The Diary of a Mad Wanderer

Roatan Blue

2011-07-29T17:55:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I believe in karma. The world just seems to work that way—you go from the lowest low to the highest high in a matter of days, as if the universe is balancing itself out. My trip to Roatan was like this.

My lowest low was my arrival on Roatan. I hadn’t slept and had been traveling all day. I deposited my scuba gear at the dive shop, saying only the quickest of hellos to Lee and Anita, my old friends and now owners of Enomis Divers in West End. I was so exhausted I was almost twitching. I don’t remember what I said to the people in the shop—I babbled about this and that, throwing dive gear everywhere and feeling an immense state of shock at being back in this place that had once been my home. I even had a beer with my old divemaster buddy Jurgen, but I have no memory of what we talked about, and the beer did nothing to calm my nerves.

As Anita gave me a ride to my old residence hotel, I felt the surreal sense of familiar unfamiliarity, or what the Thais call “same same but different.” The road was still the same pitted sand mess, full of potholes and hell on car suspensions. But the businesses had changed. One popular dance place, where girls used to dance on top of the bar and wear beads, was now boarded up, graffiti scrawled on its yellow columns. The dance floor was now populated by dead leaves, and the tiny shopping plaza next door was deserted as well, the fountain where children had played emptied and dry.

Other businesses had changed ownership, such as my old dive shop, Pura Vida—now called the Splash Inn. My favorite shack for Honduran food was gone, replaced by a store selling tourist trinkets. Same same, but different.

At my old residence hotel, the Fort Saphrey, things were looking bad. I knew they had fired Avonell, the former manager. Avonell had kept the rooms clean and in good shape, and without her things had gone from bad to worse. When I walked into my room, the sheets were covered in insect debris from the ceiling, and there were no lightbulbs. The new manager, a large black man who spoke with a slow Roatan drawl, told me he’d “take care of it,” and proceeded to shake off the sheets and put them back on the bed. He got me two lightbulbs, at least, and sent a handyman to “fix” the air conditioning, which wasn’t working, either.

I was really only there to look for Buddy, my old cat. I knew if he was alive he’d be at the hotel, since cats are territorial. Right away, I saw “Scaredy” and “Princess”, two of the cats that had been kittens when I lived there. But Mamacat and Buddy didn’t come when I called, which was a very bad sign.

Sitting on the porch in front of another room was a very drunk, very obnoxious individual. He came over and sat next to me, and he stank so strongly of stale beer I wanted to ask him to move away.

“My name’s Luis. Luis Wilkinson,” he says.

“Amber,” I say, not really in the mood for this crap right now. I want to call again for Buddy, but I feel like an idiot doing it with this guy around. Plus, when I called before the cats were scared away by the manager’s dog, so I have to wait for the dog to go away.

“Amber….?” the drunk guy says, implying that he wants me to finish the sentence.

“Amber Foster. What do you need my last name for, anyway?” At this point, I’m annoyed AND exhausted. Nothing, nothing is going as planned.

“I’m just that kind of guy,” Drunk Guy says, watching me as I take cat food out of my bag and feed Scaredy, who is more brave than last time I’d been here. Scaredy looks like she’s recently had a litter of kittens, which she must have hidden around on the roof somewhere like Mamacat used to do.

I ask Drunk Guy how long he’s lived here, and he says over a year.

“Have you seen an orange and white cat around? Really friendly?” I ask, trying to be nonchalant.
“Oh, yeah, I know which one you’re talking about. I haven’t seen that cat in over a year.” My heart sinks.

Then Drunk Guy begins a long rant about how “cats are disgusting creatures, man. They shit inside the house. Who wants a big box of shit in the house? Nah, man, dogs are for me. It’s more natural.”

By this time, I want to thunk him on the head with a box of cat shit, but instead I say, “You’re barking up the wrong tree, dude. You’re talking to a cat lover. I’ll see ya around.” I go in my room and close the door behind me.

The room is stifling hot, even with the a/c running full blast, and I have a moment of complete depression. I mean, what am I doing here? This was all a huge mistake. I wasted a bunch of money to come to a place I don’t even like. This was bad, very bad.

When I get back to the room after a quick dinner, I turn on the bathroom light to see cockroaches scurrying away between the cracks in the floorboards. Just to be safe, I move the bed away from the wall and create a little “island” before falling asleep, thinking only: I have to get out of here.

The next two days were mostly spent looking for Buddy. Anita was a huge help—she knows all the locals, and loves cats, and so she gave me courage to ask people if they’d seen him. We showed Buddy’s picture around, and talked to the cat-lovers around town. We got one lead from the lady who owns the Lobster Pot Restaurant next door to Fort Saphrey. She always feeds the cats, and suggested I come by in the evening when she has customers, because the cats like to beg at the tables.

I found out what happened to Buddy when I went there for dinner on my second night.
I was the only customer at the restaurant, and the young woman who takes care of the cats came over to my table. I asked her about Buddy, and her eyes lit up with recognition.

“Oh yah, I remember that one. He’d be over here beggin’, then I’d here you callin’ ‘im, ‘here kitty!’ and he’d take off like that!” She clapped her hands together, then laughed. “He was real friendly, that one. My daughter loved him, she used to feed him all the time. Then we had a big rain last year. It was a big one! And then a bunch of them cats didn’t come round no more. I don’t know what happened to them.” There had been a massive storm, flooding out whole portions of the beach. She supposed the cats had died, or “wandered off.”

So I sat at the table and fed juicy scraps to Scaredy, one of the last of her clan. I knew then that Buddy was gone. I’d domesticated him, and trained him to be dependent on people, then left him to fend for himself. Even if I’d been able to come back sooner, I would have been too late. I knew
Buddy wouldn’t have left his territory. He was dead. But a little part of me likes to fantasize that someone adopted him, and took him to a loving home.

While asking around about Buddy, I ran into Ronnie, owner of Ronnie’s Barefeet Bar next door to the Fort Saphrey. As it turned out, he had a little apartment that he was planning to rent long term, but the renters wouldn’t be coming in until August. It was brand new, never been lived in, and available for the rest of my stay. We worked out a deal, which worked out great. I got out of “Fort Hellhole” and into proper vacation digs. The place was up on the second floor with a nice view of the sea, and plenty of cool sea breezes coming through at night. I would save a bunch of money not staying in a hotel, and I would be able to cook my own meals. It was perfect.

When I went back to the Fort Saphrey to get my stuff, Drunk Guy knocked on my door, leaning in with one arm propped on the doorframe.

“I’m a doctor, here on the island. So, you know, if you have any kind of emergency, anything happens, I’m your guy,” he says.

I’m thinking simultaneous thoughts of: does this actually work on women? and I don’t believe for a second this creep’s a doctor.

Instead, I say, “What kind of emergency? You planning to injure me in some way or what?”

He waves his hands. “No, no, nothing like that. You know, just, if you need anything, that’s all.”

He stumbles back to his room, and I make my escape, taking one last look around for Buddy, even though I know he’s long gone.

And here is where my story turns from the lowest low to the highest high.

At the dive shop, I was introduced to Han, a dutch dive instructor with an underwater camera, who would be my dive buddy for the length of my stay. Han is a mellow, easygoing guy whose day job is computer science teacher in Holland. In the summers, though, he leaves his wife and job behind and offers his services as “shop helper” at dive shops around the world. He doesn’t ask for money, just the chance to dive and be a part of a shop dynamic.

The main problem I usually have with diving at an unfamiliar shop is that they saddle me with an incompetent divemaster or a buddy who is less experienced than myself. But at Lee and Anita’s shop, I was at a definite advantage—not only did I know all the dive sites, but Lee and Anita trusted me to navigate them on my own, without any assistance. Lee and I did our instructor course together and even worked together at Pura Vida, so he gave me complete autonomy to dive wherever and as long as I wanted. Han came along for the ride and got to do his own fundiving, and since I was more familiar with the dive sites, he spent most of our dives just trailing behind, letting me lead. Honestly, sometimes I forgot the guy was even there! There is nothing better than diving with you, your buddy, and the reef, and not another diver in sight. And the fact that Han was an underwater photographer was the icing on the cake—that way, any time we saw anything cool we’d have a picture to take home as a souvenir.

At the shop, I also met Alejandra, a 23 year old student living in Roatan for a month while working on an outdoor adventure program. She spent a good deal of time hanging out with the rest of us, since she was in limbo, waiting for her rescue course instructor to return from the mainland. I liked her immediately, and we chatted like old friends within ten minutes.

It’s hard to pinpoint what I did during my ten days on Roatan, because vacation has a funny way of blurring your perception of time. I woke up every day, had breakfast, and went diving. Some days I dived at 9 and 11, some days I dived at 11 and 2. It all depended on boat schedules and other factors. After the first 3 days, Lee’s boat was confiscated by its owner (he was renting it, and the renter decided to renege on the deal), so for the last week we were diving with Tyll’s Dive shop, about a half a block down the road. Most of the time, Han and I had the boat to ourselves, although occasionally we had to work around the needs of Tyll’s divers. In the afternoon, after a shower and lunch, I’d hang out in the shop, chatting with everyone and playing with Lee and Anita’s kitten, Cinnamon. In the evenings, I’d often get together with one or more of the others for dinner at one of the many inexpensive restaurants around town. Then it was off to bed.

Sometime before the end of my trip, I realized that I was having a once-in-a-lifetime, perfect dive trip. I may never get to dive like this again, with such freedom. In a year or two, Lee will retire, and Enomis Divers will take on new ownership. Without them, it just wouldn’t be the same. I had to quickly move past my sadness over Buddy and embrace the moment. This is the kind of diving divers dream of, and I was going to take advantage of every moment.

Other random events that occurred, in no particular order:

1. There was a big shakeup at a local restaurant near the shop. One of the staff stole an ipad from one of the owners, and we watched as police were called and an investigation took place. The excitement ended as all the staff were fired, and the owner started interviewing new servers and cooks as we watched. When you live on an island, this stuff is better than a soap opera!

2. One night, there was a lightning storm over the island. It was like fireworks, big electric forks shooting across the clouds and down to the ground. I have never seen so much lighting in my entire life. It went on for more than an hour, and the thunder rattled the walls of my apartment.

3. Since Lee and Anita didn’t have a night dive scheduled, I went into one shop to ask them about it. They gave me the runaround, saying that they couldn’t let me go on a night dive unless I dived with them first, so they could see “how I am in the water”. I informed them politely that I am an MSDT instructor, with experience teaching on the island, and they can bet their asses I am just fine “in the water.” They asked Lee, and Lee said I was fine when I wasn’t blowing bubbles up his ass (a little prank I played once), which they didn’t think was funny. Then they said there might not be room for me on the boat. In response, I walked down the street to West End Divers, and asked to get on the boat for their night dive. “No problem,” they said. No questions, no hassles.

The night dive was very nice, although I was a bit annoyed to be stuck with a group of advanced students, who spent the first ten minutes doing skills on the sand. Even so, I saw a big king crab and a bazillion lobsters, as well as a lionfish swooping in for the kill. When we got to the surface, I heard everyone shouting, “Agh! Sea wasps and jellyfish everywhere!!” so I inflated my BCD to max and held my hands up out of the water to avoid being stung (I have a long wetsuit so I was pretty well protected). I arrived on the boat unscathed, but the others had welts everywhere. One lady was so shaken up she had dropped one of her fins, and the divemaster went back into the water (shirtless!!!) to get it. We spotted it over the side and circled it with our lights so he could find it. He came back with a couple of nice welts on his rippled abs, which I guess makes him très manly. But when I looked over the boat, I saw millions of them, from large to small, swarming on the surface, attracted by the boat lights. Their white bodies gleamed with iridescent light. They sure are beautiful (if painful) little buggers. As a side note, I missed having Han as my dive buddy, especially since I couldn’t take a picture of all the jellyfish. Note to self: Buy Underwater Camera.

4. Fish buying FAIL. One afternoon, I decided to have a dinner party at my house, since Han and Alejandra don’t have a kitchen at their hostel. So we go hunting for fresh fish. We talk to a local fisherman, and he tells us to come back at sundown when he’s back from fishing. So Han and I buy all the ingredients for fish soup, only to come back at sundown to find that the fisherman didn’t catch anything. So we go back to the place with a half a chicken bought at a local restaurant, and have vegetable soup instead. It all tasted just fine anyway, and it was nice to sit on the deck with my friends, drinking Coronas and talking about diving.

5. DM-ing again. One morning, I show up for diving and there are 4 fundivers in the shop. Lee asks me if I want to take them, and I say “sure.” So Han and I tag-team the fundivers. I lead the dive, taking point, and Han stays behind keeping tabs on the two open water divers (the other two divers were more experienced fundivers off the cruise ship). It was an eventful dive—in the first attempt at descent, one of the open water divers didn’t have enough weight so I handed Han one of mine to give him, then one of the two cruise shipper’s expensive camera floods and we have to ascend to get it back on the boat before it breaks completely. After that, things went a bit more smoothly—at least, until one of the cruise shippers saw an eagle ray and took off, dropping down to about 90 feet before we finally got her back up to a reasonable depth again. She stayed low most of the dive, despite Han and I asking her repeatedly to come up to our level. To boot, the other cruise shipper ran out of air after 45 minutes, making it a short dive (usually, Han and I dive for 60). Despite these setbacks, it was fun to play DM again, and Lee even offered me instructor work. Sadly, I hadn’t paid my PADI membership dues so I couldn’t teach. Besides, I was on vacation! So when the cruise shippers decided to go on the 11am dive, Han and I wisely passed, waiting for the 2pm dive when we would be free as birds (or fish, as it were).

Okay, so if you actually read this far, you’ve heard all about the high highs and the low lows of my Roatan trip, my Buddy and fish-buying failures and my diving and divemastering successes. So everyone can just stop pestering me about my whereabouts and whatdoings. I mean, really, people, get a life!! Just kidding. You know I love you all.
Until next time…

My Pet Peeve: Divemasters who SUCK

2011-04-28T01:23:00.001-07:00

I just have to get this off my chest. Most divemasters really, really suck. I mean it. Before I ever became a dive instructor, I was a “fun diver” in places like Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. Wherever I went, I had to put my trust in the hands of 20-year old idiots who were so wrapped up in their own bubble of cool that they forgot those people called “customers.” I’ve had divemasters skip over safety briefings, and fail to check equipment. One divemaster did not brief the tricky backwards roll entry off a speedboat in Vietnam, and as a result, I watched a guy crack his head open like an egg on the side of the boat. We had to rush him to the hospital so he could get 17 stitches in his scalp. (On a side note, French divemasters are usually the worst. There is a kind of cockiness to those guys only marginally surpassed by the likes of Charlie Sheen).

