On the Road

By the Sea

2012-01-29T09:06:00.000-08:00

Lima's western suburbs peer over steep cliffs that mark the division between terra firme and the Pacific Ocean. Miraflores, the most populous of a string of coastal settlements, that also includes Barranco, Magdalena and San Miguel, styles itself the go-to place for upscale eateries and night life. The pioneering Peruvian chef, Gaston Acurio, opened his first restaurant here. Miraflores was once the preferred residence for English expatriates. That community has now largely disappeared, its existence documented only by a few street names and the interdenominational Church of the Good Shepard at the boundary of Miraflores and San Isidro.

In 1975 my wife and I got a taste of ex-pat life at Pension Miramar on the Malecon Cisneros. The place was British to the core-- a pub with Guinness on tap and a dart board on the wall, manicured gardens with a parrot or two, and a no nonsense land lady who wasn't above throwing back a drink or a dart or two with her guests. Many of the other pensioners were regulars. I remember a Lancaster merchant, there for the annual cotton harvest and a group of civilian contractors teaching the Peruvian Navy how to use the advanced weapons it had purchased. Forty years on, I went in search of Pension Miramar and learned that it fell to the wrecking ball sometime in the mid 1990s when a plague of condominiums swept the Malecon. A gentrification has its upside, though, and in this case it is a reclaiming of public property in the neighborhood.

The twenty meters of land between the Malecon and the cliffs, once an illegal but unsanctioned waste dump inhabited by squatters, has been transformed into a ribbon of parks and running trails. One of these oases, christened Parque de los Amantes, is accessorized by a colossal statue of two figures entwined in an impossible embrace and, nearby, a red windsock. The statue inspires the lovers; the windsock marks a hang glider runway. For 150 soles, $55.72 by today's exchange, anyone with a desire to float with the thermals can do so-- irresistible, I thought, until I looked down.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" my pilot asked. My reply, something along the lines of "too old to crash, too young to die," drew nervous laughs from everyone in earshot. But I had come too far for anything approaching a dignified retreat. So over the cliff it was.

Full disclosure here. My parasail was the equivalent of a bicycle with training wheels. All I had to do was sit in a nylon sling and occasionally adjust my weight in response to the pilot's commands. The route traced a series of figure-eights, sailing out to sea and tacking back toward the cliffs. Negligible turbulence, nothing like my years of riding twenty-seaters in and out of Ithaca, New York, and the profound silence of flying at low speed without an engine are my clearest memories of the ten minute descent to the beach.

Now where is that Grand Canyon, again?

Bolivian Tweets

2011-11-17T16:32:00.000-08:00

Anyone who reads this blog, if such a person exists, will recognize Bolivia as one of its recurring themes. This post documents a recent trip in six vignettes, all written during October/November of 2011.

TIPNIS
The acronym of Territorio Indigena Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure has become something of a cause celebre in the struggle for indigenous rights. To fortify their demands that a proposed highway not cross what had been declared a protected zone ten years ago, an alliance of native organizations made a 700 kilometer march from the Amazonian rainforest to the high Andes to meet with President Evo Morales. Along the way the marchers were disparaged by many politicians and roughed up by police, but once in La Paz, they received a Presidential audience and an executive order deflecting the highway away from the park. TIPNIS proved to be a no-win proposition for Morales. Much of the President's credibility comes from his representation of Bolivia's native majority. The marchers exploited Morales' standing as an Indian President to force him to choose between indigenous rights and a development project with broad national and international support. TIPNIS is only one of a number of issues with similar implications, and the march suggests that groups with a sympathetic cause and the willingness to take dramatic action can exert tremendous pressure on the political system. The genie is out of the bottle.

