Sea Hunt, or learning to swim

Of course, I did not do the writing assignment. I was too much of a flibbertigibbet to settle into it. The problem always was that I never admired the celebrities. Somewhere along the way, I had learned avoidance. And so I avoided the writing assignment.

See, we had so many celebrities, mostly musicians, living the San Geronimo Valley with us that I became quickly soured, inured to fame, feeling invaded as they bought up houses, moved in and turned everything upside down with their newfound wealth. As Joan Baez said, a savior’s a nuisance to live with at home.

At an early age, I fell in love with the sea. Lloyd Bridges playing Mike Nelson was my hero, taking us down to the underwater realm in black-and-white, on a neighbor’s old television—when we could get reception, which was iffy. Usually it was electronic snow emanating from the Andromeda galaxy decorating our screens, and the hiss of deep space singing.

Musing on mallows (photos)

Abutilon ssp., Indian mallow, wild cotton—but the shiny leaf is wrong—a Hybridum? 
I searched the web to credit the photographer, nope. Oldest v. was 2021. From Facebook.

An old friend from the Cazadero days, Marc Nassar, now living in Lisbon, posted a photo of a gorgeous globe mallow of sorts on Facebook. In his author photo, he wears a T-shirt that proclaims, in art we trust. He often posts images of pure beauty. 

So I often leave comments on his page, in part, to acknowledge the post, a habit of acknowledging the other, developed during the height of the pandemic when we were all so isolated from each other. But I also cannot resist the fleeting tangibility of beauty. (See Breakfast of campions.)

We stumbled upon each other on Facebook via old photos I had posted of a poetry reading, ca. 1998 at Marc’s house in Cazadero, of poets Mike Tuggle, Jim Dodge and Elizabeth Herron—this, after decades of isolation. It was something like 2 to 3° of separation, but Facebook often works in mysterious ways, telescoping time and distance into time present.

Alcedo tortoises, Galapagos

Once, long ago, we rode horses to the top of Alcedo caldera, a shield volcano on Isabela, the largest island in the Galapagos, where the permanent mist creates a perpetual drizzle, where giant tortoises, the size of VW Bugs, wallowed in mud puddles. As we approached, they hissed like air brakes, they hissed like the volcano, they hissed like cats, as they have no vocal cords to speak of. And yet they spoke most eloquently of a bygone era, outliers hanging for dear life on for millennia on end.

9/25/21

Remembering Jan Morris (10/2/1926 – 11/20/2020)

Way back in the yonder age, when I was an art student at Sonoma State University, circa 1976-78, Welsh travel writer Jan Morris came to give a lecture in Inez Storer’s art history class. That semester we met so many extraordinary artists, including artist and inventor, Don Farnsworth, whose grandfather invented the TV, and Sam Francis—who walked to Cotati from Point Reyes to meet us, as he was eschewing all forms of modern transport. 

I don’t exactly remember the details or the lecture itself. But what I do remember is that Jan had lunch with us afterwards in a Cotati pub and the afternoon stretched out beyond the fringes of eternity, embellished with her amazing stories. Beer-in-hand, she was on a roll. The story I remember most vividly to this day is of Jan telling us when she was in Mongolia riding a horse across the vast plains. And something about red cowboy boots stuck in the back of my mind. 

Of course, in those days, Jan may have still been a man (aka John Humphreys Morris, who was the only journalist on Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent team of Mt. Everest). But, Mongolia! When John began his ascent toward the feminine gender and reassignment in 1972, in Casablanca, Morocco, it rocked the world. People couldn’t wrap their minds around it. 

To this day, I don’t know if I imagined the story of the red Mongolian riding boots, or if I saw them in a photo. See, in those days, I was not yet a writer. It could’ve been a misplaced associative story fragment from Carolyn Leilani Lau, who followed Jan’s Mongolian path during the 1980s. I remember seeing the framed photo on her kitchen counter in Oakland. Celia Woloch too had a pair of red cowboy boots. 

