, I eat as much of it as humanly possible. We’re talking like eating myself to the point of immobility. Afterwards, I pass out on the floor and sleep for several hours. Now, I found it difficult to rid myself of this habit while I was in the US, which led to a problem because basically every meal I was eating was a good meal, so I was gorging myself three times a day and spending most of the rest of the time in a food coma. I also kept forgetting that, in the US, people expect you to do things after eating, so I often found myself trying to do such things as carry on a conversation, run errands, or drive while my eyelids were tending towards shut. I kept reminding myself to not eat as much at the next meal, but it never sunk in.
At the end of the week Ben, another friend from college, joined us in Austin and the four of us made a pilgrimage to Lockhart. Lockhart is a small town about a 45 minute drive from Austin and is home to some of the best barbecue in the world. Lockhart is a city devoted entirely to barbecue and the perfection of barbecuing technique. For many decades, Lockhart had been home to a pair of barbecue restaurants, each excellent and each owned by a rival family totally obsessed with barbecue. A little while back, there was a feud inside of the families related to some obscure nuance of barbecuing technique, which led to a schism and the establishment of a third barbecue restaurant owned by a splinter group of on of the original families. The net result is that there are now three excellent barbecue joints crowded into a town that otherwise has very little to recommend it. My personal favorite of the three is Smitty’s, which is where I directed my guests.
Upon entering Smitty’s, one is immediately struck by a wall of suffocating heat. This is due to the two giant smoking fires burning continually behind the counter. Sometimes, when the line is especially long, it snakes in front of one of these fires and one is forced to wait in the sweltering heat until the line progresses sufficiently for you to move into the clear. The serving counter is a plain wooden deal adorned only with a pair of scales and pair of cash registers. Directly behind this is a huge wooden chopping block for the slicing of meat. Behind this are the two large brick smokers, brick boxes with metal grates in them to hold the meat. The smoke from the smoking fires is drawn up through the boxes and vented through metal chimneys on the roof. The brick smokers are covered with large, hinged metal plates whose handles are connected to counterweight systems on the ceiling, which prevent them from slamming shut when opened to remove meat. The brick walls behind the smokers are covered in a thick layer of black soot. In some places the soot is so thick that it forms soot stalactites clinging to the ceiling or walls. When the smokers are opened, they reveal a cornucopia of briskets, ribs, and sausages. The counters are manned by a team of very sweaty guys whose t-shirts all sport too many grease stains to count. You order your food by the pound and it is presented to you on a sheet of pink butcher paper. Plates are for the weak. Attached to the serving room is a school cafeteria style eating area with tables and chair which, thankfully, is air conditioned. They’ve used their century of barbecue experience well here, and the brisket is melt-in-your-mount tender and greasy, the ribs have just enough seasoning on them to compliment their natural porky flavor, and the sausage is loose packed, spicy, and wonderful.
After we’d eaten enough me to become immobile, we were slated to attend my brother’s 13th birthday party. Apparently, paintball has taken hold as the party activity of choice among middle school boys. Paintball is one of the primal sports which appeals to everyone’s suppressed desire to shoot each other in the face. Although the concept sounds like the kind of thing that a bunch of middle-aged guys came up with one weekend while drinking beer and decided to assemble in their garage, the level of technology involved is a little ridiculous. Paint is encased in plastic capsules of a standard diameter (the manufacture of which is probably not trivial) and propelled through a barrel using compressed carbon dioxide. It’s a decidedly expensive sport to be pursued by middle schoolers with no source of income.
We checked in and were equipped with guns and face mask and led out to the court. My brother and his friends had already been playing for a while, but were excited at the prospect of having some larger people to shoot at. Now, being hit with a plastic ball full of paint isn’t entirely painless. This divides paintballers into two distinct groups: those hesitant to get hit and those not. I’d been paintballing a few times before when I was in high school, during which I generally fell into the former category. Now, however, having gotten a bit bigger and lived in the bush for a year, getting hit with a paintball didn’t seem like that huge a deal. My guests tended to agree with this sentiment as well, so the four of us had a good time charging startled middle schoolers, a strategy that work reasonably well because it’s intimidating, and also because paintball guns aren’t particularly accurate.
After paintballing, we cleaned up and headed to a restaurant called Chuy’s, a Mexican place which, for some reason, decided to go with a 1950’s Elvis theme. They serve excellent Mexican Martinis, which are basically margaritas with olives in them. They are awesome, not so much because of the olives, but because you get about three margaritas worth in one order. After dinner, we headed to 6th Street, where Austin keeps all of its bars and clubs. It was a scene remarkably like college, except everyone was a little older, thus making everyone look more ridiculous when they’ve had too much to drink. It was nice to be with college friends again, but it was somewhat short-lived. Jamitto and Charm had only been able to make it for a week, and Ben only a couple of nights, so everyone took off Sunday afternoon. The price, I suppose, of having a real job as opposed to living on an island in the South Pacific.
My vacation home ended a little over a week later and, as vacations often do, it felt too short. Being in Austin just felt so good. It was hard to put my finger on, what, exactly, I found most appealing about it, but it just felt like home. Despite my year in the jungles, I was still a city boy at heart and I knew I’d be glad to return to the US and to Austin the following year at the end of my service.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Home for the Holidays Part 3: Skiing
On New Year’s day I flew to Slat Lake City to do some skiing with Charm and Jamitto, two friends from college. I’d last been skiing some seven years prior in Switzerland. We were in Switzerland for a month because of my Dad’s work and, while my Mom thought of skiing to be basically the opposite of everything she enjoys, my Dad and I thought it somewhat criminal to leave without skiing at least once, so we drove to a resort a few hours outside of Zurich, rented some skis, and asked directions to the easy slopes (my Dad learned to ski in college, but my experience was essentially zero). We were directed to a lift that ascended a mountain so huge and foreboding that I imaged I could see the remains of some of Hannibal’s ill-fated Carthaginians lying just beneath the snow. In my first five minutes of skiing I knocked over two people and almost went off a cliff, and so it was decided that I would walk the rest of the way down. This proved to be one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. In a second attempt, we arranged for ski lessons from a Swiss lady who spoke English like the Nazis always do in World War 2 movies. This had the advantage of making her at least as intimidating as the slope I was asked to go down, so I learned pretty quickly. Still, there’s only so much you can learn in a day and skiing became more or less associated with fear in my memory. Thus, it was with some apprehension that I accepted the invitation to attempt the sport again.
It was night when I arrived in Salt Lake City. Charm and Jamitto met me at the airport and we drove to a ski shop to rent equipment for the following day. I sat down on a char and was immediately asked a lot of questions that I didn’t understand by some very energetic staff. My friends filled in the answers for me and soon I was in procession of a pair of skis, boots, and poles. We headed back to Charm’s house where her parents had prepared a gigantic feast for us. Some of the highlights included lamb ribs, king crab legs, and some kind of spicy vegetable with chicken. Also in attendance were a couple sweet potatoes which I avoided on the grounds that I’d been eating them nonstop for the past year.