La Paz, Wireless City
Bolivia is increasingly connected to the rest of the planet through the Internet. La Paz now provides a large slice of wireless access at hotels, restaurants and cafes. Most of the WiFi zones require passwords, available with purchase of services, but I never encountered a solicitation for fees from a service provider. And thus far, available bandwidth has kept up with demand, making connections fast and smooth. The World Wide Web forces aside the heavy curtain of isolation that has been so much a part of Bolivian life. I once found myself surfing for weather news at Alexander Coffee, a local chain providing passwordless access to anyone in range of its routers, when I noticed a woman dressed in the emblematic chola costume, wide skirts and bowler hat, scrolling through the New York Times. "Que bueno que lee ingles," I tried as a conversation starter. "Ay señor, no lo leo, solo veo las fotos." She's only looking now, but I bet she'll be reading before long.

Camera Obscura
Even as digital technology takes hold in Bolivia, vestiges of the past hide in plain sight. In Santa Cruz's Plaza 24 de Septiembre, where sloths climb deliberately across the forest canopy, a photographer practiced his trade using camera obscura. The whole process, sitting to delivery, took place in a wooden box fitted with a point-and-shoot lens. The photographer seated me on a park bench, aligned his instrument, and removed its lens cap. Exposure completed, he replaced the lens cap and went to work inside the box which was equipped with an elbow-length sleeve to provide light-proof access for one hand. A few minutes later he extracted a 2x3 inch piece of photographic paper and washed it in a small bucket of water that had up to that point served as a bird bath. This was the negative, printed on paper. For a finished product, the photographer placed the paper negative on a tablet positioned a foot or so in front of the lens and removed the cap for a second time. This exposure, the negative of a negative, produced a positive print. I cherish it as a relic.

A Scam Frustrated
Laboring up one of La Paz's many steep streets, I heard a "plop" at my feet and noticed a man hurry by to my right. Soon another man tapped my shoulder and displayed a tightly wrapped package, the source of the "plop," that revealed a roll of bills bills through its translucent, plastic covering. He claimed that he wanted to divide the windfall and invited me to accompany him into a nearby arcade. I would have none of it, insisting that Pachamama had smiled on him, alone, and he was under no obligation to share his good fortune with an anonymous gringo. I'm sure that was his point, that I was an anonymous gringo and probably an easy mark for a get-rich-quick opportunity. But this time he chanced upon an exception to the rule. [Full disclosure; I only figured this out after walking away from it.]

Public Works
Even if it leaves no other legacy to Bolivia, the Evo Morales administration will be remembered for its infrastructural improvements. La Paz's major food markets, Camacho and Lanza, now reside in well designed, covered, concrete complexes. Some of the city's worst traffic bottlenecks have been relieved by tunnels and overpasses. Several city streets have been resurfaced, and at least one, Calle Sagarnaga from its mouth beside the San Francisco church to Calle Linares, the famous "witch's market," is getting a new sewer and roadbed. These works are done as folk art, for the people by the people. The Sagarnaga construction site employs only one machine, a hand cranked cement mixer. The rest of the equipment is picks, shovels, and muscle power, a recipe for maximum employment in an economy where full-time jobs are scarce.

A Tale of Two Statues
In 1973 Bolivia installed its monument to the unknown soldier at the east end of La Paz's principal thoroughfare. A colossal bronze statue depicted the tragedy of the Chaco War with a shirtless combatant draped lifelessly across a length of barbed wire. Apparently, this fallen image was unacceptable to the military regimes that ruled the country for the next fifteen years, for as plaques on the site document, another statue, this one a fully equipped soldier charging, bayonet-first, toward some unknown adversary, was erected on the site in 1979. But while it disappeared from public view, the original statue remained intact, and in 2006, with democracy again established in Bolivia, it was reinstalled and the charging soldier carted away, one hopes, forever.

Haiti Cafe

2011-10-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

In 2011 I hardly recognize the Lima I saw forty years ago when my parents took me here for a break halfway through my Peace Corps service in neighboring Bolivia. The colonial city, then vibrant with commerce and living, now exists as a relic of the past, visited but not enjoyed. Formidable urban traffic makes travel in the city tedious and uncertain. And as Lima's population continues to grow, it further splays itself across what is a coastal desert further challenging an infrastructure already stretched beyond capacity.