I get mad now, thinking about it. Back when I was a newly-minted diver, I didn’t know what I was doing and I was intensely aware of that fact. I was the one whose cheeks burned with shame while asking bored, too-cool-for-school divemasters to check my equipment for me, please, because I really, really, want to make sure it’s on right before I go into a potentially life-threatening environment? They’d oblige me, looking down their noses at me with condescension, no doubt eyeing their buddies and sneering at the dumb little open water diver. Well, times have changed, bitches. Now I know my shit, and it is appalling the kind of shenanigans these guys get away with.

While in Oahu, an incident happened that reminded me of my pet peeve. I went diving with a local company on the leeward side which had a good reputation. I liked that it was small boats, with no more than six divers on board. On both days I went diving, the divemasters took one look at my MSDT (Master Scuba Diver Trainer) card and left me alone. On the first day, the divemaster was a young Hawaiian guy, really nice. He had just got his nitrox certification and was all gung-ho about it. I liked him, because he gave a good briefing and helped people with their gear. He also left me alone. I’m all for buddy diving, but I hate being saddled with an open water diver whose bubbles scare away all the fish. I prefer to tag along behind the group, close enough to get assistance but far enough that I can imagine I have the ocean to myself.

Things didn’t go wonky until the second day, when “Paco” was the divemaster. Paco was the shop manager, and it was his day off. So, yippee, he gets to go diving with the charter boat. Not so great is that he has to deal with customers. Case in point: while I am talking to the Hawaiian boat captain about local cuisine (Side Note: Lau Lau is delicious!), he apparently gives a dive briefing and doesn’t bother to include me in it. When I ask him about the dive site, he gives me a dose of snark, saying, “well, I gave a briefing but you weren’t listening.” Seriously?

At any rate, I knew there was a problem when I saw “Buck.” Buck was a frail, aging gentleman with arms and legs like twigs. He was clearly unprepared for diving again. He’d done his open water years ago and the dive shop had not offered or provided any kind of brush-up for his skills. Instead, they throw him on a boat going out to a 100-foot wreck dive. As any PADI instructor knows, you don’t take open water divers deeper than 60 feet. But for this dive shop, it was all about the Benjamins, baby, and poor Buck would just have to survive.

After my time as an instructor, the red flags were not just waving, they were doing the hula dance on my nose. Buck was nervous. First, he put his BCD (the inflatable jacket) onto his tank backwards. Then he puts his wetsuit on inside-out. The guy was so flustered, he was turning pink and bobbing his head like a buoy. And what, you might ask, was the divemaster doing? Why, chatting with the other diver on the boat and having a grand-ole time, of course! In fact, Paco had his own weight belt tied wrong, tucking the open end in such a way as to make quick release impossible. I thought about telling him about this, but then I remembered his little snarky comment, and kept my suggestions to myself.

At the dive site, Paco gets in the water and descends without waiting for everyone else. I already know Buck is going to be trouble, which is why I find it pretty shocking that Paco is like “see-ya, suckas!”. When I get to the wreck (about 90 feet down), I look up and see Buck, alone by the descent line. He is about 20 feet down, splashing around upside-down, and clearly freaking OUT. I think my thoughts at about this time were something like: This is f***ing ridiculous. Where is the f***ing divemaster? I wave down Paco, who is eagerly searching for sharks under the wreck. I point (quite aggressively, I suppose) up to his diver, reminding him that oh, yeah, he is supposed to take care of that dude.

Poor Buck. At this point, one of Buck’s fins is now off his foot and floating away. I point that out to the divemaster, too (who is finally trying to help the flailing Buck), and then gesture that I am taking the other diver as my buddy and going off to see the wreck. Let Paco clean up his own mess. But I was angry. Had Buck really panicked, or done something stupid, he could have drowned, and it would have been Paco’s fault. I would have testified to that effect in court. It was un-freaking believable.

Later, Buck told me he had a stomach-ache, but he was clearly trying to cover up his own embarrassment. It was panic, plain and simple. Paco should have recognized the signs, and done more to put the guy at ease. There were lots of things Paco should have done, including making sure he descended safely. But Paco was a dummy.

By the way, I don’t mean to imply that all divemasters are idiots. I’ve known quite a few great divemasters in my day. Jurgen, in Roatan, was one of them. I used to laugh hysterically (inside, of course) when he would berate a diver in German-accented English, scolding them like a mother-hen for failing to follow safety procedures. He could be harsh, but he had the best interests of everybody at heart. And back when I was a newbie, my instructor buddy Ed in Okinawa really had my back. I didn’t know jack about diving back then, but when I got in the water with Ed, I knew I was safe.

At the end of the day, becoming an instructor taught me how dangerous the job can be. Now when I dive, I am very aware of my fellow divers. I can tell who knows what they are doing, and who doesn’t, and the worst of all is someone who thinks that helping another diver out is beneath them. And it steams my britches when arrogant a-holes who think they’re God’s gift to the universe forget that they are there to do a JOB. I can only hope they learn that fact before they actually kill somebody.

The Calm Before the Storm

2011-04-11T02:20:00.001-07:00

We used to live in Texas when I was a kid. I don’t remember much of that time, other than flashes of memory—sunlight refracting on waves in a swimming pool, a little red school-house with white-painted trim—but I remember vividly the feeling of anticipation just before a tornado. There were several of them, as I recall, and each time we would look outside and see nothing but grey skies. Yet there was a stillness in the air, a waiting. As soon as the sirens sounded, my father would pull out the ladder, making last-ditch efforts to nail down roof tiles before it hit. My mother would shove us into our bedroom closet, handing us pillows, board games, snacks, and flashlights before leaving us to batten down the interior of the house, cracking open a few windows to prevent the glass from shattering. It was all a game me then--hiding in the dark with my sister, giggling as we made human jack-o-lanterns of our faces with the flashlights resting under our chins. And then the storm would hit, with a sudden roar of wind and rattling walls, and my parents would come into the closet with us, reassuring us with their confidence that everything would be just fine. And it always was. ################################################################# These days, I recognize the calm before the storm for what it is. There is a peaceful rhythm to my days—finishing up the last few weeks of Spanish teaching, writing articles for Sierra Style, writing and sending out short stories and poems in hopes of publication. It’s time to read all the books I have been putting off reading, and re-watch favorite old movies as I lie in bed with my laptop perched on my ribs. But like the tornadoes of my childhood, I can feel big changes coming. My old life will be swept up into the vortex, only to be rebuilt anew in a different place. ################################################################ But I’m in no rush. There is something grand about the electric smell of the too-still air, the subtle vibrations of shifting air. The storm will come—it always does—but for now, I’m embracing the anticipation.

Waiting for Plan A (when there is no Plan B)

2011-02-04T23:14:00.000-08:00

I don't know how this happened. I woke up this morning, and it hit me: I'm 32 years old, I'm broke, I live with my parents, and I have almost no social life to speak of. That's right, folks, I need only take one more step down and I'll be living in my parents' basement collecting comic books and never leaving the house.

Well, okay. It's not as bad as all that.

Ever since getting back from Honduras, I've had many people ask me what the heck I'm up to these days, and from all appearances (see above), it's not much. Hence my reluctance to write blog entries, because my life at present is nothing near as exciting as it was one year ago, when I was swimming with sharks and taking chicken buses through Guatemalan villages.

That being said, I'm not writing to start a pity parade. When I think about the economy, and how bad it is out there for people without family and friends to support them, I find my complaints about life pretty trivial. It's great to know that, no matter what, I have a place to live and food to eat. The basics: check.

So what the heck have I been up to lately, you ask? The answer is simple: trying to fulfill the dream of getting my doctoral degree and becoming a professor and having a "real" job. I fantasize about things other people take for granted and/or find annoying: Having my own apartment. Paying rent. Owning a pet. Being able to buy something because I want it and not because I need it.

My dream started with disaster back in 2007, when I took my GREs (Graduate Record Exams) while living in Japan, and began contacting my former professors to write me letters of recommendation. They'd worked with me, so they'd say yes right away, right? I'd passed all my classes and never missed a day. I'd been a good student. So they'd remember me, right?

Wrong, wrong. They all declined. Too much time had passed, they had moved to a new school, they were busy, they'd retired---blah, blah, blah. I was at a loss. No recommendations, no applications, end of story. So I put it off.

Fast forward to 2010. I'd published some of my writing. I'd started to get more confident about who I am and what I want to do. This time, I wouldn't be deterred. I came back from Honduras in August and took four writing courses at Sacramento City College. I got a part-time job to help with expenses, but thanks to my folks, I didn't have to worry about rent. I worked my butt off in all four classes, and convinced several professors (through much begging, crying, and bribery---okay, everything but the bribery. I'm broke, remember?) to write my letters. The wheels were in motion again. I was ecstatic.

I applied to ten schools: U of Southern California, Texas A&M, Houston U, Florida State, U of Missouri at Columbia, Western Michigan U, Denver U, U of Cincinnati, State U of New York at Binghamton, and Utah U. Why these schools? Do you really care? Well, because they're in cool places and they have cool programs that I like.

Why TEN schools? Don't most people apply to only three or five? Because there's a LOT of great writers out there who want to get paid to do it. My chances are low. Very, very low.

How low? When I asked USC how many applications they receive, they told me they get 300-400 applicants every year and they accept 3-5 people. I mean, I think I have a lot of things going for me, but am I good enough to beat out 295 other people? After eight years out of school and a change in emphasis from literature to creative writing? Hmmm. Probably not.

But hell, what are dreams for, anyway? It's what I want to do. In fact, it's the only thing I can ever imagine myself doing. Those of you who know me well know that I would rather work as a Starbucks Barista to the end of my days than spend my life working as an underpaid, overworked elementary or high school teacher. Have you looked at a high school teacher lately? These are not happy people. They write notes in their calendar such as "only 3,699 days until I retire!" Mmm, lattes.

But I digress.

It took hours and hours and hours to get those darned applications done. It was like a full time job, on top of everything else I was doing. It gave me such a feeling of accomplishment when I sent the last one off in January. It almost made me cry. There go my little hopes, sent off into the wind like dandelion fluff.

Now, there's nothing to do but wait. This is not as easy as it sounds, since my part-time job only pays my basic expenses, so I don't have money to do things like Go Out, Have Fun, or Do Anything That Isn't Free. Bo-ring! (But I won't bore you with the details of how dull my life is these days! I fall asleep just writing it!).

I haven't spoken much about my graduate applications because I am terrified that I will be rejected by all ten schools. When my odds are less than 10%, this is not an unrealistic possibility. In some ways, talking about it almost jinxes it. Plus, I hate it when people say stuff like, "Oh, don't worry, you'll get in," or "It'll work out," because I want to ask: does it? Of those hundreds of people applying, do ALL of them get in somewhere? Things don't always work out. You don't always get what you want. I just hope that in my case, I do.

At the end of the day, there is no Plan B. There can't be. I tried interviewing for jobs, but they want commitment. One year, two years. They want someone who will say, "I will be there," not someone who will say, "yes, um, I'll be there, unless, that is, I get into graduate school, okay?"

I don't have a teaching credential for California, either, which makes finding work here next to impossible. Although I have a master's degree, applying for community college jobs out of state requires almost as much planning and red tape as applying to graduate school, and would also require a firm commitment. Rock, meet hard place. We're all together in this one.

So, after several job interviews, and even one job offer which I had to decline, I've opted to wait. I wait, and I lurk in graduate forums on the Internet, and I try not to imagine the crushing blow to my heart and ego that will occur if I do not get in. By May, I will know whether or not my dream will come true, or not.

If not, I'll have to make up Plan B as I go along.

******

Update as of 03/06/11: Looks like plan A is going to work out after all. I was accepted into the English Ph.D. program with creative writing emphasis at Texas A&M University. When I got the email, I nearly fell out of my chair. I am still waiting to hear back on nine other schools, but the weight on my shoulders has lifted. I can only wish the same for the rest of my friends on thegradcafe.com, as well as all the others who share the same dream as myself. My fingers and toes are all crossed for you!

Cat Woes

2010-07-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

Picture this: I’m standing outside on my front porch, barefoot, holding sopping wet sheets that still smell faintly of cat pee. My hand goes to the doorknob only to realize two important facts: 1. I am locked out of my house 2. My cell phone, and any other means of summoning help, are locked inside, along with a half-drunk cat who keeps walking into walls. I think my thoughts at this moment were something along the lines of: is it possible to be any more stupid?

This all started with a simple piece of paper. Last week, Florida Vets came by the shop passing out fliers. A bunch of veterinary students from the University of Florida would be in West End for three days, doing free spaying, neutering, and health care. I have a soft spot in my heart for felines, so I decided to do my best to get some of the strays in my area fixed and vaccinated.

Yesterday morning, I borrowed a cat carrier from my friend Anita, who also offered to drive me and the cats to the vet. I caught Buddy with little trouble (the trusting fool! MUAHAHA!) but the skittish little kitten I also feed got wise to my antics right away and scratched my left arm to shreds when I tried to nab her. So much for that plan.

When I got to the shop, Robert (the dive shop manager) mentioned that he had a spare cat carrier lying around if I wanted to take Kitty, the official “Shop Cat” to get looked at. Kitty is a wreck—well past her prime. She was mauled by dogs a few weeks ago, and for a while there we were sure she was a goner. But she’s still kickin’, so I figured it was worth a shot.

So then there was me and two cats. The veterinary station was set up in an empty lot very close to the shop. Folding tables covered in plastic had become the operating room for the verterinary surgeons, and several other areas with sheets on the ground were designated “medical” stations for other kinds of treatment. The majority of the people there had dogs, although one guy brought in THIRTEEN kittens, and mentioned that he had over 40 cats in total. What an idiot.