Maybe it’s a poet thing. Those red boots, whether real or imagined, whether they were Jan’s or Carolyn’s, or Celia’s—on her tsigani journey to Romania—became a powerful symbol for my own wanderlust, and the metaphor led me to the far corners of the earth including crossing the Andes, the Galapagos, and to the Russian steppes when it was still the USSR. Not quite outer Mongolia. Or inner Mongolia, but I caught the firebug of travel. And ignited my mind, and my writing.

And no, I’ve never owned a pair of red riding boots, but I did travel to some of those places with red Reebock boots. Not quite the same thing, but infinitely more comfortable. I wore them out a few times over. Duct tape was my friend. In Leningrad, I discovered the Cossacks, and the ancient Scythians also wore beaded red riding boots, so I was in good company. 

But those red boots became a symbol within the distant vistas of my mind. Rest in peace, Jan Morris, and may the Elysian Fields of your mind lead you ever onward. And may you always wear those red riding boots as you travel the great plains of the great beyond.

From a Facebook note to Pamela Robertson-Pearce; rev. 11/21/21.

MARINE IGUANAS

In the Galápagos I swam
with Darwin's imps of darkness.
Marine iguanas dove into the surf
and grazed on seaweed encrusted rocks.
When they were chilled,
they hauled out to sun themselves
and bask on the hot rocks,
then they snorted the salt water
out their nostrils, spewing
like little dragons.

4/10/2016

I Remember the Stars

I remember the stars. As a kid growing up in West Marin (before there was light pollution), and later in West Sonoma County, I spent many nights just gazing up at the stars. By the time I grew up, it was almost impossible to escape the pollution from city lights. Who among us has really seen the stars in all their glory with no light pollution at all? It's truly amazing. Rare times at Sonora Pass, the Galapagos, or high in the Andes during the early 1980s, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa—unfathomable myriad stars that took my breath away. Who among us ?

2/11/14

RIP Lonesome George

I met poor old Lonesome George, the Galapagos tortoise, in the late 1980s. He was nearly the size of a VW Bug frame and he hissed like a hydraulic car lift if you got into his personal space.

KQED Science June 24, 2012 RIP Lonesome George.
"The giant tortoise Lonesome George, whose failed efforts to produce offspring made him a symbol of disappearing species, was found dead on Sunday, officials at the Galapagos National Park announced.Lonesome George was believed to be the last living member of the Pinta island subspecies and had become an ambassador of sorts for the islands off Ecuador's coast whose unique flora and fauna helped inspire Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution."

Lonesome George, the last of his species, only lived to be 100—not very old in tortoise years. He hissed like hydraulic brakes on a semi truck. He had a tortoise-sized rock in his enclosure, and would eagerly mount it from time to time, then he'd get a despondent look in his rheumy eye, and forlornly slide off. Couldn't even get his rocks off. It was tough love being the last of his species.

Marsha Calhoun said: I met him three years ago - they still had hopes that he and his girlfriend might succeed (it took him 14 years to decide to approach her). But I don't think the species is extinct - just his island branch. The Galapagans are doing a lot to keep the species itself alive - they are impressive creatures (the tortoises, that is).

Maureen Hurley Alas, with the passing of Lonesome George, it marks the extinction of a species, not merely an island branch sub-species; he was a separate Pinta Island species—they're genetically different.

However, one formerly extinct species, Chelonoidis elephantopus, from Floreana Island was found—sailors had abandoned them on Isabela Island in the 1800s. "Darwin discovered that the islands... were home to their own, distinct, tortoise species. Each differed slightly from those on nearby islands... DNA research finds at least 84 animals who were the direct offspring of a different species from Floreana Island long believed gone Giant Galapagos tortoise species may not be extinct —USA Today