One constant on this changing landscape is Haiti Cafe. Founded in the 1950s as "Haiti Coffee" beside the Government Palace in the city center, the original locale doubled as literary salon and smoke-filled room, a gathering place for poets and political plotters alike. That location closed soon after a drive-by bombing in 1962. Following its clientele, which was then abandoning downtown, Haiti reestablished itself in the Miraflores suburb beside what would become Parque Kennedy, during the hemisphere-wide mourning for JFK after his assassination.

My wife and I lived in Miraflores in 1975 and frequented Haiti while I researched in the National Archives. In those days, as in these, the layout defined two, distinct spaces. A sidewalk cafe--largely inhabited by tourists-- looks out on the park. It takes only one experience to realize that sitting there is asking for relentless solicitation from itinerant vendors hawking souvenirs, knockoff sunglasses and the Miami Herald. In the past, I have feigned both indifference and illiteracy to ward off their overtures. But I learned that the unwelcome swarm ceases only with a retreat to the second space, indoors. Here the clientele, the whole ambience, changes abruptly. The noise level increases markedly; the language of discourse becomes exclusively Spanish, and conversations deal with the myriad themes of daily life. Today to my left a father bids goodbye to his daughter. On my right, men from two generations discuss what sounds like a business proposal. And while the patrons hardly represent a cross section in a country where 40 percent of the population lives in poverty, they reflect, accurately, Lima's middle class. Cell phone chatter hums in background as a well-dressed woman feeds her dog some pastry, and a man with a cane and a hearing aid works the daily crossword puzzle.

To date-stamp this post, I have just noticed that CNN is announcing Gadhafi's demise.

Haiti's menu offers typical Lima fare, arranged by meal time. At 10:30 I flipped to the breakfast section. Eggs predominate here, but in a nod to the tourists and the local sweet tooth, pancakes and waffles-- each served with manjar blanco-- appear as well. The lunch crowd is arriving as I write this, and the menu insert today reads "ENSALADAS HAITI, all the flavor made fresh and natural" (my translation). I hope that the phrasing reflects a transformation of middle class taste, but that's a stretch when so many local dishes are heavily buttered, creamed, and fried. Some things never change. I like that.

At Her Feet

2011-05-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

When asked to name a product they associate with Colombia, most North Americans would respond with coffee, or emeralds or with “the fine Colombian,” celebrated by Steeley Dan in Hey Nineteen. While not so appreciated as the big three, Colombian leather goods are among the world’s best, and a bespoke shoe fitting on a recent trip to Bogota brought a brief glimpse of how fine craftsmanship survives there.

My friend Paula needed a new pair of little heels for those dressy occasions in her life. She remembered from a previous trip to Bogota that one of her friends had recommended a store on Carrera 11 that makes shoes from the sole up on short order. But where was it? Without a name we were reduced to window shopping or using a generic description, “una tienda que fabrica zapatos de ocasión.” These words brought blank stares, assurances that no such store existed, or, on one occasion, directions so unlikely that we ignored them. It turned out that our problem was having turned east on the 11, when we should have turned west. There it was, Calzado Corrado, number 82-00.

This is not your granddaughter’s shoe store, nary a flip-flop or canvas top in sight. Instead, behind a locked, glass door (“only to keep the drunks out,” we were assured) a small showroom arrayed several shelves of elegant pumps and bags. Despite their conservative stock, the Corrado maintains a loyal clientele. While Paula and I were addressed anonymously as “señora” and “señor,” the other patrons were greeted by name and, often, with hugs and kisses. The store's prosperity is also the result of its cobblers' skills. "They can fit anything here," a male client told us in perfect English.

Paula quickly located a model she liked and asked to try it on. Nothing in stock fit perfectly, but by trial, error and measurement, the saleswoman determined that an 8.5 length with a size seven heel was what Paula’s foot required. “And we don’t have one,” she assured us in a way that sounded like a dismissal. When Paula explained that she wanted made-to-measure, the saleswoman seemed dubious that a week would be sufficient to make the shoes properly. I began to suspect that the fix was in and that an offer of rush service for a fat fee would be the next thing out of her mouth. But no, the next thing out was a call up a stairway off the right side of the showroom and the descent of a man authorized to speak for the production side of the business. He looked at the shoe, at us, at the saleswoman and said “sí podemos.” Then another man from upstairs, wearing cornrows and black Puma athletic shoes, measured Paula’s foot and suggested that we return for a fitting in two days.