I kept bouncing back and forth between the vet and the shop like a nervous ping pong ball, until eventually I got Kitty back and Buddy was set aside to await his surgery. Kitty was on her last legs. The lump on her abdomen, which has been there as long as I’ve known her, turned out to be a herniated intestine—literally her intestines dangling down just under her skin. One kick to the stomach and the intestine will rupture and she’ll die. The shocking bit is that she had the injury prior to the dog attack. The fact that the dogs never bit her stomach is amazing. She’s also blind in both eyes and has feline herpes. Both her (blind) eyes are completely infected as well, so I got some eye cream as well as an antibiotic for curing the herpes. If she were in the States, I’m sure the vet would put her to sleep, but here in Roatan people let nature take it’s course. For now, she has a pretty good quality of life—she knows her way around the shop by smell and sound, and has food to eat and water to drink and a place to rest. She doesn’t seem to be in obvious pain, so she remains as always our furry mascot.

Buddy came out of surgery with eyes the size of dinner plates, panting, and with his tongue lolling out.

“Is this normal?” I asked one of the vets.

“Yes. We gave him a general, dissociative anesthetic. Which means, in simple terms, that he’s seeing pink elephants right now.”

The rest of the afternoon I kept Buddy at work in his carrier. He kept trying to chew his way through the metal bars. When I got him home, I set him free, and he calmed down. After a bit of food and water, he was almost his old self. I’d made my own litter box out of a cardboard box and some sand, but Buddy (being an outdoor cat to begin with) didn’t take the hint. Usually, he meows to go out, and he did this time, but I didn’t want him to go outside until he was recovered, in case a dog saw him as easy prey. I left my room to go make dinner, and when I came back I found he’d gone up on the bed and left me a nice, wet surprise.

So then I’m hand-washing sheets in my shower, trying to get the stench off so my landlady won’t know what I’ve been up to. She gave me the key to another upstairs apartment so I could catch some of the cats that live on the roof, so I “borrowed” the sheets off another bed and used them to sleep in, while my hand-washed sheets dried overnight.

Of course, this is the point in my tale where I lock myself out of my room, and have to break and enter into my own place. The shocking bit is how easy it was. It took all of ten minutes to break into my room, removing the glass panes from the windows and ripping a hole in the screen large enough to pass my hand through. I told Avonell about it the next day, and promised to pay for a new screen. At least I wasn’t stuck outside all night.

The next morning, I woke painfully early to cover my tracks. I brought in my now-dry sheets, put them back on my bed, and took the borrowed sheets back to the upstairs apartment, making the bed to look as if I’d never been there. Then I nabbed another cat, this time Mamacat, and got her into a carrier.

I had to work at 9, doing a refresher course with two students, so I dropped off Mamacat saying the prophetic words: “She’s a sweet cat, but she’s a bit of an escape artist. Be careful.”

Well, an hour into my refresher briefing one of the vet assistants came by.

“We lost your cat.”

My eyebrows shot up. “She died?”

“No! She got away. She shot off like a rocket, up the street. I can show you where.”

As soon as I finished with my students I went off to look for Mamacat, who was long gone by that point. As any cat owner can tell you—outdoor cats don’t get found unless they want to be.
After a while, I gave up, knowing it was pointless. Mamacat is a survivor, a tough little kitty—she’ll either find her way home or she’ll make a new one somewhere else. But I feel awful about it, because now her 6 week old kitten is officially on its own. I’ve still got the key to upstairs so I’m going to bring it some food and water tonight. I’m praying Mamacat is wise enough to get back home—I feel quite guilty about it all.

So now that my attempt to do good deeds has come back to bite me in the ass, life on Roatan will go back to normal. I have one month left in my stay, and I intend to spend it diving, looking out at the sea, and planning for the future. And, of course, keeping my eye out for Mamacat.

The Death of a Dream

2010-06-21T17:08:00.000-07:00

This place is falling apart.

In an abstract way, it’s rather cool to watch the slow decline of a grand idea. In the reality of day-to-day life, though, it sucks.

The Fort Saphrey Hotel and Restaurant was going to be the retirement fund of one particular local family, spearheaded by the main father figure (let’s call him “George”). It was built right along the water on a prime stretch of coastline, and from the outset it appeared that it could only be a success.

Unfortunately, George has his home base in the States and left the care of the hotel to his cousin, “Janet.” Over the years, the restaurant failed (perhaps due to the hotel’s remote location on an untrafficked part of the beach), and was turned into a common kitchen for guests.

By the time of my arrival last year, the hotel was already well into its decline. The global economic depression combined with the recent Honduran political crisis meant the majority of the hotel’s rooms would remain empty for the duration of my year on Roatan. Since there was no money coming in, basic overhead costs were not being met. Janet was no longer being paid for her stint as landlord. Her work renting rooms was now a “family favor”, and Janet was doing her best to keep the place together. She would be locked in constant phone battles with George in the States, who wanted to know why she wanted money for electricity and repairs. Most of the time, he refused to send her any money, so she was forced to let all repairs slide, or try to fix things herself with whatever parts she had on hand.

It is not unusual to see Janet scavenging shower parts from one of the unused hotel rooms in order to fix the hot water another. She is constantly calling the electricity company and trying to negotiate down-payments in order to avoid having the electricity cut off completely.

Then there is the night watchman, an alcoholic living in abject poverty with his wife and seven children in a shack behind the hotel. Their shack has no plumbing or electricity, and is made from scavenged bits of plywood and cardboard. The children have trouble sleeping because of all the mosquitoes at night, so they opt to sleep on the bare concrete floor of the common kitchen instead, which is closed to guests after 8pm for that reason.

Since the hotel can no longer afford to pay the night watchman for his services, he has become in essence a squatter on the property. His children run through the grounds collecting mangos and other wild fruit to eat while he and his wife drink themselves into oblivion. Janet and the night watchman are in constant war, because he refuses to do any work until she pays him. This includes taking out the trash, which has begun to pile up in the front yard. Janet wants him to do the work anyway, since he basically lives for free on land that is not his. She also wants him and his family evicted, but George is too far away to intervene. In the entire year of my residence here, the two parties have been locked in hostile stalemate.

This week, my ability to “make do” reached breaking point. On Friday, the well pump broke. I was thus forced to shower with buckets of water brought from the well for two days. The well water, on a good day, is a nearly opaque shade of brown and smells like sulfur. Now, with no running water, I began collecting gallon jugs of the stuff. I had to pour water manually into the toilet so it would flush. Janet finally fixed the pump, but the well is so low that she has now taken to “conserving water” by not pumping up the well at all. The end result is that from about six p.m. until the next afternoon there is rarely running water of any kind. I have stockpiled water in gallon jugs, so if the apocalypse ever comes, I’m ready.

To make matters worse, the night watchman’s family broke the ancient, rusty faucet in the kitchen. I assumed Janet would fix it but when I came home today I asked her and she said,

“I put a bucket of water in there so you can wash.”

“You’re not going to fix it?”
“No.”

So for the foreseeable future, there will be no running water in the kitchen, and I will have to collect water from the outside faucet in order to wash dishes or get water to boil. This is all assuming that the well has been pumped, and there is water at all. It’s all starting to feel very 18th century.

I’m not sure how much more of this I can take. As the year has dwindled down to my departure from Roatan, I kept thinking I could get by, but I may just start looking for another place to live for my last month. I want running water. I want a 24-hour access kitchen with a working faucet. I don’t want my front yard to look like a landfill. I don’t think I’m asking for too much.

Realistically, I give this place another year before it closes. It’s sad really--like watching a dream die of a slow-acting disease.

A Spot of Reminiscence

2010-05-21T11:06:00.000-07:00

When I was in fourth grade, my family split in two. My dad, my younger brother, and I moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where my dad would spend nine months in pilot training. My mother and my sister stayed in California, house-hunting and preparing for our eventual return.

We lived on base housing. When I close my eyes I can still see our house in vivid detail. It was a small duplex, with a long, tile corridor perfect for racing Tonka trucks. My brother and I would balance on one of those little rolling trucks and propel each other down the tile corridor, often crashing into the walls. We had almost no furniture, which was just fine for my brother and I—fewer obstacles. Our television rested on a packing box, and other than a chair, I don’t remember any other furniture in the living room.

My bedroom had a bed and a big, empty closet. I loved that closet, because it had just enough shelves to climb to the top. I liked sitting up there, looking down on my room like a benevolent deity. As a kid, I had a weird love affair with enclosed spaces. When my dad went away to the Gulf War, I would crawl into his closet, surrounding myself with his clothes. I would be surrounded by the smell of pressed military uniforms, a smell I will always associate with my father. To this day, I feel no claustrophobia when surrounded by small spaces. In fact, our old RV was so small that my sister and I would sleep in the luggage rack. I slept on the inside, with the ceiling two inches from my nose, a wall on one side, and my sister on the other. It seemed normal at the time.

In Alabama, I was the woman of the house. The only thing I knew how to cook was tater tots and chicken nuggets, which had to be reheated in the oven. I still remember my dad smiling when he’d come home from work to discover I had “made dinner.”

Another family lived on the other side of my bedroom wall, and my brother and I often took a glass from the kitchen and pressed it to the wall, which, according to TV detective shows, was the best way to eavesdrop. I don’t recall us ever hearing anything.

When we were home from school or daycare, we’d play in the yard with all the other Air Force brats. The yard was more clovers than grass, so I remember the endless search for four leaf clovers. If you found one, it was said you’d have good luck for the rest of your life. I eventually found one, and pressed it into the pages of an old school book, where it rests to this day. I check on it from time to time, to make sure my luck is still intact.

I often wonder if my restless, vagabond spirit is a direct result of my childhood. Moving from place to place, from one base housing to the next, has to take a toll. But if anything, it was a love-hate relationship. I loved the excitement of the move, the blank, empty rooms that we would soon fill with our stuff and make our own. I loved the road trips, watching my dad drive up in a U-Haul and try to cram a life’s worth of stuff into its confines. But another part of me was always angry at having to leave. There was no choice. Any friends you’d made would write for a few weeks and then vanish into the mist. I began to be quite introverted—books, at least, could come with me to each new location.

It wasn’t until my dad stopped flying that I was able to settle into a “normal” life. My mother insisted that we should be able to go to the same high school for four years, without interruption. I’m sure she saw that the constant moving was affecting all of us kids in different ways.

Now, here on Roatan, as I begin to get “itchy feet” again, my mind stretching forward to the next big adventure, I find myself looking back and wondering why I can’t ever really feel at home anywhere. There always seems to be something better up ahead, just around the corner. After a year, or two, in one place, I feel a nervous restlessness, like the jitters you get from drinking too much coffee.

I look out in front of me at the beautiful sea, the turquoise water and white sand, and I can’t help myself. It feels stagnant. I can’t stay in one place for long. Maybe because my childhood taught me that you always have to keep moving forward in life. If you stop for too long, the air grows stale, and it begins to feel less like living and more like dying.

Hell Week

2010-04-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

Some weeks, no matter how hard you try, everything goes wrong. My last week was like that, mainly due to a precocious Spaniard I will call “Paco.”

Paco came into the shop to do an open water course. He was from northern Spain, and spoke with a thick accent that was not helped by his lightning-fast conversational style that lacked discernable enunciation. Our conversations involved me saying “¿qué?” a lot.

On the first day, I knew Paco was going to be trouble. He did everything wrong. I’d say, “connect the regulator into the jacket like so” and he’d say “yes, yes,” and then do it incorrectly. Later, we’d be doing the same thing, and he would have forgotten again. I had to repeat myself about a dozen times, so much so that I began to suspect Paco had some sort of attention deficit disorder.

The quizzes were a disaster. He failed nearly every quiz at least once. When I tried to explain his errors, he would argue with me about which answer was the correct one. I finally had to scold him, telling him that I couldn’t help him if he didn’t listen, and he had to stop interrupting me during my explanations. Everything took three times longer because he kept getting frustrated. Half the time, he failed because he didn’t read the quiz questions properly. He just wanted to breeze through the course without having to do any real work.

He never did his homework, and showed up each day with nothing done. When I’d ask, he’d say he was tired, or he had a headache, or he couldn’t concentrate. I never met anyone who complained so much in my life. We did only one dive on the first day, but he came back dragging his feet. “I’m exhausted. My profesora wants to kill me!”

On the second day, he actually refused to continue to work, taking off for the afternoon because he was “too tired to concentrate.” I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “time is money”—and nowhere is this more relevant than in scuba diving. I get paid a set amount for teaching an open water course (and not very much, either). If the course takes four days, instead of the usual three, I get paid the same, so I am essentially doing extra work for nothing.

Paco set the record for my longest open water course. Seven days. Seven annoying, frustrating, exhausting days. He took two days off in the middle because he “had a headache”, and I later saw him scootering around on a rented motorcycle. I took on other clients during his “break”, and I warned him that if I was busy when he came back, then someone else could finish his course, because I wouldn’t do it.

As bad as Paco was outside of the water, he was even worse in the water. He wasn’t a big guy, so I only started him out with twelve pounds. By the end of the course, I’d shoved eighteen pounds on him in an effort to make him stay down. He was breathing so quick and with such huge gulps of air he was making himself into a human balloon, and balloons only want to go one direction—up. He burned through an entire tank (which usually lasts an hour) in twenty minutes. The main issue was that he didn’t seem to be listening to me, and so when we got down in the water to do the skills we had to do them over and over and over until he got them right. It was torture. I almost couldn’t believe it when Paco finished the course.

Nobody likes a complainer, and Paco was the biggest whiner I’ve ever met. I’ve had students who were bad before—but I still liked them, because they gave it a hundred and ten percent. Sometimes people just aren’t “water” people, and no matter what they do, or how hard they try, the basics elude them. I don’t mind so much because they are giving it their all, and usually by the end of the course they start to get the knack of it. Paco was a primadonna, expecting all the benefits without any work. It was a relief when he was gone.

The other thing that made my week “hell” was the loss of the six little kittens living in the garden of my residence hotel. Both female cats had three kittens around the same time, and the older cat adopted the three kittens of the younger, who didn’t seem too interested in being a mommy. For the first few days, I came home from work and sat watching momma cat with the kittens. They were adorable, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. My favorite was the fat orange kitten, the biggest of the litter, with his little fuzzy triangular ears that were smushed on the side of his head.

It was almost cathartic, after my long, exhausting days with Paco, to sit and watch momma cat feeding her babies and purring, kneading her paws in front of her.

Then one day I came home and the box was empty, and both female cats were sitting inside the abandoned crate. They meowed at me when I arrived, as if asking, “where are our babies?”