TALKING LEAVES

TALKING LEAVES
        Trabaja el mar en mi silencio.
             —Pablo Neruda

We watch the sky for clues.
Birds proclaim unchartered territories.
A certain slant of sunlight grows wings.
Keepers of the circle, we sit on a blanket,
listen to translations of wind in the sycamores;
palisades     summer grass      cicada song
and pass the drum. Someone hands me a piece of paper.
The source of my freedom is what I fear most.
Bluejays argue, scissor-sharp, which direction to fly.
Words fall from the mouths of bees,
deer hooves rattle—first breath or final inspiration?
It no longer matters what we believe in. It happens anyway.
Watermelon rind on the blanket—not the marriage blanket
where he undid me with promises under the stars of Chiapas
only to bury a child's eyes beneath the stones of Tikal.
From inside the drum of my heart I howled
under the solstice moon rising over Mt. St. Helena
and from deep canyons coyotes answered. What more do I want?
I wear trophies of where we've been:
Baja, Peru, the Galapagos. An equator of pain visible
to the naked eye takes on the green form of air above the pond.
I struggle for balance, drawn to obsession like fire to air,
and learn first-hand the meaning of words: betrayal, abandonment, she.
She stalks up the path; a pathetic fish skewered to her stick.
Taking my man wasn't enough, she had to kill the sunfish too;
not to eat it but to prove some senseless notion to herself—
because it was alive, an irridescent trophy. A bauble.
Its carnal colors bleed into the sky; drab corpse forgotten.
He will comfort her, call her a brave hunter.
They will build shining deceptions; whatever it takes.
Mirate, I hiss at her. Look at yourself.
The cardinal rule of the hunter: eat what you kill.
He devoured me clean down to gleaming bone.
The poets cloak me with feathers and shake the gourd;
they say the Tarot gave her Death mounted on a white horse.
I dream the medicine man uncovers a word on the photo—
heiau, and he asks me for silver coins to bury it with.
For the grandfathers, for your vision, he says.
On a yarrow stick, an "i," the letter of death
becomes a plumed serpent, Quetzocoatl.
He smudges me with wild tobacco smoke and sage,
kisses me, says, you will find what you seek.
I remember how it felt on the outside:
this circle becomes a source of acceptance.
I am the drum, I learn the drumsong.
We are standing on ceremonial ground.
A wobbly prayer lifts up, takes flight
across the valley. Heiau he way,
he noni noni ne he, heiau he way.
Oh!

9/18/89

BUDDHA MOON

BUDDHA MOON

When Neil Armstrong first walked across the face
of the moon twenty years ago did she tremble?
When the astronaut came back from space he was a changed man.
Nothing mattered any more. After all, he'd seen the earth unveiled,
turned a little crazy, and it was like looking into the face of the gorgon.
He saw what we've done to her in the name of civilization,
making the first imprint in thick lunar dust.

In Guatemala, I held a Mayan smoking mirror in my hand,
a piece of fallen star, but you'd already planted another seed.
Did the moon shudder, the way you expect me to nowó
like Chac-mool, who ripped the heart from an unborn sonó
only to wonder why the smell of death greets us in the chaparral?
I am a vessel empty of light. I should have known better
than to trust the sun. When you walk across me,
Luna cries in a language you'll never understand.

Newton said, for every action there is a reaction.
We cannot reconstruct the past to fit our poetic needs,
nor to  ease guilt. Footprints remain after 20 years,
as if it were yesterday, or, only moments before.
Perhaps we should never have crawled out of the broth.
I want to tell the gobies and mudskippers there's been a mistake.
Go back into the ocean, your mother. We can't live on land,
nor breathe the air. In the Galápagos, evolutionary myths
crawled out of the precambrian mind of the sea.
Our lives pass before us in geometric exponentials.
Long after we've gone, life will continue;
another blastopore, in all its variations, germinating.
The goddess is made of basalt like the sea floor.