Salt Lake City is build in a valley between two mountain ranges. The ranges in the western US are newer than those in the east and thus haven’t been exposed to the weathering effects of wind and rain for as long. This makes them jagged and steep as opposed to smoothing and rolling. Salt Lake City thus appears to be surrounded by row after row of jagged teeth, like the jaws of a shark. If one drives down into the city from the mountains during the night, the glittering city lights seem in danger of being swallowed up by a giant, gaping maw.
The advantage of living inside of a massive stony mouth is that it gives easy access to mountain sports. This, it was only about a 20 minute drive the following morning to the ski resort. We managed to get there around 10 o’clock, pretty impressively early for a group of twenty-somethings who tend to sleep until noon. We donned our ski gear and I immediately felt an awkwardness that can only come from having five foot long metal poles attached to your feet. I was heartily unconvinced that this was in any way superior to the more usual foot-sized shoes that had been serving me so well for so many years.
However, several things had changed since the last time I’d attempted skiing: I was bigger, stronger, more coordinated, and I had a vastly better knowledge of physics. Therefore, as opposed to being more or less scared out of my wits the whole time, I found I learned fairly quickly. After about half and hour of being coached through some basics on a small hill served by a tow rope, Jamitto and Charm decided I was ready for the real mountains. Midway through the day, I realized I was actually enjoying myself.
Towards the end of each day, it became apparent that, although I’d mastered the various mechanical principals involved in skiing pretty well, the principals of thermodynamics were still a little beyond me. That is to say, I was getting cold. Having not used my winter gear for quite a long time, a lot of it had managed to hide itself quite cleverly in various places around my house, and so I had arrived in Salt Lake City a little skimpy on the clothing. Fortunately, Charm’s family had a large box filled with extra winter clothing which I was free to browse through. Not so fortunately, most of these clothes were obviously meant to be worn by girls. And so I ended up hitting the slopes sporting periwinkle blue gloves and a hat crowned with a giant poof ball. I was quite alright with this. Much like pizza, there are two distinct styles of winter dress: New York style and Chicago style. New York style contends that the most important principal is looking good. This style is responsible for such things as the matching hat and gloves, the form-fitting coat that compliments one’s figure, and the designer sweater. It’s practiced by people who have never had to shovel snow out of their driveway or use de-icer on the car locks, people who have never REALLY been outside during the winter (ie: residents of New York City). People in Chicago have more sense. In the Midwest, it gets COLD. And not the cute it’s-snowing-out-let’s-go-build-a-snowman kind of cold, we’re talking I-hope-I-don’t-die-of-frostbite-on-the-way-to-the-mailbox cold. Winter is a struggle for survival, and in such struggles one cannot afford to be constrained by the frivolities of fashion, you just have to pile on every piece of clothing you can get your hands on. That giant down coat that makes you look like a sumo wrestler? At least you’re a warm sumo wrestler. Plaid sweater from the attic that smells kind of funny? Throw it on. One of those giant #1 hands they sell at football games? Do what you have to do. Thus is was with a degree of satisfaction that I surveyed the stylishly dressed skiers around me. I know their secret. I know behind those fashionable good looks you’re freezing your asses off.
Unfortunately, in the evenings, I was freezing my ass off as well. It became suddenly blindly clear why the resort shut down at 4:30: after that it’s just too damn cold. The last few rides up the lifts I cursed the slowness to the ridiculous machines and swore as the wind found chinks in my armor of warmth and knifed into my skin. Every stall of the lift became unacceptably long and I wondered why it was that, while I was in Vanuatu, I’d so longed to be cold. Each day it was a miniature blessing to call it quits and head back to the car, where I’d struggle to unclip my ski boots with my frozen and useless fingers, pack up the gear and get my hands in front of the car’s heater. Of course the nice thing about being out in the cold, is that it really gets your appetite up, which was good because Charm’s family was about as obsessed with food as mine is. Every meal was delightfully massive and over the course of the weekend we demolished steaks and oysters, sushi and barbecue (brought by me from Texas), hot-pot, and dim sum. All in all, an excellent vacation.
It was night when I arrived in Salt Lake City. Charm and Jamitto met me at the airport and we drove to a ski shop to rent equipment for the following day. I sat down on a char and was immediately asked a lot of questions that I didn’t understand by some very energetic staff. My friends filled in the answers for me and soon I was in procession of a pair of skis, boots, and poles. We headed back to Charm’s house where her parents had prepared a gigantic feast for us. Some of the highlights included lamb ribs, king crab legs, and some kind of spicy vegetable with chicken. Also in attendance were a couple sweet potatoes which I avoided on the grounds that I’d been eating them nonstop for the past year.
Salt Lake City is build in a valley between two mountain ranges. The ranges in the western US are newer than those in the east and thus haven’t been exposed to the weathering effects of wind and rain for as long. This makes them jagged and steep as opposed to smoothing and rolling. Salt Lake City thus appears to be surrounded by row after row of jagged teeth, like the jaws of a shark. If one drives down into the city from the mountains during the night, the glittering city lights seem in danger of being swallowed up by a giant, gaping maw.
The advantage of living inside of a massive stony mouth is that it gives easy access to mountain sports. This, it was only about a 20 minute drive the following morning to the ski resort. We managed to get there around 10 o’clock, pretty impressively early for a group of twenty-somethings who tend to sleep until noon. We donned our ski gear and I immediately felt an awkwardness that can only come from having five foot long metal poles attached to your feet. I was heartily unconvinced that this was in any way superior to the more usual foot-sized shoes that had been serving me so well for so many years.
However, several things had changed since the last time I’d attempted skiing: I was bigger, stronger, more coordinated, and I had a vastly better knowledge of physics. Therefore, as opposed to being more or less scared out of my wits the whole time, I found I learned fairly quickly. After about half and hour of being coached through some basics on a small hill served by a tow rope, Jamitto and Charm decided I was ready for the real mountains. Midway through the day, I realized I was actually enjoying myself.
Towards the end of each day, it became apparent that, although I’d mastered the various mechanical principals involved in skiing pretty well, the principals of thermodynamics were still a little beyond me. That is to say, I was getting cold. Having not used my winter gear for quite a long time, a lot of it had managed to hide itself quite cleverly in various places around my house, and so I had arrived in Salt Lake City a little skimpy on the clothing. Fortunately, Charm’s family had a large box filled with extra winter clothing which I was free to browse through. Not so fortunately, most of these clothes were obviously meant to be worn by girls. And so I ended up hitting the slopes sporting periwinkle blue gloves and a hat crowned with a giant poof ball. I was quite alright with this. Much like pizza, there are two distinct styles of winter dress: New York style and Chicago style. New York style contends that the most important principal is looking good. This style is responsible for such things as the matching hat and gloves, the form-fitting coat that compliments one’s figure, and the designer sweater. It’s practiced by people who have never had to shovel snow out of their driveway or use de-icer on the car locks, people who have never REALLY been outside during the winter (ie: residents of New York City). People in Chicago have more sense. In the Midwest, it gets COLD. And not the cute it’s-snowing-out-let’s-go-build-a-snowman kind of cold, we’re talking I-hope-I-don’t-die-of-frostbite-on-the-way-to-the-mailbox cold. Winter is a struggle for survival, and in such struggles one cannot afford to be constrained by the frivolities of fashion, you just have to pile on every piece of clothing you can get your hands on. That giant down coat that makes you look like a sumo wrestler? At least you’re a warm sumo wrestler. Plaid sweater from the attic that smells kind of funny? Throw it on. One of those giant #1 hands they sell at football games? Do what you have to do. Thus is was with a degree of satisfaction that I surveyed the stylishly dressed skiers around me. I know their secret. I know behind those fashionable good looks you’re freezing your asses off.