I was really, really sad. Even though I’d only seen the kittens for a couple of days, I was heartbroken. I have a real soft spot in my heart when it comes to cats, and here on the island cats are seen as pests. Honduran people have no love for animals. The owner of the restaurant next door got a puppy for his kid to play with. They treated the puppy great—until it was big, and no longer cute. Last week I saw it limping around on a broken leg, nearly all its fur worn away from a bad case of mange. Often, locals throw poisoned meat into the garbage for the strays. My landlady, Avonell, mentioned that many people take litters of cats and dogs out on a boat and dump them out to sea to keep the dog and cat populations down. Spaying and neutering takes effort and money, so instead, people just kill the litters. It’s absolutely vile.

When I saw the kittens were missing, I assumed someone had drowned them. I looked all over, but no such luck. All week, I’ve been asking around, trying to find out what happened to the kittens. I didn’t know what I would do when I came across the “kitten murderer”. I thought I would very much enjoy breaking all their fingers, although of course that sort of thing would have to remain in the realm of my fantasies.

The good thing is that all weeks must end. Karma may be a bitch, but she always comes back around again. Immediately after my course with Paco, I got three Scuba Diver students who were a walk in the park. Amazing how three easy students combined can provide less work than one difficult one.

Earlier today, on a whim, I asked the night watchman’s kids if they knew what had happened to the kittens.

“One of them is still alive!” one of the two boys said energetically. “On the roof!”

When I said I thought all the kittens were dead, the boys climbed up a tree to a small roof overhang, where the kitten was nestled in a pile of fallen leaves. It was the little black female with a white streak across her face. The boys brought her down for me to see, and when I saw momma cat I set the kitten down on the ground. In a flash, she grabbed the kitten in her mouth and leapt right back up to her rooftop nest.

My final guess is that something (perhaps a dog) or someone found the litter at the beginning, and killed all of the kittens but one. Momma cat must have rescued that one by putting it in her mouth and jumping to safety. Alas, not fast enough to save the other five. It may even be possible she stashed them in different hiding places, but I doubt it. Either way, it is a small relief to me to see one of the kittens lives on. It’s always nice to feel the tide of your life changing from bad back on over to good, like sunshine after a storm.

The Trouble with Currents

2010-03-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Wind is never good for diving. Wind creates waves, and waves create surge. Surge plus wind and waves makes it quite hard indeed to get on and off a boat. Now imagine a day where there is wind, waves, surge, and on top of that a strong current that whisks divers away whether they like it or not. Those were the conditions in which I took out my dive student on Friday, and the end result was a bit of a disaster.

Monica was my Spanish-speaking open water student from Argentina. She was only taking the course at the insistence of her friend and travel companion, who wanted her to dive so that they could dive together (he had a bit of a crush on her). He had paid for her course, but she was a little reluctant to say the least.

When we got out for our first dive, the waves were picking up but they weren’t too bad as yet. I didn’t yet know about the incredibly strong current, which would have been hard to fight even with experienced divers.

It took us a long time to get started. Monica had trouble equalizing, and panicked twice while trying to descend. We spent so much time at the surface we drifted far away from the boat, and I inflated my marker buoy (imagine a large orange inflatable tube) so that boats wouldn’t accidentally run us over. Eventually, I got her down, but the boat was now more than 200 yards away. I took her down near the bottom in hopes that the current would be less there, so that we could do our dive swimming back in the direction of the boat.

Unfortunately, Monica was not used to swimming with fins, and bicycled her feet up and down in a rather futile attempt at forward motion. I found myself dragging her by her tank, because the moment I let her go she would either sink down or float up to the surface, as she had not yet mastered the basics of buoyancy.

Swimming into the current was like running up a mountain on a hot day caring a 100 pound sack of potatoes. Dragging Monica as I was, I barely made any forward progress, even using all my strength. The minute I stopped to breathe, the current pushed me backwards. After a good ten minutes of this, I gave up. Monica and I drifted with the current, moving so fast we were practically flying over the reef.

It would have been a beautiful dive if I hadn’t been so worried that the boat—unaware that we would be drifting—would not see us when we came up. After another ten or 15 minutes we ascended. I was hoping that by keeping the dive short we wouldn’t end up so far away that we lost the boat completely.

At the surface, I realized that we had traveled much farther than I had imagined. We had completely drifted around the point of the island, and only one corner of the boat was visible from where we were. I had inflated my buoy, and I spent a long time waving it from side to side, to no avail. The boat couldn’t see us. I was faced with two choices: Wait, and hope that the boat would eventually come looking for us (although at that point we could be completely out to sea or a mile further down the coast), or attempt a shore entry with waves pushing us into the rocks.

Monica, to this point calm, was starting to panic. Even with the regulator in her mouth, the waves were crashing over her head and making it hard to see. I could tell she was going to flip out soon, if I didn’t get her out of the water. Then I looked to shore and saw a low, concrete pier.

I gauged the strength of the waves and decided we could probably exit the shore there, if we were careful about it. As we got close, a few people from the resort there came out to the edge of the pier to help us. The waves were buffeting us around a bit, making it hard to reach the pier without hitting the rocks, so we had to be careful. I had Monica take off all her equipment and I handed it up to the people. Then, they lifted her up to safety. Once she was safe, I felt a huge weight lifting from my shoulders. I got tossed around a bit by a particularly big wave, but I was wearing a full, thick wetsuit, along with boots, so I came out of it with just a few little scrapes on my hands.

I handed up my equipment but as I did so one of my boots popped off and drifted away. They were old boots, worn and full of holes, and I figured it was God’s way of telling me I needed new boots. There was no way in hell I was going back into that turbulent water to rescue a measly boot.

Back on shore, my worries compounded. I had to contact the boat immediately, so they did not think us lost at sea or missing. There was no radio at the resort where we came up, but a guy there had a cell phone and offered to call his buddy who works in one of the dive shops and relay the message that we were fine.

I went to the edge of the pier with my buoy and waited for the boat to notice us. About an hour later, it did, chugging down along the coast in an effort to find us. I signaled that we were all right and called a cab for my student and I.

The divemaster’s face was understandably perplexed when I returned from the dive in a car rather than on the boat.

I was VERY worried indeed that I would be in big trouble for doing a questionable shore exit, but when I look back, I don’t see what else I could have done, other than not taking the student out at all. I know I made the right call, because my student and I, plus all our equipment, came out of the experience unscathed. But I wasn’t sure the dive shop would see it the same way.

The manager of the shop was a bit annoyed with me, I could tell, because he’d heard we were in trouble and had come to look for me, not knowing I had taken a cab. He told me that I needed to “consider the political ramifications of my actions” and I almost laughed out loud. Apparently, my calling to notify the boat had spread all over the island, and several dive shops had called him with offers for assistance, and a former, disgruntled employee of the shop had written a scathing email of some sort to the owners.

“Look, I had to let you know we weren’t missing. What else was I going to do?” I asked, and he didn’t have a response. When you are in the middle of a rescue scenario, “political ramifications” are just about the farthest thing from your mind. Honestly!

Monica never did finish the open water course. She had trouble equalizing the pressure in her ears and had to discontinue. I quite liked her. After that first, disastrous dive, when we were standing there on the pier, dripping and exhausted, the first thing out of her mouth was: “It’s so beautiful. Can we go again tomorrow?”

The Cruel Sea

2010-02-24T15:34:00.000-08:00

The boat arced up five feet overhead and then slammed down into the waves. My student and I watched in dismay as the boat ladder--our primary means of exiting the water-- leapt and fell like a acrobatic plane.

“Everything is going to be fine,” I told C, my student. This is bad, I thought. I faced our situation with a kind of supernatural calm. The adrenaline roared through my veins, heightening all my senses. It was one of those rare occasions when I am reminded that what I do can be dangerous.

The wind hadn’t seemed so bad at first. The boat rocked and rolled a lot on the way to the dive site, and waves splashed up over the bow, but I figured we would be okay as soon as we got underwater. We hadn’t anticipated that the wind would pick up while we were diving, and a challenging situation transformed into a dangerous one.

My student had been struggling with the course. She became tired easily, and was fearful of descending below twenty feet of water. These were less than ideal conditions for conducting an open water dive, and—hindsight being what it is—we should never have attempted it.

The dive was fine, although visibility was terrible and there was considerable surge. C. had much less trouble swimming this time and had better buoyancy control, but she couldn’t be coaxed below 20 feet, and she refused to do any of the skills. After a while, I decided it was best to call it a day and go back to the boat.

It wasn’t until we surfaced that I noticed how bad the wind had become. These were big swells of cresting waves, and I was immediately presented with the question of how to get my student back on the boat. I wasn’t worried for myself—I am used to diving in waves, and have built up plenty of stamina and endurance for surface swims in my time as an instructor. But my student was not so lucky. She was not familiar with the equipment or the conditions. This was only her second dive, ever, and I could see from her face that she was afraid.

“Don’t let go of me,” she said.

“I won’t. I promise,” I said. “Give me your weight belt.”

Now, C. isn’t a small girl, so her weight belt weighed a good 26 pounds. There was no way she was going to make it back on the boat with all that weight on. It took a few minutes, but I got her weight belt in hand and tried to hand it up to the captain. As I did so, another big wave came crashing in and I had to swim away from the boat so it wouldn’t hit me. This was getting me pretty winded, and I came close to dropping the weight belt (I would have to go back and get it another day, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world).

Just then, Neil, the shop manager, came up in the smaller boat, in an attempt to help us. I managed to hand him the heavy weight belt (“Mother of God, that’s heavy,” I grunted), but Neil was getting buffeted by the waves and there was no way in hell he was going to be able to pull C. up onto that tiny boat. I can barely manage to pull myself up there, on the best of days, and there would barely be enough room for him and the seven fundivers he had to retrieve as well.

So Neil waved us back to the big boat.

I told C. to put in her regulator . In these conditions, snorkels are pretty useless—they just fill with water from the splashing waves. She put her face down and I grabbed her shoulder and steered as we swam back towards the rocking boat.

Once we got to the side, I had her lean back and take off her equipment, then swim to the ladder as fast as she could. The captain pulled her up and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. She was safe. Now it was my turn. I had to get the equipment up, so timing was everything. I waited for a big wave, then in the trough I swam up quickly and handed up C’s gear. I then had to dart away again in case another wave came and slammed the boat back down. Next, I took off my own equipment and lay on it, using it like a surf board as I swam up to the ladder. The captain caught it, and in the next lull I grabbed the ladder and hauled myself up, flopping out on the deck like a caught fish.

I couldn’t believe it—we’d not only managed to get back on board safely with no injuries, but we’d saved all the equipment as well. It was only after it was all over that I thought to myself,
“Jeez, that was pretty scary!”

In the distance, I saw that Neil had retrieved all the other divers. We headed to shore, the boat getting slammed hard by waves and tilting to a near ninety-degree angle. It was a relief when we pulled into the dock and were back on solid ground again.

I was majorly impressed by C, who kept her cool despite being afraid. She did exactly what I said and when, and for that reason everything worked out. I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have a student more prone to panic. Thanks to her trust, I was able to calmly assess the situation and come up with a solution. Near the end there, I came close to swimming to shore. The shore wasn’t far away and we would have been fine once we hit the shallower water. But that would have been a long swim, and as it turned out, we could get on the boat just fine as long as we were careful.

As I walked home from work today, I looked at the water, which this morning had been calm as a mountain lake. The sea is a cruel mistress, they say. She certainly has her moods.

Quick Update

2010-02-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

Here's my writing update:

My creative nonfiction piece, "The Icicle" will be appearing sometime this month on Frostwriting.com.

My short short "flash" story, "Somewhere Between Flores and El Remate" is viewable now on CC&D--Children, Churches & Daddies magaine. Go to http://scars.tv/ccd-new-issue.htm, and browse for my name under "Writings."

Also, my short story "The Sea Cave" was accepted at Absent Willow Review, and will appear in their April 2010 issue--more updates coming soon.

In case you're wondering, I removed the previous post because I don't want to get deported. Although it would make a good story, that's for sure.

Thanks as always for your support. You guys (and gals) are the best!

Amber

Cat Crisis

2010-01-22T00:19:00.000-08:00

I thought it was ketchup. I’d had hotdogs wrapped in tortillas for dinner-had I made a mess without noticing? I leaned down and dipped a finger into the small red puddle. Buddy, sitting nearby, came over to investigate, and licked at the liquid, which was too bright and too thin to be ketchup.

It was blood. I looked at Buddy, ran my hands down his fur. I didn’t see an obvious wound at first. Earlier in the day, I’d wondered why he’d yelped when I’d picked him up. Now, on closer inspection, I saw a dark patch of blood oozing from a spot just above his tail, along the ridge of his spine.

I’d told myself from the beginning not to get attached to Buddy. He’s a stray, after all, an outdoor cat. An unneutered male, the alpha male of my residence hotel’s vast grounds. But he wormed his way into my heart, despite my resistance. Little by little, he started to spend more and more time with me, and less time outside. Although at first I feared having him in my room at night (where, unsupervised, he might pee on something), my fears proved unfounded. When he needs to go out, he sits patiently by the door and meows. When that doesn’t work, he walks up onto the bed and sticks his nose in my face. Occasionally, he comes over and licks my hand. Once, I woke up with him sleeping with his head cupped in my hand like a pillow.

I didn’t mean to get attached, I really didn’t. I knew I would have to leave Roatan at some point, and there would be no chance of my taking him with me. But when I saw all that bright red blood dripping down his fur, I knew I couldn’t just let him suffer. What was I going to do? It was 11pm, far too late to think about a vet. If Buddy was going to bleed to death, I would be forced to watch it happen.

I took an old pair of shorts I don’t wear anymore and tore off a strip, thinking back to my first aid training. I’d staunch the flow of blood, to help his clotting along. He yelped when I tied it around his tail, but my efforts were pretty pathetic. I missed the wound entirely, and I could still see the blood droplets falling on the floor from the chair where he was resting.

It was a long, stressful night. I couldn’t sleep, anxious that he would go into shock and die. I was also worried he'd try to come up on the bed with me (as he usually does) and get red stains all over my sheets--something I didn't want to have to explain to the hotel manager. But I didn’t know what to do except wait, and hope the bleeding would stop on its own. Every hour or so I got up and turned on the light to check on him. I even looked up “signs of shock in cats” on the internet.