I had completely missed the significance of the upstairs/downstairs architecture of Corrado until we returned for the fitting, and I situated myself on a bench next to the stairway. From that vantage, a rapping and tapping—like Poe’s Raven—was unmistakable. The workroom was upstairs in a large sunlit space filled with leather, shoe blanks and cobbler's benches. Subsequently we had a series of consultations with a Geppetto look alike who explained, in terminology beyond my vocabulary in either English or Spanish, what they would do to make the shoes fit just right. So it was a segregated shop, with the women downstairs and the men upstairs. But the results are great; right, Paula?

Mexico, City of Museums

2011-04-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

Mexico City is a great museum town. As the seat of the Spanish Viceregency and, briefly, a Francophone Empire, Mexico City has a long tradition of royal patronage that assembled treasures from its rich, multicultural heritage. The Museo Nacional de AntropologÍa, inaugurated in 1964, began what is now a half-century of cultural enterprise sponsored by public and private means. The latest addition to this assemblage opened the last week in March. Museo Soumaya, built, furnished and endowed by Mexico’s premiere entrepreneur, Carlos Slim, is marvelous in its architecture and its collections, and, as Slim has repeatedly insisted, Mexican from design to execution.

I’m staying in the historic center, a ten-minute walk from some of the city’s marvels: the Palacio Cultural Banamex, which opened in 2002 and exhibits colonial painting; the Museo del Estanquillo, home to the Mexican writer, Carlos Monsivais’, whimsical collection of objects; and my favorite, the Museo Franz Mayer, which houses the decorative arts assembled by the German-Mexican financier in the 20th century. With so much at arm’s length, why bother to visit a museum beyond Polanco and far from the nearest Metro? I can only say that it’s well worth the effort.

The first challenge is getting there. I touched off a spat between the bell captain and the concierge at the hotel when I asked for routing. Turns out that there are two Soumaya museums which complicates matters, but even having the address —Plaza Carzo, Colonia Ampliaciones Granada—gave them little to go on. As the hotel staff parsed its maps, I went out on the street for some real expertise. Locating the nearest taxi stand and waving a newspaper account of the museum’s opening, I asked for volunteers. After a few blank stares, one driver offered that he’d never heard of the museum, but he knew how to find Plaza Carso—and he did. The museum is located on the west side of Delegación Hidalgo, on an appropriately neoliberal site between Saks Fifth Avenue and Costco.

The exterior is nothing short of stunning. Clad in a reticulated, shiny skin and situated on a sculpted hillock, the Soumaya stands at a dignified distance from its commercial surroundings. Its silhouette forms a crescent, from foundation to waist to roof—bearing an unfortunate resemblance to the Fukushima reactor. Taking in the full perimeter is currently impossible, as heavy equipment applies finishing touches to the landscape, but the juxtaposition of cranes with the building, one solidly straight, the other delicately curved, provided a striking consolation.

One rectangular door provides the only public entrance. Another rectangle, this a metal detector, stands just inside. Security yields to an enormous vestibule, currently decorated with couches, floor-standing metal sculpture and a multi-media exhibition done by Mexican school children. Looking (way) up reveals a curvilinear, dropped ceiling shaped like the hull of the Starship Enterprise—surely the resemblance occurred to the architect—and looking left reveals a ramp raked gently upward.

Yes, the Soumaya is a serpentine. It’s a museum, after all, and comparisons with Bilbao punctuate descriptions of the opening. The incline feels gentler than Wright’s Guggenheim – I haven’t been to Bilbao—and its surrounding spaces are bare, white, and lowly illuminated. Each of the five floor levels breaks out of the dim monotony in its own way.