Unfortunately, in the evenings, I was freezing my ass off as well. It became suddenly blindly clear why the resort shut down at 4:30: after that it’s just too damn cold. The last few rides up the lifts I cursed the slowness to the ridiculous machines and swore as the wind found chinks in my armor of warmth and knifed into my skin. Every stall of the lift became unacceptably long and I wondered why it was that, while I was in Vanuatu, I’d so longed to be cold. Each day it was a miniature blessing to call it quits and head back to the car, where I’d struggle to unclip my ski boots with my frozen and useless fingers, pack up the gear and get my hands in front of the car’s heater. Of course the nice thing about being out in the cold, is that it really gets your appetite up, which was good because Charm’s family was about as obsessed with food as mine is. Every meal was delightfully massive and over the course of the weekend we demolished steaks and oysters, sushi and barbecue (brought by me from Texas), hot-pot, and dim sum. All in all, an excellent vacation.
Home for the Holidays Part 2: Christmas
My parents had decided to get my brother a cell phone for Christmas. Apparently all twelve-year-olds have their own cell phones nowadays. I remember longing for a cell phone back when I was in high school before realizing that there wasn't really anyone who I wanted to talk to on the phone anyway. As the youngest responsible adult in the family, I was placed in charged of taking my brother cell phone shopping. My cell phone in Vanuatu is probably the sweetest piece of technology I've ever had the pleasure of owning because it has a little LED flashlight on the end of it. This is immensely useful in Vanuatu because one often finds oneself caught outside after dark without and flashlight and, while I've gotten pretty good at navigating through the pitch blackness, a light is good to have if it's been raining because large puddles can crop up unannounced. The flashlight phone is the cheapest model that Digicel offers and the flashlight is really the only actually useful cellphone extra that I've ever seen (the camera phones seem pretty cool until the realization strikes that no one has a computer to save their pictures on, so all their photos are relegated to the one inch by one inch phone screen. Movies suffer a similar fate), and a lot of people that I've seen purchasing the more expensive models wind up complaining that they lack a flashlight (also, the flashlight model seems to have the preferred version of snake since people are always borrowing my phone at the nakamal to play the game). The flashlight did not seem to be a major selling point in the US, however, as I found my favorite phone stuck in the back corner of the T-Mobile store with all the other neglected devices that no trendy techie would be caught dead with (I think it's time for a retro cell phone fad. I want to see them bringing back those phones from the late 80's that were basically just bricks with antennas sticking out. I know I'd buy one. Anyone else?).
According to my brother, texting is the new calling. Having an actual voice conversation with someone is considered monstrously uncool, it's much more trendy to try and express yourself using 160 character text messages painstakingly typed out on cell phone keypads. We actually use texting a lot in Vanuatu, but this is because we're charged about fifty cents a minute for voice conversations, thus basically all communications, including those regarding serious medical issues, are limited to these quasi-emails (ie: “have skin infect. need ur erythromicin”). In the US, however, I suppose it's evolved as sort of a high tech way of passing notes in class. Also, the introduction of Apple's iAmReallyObcessedWithCheckingMyEmailEverySecondOfTheDayPhone, which came out just before I left for Vanuatu, seems to have kicked off something of a cell-phone-as-a-pocket-computer trend. As we browsed through the store I noted a fair number of phones sporting full QWERTY keyboards whose buttons are conveniently sized for those of us whose fingers have been replaced with toothpicks. Some phones even had computer applications on them, like Microsoft Word or Excel, programs that we apparently loved so much at work that we want to be able to enjoy them on-the-go as well. We weren't looking to turn my brother into a mobile productivity center just yet (I actually noticed a kid while I was home who was probably in grade school, had an iPhone, and was using it to play with a virtual Zippo lighter. Yes. The screen showed a Zippo lighter that you could snap open or closed using the iPhone's motion sensors. I mean, are you supposed to use that in conjunction with a program that allows you to light and smoke virtual cigarettes and then contract virtual lung cancer? Are real Zippo lighters so prohibitively expensive now that it's more cost effective to have your iPhone simulate one?), but a texting-friendly keypad was deemed preferable. Eventually we did find a phone that was sufficiently cool to pass twelve year old standards and sufficiently inexpensive to pass parent standards, but I couldn't help but think about the horror that would be unleashed should Ni-Vans ever get their hands on internet phones. I pictured my inbox crowded with incomprehensible messages in Bislama and a veritable ocean of useless forwards. Perhaps it's best that some countries remain underdeveloped.
On Christmas Eve we drove to San Antonio. Although no one in my family really lives in San Antonio anymore, it's still considered something of a home base for us. Plus, there's this awesome Mexican restaurant there that's always open (like, always. Christmas, New Year's, Wednesdays at 3am, always) that we've been going to forever. It's approximately the size of a supermarket and it's difficult to picture how it could possibly get more tacky, but the food's pretty good and tradition is tradition. We met up with some of my extended family for lunch and then headed out to the Riverwalk. The San Antonio river runs right through the city of San Antonio (makes sense, right) and, as part of a flood control project, a network of walking paths follow the river along beneath the street level. A number of shops and restaurants have opened up along the river as well and now the whole thing is a nice sort of pedestrian commercial area.
On Christmas we had smoked duck, which was probably one of the greatest things in the world. My Dad, in what was perhaps one of the best decisions ever made, had purchased a smoker while I'd been in Vanuatu. It was a barrel style BBQ, a fat cylinder cut in half longways and hinged. Charcoal or wood can be placed directly beneath the grill in the main barrel, but there is also a smaller barrel attached to one side as a firebox, with the smoke from the fire there being drawn up through the main chamber. Thus, one can place meat in the main part of the grill, get a fire going in the firebox, and smoke meat without directly exposing it to the heat. We picked up a couple of ducks from the grocery store and smoked them for about five hours. Ducks are so amazingly greasy that big puddles of drippings were left in the bottom of our grill after cooking them. Despite this, the ducks were not in the least bit dried out and they probably made the best Christmas dinner I'd ever had.
On Friday, we piled into the car again, this time headed for Big Bend, a large national park located on that part of west Texas that sticks out to a point. It was a long drive through a lot of nothing to get there. The US is really amazingly giant. The area that all of Vanuatu covers, not just the land, ocean as well, is about the same size as California. The actual land area is about the size of Connecticut, yet Texas is so vast that you can drive through it for hours and still manage not to get anywhere. I don’t know how the crammed so much nothing into one state. Our car devoured miles of scrubby desert at an alarming rate, but always there seemed to be an endless expanse of it ahead. Once we stopped for gas at a filling station in the middle of nowhere. I mean that quite literally: just a gas station (not even an attached convenience store or McDonalds) on a patch of desert surrounded on all sides with nothing but more desert for at least 30 miles. I believe the attendant there probably had one of the loneliest jobs on the planet.