Off the coast of Japan, two rocks got married
with golden ropes, but the waves threaten to take one back.
They fortifed the islet with steel girders and concrete,
trying to halt another kind of progress.
You understand the bondage part, but not love itself.
The gods of dailiness have swept us bare.
Fallen off from ritual, who are we then?
Danger chose to walk in the form of a pigmentary default,
likening your eyes to the sky. You've found the cliff
to throw me from, and still not satisfied,
you want to barter exquisite corpses for forgiveness.
Your father is dead—his blue eyes beneath the Sea of Cortez—
tell him everything. Perhaps the sea will take you back.
No questions asked. But then, you already saw to that,
shuffling the tarot cards with a dealer's ease
from the bottom of the deck.

5/22/89

OUT TAKES/COLLAGE Galapagos, Gauguin

OUT TAKES/COLLAGE  

In the Galapagos, evolutionary myths
crawled out of the precambrian mind of the sea.
Birds proclaim unchartered territories.
A certain slant of sunlight grows wings.
I listen to translations of wind in the trees
and turn stones over and over,
trying to fathom below the surface.
If only we could move freely among molecules—
no separation between stone, water and air.

Civilization falls from me little by little.
I know the odor of the soil.
Gauguin said, Let everything you do breathe. 
I'm hard at work;
entering into truth, into nature.
I go deeper into the idea of word,
primal soup, blue-green algae,
the first "I am" the world uttered.
Long after we've gone, life will continue;
another blastopore, in all its variations, germinating.
The moon is made of basalt like the sea floor.
Here, poetry emerges spontaneously.
Here there are no more refuges to flee to.
We are standing on ceremonial ground.
A wobbly prayer lifts up, takes flight
across the valley.  

date?  2/89?

Are the French Really Rude? On the Gringo Trail

ARE THE FRENCH REALLY RUDE?

Just back from spending the summer in South America, for me, one of the first indulgences of coming home (besides marveling at flush toilets, potable tap water and raw fruits and vegetables), is to read the Sunday paper.

One title in This World section caught my eye. “Are the French Really Rude?” Foreign LA Times correspondent Stanley Meisler writes, “after five years in France, and American still has a puzzling time figuring out the French. Are they really rude?

I read that article with particular interest because I was going through the same dilemma after spending two months on the Gringo Trail with them. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, all those places we budget travelers have been beating a path to, made popular in the “60’s, is the Gringo Trail. Tropical beaches and ancient ruins are de riguer. Club Med is out.

One meets people from all over the world vagabonding on the Gringo Trail but these days the bulk of travelers are comprised of young Europeans. The trouble with the Gringo Trail is that the travelers tend to bring to bring a portmanteau of their country’s obnoxious habits with them. Friction develops.

Fellow tourists from other countries tend to get annoyed with each other. Being forced to ride 14 hours in the Pullman car or a first class bus with a group tour of rude Frenchmen is worse than water torture for some travelers. I suppose a tour of North Americans or Germans would be equally obnoxious— but one sees fewer North Americans on the road.

These reports are not isolated instances of psychopathic travelers who have it in for the French. For example, the journalist from Boston’s very first sentence to us was to commiserate how rude the French were.

It seems one Frenchman didn’t like the way she moved his suitcase in the overhead luggage rack above her seat to make room for hers. He jumped up frothing and shoved her suitcase back screaming if he wanted his suitcase moved, he would have done it himself.

Days later she’s still pissed off. The problem with the Gringo Trail, is that you keep running into each other in various ruins and cafes all over South America. Vendettas and quickie marriages are common.

There are times when I prefer a second class carriage with its chickens, pigs and robbers to traveling with the French. When the train stopped to wait for an oncoming train to pass, pity the poor traveler, unable to face a second class pissior, who jumped off the parked train to take a quick pee and lost his eyeglasses to a light-fingered Peruvian admirer in the process. He was pissed off. P.O’d. is a more polite abbreviated term.

Any tree in a public park is well guttered with piss. A seal rookery smells better than the local plaza. One rarely sees a Frenchman traveling second class. I didn’t always have this racist attitude toward an entire segment of fellow travelers. Being on the road with them too long did it.