The first floor begins with a tribute to gold and silver, and why not? Money built the place and assembled its collections. However, given the telecommunications source of the Carlos Slim fortune, silicon might have been displayed, as well. Precious metal transitions smoothly to their early extraction in the Indies, particularly Mexico and Peru, and to illustrate the South American mines, two floating partitions exhibit a set of paintings from Potosi, Sucre and the north of Argentina done by an anonymous artist in the 18th century. These paintings establish a tone that subsequent floors would maintain—an expansive range of tastes from sculpture and easel-painted high art to the objects of everyday (if elite, every day) life. They also demonstrate the capacity of modern capitalists to search the world for treasures. The Peruvian paintings are known to scholars as the “Crombie Collection,” after their former British owners. I do not know if the current owner will now attach his name to them; the Slim Collection doesn’t sound quite right.

Even with their striking chronological and geographical sweep (El Bosco to Botero; El Greco/ Van Gogh) collections of fine art are strikingly French -oriented. The fifth floor has what must be the largest collection of Rodin sculptures ever assembled. Major impressionist painters, Degas, Pisarro and Renoir (11 paintings and 3 bronzes from the last by my count), all have representatives of their ouvre on the third floor. The fourth floor is dedicated to Mexican artists of the 20th century, with a Diego Rivera painted head at the entrance and canvases by Orozco, Toledo, Tamayo, Dr. Atl and Soriano scattered about. An enormous mural, Siqueiros’ La Tierra como el agua y la industria nos pertencen, strikes a prescient tone. Along with these contemporary Mexican giants, curators have arranged three dozen cases of masterworks by anonymous precolombian ceramicists.

Curators have successfully toned down the glitterati with themes from the Mexican earth. Near the gold and silver tribute hang remarkable sets of Mexican family portraits, including a dozen from the Cumplido Rodriguez clan, completed in the 18th and 19th centuries. A large part of the third floor features travelers’ paintings of the Mexican landscape. An eighteenth-century depiction of the Iglesia de Itzacalco by Pedro Villegas gives way to more familiar scenes of the Valley of Mexico done by English and French visitors in the 1860s. Nearby is a collection of resplendent Guadalupe images done by Mexican artists in the 18thcentury. And would any Mexican art collection be complete without the set of casta paintings displayed on the first floor?

At closing time, the staff was gentle but firm, I noticed a small convoy of black Tahoes pulling up to a side entrance. Apparently, I just missed a private showing that Mr. Slim gave to the Colombian pop star, Shakira, who is in town for a concert. I hope she enjoyed the museum as much as I did.

The Valdivia Market

2010-11-25T11:06:00.000-08:00

Despite intermittent earthquakes and a conflagration that consumed most of its traditional, wooden structures a century ago, Valdivia stands right where it was founded in 1554. The city owes its longevity to a resilient economy based on timbering, agriculture, and ranching in the uplands to the east and the rich, marine resources of the Pacific Ocean to the west. This mix of land and sea colors the local palate and the daily produce market that is the subject of this post.

The opening of the Chilean economy, a hallmark of two decades of military dictatorship, brought a plague of supermarkets to the country. Mass merchandizing, prepackaging, and long distance hauling have undermined some sectors of food retailing. But in a way that locovores have recently adopted in the United States, Valdivia offers an alternative to the supermarket. At the foot of the Paseo de la Libertad and beneath a crazy quilt of plastic tarps, farmers and fishermen offer their wares from 8 AM to sunset.

An aisle divides the market into a realm of vegetables and another of fish. I found the green groceries familiar. Mounds of potatoes rose beside flats of strawberries, green and red peppers, baskets of peas and pints of the locally-abundant bing cherries. Across the aisle, many of the offerings lay outside my vocabulary.

Torpedo-shaped pescada stared up from pallets with eyes so shiny that they appeared ready to slip back into the water and swim away. (Since “pescada” differs by only one letter from “pescado,” the generic name for fish, I asked several times for clarification.) A large, pink-skinned fish whose body tapers to a finless tail carries the name congrio. It’s delicious, by the way. There were also some familiar species: salmon (wild, I was assured on more than one occasion), flounder (merlusa), and pejerrey, a brakish-water fish introduced to Lake Titicaca fifty years ago with disastrous consequences for its ecosystem. I did not see octopus (calamar) in the market, but I found some later in the day in a soup.