As we exited central Texas and entered west Texas, flat expanses of lonely desert gave way to hilly expanses of lonely desert. Finally, after about eight hours of riving, we arrived in the town of Terlingua, where we would be staying for the next few nights. My parents had arranged for a small condo unit which was situated on a hill amongst other small condo units. The area was a collection of short, knobby hills looking like overly large gopher mounds. Each hill had a solitary structure (presumably a condos) perched on it and they were all connected by a gravel road that ran along the valley between the small hills. It seemed like an excellent setting for some sort of Sci-Fi/horror movie involving the sudden arrival of a small number of otherworldly visitors who, wouldn’t you know it, have nothing better to do than devour the brains of unsuspecting people. The only possible problem would be that, this being Texas, everyone and their mother has a gun and the good sense to shoot anything scary and otherworldly-looking instead of blindly blundering into obviously monster-infested caves/basements/craters like lemmings over a cliff.
Not surprisingly, Terlingua is host to a ghost town. Apparently, some time ago, a valuable resource was discovered in this particular piece of desert wasteland and a number of people, who would otherwise never consider living on such undesirable real estate, were enticed to move to the area and then equally enticed to leave once the resource was depleted. This ghost town, rather than becoming infested with ghosts and demons, instead became infested with hippies (some may argue that this is basically the same thing). Combined with the opening of the nearby national park, Terlingua is now something of a tourist attraction.
The thing that struck me first about Terlingua was how dark it got a night. Although I’d only been away from Vanuatu for a few weeks, I’d already forgotten how dark it can be when you’re not in a city. Ironically, it’s equally surprising how light it can be at night when a good moon is out, but this weekend there was no moon to be seen. I think we’re all secretly afraid of the dark. How else can one explain our obsession with artificial lighting? Our towns and cities positively glitter at night. Street lights, house lights, window lights, porch lights, car lights all kick on around dusk against the impending departure of the sun. Some will shine all night so that someone wishing to go for a stroll at 4am will not be inconvenienced by having to carry a flashlight. Our world becomes bathing in that strange, yellowish not-quite-natural glow. Instinctively, night in a city FEELS dark, but very little is actually dark, rarely are you outside and unable to walk because you can’t see what’s in front of you. As such, it is possible to forget what darkness is really like and be surprised when it is encountered. In Terlingua (and Vanuatu) it gets dark. This is a darkness that’s heavy and sticky and dense. This is a darkness that takes light and swallows it. Flashlights and even car headlights seem as fragile as candles when placed within it. Fires, houses, cars provide reassuring little spheres of light to be sure, but on the edges the darkness is still visible, coiled and waiting to flood back in once the light is extinguished. Buildings are but little glowing dots against an inky black canvas, little oasis of life amongst a vast abyss of nothingness, little islands that we cling to for comfort and leave only reluctantly. It is a feeling both eerie and comforting to be in a house, restaurant, or nakamal at night at have your world shrunk down to a small area of whatever the establishment’s lights can illuminate. While your neighbors may seem so uncomfortably close in the daylight, now the seem part of a different world. I, for one, like the darkness, for all of its ominous-ness and foreboding. The power of it may seem terrifying if you are trying to oppose it, but I find darkness is much the ocean in this respect: fight it, and it will retaliate most violently, but embrace it and it will embrace you in return.
Big Bend National Park required additional driving from Terlingua in order to reach. On top of its being out of the way, the park itself is huge and takes on the order of hours to drive across. The Rio Grande is the principal attraction in the park, along with a number of canyons and interesting rock formations which it is responsible for carving. The Rio Grande also has the dubious distinction of dividing the US from Mexico. In recent years there’s been a push for tighter border control, and Big Bend has been no exception. Unfortunately for the folks at border control, the Rio Grande is not, as the name suggests, a giant, raging river worthy of dividing nations. The part I saw, at least, more resembled something that might run through a subdivision and be frequented by 8-year-olds in the summer to come splash in. IN previous years, it had been acceptable for Americans to cross the river into Mexico to go purchase tacos and maybe some trinkets, but now this is strictly prohibited. Instead, when nobody is looking (which is most of the time as this is the middle of the desert), Mexicans dash across the river and set up little stands with merchandise and donation boxes on the American side. While we got stern instructions from the rangers not to purchase anything, I guess some people still do, as the practice persists.
Desert landscapes are all very stark. The northern woods are rugged and stately, the tropical jungles and bush are wild and unmanageable, but the desert is stark. In a wood, the trees are tall and proud and they hide wide, glistening meadows, babbling brooks and swamps, all of which a hiker might come upon unexpectedly. In the bush, trees (with thin, ill-thought-out trunks that hardly seem capable of supporting themselves) grow every which way and vines and creepers choked out the sunlight. The bush is not hiked, it is slogged through with ax and machete and it hides nothing at all, just more green to be hacked at. In a desert, the scrubby greenery leaves bear the mountains and valleys and gorges and one is struck at once at how big the world is and how small we are who walk upon itt. A desert is trekked across, it spreads out like a map at your feet and you can see all at once where you started, where you are going, and how much distance separates the two. I think the desert is the most honest of landscapes. While a wood tucks its treasures away and a bush is all chest and no treasure, a desert shows everything to you all at once. To some, this makes them seem bleak and forlorn, but I enjoy the effect. I do not mind to be made small by the vastness of the world around me and, after many months hemmed in by the bush of Vanuatu, it was refreshing to be somewhere genuinely big again.
According to my brother, texting is the new calling. Having an actual voice conversation with someone is considered monstrously uncool, it's much more trendy to try and express yourself using 160 character text messages painstakingly typed out on cell phone keypads. We actually use texting a lot in Vanuatu, but this is because we're charged about fifty cents a minute for voice conversations, thus basically all communications, including those regarding serious medical issues, are limited to these quasi-emails (ie: “have skin infect. need ur erythromicin”). In the US, however, I suppose it's evolved as sort of a high tech way of passing notes in class. Also, the introduction of Apple's iAmReallyObcessedWithCheckingMyEmailEverySecondOfTheDayPhone, which came out just before I left for Vanuatu, seems to have kicked off something of a cell-phone-as-a-pocket-computer trend. As we browsed through the store I noted a fair number of phones sporting full QWERTY keyboards whose buttons are conveniently sized for those of us whose fingers have been replaced with toothpicks. Some phones even had computer applications on them, like Microsoft Word or Excel, programs that we apparently loved so much at work that we want to be able to enjoy them on-the-go as well. We weren't looking to turn my brother into a mobile productivity center just yet (I actually noticed a kid while I was home who was probably in grade school, had an iPhone, and was using it to play with a virtual Zippo lighter. Yes. The screen showed a Zippo lighter that you could snap open or closed using the iPhone's motion sensors. I mean, are you supposed to use that in conjunction with a program that allows you to light and smoke virtual cigarettes and then contract virtual lung cancer? Are real Zippo lighters so prohibitively expensive now that it's more cost effective to have your iPhone simulate one?), but a texting-friendly keypad was deemed preferable. Eventually we did find a phone that was sufficiently cool to pass twelve year old standards and sufficiently inexpensive to pass parent standards, but I couldn't help but think about the horror that would be unleashed should Ni-Vans ever get their hands on internet phones. I pictured my inbox crowded with incomprehensible messages in Bislama and a veritable ocean of useless forwards. Perhaps it's best that some countries remain underdeveloped.