When I first came face to face with blatantly rude French travelers was in Guatemala. It’s true they won’t give you the time of day. In Latin America, every one graciously and politely greets each other. A greeting is met with coldness by the French. Being in a restaurant with them can be embarrassing for fellow Gringos. If they wanted to eat at Maxim’s why on earth did they come here?

I though my normally liberal traveling companion’s bristling tirade against the very sight of the French was a bit of an overreaction— he’s logged many more miles than I have, with ten more years on the Gringo Trail than I— I figured that they just pushed his buttons and the incident was merely one of travelers crossing each other’s paths wrong.

That was until one Frenchman decided my bus window needed closing with my hand still in it. I wasn’t upset that he knowingly slammed it on my hand. He didn’t have the courtesy to ask to close it. As it turned out, I was carsick— about to lose my cookies as they say— because he smoked a cigar and I needed air. A minor brawl erupted. What thoughts go through their heads that they prefer to do violence to fellow travelers than to speak anything abut French?

Or the time one Frenchman took to shouting and laughing into the wee hours in the open air bathroom adjacent to our room in a minus three star hotel in the Galapagos. Minus star hotels generally don’t have glass in the windows or curtains for starters. I asked him to be quiet in the lengua de pais, Spanish, which he ignored. I tried both the formal usted and the familiar tu forms. I even tried French. No luck.

It’s amazing how much English they do understand when it’s delivered at top lung and peppered with stout anglo-saxon phrases. “Fuck” a guaranteed attention grabber will usually trick them into speaking English with you. Then they really hate you.

Next morning, he claimed innocence saying he didn’t understand Spanish because he was French— as if that in itself was an excuse— and proceeded to deliver insults like a schoolyard bully.

Lack of sleep does wonders for my Irish temper. He erred in his judgment as to how much abuse I would take. Spineless, I’m not. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. When he flicked his hand like a glove at my face like a man about to challenge another to a duel, he got one.

I avoid physical conflict, being on the short side of small. There was a time when I despaired that I would never reach five feet. That was like breaking the sound barrier. When I was in 8th grade, the school bully, a well developed “girl” named Tayde who outweighed me by100 pounds, and was a foot taller, had me cornered and tormented me one time too many.

I went in swinging expecting to be killed on the spot but I didn’t care any more. About the only place I could make contact was with her boobs. We always speculated they were fake balloons. Well, they weren’t and they didn’t pop. To my surprise, she laughed, and later became my friend.

I went for the Frenchman’s throat. I didn’t care that I was creating an international scandal. I was out for blood. My companion separated us and everyone thought he had pushed the Frenchman and jumped on him! Male chauvinism. He didn’t become my friend.

I am reminded of the curious fact that the French installed in their public buildings the placard, “no spitting and no Bretons allowed here.” They have little love for the Celt yet they call themselves Gallic— which is a Celt of course! The French, or the Franks of Charlemagne as they were called, took what is now called France from the Celts in the first place.

It took the Bretons, last of the European Celts to rescind the law concerning spitting and Celts. Llamas and Latin American men spit like crazy. A disgusting habit. At least llama spit is mostly hay.

The natives get jaded fast from all this hobnobbing with world travelers and demand money for everything from posing for photos to tourists loitering in public squares and churches. Gone are the National Geographic salad days of photographing the natives going about their business in quaint settings with llamas gamboling about.

Kids are the worst. Dame plata, dame sucre. Gimme money, gimme candy. And if you don’t give willingly to the cause, there are other methods. They’ll come up and hug you, their tiny starfish hands thoroughly frisking each pocket and wrist before you can say como te llamas.

They grow up to be razor artists who slash your daypacks and pants pockets so everything falls out. There’s a funny story of a razor artist so skilled that one unfortunate traveler’s pants fell off as he was walking down the street. Some are that skilled. It gives new meaning to the word embarrassed.

In South America, one has to register name, age, nationality and passport number at every tourist site and public transport. Each ticket taker demands this information and woe to the traveler who resists. I assume this precaution is in case there’s a coup so they’ll be able to identify the bodies after. This does not make me feel any more secure.