I’m crazy, I know.

Around six in the morning, I let Buddy out to go to the bathroom. He was still bleeding, but otherwise behaved with his usual nonchalance (Bleeding? What bleeding? Where’s the food?).
When I got up in the late morning, the wound looked even worse, because now it was encrusted with sand and dirt. I looked into his trusting green eyes and I knew I had to do something. But what? I didn’t have a box to put him in. What was I going to do, wrap him in a towel and stick him in a taxi? This cat is STRONG. He doesn’t get held unless he wants to be. I doubted that would work, and it would be a huge headache.

Instead, I called in a favor from one of my Spanish students, Pam. She has two cats, both plump and happy, whom she adores. I knew of all people, she’d understand my crisis.

She was a godsend. Within minutes, she had called the vet to inform him of our arrival and was on her way to my house with a cat carrier. It took both of us to shove him into the thing (he got away twice, but we triumphed in the end), and after a while he calmed down a bit. Buddy got his first ever vet visit today, along with his first car ride.

It was not an auspicious time to arrive at the vet’s office. In the parking lot, several men stood around a pickup truck with two dogs inside. One dog was lying on its side, panting heavily; the other was dead. They had been hit by a car. The vet was a young guy, probably in his 30’s, in a purple shirt emblazoned with his name. As we pulled up, he was relaying the bad news: the dog’s leg was shattered, and he would have to be put down.

Here on Roatan, veterinary services are minimal. They can do basic fixes, but they have no x-ray machine or surgical capability. If an animal requires surgery, they put them to sleep. It’s either that or find some way to get them to Guatemala, or somewhere with more advanced veterinary facilities.

The owner was upset, and left with the still-living dog, promising to bring him back tomorrow to be put down.

Then it was Buddy’s turn to see the vet. Although I warned the vet that Buddy was a fighter, he was surprisingly docile throughout the proceedings. He was probably bewildered by the dozens of parakeets and iguanas in cages all over the office; either that, or he was scared past the point of fighting back.

The vet looked him over and informed me that Buddy was running a high fever. The wound on his back was a deep puncture wound, probably a cat bite, but not wide enough to require stitches. It was infected, however, and Buddy would need antibiotics. I gave him a de-worming shot, too (kill two birds, as they say), and we headed home. Buddy didn’t show signs of life until we were back home again--when he recognized his familiar haunts, he squirmed to be let out of the bag. I can't resist saying this: I let the cat out of the bag.

After getting back, I gave his wound a good wash (as the vet suggested), and he went straight to sleep. He’s tuckered out, the poor guy. But the wound already looks MUCH better and is hardly bleeding at all. Once, he went over to inspect the cat carrier, which I left open on the floor. He crawled inside, sniffing all around and looking as if he quite liked it, indeed—until he saw me watching him, and he leapt out, as if saying, “Just looking!!”

Leaving, on a Jet Plane....

2009-12-19T12:50:00.000-08:00

Travel is always exciting. I never cease to feel nervous the day before a flight. Despite all the hassles of air travel (claustrophobic seats, bad food, long waits), I am a complete dork when it comes to planes. I scour the Skymall magazine, I try to listen to all the horrible in-flight music, and I am always eager to see what B-movie they will be showing. Even with lack of sleep and long journeys, I am buoyed up by the excitement of going somewhere new.

This time, I'm going home again after a year-long absence. Sometimes, when I think about it, home seems like a far-off dream, and yet other times it feels like the life I am living now is a dream, and going home will be like waking up.

The last week has been busy, which is a nice change of pace from my idyllic (and somewhat boring) beach life. On Sunday, the phone rang at 11 a.m. with a call from an instructor friend of mine. A dive shop he knew was desperate to find an EFR (Emergency First Response--your basic first aid/CPR class) instructor at the last minute. I was happy to oblige. Then five minutes later, the phone rings again with an offer to teach an Open Water course in French. Bien sur! (Of course!).

So my last week on Roatan was spent contentedly diving and teaching, the things I came here to do. My French student, Michael, was a piece of cake, and by day two he was diving like a pro. We had great dives, although the best had to be the first one--we saw a turtle, a lionfish, a sting ray, an eagle ray, and a spotted drumfish, all in one dive!

The lionfish was a really interesting find because they are an invasive species that have only begun to pop up recently. The other fish don't see them as a predator so they become easy prey. The marine park here is trying to kill them, since they are a non-native species, but they are already breeding like crazy and popping up all over the place. It is sad, but as a diver I can't help but harbor a tiny bit of love for the lionfish in my heart--they sure are pretty. Shame they're so deadly to the reef.

Now it is my last day here in Roatan, and I am relieved that my time here isn't over--I'll be coming back in January. In all my travels, I've always looked for a place like this--a place where I can live on the beach, and write, and dive. It's a great gig, and I'm pretty happy I can stay on a bit longer. The job market being what it is in the States, I doubt I'd be able to find work right now, and there's no point in coming home in the summer months (I'm a teacher, and everyone is on summer vacation then).

The larger plan is to come back at the end of August, and work on applying for graduate school. I'm aiming for a Ph.D. in Creative Writing. All the applications are due between December and February, so I'll have a few months to try to get letters of rec. and to work on all the applications crap. I've limited my list of schools to ten, all over the good ole US of A, so if I get in anywhere you'll certainly be seeing more of me. These programs are highly competitive, though, so my chances of getting in are slim. Who knows what the future holds? My plan is to enjoy the moment in true carpe-diem style, yet keep one eye on the horizon. It's worked for me so far!

So have happy holidays, everyone, thanks as always for reading (and caring) about all the nonsense I get up to.

Amber

Amor in Paradise

2009-12-03T15:26:00.000-08:00

"Amber, I have to speak from the heart. I think you are a really pretty girl. You're beautiful. I'd really like to go out with you."

Ah, the words every woman longs to hear. If only they didn't come from the mouth of a nineteen-year-old bootleg DVD salesman.

I don't know what it is with me and 19 year olds. A boat captain I know hits on me every time I see him, with the unique blend of directness and "cojones" I have come to see as typical of Honduran guys. I have to admit, he is one hot boat captain--six pack abs, bulging biceps, propensity for walking around shirtless--but, come on. These young guys aren't exactly shopping at the Monogamy Store.

Cristian, the aforementioned DVD salesman, is a sweet kid that I think of as exactly that--a kid. His DVDs always work, he gives me a fair price, and he never tries to cheat me. He trolls the street near my house, so I can always find him with his overstuffed bacpack full of his wares and a large stack of new releases in his hand. I am always glad to see him--why not? My DVD player broke in June and it took until November to get a replacement. At last, I can watch movies again! So I assumed Cristian liked me for obvious reasons--I am a very good customer.

Today, though, I ran into him at Bananarama bar, where I was serving cruise ship patrons (a once-weekly gig I picked up while I wait for more scuba work). He was taking a break in the shade, and I came over to see what new stuff he had. I mentioned I had a stack of old DVDs that I wanted to get rid of.

"You live in West End, right?" he asked. "I can come by there later, when you get off work."

Great, I thought, this would save me from having to walk up the road trying to find him. He agreed to meet me in front of my house later that day, and I thought little of it (other than to rejoice that I'd have new movies to watch!).

When he showed up, though, it was like someone turned on the Flirtation Switch in his brain. As I sorted through the new releases, he complimented me profusely. Although I am used to this kind of empty flattery in Honduras, this was overkill. After I selected my films, I began to pack up to take my dinner (which was growing cold by now) and go into my room.

"Perhaps I could rest here a while?" Cristian said.

"Here? In the kitchen? I'm sorry, I have to lock up. I'm going to my room to eat dinner. But there are picnic tables outside--"

"Oh. I thought we could sit here and talk a while."

"How old are you Cristian?"

"Nineteen."

"Do you know I am thirty-one years old? My younger brother is 25, and he already has kids."

"Yes, but love has no age," Cristian said, putting his hands over his heart. "Besides, I see you are single, you have no kids--"

Ah, so now we were getting to it. A few times, I'd joked about my lack of a social life while purchasing movies. Most Honduran guys my age have at least a couple of kids by my age. Most of the women are pregnant in their teens, and birth control doesn't seem to be much of a priority on the island. Most local women I know have four or five kids, and they're younger than me. Not all of the kids are from the same father. The general unreliability and unfaithfulness of island men is a constant lament.

A woman who is unmarried, and unburdened by any kids, is pretty darn rare around here. I'm a real catch. No kids equals no mouths to feed. And even better, I'm a gringa! I'm independent, so I take care of myself. It's like a dream come true for the Honduran male--get in with a gringa like me, and you could have lots of sex, secure in the knowledge that she won't have kids, and best of all, she won't ask for any money! Woo hoo!

I almost feel sorry for them. They have no shot. None. And I almost hate to break it to them.

"I'm sorry, Cristian. There is a reason why I'm single. I choose to be. I am an independent, educated woman, and I seek someone who is the same. And I prefer men my age or older. "

Cristian persisted for a while, but when he saw he wasn't getting anywhere, he gave in.

"We can always be friends, yes?"

"Sure," I said, and escorted him out of the kitchen.

A few minutes later, I heard a knock at my door. He wanted a DVD back, he made some kind of mistake in the exchange. I'm pretty sure he made up the excuse to come talk to me again. I felt uncomfortable having him know where I live, but it was too late for that.

"I want to learn English," Cristian said. "You are a teacher, right?"

"Yes. Seriously? You want to take English class with me? Can you speak some English already?"

"Of course. Like this: Your eye. So beautiful."

"So you basically only use English to chat up girls?"

"And sell my DVDs. But I want to learn to read and speak also."

"Okay, sure. But I want to make something clear. I'm never going out with you. Not ever. So if you are taking English because you think it will make me change my mind, it won't work. I'm a professional English teacher, and if you pay me, I will teach you English. Okay?"

"Okay! Great." Cristian said, practically skipping as he made his way back down the beach.

I'm going to regret this, I thought.

Thoughts on Unemployment

2009-11-29T18:12:00.000-08:00

I have never been unemployed before. It is a new, somewhat liberating feeling. In fact, I will go so far as to admit I've been a bit spoiled in my employment history. That's right, I'll fess up--I've never had to try very hard to find a job.

My very first job was in the dormitory cafeteria, during my freshman year at college. I walked in, met the manager, and the next day was sporting ugly no-slip shoes and a polo shirt the sickly green color of hospital walls. It was a wonder anyone was able to eat anything after looking at us.

I worked there for my entire first year, and the majority of my shifts were spent in the back room, washing dishes. I preferred it to any other task, because it meant I didn't have to deal with annoying people as they complained about the slop we were feeding them. In back, I could listen to my CD player (something appropriately full of angst, like Nirvana) while I dumped food into huge trash cans and then slid the dishes into racks, where they made their way on a conveyor belt into the huge, stainless steel dishwasher that belted steam in huge clouds.

The repetitive, robotic nature of my task meant that my mind could float free and unencumbered, or simply sink into the idle hum of the music pumping into my headphones. What impressed me most about that job was how much food we wasted. Huge sculptures of re-hydrated mashed potatoes, mountains of reheated, canned vegetables--all of it tossed into a bin. It could have fed a small country in Africa, that waste. Oh, and I went home every night smelling like garbage--is it surprising I didn't have many dates back then?

I did a lot of random jobs during college. I worked in a call center trying to convince people on welfare to donate money to the school (I quit after a week), I worked as a writing tutor, I helped a PhD student with her psychology dissertation by performing the role of the mental patient on her series of audio tapes (whatever happened to those, I wonder?), and I spent summers as a secretary or as a clerk in a title office, pulling up files from strips of microfiche all day--birth certificates, property titles, death certificates, you name it.

When I got to grad school, I didn't even have to apply for a job. The head of the linguistics department needed someone who could speak Spanish to be a language TA. I didn't have to do an interview. Having more TAs meant a substantial savings for the university, which didn't want to pay high professor salaries or deal with tenure. As a grad student, TA-ships paid my rent, food, tuition, and books. Not a bad deal.

Because of my luck with jobs, I've had faith that I would find work even when other people told me it was impossible. I went to France with my CV, a cover letter, and heaps of wishful thinking. I carefully unfolded my one business suit each morning at the youth hostel before heading out into the streets of the city. I had a map of Paris in one hand and a list of schools in the other. I still remember one secretary who told me, looking down her nose, "you want to work 'ere? Go marry a Frenchman!" Fortunately, I happened into the right school at the right time, and within a year I had a working visa and a residence permit to live in France.

It wasn't until getting back from my two years on the JET program in Japan that I noticed a real change in the employment world as I knew it. The economy was just beginning its nose dive, and it took several months to accumulate the four jobs that it required to replenish my savings. I was a substitute high school teacher, I taught English at an adult school at night, I worked as a restaurant hostess, and I wrote freelance articles for a local magazine. Even with all of that (working seven days a week, days and nights), I barely made 1700$ a month. If I hadn't lived at home with my parents, I would have only broken even.

Now, here in Roatan, I have to face the bare facts: I have not had steady work since the end of August. That's almost 4 months of unemployment, a record for me.

The Honduran political crisis together with the global recession has meant fewer tourists in Roatan than ever before. Recent statistics show that tourism is down 70%, even lower than after Hurricane Mitch. It's bad. Dive shops have let go most of their staff, keeping on only the one or two instructors with the most seniority.

People like me, people not affiliated with any shop--are left as freelance instructors, bouncing between the shops whenever they have a need for an extra set of hands. With freelance, two factors come into play: how many languages you speak, and who you know. You get "in" with a shop--make friends with the owner, or with some of the instructors, and you'll be the first one they call. You speak a useful language, like Spanish, and they'll call you because they need you.
In the last four months, I have done one dive with one customer, and that's only because they needed a Spanish speaker.

Of course, I've done loads of writing. For the first time in my life, I have the kind of life most writers dream of. I live on the beach, I have Internet and everything I need, and I have no demands on my time other than writing. I am broke, but who cares? I'm writing better stuff than I ever have in my life (at least I hope so!) and I know I'm making an investment in a future goal that is more important than money or material things.