On Christmas Eve we drove to San Antonio. Although no one in my family really lives in San Antonio anymore, it's still considered something of a home base for us. Plus, there's this awesome Mexican restaurant there that's always open (like, always. Christmas, New Year's, Wednesdays at 3am, always) that we've been going to forever. It's approximately the size of a supermarket and it's difficult to picture how it could possibly get more tacky, but the food's pretty good and tradition is tradition. We met up with some of my extended family for lunch and then headed out to the Riverwalk. The San Antonio river runs right through the city of San Antonio (makes sense, right) and, as part of a flood control project, a network of walking paths follow the river along beneath the street level. A number of shops and restaurants have opened up along the river as well and now the whole thing is a nice sort of pedestrian commercial area.
On Christmas we had smoked duck, which was probably one of the greatest things in the world. My Dad, in what was perhaps one of the best decisions ever made, had purchased a smoker while I'd been in Vanuatu. It was a barrel style BBQ, a fat cylinder cut in half longways and hinged. Charcoal or wood can be placed directly beneath the grill in the main barrel, but there is also a smaller barrel attached to one side as a firebox, with the smoke from the fire there being drawn up through the main chamber. Thus, one can place meat in the main part of the grill, get a fire going in the firebox, and smoke meat without directly exposing it to the heat. We picked up a couple of ducks from the grocery store and smoked them for about five hours. Ducks are so amazingly greasy that big puddles of drippings were left in the bottom of our grill after cooking them. Despite this, the ducks were not in the least bit dried out and they probably made the best Christmas dinner I'd ever had.
On Friday, we piled into the car again, this time headed for Big Bend, a large national park located on that part of west Texas that sticks out to a point. It was a long drive through a lot of nothing to get there. The US is really amazingly giant. The area that all of Vanuatu covers, not just the land, ocean as well, is about the same size as California. The actual land area is about the size of Connecticut, yet Texas is so vast that you can drive through it for hours and still manage not to get anywhere. I don’t know how the crammed so much nothing into one state. Our car devoured miles of scrubby desert at an alarming rate, but always there seemed to be an endless expanse of it ahead. Once we stopped for gas at a filling station in the middle of nowhere. I mean that quite literally: just a gas station (not even an attached convenience store or McDonalds) on a patch of desert surrounded on all sides with nothing but more desert for at least 30 miles. I believe the attendant there probably had one of the loneliest jobs on the planet.
As we exited central Texas and entered west Texas, flat expanses of lonely desert gave way to hilly expanses of lonely desert. Finally, after about eight hours of riving, we arrived in the town of Terlingua, where we would be staying for the next few nights. My parents had arranged for a small condo unit which was situated on a hill amongst other small condo units. The area was a collection of short, knobby hills looking like overly large gopher mounds. Each hill had a solitary structure (presumably a condos) perched on it and they were all connected by a gravel road that ran along the valley between the small hills. It seemed like an excellent setting for some sort of Sci-Fi/horror movie involving the sudden arrival of a small number of otherworldly visitors who, wouldn’t you know it, have nothing better to do than devour the brains of unsuspecting people. The only possible problem would be that, this being Texas, everyone and their mother has a gun and the good sense to shoot anything scary and otherworldly-looking instead of blindly blundering into obviously monster-infested caves/basements/craters like lemmings over a cliff.
Not surprisingly, Terlingua is host to a ghost town. Apparently, some time ago, a valuable resource was discovered in this particular piece of desert wasteland and a number of people, who would otherwise never consider living on such undesirable real estate, were enticed to move to the area and then equally enticed to leave once the resource was depleted. This ghost town, rather than becoming infested with ghosts and demons, instead became infested with hippies (some may argue that this is basically the same thing). Combined with the opening of the nearby national park, Terlingua is now something of a tourist attraction.
The thing that struck me first about Terlingua was how dark it got a night. Although I’d only been away from Vanuatu for a few weeks, I’d already forgotten how dark it can be when you’re not in a city. Ironically, it’s equally surprising how light it can be at night when a good moon is out, but this weekend there was no moon to be seen. I think we’re all secretly afraid of the dark. How else can one explain our obsession with artificial lighting? Our towns and cities positively glitter at night. Street lights, house lights, window lights, porch lights, car lights all kick on around dusk against the impending departure of the sun. Some will shine all night so that someone wishing to go for a stroll at 4am will not be inconvenienced by having to carry a flashlight. Our world becomes bathing in that strange, yellowish not-quite-natural glow. Instinctively, night in a city FEELS dark, but very little is actually dark, rarely are you outside and unable to walk because you can’t see what’s in front of you. As such, it is possible to forget what darkness is really like and be surprised when it is encountered. In Terlingua (and Vanuatu) it gets dark. This is a darkness that’s heavy and sticky and dense. This is a darkness that takes light and swallows it. Flashlights and even car headlights seem as fragile as candles when placed within it. Fires, houses, cars provide reassuring little spheres of light to be sure, but on the edges the darkness is still visible, coiled and waiting to flood back in once the light is extinguished. Buildings are but little glowing dots against an inky black canvas, little oasis of life amongst a vast abyss of nothingness, little islands that we cling to for comfort and leave only reluctantly. It is a feeling both eerie and comforting to be in a house, restaurant, or nakamal at night at have your world shrunk down to a small area of whatever the establishment’s lights can illuminate. While your neighbors may seem so uncomfortably close in the daylight, now the seem part of a different world. I, for one, like the darkness, for all of its ominous-ness and foreboding. The power of it may seem terrifying if you are trying to oppose it, but I find darkness is much the ocean in this respect: fight it, and it will retaliate most violently, but embrace it and it will embrace you in return.
Big Bend National Park required additional driving from Terlingua in order to reach. On top of its being out of the way, the park itself is huge and takes on the order of hours to drive across. The Rio Grande is the principal attraction in the park, along with a number of canyons and interesting rock formations which it is responsible for carving. The Rio Grande also has the dubious distinction of dividing the US from Mexico. In recent years there’s been a push for tighter border control, and Big Bend has been no exception. Unfortunately for the folks at border control, the Rio Grande is not, as the name suggests, a giant, raging river worthy of dividing nations. The part I saw, at least, more resembled something that might run through a subdivision and be frequented by 8-year-olds in the summer to come splash in. IN previous years, it had been acceptable for Americans to cross the river into Mexico to go purchase tacos and maybe some trinkets, but now this is strictly prohibited. Instead, when nobody is looking (which is most of the time as this is the middle of the desert), Mexicans dash across the river and set up little stands with merchandise and donation boxes on the American side. While we got stern instructions from the rangers not to purchase anything, I guess some people still do, as the practice persists.