Half the time, we weren’t about to list our passport numbers namely because our passports were safely stashed inside a secret pocket in my traveling companion’s pants which meant exposing himself in public just to get the number and so we made up new ones on the spot.

Getting arrested for publicly unzipping and rummaging in one’s pants in a foreign country didn’t appeal to us when there were so many other more interesting things we could get arrested for— like false passport numbers. Ticket takers are almost as irrational as the French when crossed.

My traveling companion, at 46, took a perverse delight in noting he was usually the oldest person on the road. About the only time he was upstaged was at Lake Titicaca by a 60-year-old New Zealand grandmother who decided it was time to travel the world. So she left husband and kids to fend for themselves for a year. At 12,600 feet, she did better than we did in the thin air.

He said, admiringly, “I hope I’m in that good of shape at 60.” My traveling companion and I were an anomaly. North Americans, Californians— over twenty-three traveling with backpacks. Not many from our neck of the woods travel in strife-torn Central and South America these days. The declining dollar, the unofficial coin of the realm is keeping us home, but not the Europeans who are able to travel at bargain prices. The median age of all the world’s people is twenty-three.

The cliché that the French are rude as you’ve heard seems to be true in Latin America. It’s become one of the topics of conversation in coffee houses along the Gringo Trail. Latin Americans are complaining. Even other Europeans. I’m not about to write off the entire French population. I love French cooking. My aunt spent two years in Paris getting her Grand Diplome at the Cordon Bleu School of Cooking. I can’t imagine the world without the visions of Renoir, Cezanne or Debussy.

I also remember reading how the impressionist artists were barred from the Salon of Painting because they did something different than what was accepted as culture. According to my aunt the French come from a stiff, unbending world, blamed in part on their rigorous school system which focuses on rote learning rather than creativity.

“Shhhh! You Americans and French always at each other's throats! France is a middling power, arrogant and with an inferiority complex,” said a Limeño friend. It’s a pity so many take the national prejudices with them.

I’m sure I will meet many lovely French people traveling. I prefer the individual travelers to groups who may as well never have left their native soil to begin with. Nationalism belongs at home.

I read that the French president Mitterand is one of the few foreign leaders who stands up to the US and refuses to bow to its power and influence. They have banned “American” words like hamburger and computer from the French language, fearing the corruption of their language. Our language is enriched by the addition of French. I can’t see North Americans boycotting words like envelope, romance and intellectual because they’re French words.

I can imagine all the hate mail I’ll receive in French envelopes on this one. (Oops, French envelopes means something else again. Rubbers, galoshes).

One Peruvian said France is too unyielding. It’s unable to bend. That is why it is no longer a superpower. As Americans— let me digress. Calling ourselves Americans is considered an imperialist attitude. And rightly so. It was pointed out to me that North America also contained two other countries, Canada and Mexico. We are all North Americans. English, Spanish and French.

Central and South Americans don’t call themselves Latin Americans. They call themselves Americans! And they are also Americans. I’m sure Kennedy addressing the people, “my fellow Americans…” had no idea he was addressing two continents. Simón Bolívar’s dream was to unite South America and call it the United States of South America. How different things might have been if he’d succeeded.

As US citizens, we are often called on the carpet for our embarrassing policies on Central America. We travel as ambassadors of the American people who don’t necessarily support or agree with the political policies of our nation.

Reagan is a very dirty word. Reagan may shoot down passenger planes mistaking them for military planes in the Iranian Gulf but at least he doesn’t go around blowing up Greenpeace ships protesting nuclear testing in the South Pacific like the French did in Tahiti. That’s a very small consolation prize.

I take it back. The man’s senile and crazy. Referring to the destruction of Polynesia, Jacques Cousteau said, “small material things mask the vital problems in the destruction of a culture. He was referring to his own countrymen. Nationalist attitudes should stay at home with all the extra baggage you don’t need (like the outboard motor) while traveling in a foreign country.