Even so, it feels weird. For the first time, ever, I don't have anything to get up in the morning for. I have no co-workers, none of the security of a regular paycheck. It is a complete novelty to watch my dwindling savings and wonder if I will be able to pay my rent. I could call myself a starving artist, except that if there is one thing I will always find the money for, it's food. But it's a strange thing to be alone. There is only me, this computer, and the sound of waves outside my window. Who knew?

Shopping in Paradise

2009-11-19T21:31:00.000-08:00

Shopping in Paradise

The bus started out empty as it bumped and rattled its way down the pot-holed expanse of West End road. I was the only foreigner, but I was used to that. The tourists could afford taxis and private cars, not these antiquated mini-buses full of crying babies, shopping bags, and whatever else could be crammed inside. This time, a man with a giant red can of gasoline came on board, along with a mother and several children, who sat on the seat directly behind me, loudly popping their gum.

The morning rain clouds had drifted away, and the sudden sunshine made the air thick, humid, and swarming with mosquitoes. We eventually pulled onto the paved main road, and started making better time.

In Sandy Bay, we turned into La Colonia, the small jumble of ramshackle houses with corrugated tin roofs that was the home of many of the locals on the island. The driver stopped in a dirt lot where plump ladies sat in front of tables selling shoes, clothes, and trinkets. A pot-bellied man in a New York Yankees baseball cap suit sold red, fuzzy lychee fruit that rested in piles on the roof of his car.

After picking up more passengers in La Colonia, we went back to the road, winding our way through sharp curves with green jungle on either side. In one break in the trees, I saw the Que Tal condominiums, replete with a private, man-made beach and a golf course. In another gap was a collection of local houses, where children played football with an old coconut husk in the dirt yard.

A very gay black man got on the bus. "How you doin', sweetheart?" he said as he took the seat next to me. His eyebrows had been plucked into a diva-like arch, and he carried a pink handbag. When he got off, he bent over and I got an unwelcome eyeful of a green and yellow thong g-string.

A woman the driver knew got on the bus. "Hey! Come sit up here with me, so we can chat," he told her and she climbed into the van's passenger seat.

"Did you hear? They killed someone yesterday," the driver said.

"Oh my God. Here? On Roatan?" the woman replied, putting a hand over her mouth.

"I know, you'd expect something like that on the mainland, in San Pedro Sula, but things are getting bad here now. It was in an isolated spot above la Colonia, near where my uncle lives--you know the place?" The woman nodded. "They broke in to rob the place, and they ended up killing the man who lives there."

The woman asked a question, but her voice was drowned out by the roar of the motor.

"I know," the driver said. "I can't imagine killing a man. Me? Kill a man? It's a mortal sin."

I thought of one of the instructors at my shop, who had his house broken into twice in the last month. They came in while he was sleeping. The economic and political crisis has caused many would-be thieves to come over from the mainland. They steal what they can, and then sneak away in the middle of the night on a boat. They are almost impossible to catch, and robberies have become more and more common due to the economic aftermath of the recent political crisis.

I always hear interesting things on busses.

When I climbed out of the bus in Coxen Hole, I made my way down the crowded street to the office supplies store. I'd bought a day planner there a week earlier, only to realize belatedly that it was for 2008. I wanted to return or exchange it for something else.

"You'll have to come back another day," the cranky saleswoman said. I was the only customer in the store, but she acted put out by my demands on her time. "The owner isn't here."

"It was hard enough for me to come today," I said. "I don't have a car."

"Well, the owner's not here--"

"Okay, so could you call the owner?"

"It's your mistake, you know. You should have checked the planner before you bought it."

"Well, I just assumed you wouldn't sell a planner that expired in August. Silly me."

I eventually convinced her to call, and the owner was much more amenable to my request. I exchanged the planner for some whiteboard markers, and I was on my way.

I walked farther down the street, which smelled of unwashed bodies and grime. A few stray dogs slept on the sidewalk, their ribs and hipbones visible through their mangy fur. Bootleg DVD sellers trolled the road, both their arms laden with stacks of DVDs up to their shoulders. As I walked, taxis beeped at me, hoping for a rich tourist fare.

Despite its negative aspects, I liked the market area of Coxen Hole--the little boutiques with bras and panties laid out on tables, the fruit and vegetable stands, the shops that sold hodge-podge collections of knives, plastic Tupperware, brooms, and anything else potentially useful in the home.

Inside H.B. Warren, one of the oldest supermarkets on the island, I found a few of the things I needed to buy, although many of the shelves were empty, awaiting the arrival of goods from the ferry. One whole bank of freezers at the back of the store was empty, too, which made me wonder if the store was going out of business.

I couldn't find everything on my list, so I tromped back up the road and up a small hill to the Plaza Mar shopping center, where I found the last of the items of my list. Before going to the register, I carefully tallyied up how much things cost before putting them in my hand cart. I lived in terror of not having enough money and having to ask the cashier to take an item back. (A humiliating experience. "Um, yeah, I changed my mind. I don't want that box of cereal. That's right. I suddenly don't like it any more.")

Outside, local kids played soccer in an open field. They'd fashioned goals out of wooden posts dug into the ground.

On the bus ride back, I sat near the back of the bus, where a young child, no older than eight, sang Spanish love songs the entire ride to West End, despite the occasional, ineffective hushing of her mother.

I was the last person off the bus, since my house lies at the very end of West End, at the first and last stop for the busses. After putting my goodies away in the kitchen, I sighed and looked out at the turqoise sea, hearing nothing but the lapping of waves against shore. It was good to be home again.

An Anatomy of Solitude

2009-11-08T18:56:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from Personal Journal: November 8, 2009

Freddie called and cancelled our dinner tonight. "I want to eat alone. I hope you don't mind," he said. No, I didn't mind. Part of me was relieved. I'd been dreading the dinner, thinking of ways to keep the cost minimal (I won't have a drink, I'll order a bean quesadilla, that's only 80 Lempiras, the cheapest thing on the menu...) but it was a surprise nonetheless.

Our last dinner was frustrating. Freddie likes to lecture, likes to make quick judgements. Pitbulls are killers, he says, so he won't go to a particular restaurant because the owners have a pitbull. I find this silly, since the pitbull isn't even at the restaurant, but Freddie has made up his mind. All pitbulls, and pitbull owners, are evil. After a long rant, I tell him he's convinced me. I'm going to buy a pitbull. He doesn't laugh.

Freddie and I have been friends since I met him one day as he was walking his dog on the beach. He is in his 50's, with a sweet, aging dog he takes with him everywhere. We are both writers, but we could not be more different. He writes by hand, in paper notebooks; I use a computer. He writes about Life, the Universe, and Spirituality; I write about myself, since I am what Freddy would call "unenlightened". Freddie has no immediate plans to get published; I spend hours each day thinking only of ways to do so. Freddie likes routines; I like change.

"Why don't we try someplace different this week?" I asked last week. We have dinner every Sunday, at the same restaurant.

"Where would we go?" He was incredulous, as if I were asking him to travel to the moon.

"How about the other chicken place, down the road?"

"They only sell fried chicken, I think. It looks like crap."

"Or the baleada place?"

"The baleadas aren't filling enough."

"Pizza?"

"I hate the owner. I'll never go there. Besides, I don't eat pizza any more."

"Noodle Shack?"

"They own a pitbull."

During the meal, Freddie sulked. "Now I can't enjoy myself, because I keep thinking you don't want to eat here," he said. He wasn't wrong.

Freddie and I are like two worlds colliding, and then careening apart again. He is my only real friend in West End, but I can sense that it won't last. We are too different. Freddie resents me because I am a commercial writer. I am "selling out". I resent him because he lives in La La Land. He thinks that one day, he'll mail his notebooks to a publisher and--voila!--they will be published.

In the real world, my world, editors and publishers have built walls up in front of themselves. These walls help keep out all the housewives with too much time on their hands, the college students who decide to write a novel over summer vacation. The walls are built high, so that only the strong and persistent can climb over, with much effort. Each editor requires a query letter, a synopsis, chapter outlines. Those 50 sample pages of your work must reach out and grab the editor out of a sea of slush. Thousands upon thousands of people write books, and each year the demand for books lessens. The printed word is dying, a long, slow, agonized death. People don't read as much any more, with all the other advanced technology around, the flashing lights and ringing bells that draw the eye inevitably away from the plain, unresourceful page.

I try to tell Freddie about how I am climbing that wall, inch by painful inch, scratching my fingernails into the grooves, finding handholds. He thinks I am wasting my time. When I talk about my writing, he yawns, watches other patrons in the restaurant, stares at his dog. It is as if I am speaking a foreign language.

"I want to eat alone," he'd said.

"Sure, okay," I'd replied. "Whatever."

I see my friendship with Freddie dissolving like exhaled breath on a glass window. Friendships have a natural shelf life, and it is only the rare one that manages to withstand the test of time.

With the lack of work in West End, I have retreated to a peaceful, inner world. I write, I read, I take walks. My constant companion now is my cat Buddy--a fickle companion, since he is drawn to me more for what I can give him (food) than actual attention--but a companion all the same.

I am alone, but I am not lonely. I think of Jack Kerouac's Big Sur. Jack knew real solitude. I will never know that. My computer connects me to the world, so that even if I am alone, I am part of the world. My friends and family are at my fingertips. I have entertainment, television, books, at the click of the mouse.

As I sit here now, I am glad I came outside today. The sunlight reaches me only in patches, and through the gaps in the trees I can see sunlight glinting on water, and hear waves crashing against shore. The world smells fresh, like a perpetual spring, and on the breeze rides the acrid stench of rotting seaweed ripped up by the recent storm. I saw a possum-like animal as I left the kitchen this morning, brown with a yellow stripe on the back of its curved, sausage-like body. I watch the cats as they patrol the trees, looking for prey. I listen to the birds, chittering in the trees, laughing at the cats who leap but can never catch them. An orange wheelbarrow sits deserted in sand which is still indented with the pattern of millions of individual raindrops.

It is a beautiful world I live in, and it makes me afraid. One day, sooner or later, it will end, and all I will have is memories of this time, this place. I hate nostalgia more than anything else, because it means that something great, something magical, has passed from the world, never to return again.

I look out on this world and I think: No. I'm not lonely.

Let the Rainy Season Begin!

2009-10-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

Complete and utter darkness greeted me as I left my friend Robert's place and headed for my own. His apartment has a generator, so I was able to use my computer for a few hours, until around seven thirty, when his generator went, too.

"You should stay here," Robert said, his face ghost-like in the white glow of his battery-powered lamp. "It looks pretty nasty out there."

"No, they close the kitchen at eight, and I want to eat dinner tonight," I said, stepping out into the road. My rain poncho fluttered around me like birds' wings as I made my way down the dirt road to the beach, waving both hands in front of me like a blind woman.

I'd been wondering for a long time when the rain would come. Thus far, the weather had been hot and humid as always, and I was actually looking forward to a drop in temperature. This storm, however, came fast and furious, dropping sheets of rain on the houses that made their tin roofs bang like an 80's drum solo. The high winds knocked out the power at 11 in the morning, and no one knew when the repairs would be finished.

Power outages on Roatan are a regular, often daily, occurrence. The entire island's power supply emanates from an ancient generator that reminds me of old jalopies that people refuse to let die. You fix one part, and the next day something else breaks. It's irritiating, but most of the outages last only a couple of hours. On a rare occasion, the power outages take place at night--that is the absolute worst.

Without power, the streetlights are out, and the whole world feels as if a blanket has been thrown over it. There is the occasional glimmer from places with generators, but most areas are dark. I walk the same route ten times a day, but it's amazing how darkness and howling winds change your perception of the familiar. The strong winds had changed the beach into a wild, strange place. The normally calm, lake-like waters lapping the shore had turned into breaking waves, and the water level had risen so high it was washing away beach chairs and covering the sand with a morass of dead sea grass.

I forded through several deep puddles on the road that reached nearly to my knees. You couldn't hear much of anything over the roar of the surf, which had reached so high that there would be no way to get to my house without taking off my shoes and wading through the waves. I didn't mind the waves--they reminded me of home, smaller cousins to the giant, crashing monsters of the California Pacific. At night, though, waves feel dangerous, as if a giant tsunami is about to crash into you at any moment. Occasionally my foot would disappear into an area of soft sand, like quicksand, and I'd have to yank out my foot to a wet, slurping sound.

I made it back to my apartment by taking careful steps forward, almost walking into a mango tree a few times. I went inside and fumbled around for my candles and matches. Only one match left, darn. I carefully aligned it on the strike pad and pulled the match. It burst into flame, and then immediately went out.

"You've got to be kidding me," I said.

I found my cell phone and used its bluish glow to stumble to the kitchen. The common kitchen is across a large, tree-filled courtyard, bordering the beach. The rooms are farther back. Avonell, the manager of the hotel, told me that once, during a hurricaine, the water level rose so high that the water came all the way past the kitchen, almost to the rooms. An encouraging story.

There were matches in the kitchen, I knew, and I would be able to eat my dinner as well. The kitchen closes at 8, and it was ten till. I could make it. When I arived however, the kitchen had been locked from the inside by the night watchman. I knocked twice, but he didn't open the door. I had no doubt he was passed out drunk again, which meant not even the apocalypse would wake him.

Using my cell phone light, I went over to my next door neighbor, Barefoot Bar, and begged for a couple of matches. The bar was mostly deserted, but the bartender was friendly and wrapped the matches in a napkin for me so they wouldn't get wet. Then I darted back through the surf again to my place.

Having no power during a thunderstorm sucks just about as much as you would expect. No power means no computer, no lights, no entertainment. The best I could manage was holding a candle close to the pages of a book, although at one point I shifted positions on the bed and nearly set the book on fire. I ate dry cereal for dinner, the only thing I had in my room. Suffice to say my evening wasn't a high point of my time on Roatan.

Of course, the power came back on in the night, and today I am able to enjoy the storm. I can sit here and write on my computer, listen to music on my Ipod, and snuggle with my cat, while outside the window, the rain crashes down. Rainy season has officially begun, and as long as the power stays on, I am all right with it.

The Pied Piper of Puerto Cortez

2009-09-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

My stomach was in knots. It was Friday, and I was standing in the Placencia tourist office, awaiting the verdict. Would I be able to get into Honduras on the ferry to Puerto Cortez? The tourist office lady wasn't sure.

Then a large black man with watery eyes and a substantial potbelly walked in.

"You're going, then?" the lady asked him.

"No. Not going nowhere. Staying here. Forever," he replied, flashing several gold teeth when he smiled.