Desert landscapes are all very stark. The northern woods are rugged and stately, the tropical jungles and bush are wild and unmanageable, but the desert is stark. In a wood, the trees are tall and proud and they hide wide, glistening meadows, babbling brooks and swamps, all of which a hiker might come upon unexpectedly. In the bush, trees (with thin, ill-thought-out trunks that hardly seem capable of supporting themselves) grow every which way and vines and creepers choked out the sunlight. The bush is not hiked, it is slogged through with ax and machete and it hides nothing at all, just more green to be hacked at. In a desert, the scrubby greenery leaves bear the mountains and valleys and gorges and one is struck at once at how big the world is and how small we are who walk upon itt. A desert is trekked across, it spreads out like a map at your feet and you can see all at once where you started, where you are going, and how much distance separates the two. I think the desert is the most honest of landscapes. While a wood tucks its treasures away and a bush is all chest and no treasure, a desert shows everything to you all at once. To some, this makes them seem bleak and forlorn, but I enjoy the effect. I do not mind to be made small by the vastness of the world around me and, after many months hemmed in by the bush of Vanuatu, it was refreshing to be somewhere genuinely big again.
Home for the Holidays Part 1: Grocery Stores and Parking Lots
We have an old, red Toyota Camery that my parents gave me to drive when I went to college. It's a 1990, and I vaguely remember my Mom going to buy it when I was four, so it's not quite older than me, but it's a close call. One of the wheel wells is all but rusted away from many years of exposure to the salty winter roads of central Illinois, augmented by the fact that I once steered it into the side of our garage as I was trying to back out into the driveway when I was sixteen and ruined the paint job; my one traffic collision to date. It has three clear glass side windows and one tinted one on the rear passenger side because while driving from New Jersey to Texas after graduation I got a flat on I-35 and, while going around to open the trunk, I realized I'd locked my keys inside the car along with my wallet and cell phone. A rock through the window quickly solved my entry problem, but apparently Toyota doesn't make clear windows for this particular model anymore. The air-conditioner still works, a miracle as it seems the AC is usually the first thing to go in old cars, but only for about thirty minutes at a time. After that, you have to give it a ten to fifteen minute break before trying to switch it back on. For long drives through the Texas desert in summer, this necessitates cranking up the AC to full blast and making the car as unbearably freezing as possible in order to have enough residual coolness to coast through the ten minutes of AClessness. The wiring for the ceiling light came loose a long time ago and one can hear it sliding around in the roof when you take a corner too quickly. And once, when I was driving to college with my friend, the engine overheated just outside of Texarkana because of a coolant leak and we refilled the coolant tank with water taken from the tap of a church retreat and then later emptied some out with a turkey baster to make room for some anti-freeze we'd purchased at Wal-Mart. I believe the turkey baster is still in the trunk. Needless to say, I love this car, and I think my parents do too, although they vehemently deny it. They were supposed to have sold it as soon as I left for Peace Corps, but there it was, still sitting in the driveway, more than a year later. According to my Dad the battery had died, so we took it into the shop to get it replaced so that we could have an extra car while I was in Austin. The trip to the shop revealed some pending problems with the transmission, but the mechanic gave it a couple months before they became critical. This was pretty perfect as I was only going to be in town for about six weeks.
Although the various skill involved with driving returned to me fairly quickly, parking remained something of an issue. I think the parking space gives an interesting insight into US life; parallel white lines that define a culture. The automobile, of course, is a widely recognized American icon, as well it should be. These modern marvels represent a culmination of over a century and a half of engineering work. Chemistry, mechanics, and electronics all come together to form a machine so intricately complicated that nowadays they can only be assembled by other machines. They operate unfailingly for decades and can be repaired by someone with only minimal technical training, and yet we've so streamlined their production that they are affordable to just about everyone and they're so easy to use that we trust them to the hands of even the most dimwitted of sixteen year olds. What is perhaps even more remarkable about these ten foot by five foot iron boxes is that, in some places, there are now so many of the machines that it has become difficult to find places to put them. Hence, the parking space. That these linear dabs of paint mean anything at all to us is in itself kind of strange. I mean, someone paints some lines on some cement and we all, without a second thought, organize our parked cars neatly between them. No one's ever like: “you know, I think I'll park ON the lines today.” Or put up a sign that says “No Parking” and we're all like “OK, no problem, I'll just drive around for another five minutes looking for another spot.” I mean, think about the level of organization that's required to achieve such a system. And how we frown upon those that do not follow the oh-so-holy parking code. I see a truck taking up two spaces outside of a Target and I'm filled with righteous indignation. Someone's back wheel is lying slightly over the line and I'm made angrier than a four-year-old whose brother is encroaching on his side of the car seat.
Parking has even become something of a competition. We take pride in our parking abilities. People brag about how close they manage to park their vehicles outside of Bed, Bath & Beyond. “Dude, you're not going to believe this. That parking lot was totally packed but I got myself a space right in front of the store. I'm talking right by the door!” Right by the door, huh? No shit. We prowl the massive concrete car-scapes outside of Best Buy or Wal-Mart in search of the holy grail: the spot that's just that much closer to the store entrance. We know it's out there somewhere and we will not rest until we've found it. And why? To shave a few tens of yards off of our foot journey? Perhaps. Perhaps we Americans are just so fat and lazy that we can no longer bear to walk the extra distance. While this explanation may appeal to those critical of our automobile-based lifestyle, I think there is more at stake here. In a world where we can no longer prove ourselves by going toe-to-toe with wild bears equipped only with wooden spears, we've found new outlets for our aggression. Backing down and accepting one of those god-forsaken back row spaces does not only increase our walking distance, it's also an admission of inadequacy. Consider: you see someone loading their purchases into the trunk. They've got a coveted third-row parking spot. Suddenly, the area fills with cars, hovering like buzzards over a fresh kill. Traffic backs up in the aisle, everyone watching for the outcome. On one side of the soon-to-be-opening space is a Lexus SUV, on the other is a Ford Expedition. The drivers stare each other down through tinted windows. They're both respectable adults. They probably have kids, perhaps even in the car with them. If they were to meet each other inside of the store whose lot they're circling, they'd no doubt be perfectly cordial and polite. But not here. Here, on this cement battleground, nothing is scared. Here, clothed in their armor of steel and rubber, two apes bare their teeth at each other. It's a contest for dominance of the oldest variety. The winner will have secured his position as leader, while the loser will be forced to go lick his wounds in the rear of the tarmac. And what about those of us that choose to frown upon such practice? I'm a back-of-the-lot kind of guy myself, and I like to think of myself as wiser for abstaining from such parking antics, but perhaps I'm kidding myself. Maybe my unwillingness to participate forever dooms me to some lesser rank of society. In our modern concrete savannah, it's hard to say.