Stanley Meiser cites a stifling school system and foolish posturing on the world stage as an excuse for their behavior. He writes, “all studies show that outsiders look on the French as the coldest and least welcoming people of Europe. They have no tolerance or time for spontaneity or weakness.”

One begins to wonder why a group of people who steadfastly refuse to learn the barest minimum of a foreign language would even want to travel. Simple words like excuse me, con permisso, or thank you, gracias would make all the difference in the world—well, not world but in the Americas at least. ”When in Rome, do as the Romans do” obviously hasn’t yet been translated into French.

The sad part is, aside from pissing everyone off, they miss so much of the culture. Americans both the Latin and Northern of the species— are gregarious and open. A Bolivian writer said, “Nowhere else in the world do people treat you like the French if you do not speak their language.”

Note Bene: I transcribed these journal entries in 1988 - 1990, hence the variable dates. (I'm moving them all to 1988, journal entry date, not transcription/revision date). We were in South America during the summer of 1988. I was trying to publish these stories, or at least find a home for them. I've a vague recollection of the Machu Picchu piece being published in The Paper. 

I was readying several of these Peru pieces pieces for an anthology, House on Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad. I also wrote Bill Truesdale, the editor for New RIvers Press, St. Paul, MN, a rather zany letter about my travels across the USSR. He took the letter, and not the stories. 

After an incredible journey through South America, John Oliver Simon broke up with me, left me for a young blonde former student of his, and it took me nearly a decade to recover from the horror of it all. Going to the USSR in 1989 was my salvation—and still John was trying to reel me back in. Or maybe he was doing the AA thing, in his case, the SA 12-step thing, atoning for his wrongdoings. By that point, I wouldn't even give him the time of day. Ironically, we managed to heal the gap nearly 35 years later. So it's fitting that these pieces finally get to see daylight, after languishing in darkness for so long.   —Maureen Hurley 2/26/2014

I've very few photos transcribed over to the electronic medium, another project. Here are three small albums.

Machu Picchu
Peru
Galapagos

Lima Journal, a rough timeline (3 watercolors)

Not sure of the dates, I’m also missing one Ecuador journal but inside my watercolor block I found three watercolor sketches, one of Ecuador, two unfinished sketches of Puerto Ayora.

Timeline: 

7/3 Equator

When? Galapagos

7/12 Española Island

7/13 Floreana, PO Bay

7/17? Bartolomé 

7/19 

7/25 Ecuador to Lima

7/27 Cuzco

8/8 to 11 Machu Picchu

8/19 Arequipa, Puno

8/22 Paracas

8/29 SFO

We explore the countryside. We visit the Otavalo market to buy Panama hats. Otovaleños still speak Quechua, a hangover from the Inca conquest days but their original language is lost.

No date:

7/26. No dates in my journal…. At the airport we hold a copy of our chapbook of poetry Falling to Sea Level in hopes that the Peruvian poet Carlos Arellano has come to meet us. We’ve been told that Peru is positively dangerous for rip-offs. And we guard each other’s flank diligently.

The exchange rate about 80 intis to the dollar and so we convert money, it’s a much better rate on the black market but we need the intis now. I can’t begin to describe Peru without comparing it to Ecuador. I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico, in Baja California, Guatemala. Mexico City helps prepare for the shock but it’s far worse than that. Any port in a storm just won’t do here. There are limits. 

The city is so dismal. I thought Jesus was a being quaint when he locked us into the car as we left the airport but he was protecting us from the city. He couldn’t protect us from the view. People picking their way through piles of refuge refuge. Mongrels guarding claimed treasure. Cardboard and tin shanties and other building material. 

Where one enters a Third World country one can expect to see buildings in a continual state of growth and repair. When one level is finished, the cement, the bricks, and the mortar are used to add a second or third story onto an insubstantial first story structure. So the skyline is a series of ragged walls and tall spears of rebar. 