My heart practically stopped beating. Then the lady looked at me and smiled. "He's kidding. He's a real joker. The boat's going out. That'll be a hundred and ten, Belize."

I was torn between strangling them and hugging them, but decided neither course of action would be prudent. I forked over the dough.

The ferry was a small, fast motorboat that zipped across the water. It was at less than half capacity, so many people stretched out on the padded benches and went to sleep for the duration of the trip. All told, the voyage took about four hours, and I spent much of the time getting to know the other passengers around me.

On my left sat two young, British newlyweds, traveling the world on their honeymoon before emigrating to Australia. There was also a blonde journalist, who was quite upset that she'd chosen to do her visa run on the very day Zelaya snuck back into the capital. "I would have been the only British journalist there!" she lamented. I also met a brother and sister from Norway, although I originally mistook them for a couple.

On my right were two Hondurans. One, a prim, well-dressed Honduran woman with dark skin and long, shiny hair, had gone to Belize to look for work. Finding none, she was returning to Honduras to open a shop. The other was a fat lady with an unruly mop of curly hair. She lay stretched out on a bench, looking rather unfortunately like a beached whale, and insisted that the political crisis was a sign of the end of the world, and that it was time to repent before the coming of Jesus. The other Honduran woman had nodded her head in agreement at this, saying, "It's all there, in the Bible. We repent our sins, and our suffering will be over. We'll all be in a better world, a beautiful paradise."

"Well, I hope the end of the world doesn't come today," I said. "I have to get to La Ceiba."

When we arrived at Puerto Cortez, stepping off the dock was like stepping onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The boat company had taken our passports to customs, a few kilometers away, and the only way to get there was by taxi. The taxi drivers knew this, and swarmed around us like flies, quoting ridiculously high fares. Money changers wielding calculators and huge wads of cash tugged on our sleeves, offering to change Guatemalan Quetzales and Belize Dollars at dubious exhange rates.

Never has my ability to speak Spanish proved more useful. I immediately seized the opportunity to offload the Guatemalan money I'd been stuck with. It took a while to find a money changer who would offer me a reasonably fair rate, but at last I followed an older man wearing the boat company's insignia on his shirt, who promised that his agency would give me a good deal. The "agency" was really a motorcycle shop, but the woman inside gave me close enough to the money's value for me to be satisfied.

When I stepped back out into the street, I saw the other foreign travelers standing around like nervous sheep encircled by wolves. Several shady characters were trying to convince them that it would be wiser to pay thirty bucks (per person!) for a taxi to San Pedro Sula, the departure terminal for all buses bound to La Ceiba. The leader of the taxistas was a mustachioed Honduran, who spoke fluent English and played upon every traveler's fears.

"No, no, you can't take a bus. It's too late. You'll never make the bus to La Ceiba. Unless you go with me. Maybe you'll make it." When they resisted, he added, "you'll get caught by the curfew, and you'll get arrested by the police! It's very dangerous now, with the political situation."

I knew this guy was full of crap. Every traveler's bone in my body told me going with him would be a mistake. The other travelers had no idea what was going on, and since none of them spoke Spanish, they were tempted to take him up on his offer. I decided to intervene.

"Look, guys," I said, ignoring the resentful glare of the taxista. "I know for a fact that there are buses. You shouldn't listen to anything that man is telling you. Even if we did get caught by a curfew, we could stay the night in San Pedro and still make the afternoon ferries to the islands tomorrow. I'm going on the normal bus."

The taxista snorted, leaning back against a parked car. "A chicken bus? It's not safe. You'll be much safer with me."

"I don't know, maybe we should," the Norwegian girl said, and some of the others nodded.

I turned my back on them and started negotiating a fare to the customs office with another driver. "If I were you, I'd come with me," I said, making one final effort before getting in the car. The newlyweds hopped in.

On the way to customs, the new taxista insisted that we could never make it to to bus terminal in time unless he drove us, for "only" fifteen dollars a head. We declined.

It only took a few minutes to get our passports stamped at customs, and I asked the official there about the buses to San Pedro.

"Aren't you taking a taxi?" he asked, probably accustomed to tourists being terrified of public transport.

"Nah, too expensive," I said. Then he told me the stop for buses to San Pedro was a mere six blocks away, not the miles and miles the taxistas had led us to believe.

I shouldered my pack and faced the other seven foreigners, who were standing around outside the office with lost expressions.

"The bus stop is six blocks away. You can follow me, if you want," I said, and started walking. They all followed, much to the anger and disappointment of the taxistas, including the mustachioed man, who had followed us to customs like vultures circling prey.

We must have been quite a sight. I led the pack, like the Pied Piper of Puerto Cortez, followed by seven tourists toting large backpacks or rolling suitcases down the dusty avenues of the town. Within ten minutes, we were piling onto a comfortable, air conditioned bus headed directly for San Pedro. The cost was 42 Lempiras, or slightly more than two dollars.

I asked the driver about our chances of getting into La Ceiba that day. I was worried, of course, that the taxistas had been right, and that I was leading the other travelers to a bad end. The driver's response eased all my worries, however.

"No problem," he said. "There's no curfew today, and the last bus to Ceiba does't leave until 6. You have plenty of time."

All those taxistas had been such liars! I restrained myself from shouting "Ha! Gotcha!" out the window as we drove away.

The bus did get stopped once by police, who frisked all the men on board and searched the bags of all the women. With the political crisis in the capital, the Honduran government fears people bringing weapons or explosives to the cities. It only took a couple of minutes, however, and then we were back on the road.

As we approached San Pedro, it started to rain heavily, and many streets turned into rivers of brown water. Others had been blocked by fallen trees, which forced the driver to take several detours on his way to the bus terminal. We were in the center of town when, all of the sudden, our driver flagged down another bus, shouting out the window, "Ceiba? Ceiba?"

Apparently, the 4:15 bus had just left the terminal on its way to La Ceiba, and we had stumbled across it. We could still make it, if we darted across several lanes of moving traffic to the other bus. I thanked the driver for his help, and narrowly avoided getting flattened by a semi before clambering onto the other bus.

We'd made it. I would be in La Ceiba in time to catch the morning ferry to Roatan. Hooray! Unfortunately, the normally three-hour journey was extended to five due to heavy traffic and rain, and I was exhausted by the time my five remaining foriegn followers and I (two had gotten off at an earlier stop) finally pulled into La Ceiba terminal.

The La Ceiba cabbies were much more friendly, and I had no problem negotiating a reasonable price for a ride to the town center. I suggested to the "final five" that we go to Hotel Italia, since I'd stayed there before, and knew it to be a clean, quiet place. They accepted.

In short order, I was sharing a hotel room with the two Norwegians, relieved to be free of buses and boats for one day. I have to admit, I was quite proud of myself. I'd made the entire journey from the border for less than six dollars, and not one of the taxistas' prophecies of doom had come to pass. If I've learned anything from this trip, it's that I feel safer traveling elbow to elbow with normal, everyday people. A taxista could hypothetically take me anywhere, and muggings of that sort are not uncommon. Besides, it's on the bus that I had the most memorable conversations of my entire journey.

When I was in Guatemala, I listened to a woman talk for 45 minutes about how Jesus had spoken to her in a vision, and told her not to eat meat. On the bus to La Ceiba, I met a woman who's husband had been murdered by his business partner, leaving her alone to raise three kids. On that same bus, I overheard men talking politics in loud voices, and another man spent twenty minutes selling Ibuprofen and a "miracle elixer" that he claimed could cure anything from constipation to ulcers. Those people are the reason I love to travel. I don't travel so that I can get from photo op to photo op in an air conditioned mini-bus with other westerners, speaking in English and thanking my lucky stars I'm not "out there" where it's "dangerous."

At the ferry port this morning, the other foreigners thanked me for my help and and said good-bye. They were headed for Utila, a different island in the Bay Islands chain. I made my way alone on the Galaxy Wave to Roatan, where at long last I walked down the street of West End. I found it much the same as before I left, although quieter. The rainy season is nigh, the streets are silent, and many shops are closed, awaiting the return of the tourist masses. I find it both familiar and unfamiliar after my prolonged absence, since it is not the island that has changed so much as myself. Travel always has that effect, I think, because every time we leave the familiar for the unknown we gain perspective on what we have left behind.

For now, all I know is that it's good to be "home".

Life is What Happens . . .

2009-09-24T15:48:00.000-07:00

Life is what happens when you are busy making plans. Or so the saying goes. It never really made sense to me until today. It's so, so true.

Last night, I was heading off to bed with a deep sense of satisfaction. I'd spent a day wandering the ancient ruins of Tikal with my new friend Sevrine. We'd climbed giant stone steps and looked out across miles and miles of jungle. We saw wild monkeys playing in the trees, dozens of varieties of tropical birds, and even one of the adorable "pisotes," a furry animal that looks like a cross between a raccoon and a Daschund.

The whole experience was enriched by having a pleasant travel companion. Sevrine and I were the only two guests in the hotel, and as luck would have it, we both spoke French, were of approximately same age, and agreed about nearly everything. We both loved our hotel, the "Mon Ami," located right on the edge of lake Peten Itza. My room was like something right out of Indiana Jones, a wide, attic-like space with great open windows (sans glass) looking out on jungle. The thatched roof slanted upwards, and at night the occasional stray bat would fly in and zoom about the ceiling for a while before finding his way back out again. I slept to the sound of crowing roosters, ribbeting frogs, and crickets.

After our afternoon in Tikal, we even went for a swim in the lake, and I was surprised to find the water warm and clear. Little green fish darted about us as we swam, and the lake mud squished (somewhat unpleasantly) underfoot as we darted back to the hotel when it started to rain. I loved El Remate, a village off the beaten track but right on the way to the more touristy Tikal ruins.

Yes, everything was going to plan. Then I happened to glance down at a newspaper at the hotel's front desk. "Honduran borders closed," the headline read.

"You've got to be kidding me!" I exclaimed. But it was true--ousted president Zelaya had snuck back into the country and taken refuge in the Brazilian embassy, to the consternation of all. Riots and protests had followed in the capital city, and Thursday morning all borders and airports had been closed.

I'd been rather smug, thinking that my plan for returning home was going to work out perfectly. I was going to do a quick visa run to Belize, only a few hours' drive away, and then come back to the cheaper, more familiar Guatemala for the trip southward. I planned to take the southern border crossing into Honduras.

That night, I could barely sleep. All my stuff was in Roatan--my computer, my dive gear. If the violence escalated in Honduras, I would have to find some way to get my stuff, without endangering myself. Or, I could wait until the borders re-opened...but how long would that take? It was certainly a pickle. I determined that I would stick to the plan, and hope that by the time I got down south, the borders would be open again.

Well, that didn't quite go according to plan, either. I'd only intended to go as far as San Ignacio, Belize. The travel agent told me I would arrive there at 10am. From there, I could even turn around and go back to Guatemala that same day, visa renewed. By around 8:30 a.m, however, I had a sinking suspicion that the bus had passed San Ignacio. We seemed to be on a long, fast highway. I re-examined my ticket. The travel agent had only written "Belize," and had forgotten to specify the city. I asked the driver when we would arrive in San Ignacio.

"San Ignacio?" he said. "That was a long time ago. We go to Belize."

"Belize?" I said, as if I hadn't heard him correctly.

"Of course! Belize City."

I frantically flipped through my Lonely Planet. Oh, no. Now I was going to be all the way at the coast, much too far from the Guatemalan border for it to be practical to go back.

It was time for Plan B. I didn't want to stay in Belize City, that was for sure. I wanted to go home, the faster the better. A sudden idea came to me, and I flipped to the chapter on the southern city of Placencia, Belize. There it was! The "Gulf Cruza" ferry offers once-weekly trips to Honduras, every Friday. Friday was tomorrow! Should I risk everything, hoping that the border would be open and the ferry running, and try to get back to Honduras? You bet!

I arrived on time in Belize city, and I had no problem getting a cab. The cabbie was friendly, and even pointed out the right bus for me to take to get to Placencia, a refurbished school bus painted with Jamaican stripes. The bus seemed to take forever, but I arrived in Mango Creek (the sister city to Placencia) with no problems. I lucked out, and caught a free boat ride over to Placencia (which is actually a Caye, and most easily accessible by boat). The guy with the boat also happened to run a cheap hostel, and it is there that I am holed up for the night.

I went to the tourist office, and they tell me that, so far, the Gulf Cruza will still run tomorrow, and that the borders are back open again. Tomorrow morning, I will show up, ready to roll, and pray that I can be in my own bed by Saturday night. Fingers crossed!!

Mayan Crime and Punishment

2009-09-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

I took a chicken bus today, and ended up seeing something I wasn´t supposed to see.

¨Chicken bus¨is a bit of a misnomer, because I didn´t see a single chicken. I don´t know where they would have fit, anyway. People were crammed in three to a seat in the refurbished schoolbus, and I had my shoulder crammed unpleasantly against the window as my back found no refuge against the metal edge of the bench.

I was sad to leave Panajachel. I´d had a nice time there, spending one entire day visiting numerous lakeside villages. I loved the little markets selling everything under the sun, and my particular favorite sight was the baskets full of different sized lake fish, dried and seasoned for easy snacking. The most popular seemed to be the smallest fish, no larger than tadpoles. People popped those in their mouth like popcorn.

But it was time to move on to Xela (otherwise known as Quetzaltenango), and then begin my long trek east and north to Tikal. It wasn´t a long bus ride, and I was relieved when a large group of people left the bus at its halfway point. A portly, middle-aged woman sat next to me, greeting me kindly, and the voyage resumed.

Her name was Lita, and she taught grade school in Xela. Every day, she commuted the two hour trip from her home village near Panajachel. She didn´t necessarily like teaching, but when she was a child her parents had limited funds for her education. She´d wanted to study English and other languages, but they had said no. So now she was in her 50´s, married with 3 kids, and resigned to her fate of dealing with unruly kids all day.