I ended up getting plenty of parking practice, however, as with both my parents and my brother gone during the day to work and school, I was left with a lot of time to explore Austin. The first stop, and perhaps the most frequented during my vacation, was the grocery store. Texas is blessed with a large grocery store chain called H.E.B, which I've been going to with my family ever since I was a little kid and we'd fly to San Antonio for Christmas and browse the isles of said establishment for what seemed like hours, seeking various ingredients for Christmas dinner. No one really seems to know what H.E.B stands for, but a recent ad campaign associates it with the slogan “Here Everything's Better,” an assertion that I can't really argue with. H.E.B has everything a Texas family could ask for: tortillas made in-house, lots of Mexican food, a pretty good beer aisle, and it's open 24 hours. We've been over this before, I know, but I maintain that the grocery store is the single greatest achievement of the western world. It's a wonder, it really is. You approach this mecca of comestibles and the door miraculously slides open for you as you near. You're greeted by a blast of air conditioning or heat, depending on the time year, and (at least in my H.E.B) you're deposited in the produce section. I think we tend to forget this, but most fruits and vegetables have seasons. Take pineapples. In Vanuatu, we have pineapples in November and December. That's it. Want a pineapple in April? Too bad. But in the grocery store it's all there, laid out in front of you. Strawberries, apples (like ten different kinds. Ten kinds of apples!), avocados, oranges, grapes, seven different varieties of lettuce, broccoli, cucumbers, green beans, carrots, fruits and vegetables that I've never heard of. Food is shipped in from all different corners of the globe. Think about how much precision and effort goes into getting a single piece of fruit to a grocery store. The fruit has to be grown and picked, packed and shipped, unpacked and checked and placed on the shelf. Think about how many people are required in the process. Farmers, pickers, packers, truckers, and grocers all deal with the fruit directly, but a myriad of others are involved indirectly as well. Herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers have to be produced, distributed and applied to the plants. Harvesting equipment has to be built and maintained. Trucks have to be built, maintained, and fueled. Shipping routes have to be planned and overseen. A whole tangled, interconnected web of people and institutions, all relying on each other to operate properly, is required for something as simple as bringing a piece of fruit to a store. I think about this and my work in Vanuatu starts to seem just a little absurd. Our society is a staggeringly complicated mess of interlocking parts. Nothing in it exists in a vacuum, everything relies on everything else and the whole interconnected structure was built over a period of centuries. There was no moment of clarity when some guy woke up and was like “Eureka! I've invented technology! It's so simple! I don't know why I didn't think of it before!” There was no trick to it, no great leap forward, just a long trudge through a slow process of development. And now we're trying to fast forward the process for countries farther down the technological ladder, like Vanuatu. We try to hand them things. “Here, have some solar power,” we say or “here, take these medicines,” or “here, this is how bacteria work,” and we try to make such things “sustainable,” hoping that our efforts will have an impact lasting more than just a few months. It's like if aliens showed up in the US and handed us a bunch of gizmos and said “here, here's a bunch of teleportation devices, congratulations you're now a more advanced civilization.” Without any context or foundation to stand on, such infusions of technology or thinking are bound to be short lived. I'm not saying that such a fast forwarding process is necessarily impossible (I have no idea if it's possible or not, actually), but it does seem that it's usually attempted in the wrong way: donations of equipment or grants or training programs that last only a few days. Even the two years that we Peace Corps volunteers commit does next to nothing to chip away at the task. Sometimes I wonder how much thought goes into these international development projects. If this is a task we're going to pursue seriously, it seems like we should take the time to ensure that it's done well.
Although the various skill involved with driving returned to me fairly quickly, parking remained something of an issue. I think the parking space gives an interesting insight into US life; parallel white lines that define a culture. The automobile, of course, is a widely recognized American icon, as well it should be. These modern marvels represent a culmination of over a century and a half of engineering work. Chemistry, mechanics, and electronics all come together to form a machine so intricately complicated that nowadays they can only be assembled by other machines. They operate unfailingly for decades and can be repaired by someone with only minimal technical training, and yet we've so streamlined their production that they are affordable to just about everyone and they're so easy to use that we trust them to the hands of even the most dimwitted of sixteen year olds. What is perhaps even more remarkable about these ten foot by five foot iron boxes is that, in some places, there are now so many of the machines that it has become difficult to find places to put them. Hence, the parking space. That these linear dabs of paint mean anything at all to us is in itself kind of strange. I mean, someone paints some lines on some cement and we all, without a second thought, organize our parked cars neatly between them. No one's ever like: “you know, I think I'll park ON the lines today.” Or put up a sign that says “No Parking” and we're all like “OK, no problem, I'll just drive around for another five minutes looking for another spot.” I mean, think about the level of organization that's required to achieve such a system. And how we frown upon those that do not follow the oh-so-holy parking code. I see a truck taking up two spaces outside of a Target and I'm filled with righteous indignation. Someone's back wheel is lying slightly over the line and I'm made angrier than a four-year-old whose brother is encroaching on his side of the car seat.
Parking has even become something of a competition. We take pride in our parking abilities. People brag about how close they manage to park their vehicles outside of Bed, Bath & Beyond. “Dude, you're not going to believe this. That parking lot was totally packed but I got myself a space right in front of the store. I'm talking right by the door!” Right by the door, huh? No shit. We prowl the massive concrete car-scapes outside of Best Buy or Wal-Mart in search of the holy grail: the spot that's just that much closer to the store entrance. We know it's out there somewhere and we will not rest until we've found it. And why? To shave a few tens of yards off of our foot journey? Perhaps. Perhaps we Americans are just so fat and lazy that we can no longer bear to walk the extra distance. While this explanation may appeal to those critical of our automobile-based lifestyle, I think there is more at stake here. In a world where we can no longer prove ourselves by going toe-to-toe with wild bears equipped only with wooden spears, we've found new outlets for our aggression. Backing down and accepting one of those god-forsaken back row spaces does not only increase our walking distance, it's also an admission of inadequacy. Consider: you see someone loading their purchases into the trunk. They've got a coveted third-row parking spot. Suddenly, the area fills with cars, hovering like buzzards over a fresh kill. Traffic backs up in the aisle, everyone watching for the outcome. On one side of the soon-to-be-opening space is a Lexus SUV, on the other is a Ford Expedition. The drivers stare each other down through tinted windows. They're both respectable adults. They probably have kids, perhaps even in the car with them. If they were to meet each other inside of the store whose lot they're circling, they'd no doubt be perfectly cordial and polite. But not here. Here, on this cement battleground, nothing is scared. Here, clothed in their armor of steel and rubber, two apes bare their teeth at each other. It's a contest for dominance of the oldest variety. The winner will have secured his position as leader, while the loser will be forced to go lick his wounds in the rear of the tarmac. And what about those of us that choose to frown upon such practice? I'm a back-of-the-lot kind of guy myself, and I like to think of myself as wiser for abstaining from such parking antics, but perhaps I'm kidding myself. Maybe my unwillingness to participate forever dooms me to some lesser rank of society. In our modern concrete savannah, it's hard to say.