Shoppers chose both their fish and its processing: au natural, beheaded, scaled, filleted (or any combination). Butchers followed individual orders and tossed fish heads, entrails, and scales toward the river. Most of the discards never touched the water, though, as flocks of gulls and white pelicans hovered in the air hoping for some easy pickings. And patrolling the water’s surface, huge sea lions (lobos marineros) silently feasted on the largest bits and noisily received the leftovers at maket’s end—nothing wasted here.

Whales in Nova Scotia

2010-10-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

Nova Scotia is duly famous for its lobsters and lighthouses, and they're plentiful, all right. But the highlight of our July 2010 vacation to the island was a whale watch in the Bay of Fundy.

The humpback whale's life cycle brings pods of females with their calves in tow to the north Atlantic as they swim to summer feeding grounds off Newfoundland. Nova Scotia seems to be something of a stopover on the way further north. So whale activity there is somnolent; it's as if they were catching their breath before the last push to Newfoundland.

Pacific Life Insurance’s use of the whale as its logo, and their superimposition of breaching and tail slapping to try to convince viewers to use their products trivializes the attraction of whale watching. First of all, nothing is guaranteed. Certain areas of the coast, certain times of the day make sightings more likely, but much depends on luck. Many outfitters guarantee that they will take you out until you see whales, but that is a hollow promise given most vacation schedules. And second, the dramatic breaching occurs so unexpectedly that it is almost impossible to observe and even more difficult to capture on film or digits. Talking to the crew after our own successful cruise, we learned that the day before, they had seen nothing. But I get ahead of myself.

Whale watching boats come in two flavors. The “traditional” rigging is a flat decked, diesel powered craft carrying a couple of dozen people and a crew of four. These are often refitted from other uses for the tourist season—ours is a lobster boat eight months of the year. The second type is the Zodiac, a large, inflatable craft with an outboard motor and a crew of two. The appeal of the Zodiac is that it takes its six passengers right up to the whale. But because they are so close to the water, Zodiacs require a wetsuit-like garment to shield whale watchers from chop and spray. We chose the traditional rigging.

Most outfitters run two daily cruises, morning and evening. In making reservations in the spring, I had quizzed the owners on which was more likely to see whales, but never succeeded in getting a straight answer. For some reason, I chose the 9AM departure. This seemed reasonable until we got driving times from our B&B at Annapolis Royal to the dock at East Ferry, an hour and a half. What was I thinking on a vacation? As it turned out we arrived with ten minutes to spare only to learn that the cruise had been cancelled. Turns out we were the only takers; “people just don’t want to get up early,” the owner observed as my wife gave me a withering stare. Rather than get back in the car, we reserved seats on the 2PM boat and took in some Nova Scotian lobster and lighthouses as we whiled away five hours.

The afternoon boat was filled, but not beyond capacity. I believe that we were the only people from the States aboard. Most of our companions were Canadian, but from all across the country, one couple hailed from Vancouver. There was one Englishman (more on him later) and an Australian couple. After its crew provided a brief overview of the trip and safety instructions, the Passage Provider, chugged off from the pier and out into Digby Neck before turning north into the Bay of Fundy. The first half hour passed uneventfully. We excitedly sighted a pair of dolphins rolling off our starboard and laughed as a seal (of some sort) poked its head above the water and watched us pass. To this point we had dutifully seated ourselves along the boat railing and on both sides of bench positioned in center of the deck. This would soon change.

Perhaps a half hour out of port, one of the crew who was sitting on the roof of the cockpit spotted a whale breaching. He didn’t say “thar' she blows,” but that anachronism would have been appropriate as spray propelled from the breathing hole is the surest sign of a whale when viewed from a distance. As we approached our quarry, the passengers moved, tentatively at first and then in a rush to the side of the boat that would have the best view. Our Englishman, brandishing a video camera, was particularly aggressive in his movements. After a while, we learned to give him a wide berth. But everyone managed to get a good look.