I was curious about the school system here. ¨Lita, I see kids everywhere, in the street, selling cloth or bracelets. Isn´t school mandatory here?¨

"Of course," she said. "But we have many, many orphans. Did you see the boy who came on the bus at the last stop, the one selling newspapers? They shot his papa, right in front of him. Now he lives with his mama, but he has many brothers. He must work. There are also many single mothers. They get pregnant and the fathers dissapear. Often they are fifteen, sixteen years old. But the government is trying to make it better. They have made it possible for children who work in the morning to go to school in the afternoon, or vice versa. Children who must work during the week can go to school on weekends.¨

Our conversation was interrupted when the bus slowed down to rubberneck a large group of people crowded in an intersection. A police car was parked nearby, flashing its lights. Several people murmured the word "accidente," but it was soon clear that it wasn´t an accident.

"Ah,¨Lita said. "Mayan justice." She pointed, and I saw a man in a yellow T-shirt and torn jean shorts, crawling on his knees on the gravel. The observers had split on either side of him, like the parting of the Red Sea, and were watching him with silent, grave expressions. His mouth gaped open, and one of his eyes was purple and swollen from a beating.

"A thief. His parents are punishing him, and they will beat him. It is a Mayan punishment."

"What will the police do?" I asked.

"The police will wait until they are done, and take him to jail, probably only for a day. "

I later read in my guidebook that vigilante justice is common here, due to the ineffectiveness of the police. Criminals are imprisoned for only short terms, and released. Lynchings are still a regular occurence in the smaller towns, where a rapist, murderer, or other criminal often walks away from their crime with little more than a judicial slap on the wrist. It was the darker side to rural life in Guatemala.

Lita helped me find my stop, and showed me which bus to get on for the city center. I had enjoyed her company, although she had reveled in telling me bus horror stories, which is kind of like watching a movie with a plane crash when you are 30,000 feet in the air. "Sometimes people get road rage, and they strike the bus with a machete," she said, almost gleefully. "Somemetimes they shoot a gun."

Unfortunately, the bus trip to Xela appears to have been the most interesting aspect of the city itself, which is disappointing. It´s a grey, dismal city, full of traffic and dingy, worn-looking cafes. I went to the closest hostel, and now am grateful I am only staying one day. It´s clearly the "party hostel" of Xela, where people stand around smoking and drinking beers in the interior patio. In the rooms, empty vodka and beer bottles litter the tables, and I have a feeling I will not be getting much sleep tonight. I was too lazy to find another place, so I will suffer the consequences. I have already bought a bus ticket to "Chichi" (Chichicastenango) for tomorrow morning, where I plan to see one of the country´s best Sunday markets. Onwards.

Moctezuma´s Revenge

2009-09-17T18:08:00.000-07:00

Moctezuma II was ruler over the Aztec empire in the late fifteth century, in what we now know as Mexico. He lead the nation both to great conquest and to its eventual doom. He welcomed the Spanish conquistadors with open arms, inviting them into his house, where they stayed for several months. Eventually, hostilities arose, and Moctezuma became a prisoner in his own home. He later became a hostage, and eventual victim, in the skirmishes that followed.

Why, do you ask, am I concerned with Moctezuma, when I am not in Mexico? Well, as I lie in bed in my cockroach-infested hotel, feverish and ill, I became curious to know the origins of the expression ¨Moctezuma´s Revenge¨, which is a name for all the nasty food-borne bugs we travelers pick up when we have the nerve to leave home and invade another country with our cameras and our backpacks. It´s a fitting name, now that I think about it.

I was feeling fine when we got back from the volcano, and I didn´t eat anything terribly risky (a sandwich?) but you never know with these things. By the time we went to bed I knew something was wrong. I was FREEZING. Julie, being the wonderful person that she is, even gave me her blanket, but I couldn´t seem to get warm, no matter how many blankets they piled on me. I had a fever, and things were only going to go downhill from there.

I woke up in the middle of the night with all the usual symptoms of food poisoning. I´ll spare you the gory details, but suffice to say it wasn´t pretty. By morning I was so sick I could barely walk to the toilet without getting dizzy. We had pre-paid bus tickets to Chichicastenango, but if one thing was clear, it was that I wasn´t going anywhere.

Julie and Manu ended up leaving without me. They are on a tight schedule, with a flight waiting for them in Mexico, so I didn´t mind. The room felt empty without them, but I was glad that no other travelers rented the other two beds in the dorm during my stay. I hated my hostel, with its springy, hard mattress that killed my back, and the legions of cockroaches that skittered along the walls at night, but I didn´t have the energy to search for another place to stay. I paid up my room for the night, and alternately slept or went to the toilet for the next 24 hours.

In the morning, the watchman knocked on my door.

¨Señorita? Are you okay?¨ he asked, peeking his head through the crack of the door.

¨Never been better,¨ I croaked.

¨Ahem, I ask because I have been here thriteen hours and you haven´t come out of your room once. Are you sure you are okay?¨

¨Not really. But I think I´ll see a doctor tomorrow morning,¨ I said, and said farewell. Both he, Leonel, and the cleaning woman who came in the room from time to time, were like substitute parents during my stay. The woman offered to go to the store and buy me anything I needed. They were lovely people.

As promised, the following morning I made my way to find a doctor. This was no easy feat, as every block or so I felt faint and had to sit down on the curb for a minute. One passerby even said, ¨You look pale. Shall I call you a doctor?¨ which reinforced my high opinion of Guatemalan kindness to strangers. Eventually, I got to Doctor Ramon, a very nice, middle aged man with lots of official-looking diplomas lining the wall. He sent me to a lab for tests, and then when the results came back he told me that it was good news. He had been worried about an infection because of my high fever, but it was just a particulary obnoxious food-borne parasite. He perscribed an antibiotic and ibuprofen to reduce my fever.

I felt better within hours. It was like waking up out of a dream. Fever makes time pass with a surreal fluidity. I had no concept of time, with no meals to fall back on, no routine. I slept, and occasionally I woke up and watched movies on my ipod. Thank God I had the good sense to put the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy on there. Those movies are LONG. Perfect for when you are stuck in bed all day.

Ah, but I haven´t gotten to the worst part. The doc said I have to be careful. No sugar, no fried foods, no-- no-- COFFEE!!!! Ah, the horror! It´s a terrible punishment to be resigned to a world without fat, sugar, or caffeine. What else is there to live for??? Although the truth is that I was glad to eat anything after two days where I couldn´t eat a piece of bread without throwing it up. After the antibiotics kicked in, it was like a great conquest when I was able to keep down a whole bowl of soup.

After I started feeling better, I knew I had to get out of that hostel. I´d been there almost a week! And it was a horrible place at that, as dank as a dungeon, a gloom mitigated only by the friendliness of the staff. I bought a bus ticket for lake Atitlan, where I find myself at the moment.

I met a nice French girl named Camille on the bus, and we decided to share a hotel room here to save on costs. The hotel is like night and day with the hostel in Antigua. The beds are soft and comfortable, there´s television, and the rooms face a lush garden that twitters with the sound of birds in the morning. Outside, a sloping street leads down to the blue water of the lake, and each side of the road is lined with stalls selling local crafts and textiles. Panajachel is one of the main villages perched on the edge of the lake, and there are so many things to see and do I know I´ll never have time for all of them (you can even dive here!) .

Today Camille and I walked to a neighboring village, but the four kilometer trek wore me out (I am still not quite 100%, but getting there!). We hitched a ride back on the back of a pickup with a bunch of locals, traveling Guatemala-style. The villages here are adorable, so I plan to take an all-day boat tour of some of the villages tomorrow. It´s a touristy thing to do, but hell, I´m a tourist, aren´t I? I am starting to enjoy myself now. Moctezuma has had his revenge; let´s hope he´s done with me.

You Know You´re Too Close to a Volcano When...

2009-09-12T16:09:00.000-07:00

... your shoes start to melt.
...the guide shouts, ¨move!¨ when a piece of molten rock the size of a Volkswagon starts rolling towards you.
...you see people roasting marshmallows on the lava by the path.

Volcano Pacaya made a fun day trip from Antigua city, but I must admit I had quite a bit of apprehension about going there. Lonely Planet warned about robberies, rapes, and muggings along the trail there, and advised bringing a security guard. Add to that the fact that you are daring to approach an active volcano, and it feels like you are tempting fate.

All my fears dissipated, however, when our rickety tourist minibus arrived at our hotel. We would be traveling in a group of other tourists, with a tour guide to lead us up the trail. Chances were good we´d be fine, as long as we didn´t decide to walk on the wrong patch of ¨rock¨.

Upon stepping off the bus at the base of the trail, we were assaulted by dozens of stick wielding children, chanting, ¨stick? stick? you need, you need!¨ Many of these walking sticks would later be used as marshmallow roasters, or be thrown on the lava for the sheer enjoyment of watching them burn.

As we started up the steep path of black volcanic sand, we were followed by half a dozen horse ¨taxis¨, ready to swoop in and pick you up (for a reasonable price) should you start to show signs of fatigue. I was slower than everybody else at first, because I´d had a horrible night´s sleep at the cheap hotel where we were staying. I could feel every spring in that bed, and woke with a sore back that made walking uphill a real treat. Two ibuprofen later, however, I disappointed the eager horse taxis (¨You tired señora? Long way. Four kilometers! My horse is easy. Nice horse . . .¨) by speeding up and passing several other people from our group, who were gasping in the unaccustomed altitude.

It was a steep walk, but short, and soon we arrived at a rocky stretch of former lava that had cooled in a thin layer that crunched like glass underfoot. It was tenuous footing, and one lady slipped and got a deep cut on her ankle from the knife-like blades of rock.

Overhead, a red and black river made it´s langorous way downhill, a rockslide in slow motion, and the accompanying noise was like the sound of a million barbecuers raking the coals of their fires. We got close (too close, if you ask me). The scenery wavered in the intense heat, and several people were fretting about their shoes, which were melting. I got my pictures in, but when the guide shouted, ¨move!¨ as a huge, red, rock rolled downhill within twenty feet of where I was standing, I decided I was happy to watch the show from the base of the hill.

Just as we were heading back, huge clouds rolled in, blanketing the volcano in a sea of white. ¨It is like this every day,¨ the guide explained. ¨That is why it is good to come early.¨ The walk back was easy and uneventful, although we had to wade through the local children again before getting back on the bus, who all had hands extending, asking, ¨Tienen algo por mi? Do you have anything for me?¨

Antigua has been a lovely stopping place. It has dozens of churches, cobbled streets, and multicolored buildings that lend everything a colonial atmosphere. Sadly, tomorrow we are heading on to Chichicastenango (say that ten times fast!). I won´t miss the bed at the hotel, though.

Copan, Honduras (A Guilty Confession)

2009-09-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. Here it is: I'm not all that interested in the Mayan civilization. There! I said it. I know, I should probably be put on trial by the makers of Lonely Planet guidebooks. But it's true.

Don't get me wrong: Mayan culture and civilization are quite interesting. I like seeing the crumbling temples, and learning about how they were painstakingly put together, piece by piece, over decades, by teams of archaeologists. I like learning about the Mayan version of football, which involved sacrificing the winners to the Gods as a way to protect against drought and famine. I like the intricately carved "stelae"-- statues with carved hieroglyphs depicting the history of Mayan kings. It's all nice. But an overview is enough for me. I don't need to know the name of every Mayan king that existed, or how long their dynasty lasted, or what each carving means in explicit detail. It's enough for me to have the basics.

Not so for my travel companions, Manu and Julie. After three hours at the ruins in Copan, they'd barely gotten through half of the large complex of temples that make up the archaeological site on the outskirts of town. Manu had been here on a previous trip, and he loved to go on and on about the history of the Mayan civilization, while Julie took photo after photo of the temples and carvings, sometimes with her and Manu in them, sometimes from one angle, sometimes from another. I adore Manu and Julie, but compared to their travel pace, I was moving at the speed of light.

After three hours, I couldn't take it any more. I wanted to move--to walk and keep walking, stopping only for a moment or two, long enough to snap a photo or cement the experience in my memory. I explained this to Manu and Julie, and arranged to meet with them later. They had an ambitious day planned, involving a visit to the sculpture museum and another set of nearby ruins. Instead, I wanted to sit and soak in the afternoon sunlight from a sidewalk cafe in the heart of Copan. I wanted to relax and listen to the chittering of birds the parque central. I thought about visiting one of the museums, I really did. But at the end of the day, I chose modern Copan over ancient Copan. Guilty as charged.

After taking my leave of Manu and Julie, it took me less than an hour to finish viewing the bulk of the ruins. Then I took a long, meandering nature trail through the forest, which I enjoyed as much, if not more, than the ruins themselves. The walk took me past giant Ceiba trees, which represented the triad of human existence for the Mayans: the deep roots are the underworld, the trunk is the present, and the boughs the afterlife. They were comparable in size to the giant Sequoias of California, with enormous, broad branches flat enough to allow other plants to grow on top. I could tell that not many people take the nature trail--every few feet I stepped through strings of spider webs that had grown unhindered across the path, making me constantly brush my arms in case I happened to take on an unwilling, eight-legged passenger.

When I got back to the cobbled streets of Copan, I feasted on "tacos Hondurenos," which were crispy fried tortillas, rolled up like empanadas, and stuffed with potatoes, spices, and chicken. There are definite benefits of travel, and trying new foods is one of the big ones. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking through the town, stopping to look at touristy trinkets and meandering through the local fruit and vegetable market. Tonight, I plan to see the sun set past several hilltop stellae. Manu and Julie will come if they make it, and then I think we can appreciate the view at the same pace. After all, you can't speed up the setting of the sun.

Welcome, my friends!

2009-09-04T15:50:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I resisted the idea of making a blog for years. But it's time to get with the times. My email list has become cluttered with people I met years and years ago on a bus or a train, people whose faces are now little more than shadows to me, and whose lives have no doubt quite moved on since we were fairweather travel companions. With this blog, I'll be able to start with a clean slate. Those people that enjoy my silly little writing can subscribe and read, and those people that don't can fade into the mist. I'd rather have five people read and enjoy than a hundred who press "delete" when my stories come into their email inbox. The saddest thing about the email era is how quickly things are discarded, thrown into the virtual trash with a flick of the mouse button.

As I am now in the process of writing a travel memoir, I am hoping to share some of my "vignettes" of life in Honduras, as well as any other writing that might come down from the muses to my keyboard. I'm leaving shortly for a trip through Guatemala and parts unknown, and there is a need in me to share what I find there, with anyone who will listen. I imagine those of you that read this blog as invisible friends, silently sitting on my shoulder as I wander and learn. I hope occasionally I will hear something back. It's the best I can hope for.