I ended up getting plenty of parking practice, however, as with both my parents and my brother gone during the day to work and school, I was left with a lot of time to explore Austin. The first stop, and perhaps the most frequented during my vacation, was the grocery store. Texas is blessed with a large grocery store chain called H.E.B, which I've been going to with my family ever since I was a little kid and we'd fly to San Antonio for Christmas and browse the isles of said establishment for what seemed like hours, seeking various ingredients for Christmas dinner. No one really seems to know what H.E.B stands for, but a recent ad campaign associates it with the slogan “Here Everything's Better,” an assertion that I can't really argue with. H.E.B has everything a Texas family could ask for: tortillas made in-house, lots of Mexican food, a pretty good beer aisle, and it's open 24 hours. We've been over this before, I know, but I maintain that the grocery store is the single greatest achievement of the western world. It's a wonder, it really is. You approach this mecca of comestibles and the door miraculously slides open for you as you near. You're greeted by a blast of air conditioning or heat, depending on the time year, and (at least in my H.E.B) you're deposited in the produce section. I think we tend to forget this, but most fruits and vegetables have seasons. Take pineapples. In Vanuatu, we have pineapples in November and December. That's it. Want a pineapple in April? Too bad. But in the grocery store it's all there, laid out in front of you. Strawberries, apples (like ten different kinds. Ten kinds of apples!), avocados, oranges, grapes, seven different varieties of lettuce, broccoli, cucumbers, green beans, carrots, fruits and vegetables that I've never heard of. Food is shipped in from all different corners of the globe. Think about how much precision and effort goes into getting a single piece of fruit to a grocery store. The fruit has to be grown and picked, packed and shipped, unpacked and checked and placed on the shelf. Think about how many people are required in the process. Farmers, pickers, packers, truckers, and grocers all deal with the fruit directly, but a myriad of others are involved indirectly as well. Herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers have to be produced, distributed and applied to the plants. Harvesting equipment has to be built and maintained. Trucks have to be built, maintained, and fueled. Shipping routes have to be planned and overseen. A whole tangled, interconnected web of people and institutions, all relying on each other to operate properly, is required for something as simple as bringing a piece of fruit to a store. I think about this and my work in Vanuatu starts to seem just a little absurd. Our society is a staggeringly complicated mess of interlocking parts. Nothing in it exists in a vacuum, everything relies on everything else and the whole interconnected structure was built over a period of centuries. There was no moment of clarity when some guy woke up and was like “Eureka! I've invented technology! It's so simple! I don't know why I didn't think of it before!” There was no trick to it, no great leap forward, just a long trudge through a slow process of development. And now we're trying to fast forward the process for countries farther down the technological ladder, like Vanuatu. We try to hand them things. “Here, have some solar power,” we say or “here, take these medicines,” or “here, this is how bacteria work,” and we try to make such things “sustainable,” hoping that our efforts will have an impact lasting more than just a few months. It's like if aliens showed up in the US and handed us a bunch of gizmos and said “here, here's a bunch of teleportation devices, congratulations you're now a more advanced civilization.” Without any context or foundation to stand on, such infusions of technology or thinking are bound to be short lived. I'm not saying that such a fast forwarding process is necessarily impossible (I have no idea if it's possible or not, actually), but it does seem that it's usually attempted in the wrong way: donations of equipment or grants or training programs that last only a few days. Even the two years that we Peace Corps volunteers commit does next to nothing to chip away at the task. Sometimes I wonder how much thought goes into these international development projects. If this is a task we're going to pursue seriously, it seems like we should take the time to ensure that it's done well.
So……. Cont.
So, my laptop is still broken, but progress has been made on the technology front. I’ve arranged to have a couple of desktop computers from my school’s computer center (which, up until this point, have been sitting in boxes) set up in my house so that I can give little computer classes to interested people in the village. This is, of course, a thinly veiled excuse to get my hands on a computer that I can use whenever I want, but it seems to have worked out well for all parties involved. McKenzie also now has internet access at her office, so what I can do is type anything I want at my computers at home and put them on a USB key and then upload them to the internet whenever I make it down to Litz Litz. Not a bad interim solution and, of course, I have a new keyboard on order from the US which should be getting here in a few weeks. So, all’s well right? Back to blogging! Well, here’s the thing: I don’t think I’m going to continue Life in the Ring of Fire. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, and most practically, my recent technical issues have led to a great backlog of entries which seems pretty daunting and is thus leading to an infinite cycle of procrastination in which I end up writing nothing at all. Secondly, it just doesn’t seem as appealing anymore to write up week-by-week updates of my life. A few weeks into my second year volunteering and things are starting to seem awfully repetitive, the stories are the same, the jokes are the same, and the frustrations are the same. Nothing seems new enough to commit to paper. Finally, I seem to have unintentionally wrapped up Life in the Ring of Fire already. The last entry I posted before my computer stopped working actually closed things up pretty nicely (I thought), so maybe it was meant to be. I’m going to heed the writing on the wall and not force something to continue that should just finish (TV series such as Scrubs, House, and The Office might want to try this). It’s been a pleasure to write Life in the Ring of Fire and I hope all of you found it pleasant to read. Your comments, praises, and critiques have meant the world to me and I thank you for them. I can’t tell you how great it feels to know that things I’ve written are being read and talked about.
That being said, I hope you all will continue reading, because I am certainly not done writing. Rather than try to force a second season of Life in the Ring of Fire, I’m going to start fresh. I’ve written a series of articles about being back in the US for Christmas which I’m going to post in a series called Home for the Holidays. I think I only have five or six issues, so that will just be kind of a short intermission. After that, I’m going to launch a new series called “Yu No Kick” to cover my second year in Peace Corps. I’m going to go for a more open format. Instead of going through what I’ve been doing each week, I’m just going to write about whatever comes to mind. There will still be plenty of stories, I’m sure, as well as a few random thoughts about, say, centipedes, or toilets. I’ll try to keep the one-a-week thing going at the very least, but I might start throwing out two or three issues in a week if I’m feeling adventurous. We’ll see. And by the way, “Yu No Kick” is a Bislama slang term meaning something along the lines of “come on” or “chill out.” For example, if someone doesn’t want to let you buy kava on credit you might say “yu no kick,” meaning “come on man, it’s me, you know I’m good for it.” I hope you all enjoy.
That being said, I hope you all will continue reading, because I am certainly not done writing. Rather than try to force a second season of Life in the Ring of Fire, I’m going to start fresh. I’ve written a series of articles about being back in the US for Christmas which I’m going to post in a series called Home for the Holidays. I think I only have five or six issues, so that will just be kind of a short intermission. After that, I’m going to launch a new series called “Yu No Kick” to cover my second year in Peace Corps. I’m going to go for a more open format. Instead of going through what I’ve been doing each week, I’m just going to write about whatever comes to mind. There will still be plenty of stories, I’m sure, as well as a few random thoughts about, say, centipedes, or toilets. I’ll try to keep the one-a-week thing going at the very least, but I might start throwing out two or three issues in a week if I’m feeling adventurous. We’ll see. And by the way, “Yu No Kick” is a Bislama slang term meaning something along the lines of “come on” or “chill out.” For example, if someone doesn’t want to let you buy kava on credit you might say “yu no kick,” meaning “come on man, it’s me, you know I’m good for it.” I hope you all enjoy.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
So.......
So, as you may have noticed, I haven't updated this blog for a while. I'm sorry to those who rely on this for entertainment (friends) and more so to those who rely on this as a steady assurance that I'm still alive (family). I am back in Vanuatu, but the keyboard on my laptop is broken, thus making writing and posting blog entries somewhat difficult. I have been keeping the blog going on paper, however, which doesn't do you all a lot of good, but rest assured that when I'm able to get regular access to a computer once again, things will be back up and running. Hang in there.
Cheers,
Dan
Cheers,
Dan
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