Chickens adapt to rooftop living, clothes hang out a long time to dry— difficult in a place where the fog comes in for six months of the year. Small fires along the street, people warming themselves. Numerous street vendors and stalls. On one street the vendors have claimed it in its entirety, so it’s difficult to navigate. It is a street of oranges and shoes and gum and motor oil. 

The only time it rains here is when El Niño, the warm, current comes, changing the weather pattern and the normally cold Humboldt current turns warm. When this happens thousands of fish starve and die. The Antarctic current is one reason why it’s so cold and foggy here. Both it and the Humboldt currents feed La Garúa, the ever present mist.

Our room is $12 a night, pricy after Ecuador, where a bed goes for a dollar a night. Even food is expensive. Meals cost $1 to 2  here. The cost of living is about twice as high as Ecuador, with far fewer services. Our Hotel Colón was $5 a night.

Inside the caldera (drawing)

 

Postcard from the Galapagos, 0° Lat., 8° long.

Sweet potatoes and Taro, Galápagos Journal

In the Galápagos I saw taro plants on old volcanic terraces, and caves are very much like in Hawaii. Sweet potato, a Polynesian staple, how did it get here? Easter Island? According to our guide, José, there's only one variety of sweet potato, related to morning glories. Anthropologists think the Polynesians got the sweet potato from Ecuador, or Peru – or it even came from tropical America, bringing the sweet potato with them to Hawaii—and the plantain too.

no date  7/88
added 10/16

LONESOME GEORGE

LONESOME GEORGE

Poor old Lonesome George,
the last Pinzón Island tortoise,
straddling a tortoise-shaped boulder
in hopes that it was a female.
I noted it was pahoehoe, female lava.
The last of his species, George has a long wait
while biologist yentas frantically search
for a suitable mate. A $10,000 reward
for a female Pinzón tortoise is offered.
Something that even money can't buy.
Rumors of tortoise droppings cited on Pinzón,
but no tortoises. Meanwhile George, 
knowing the end is near, clamorous up his rock
and gives a lovesick moan, has another go at it,
hissing like a hydraulic jackhammer,
thrusting for all he's worth.


7/17? 1988
added 10/16
minor revision

RICE RAT

RICE RAT

One begins to see subtle differences
among each of the islands.

The owner of Solymar shoos away the rat,
saying, She has no fear of man.
And she is a protected species, a rice rat.

He says, You should hear the guest scream
when she comes out at dinner time.
Old habits die hard. You can tell
by her accent she's a Norwegian rat.
Should I tell him that rice rats
are extinct on Santa Crúz Island?

The first family to stay here, were they
lonesome for their Old World rats?
Did they bring them with them?
Or did the rats boldly jump ship?

7/17/1988?
added 10/16
revised

Angermyer's, Puerto Ayora

Pelican Bay, Puerto Ayora

We stay in the upper story of the old water tower at the Angermyer farm outside of town, on Avenida Charles Darwin, as the hotels are full. We were told La Señora*, whom we were told we simply MUST meet, is traveling. I meet Franklin, her son, he looks familiar. Someone I once met. It turns out he married a friend and lived in Sausalito. Temporary residencies. I remember him, with his impossible blue eyes and gold-filled teeth. We used to go down to the dock and admire his boat. We were crazy about the water and desperate to learn to sail. He said, I would have taken you sailing. Why didn't you ask? But we were so young and too shy to speak.

7/17/1988

*Johanna Angermeyer may be Franklin's mother, she lived in California during the 1950s and 60s (Sausalito?), and moved back to Puerto Ayora to meet her uncles, but later married an Englishman and moved to England. She lives in Vilcabamba, Ecuador. 

PENGUINS on BARTOLEME ISLAND

Bartolomé Island.

Yesterday we swam with penguins,

poor, misguided polar birds,

lost enroute from an ice flow 

somewhere in Antarctica, 

who decided paradise 

look pretty good after all.

The water is fricking cold 

for being at 0° latitude, 

in the frigid equator.
No wonder they feel at home.

7/17/1988?

added 10/16

Imps of Darkness (drawings) Galapagos