For an hour and a half, moving between four pods, we saw whales breach with loud hisses as they expelled carbon dioxide and water vapor above their blowholes. Sometimes they just logged as we went by. They rolled and dove—the pattern was three rolls and dive. We even got several signature tail raises on the dive. Everyone was thrilled, especially the crew.

Since we had done so well, they felt free to admit that things are not always so good. The day before, the single whale that was sighted became the quarry of five boats. But not today. Today was wonderful.

Marketing in Solola

2010-02-22T02:58:00.000-08:00

Sololá is a town of 35,000 perched 2,000 feet above the shore of Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán. It has a long history, appearing in the Anales de los Cakchiquels as Tecpán-Atitlán and dating its Spanish foundation to 1547. But that’s all in the past. Today, a sunny Friday, Sololá welcomes shoppers to its twice weekly market, and we’ve come along for a look.

Sololá sits at the nexus of a commercial network that includes fish and water plants taken from the lake below and garden vegetables harvested on the plains above. Wholesalers visit the market on Thursday night and make purchases destined for tables in Guatemala City, El Salvador and the United States. The retail action begins (very) early on Friday, and we found that some items, especially flowers, were sold out by 9:00, the time we pulled into town.

While the market spills across the whole town, its main concentrations are the Parque Central and three commercial blocks to the west. Grain and vegetable sellers sit around the park’s perimeter, breaking down large lots into small quantities weighed out on hand-held balance scales. Commerce at this location seemed pretty bland—order, weigh out, pay. But walk a little further west, and hold on to your wallet.

Three narrow streets are closed to motor traffic on market days, making way for one of the most interesting brokerages on earth, a wave of crowd and color. The products are as varied as they are copious, a pot potpourri of the familiar and exotic. “BAÑO hay BAÑO,” droned a man with plastic basins at his feet. A shoe salesman hawked his wares with “ZAPATOS MEXICANOS, BARATOS.” We stepped over chickens, ducks and turkeys and learned that they are priced at 60, 50 and 100 Quetzales, respectively. In another area, we sniffed medicinal plants, some of which have yet to emerge from their Maya nomenclature.

At some point, I realized that my friend, Leigh, was in the grasp of a woman selling textiles. Turns out that “Maria” had made first contact as we crossed the Parque Central and was now addressing Leigh by her first name. Leigh doesn’t speak Spanish, but Maria had crossed the language barrier for her. “Give me another price,” she kept repeating. For what seemed like an hour, but was probably no more than fifteen minutes, Maria followed us through the crowd. She would sometimes disappear from view, but only to get a better angle for the next round of bargaining. And when we entered the park again, the two adversaries reached a dignified agreement.

We left soon after, but I still have my memories and my sunburn.

Alacitas

2010-01-28T11:22:00.000-08:00

January 24, 2010
Today La Paz, Bolivia, begins a month-long observance of Alacitas, the annual festival of hope for a bountiful future. A mix of indigenous and European traditions – what in Bolivia isn’t?— Alacitas encourages the purchase of miniatures in anticipation that with enough faith and effort from the devotee, they will grow into the real thing before the next January 24th rolls around.

The miniatures have morphed over the years with advances in technology and expectations. Trucks, cars and houses along with dollars and Bolivian currency used to dominate. Now currencies are world-wide with Euros, Yen, and yuan entering the market basket. I did not see many trucks this year, but busses abound and Hummers have supplanted sedans. Another interesting twist for 2010 is a miniature house construction, with reinforced concrete pillars erected and sacks of cement, corrugated roofing panels and floor tiles laid nearby.

To add to their prospects, shoppers can also purchase a blessing. The blessers, most looking like curanderos brought in for the day, burn offerings of coca, honey and flower petals over tiny braziers and pass the miniatures through the smoke. Another technique employs intinction, using a flower dipped in solutions whose compositions I could not discern.

The icon of Alacitas is the Eke’ko, a jolly, little man offering an expansive gesture with his arms and sometimes accessorized with a cigarette thrust between his parted lips. “Eke’ko” means “buy me” in the Aymara language. Thus named, he is the pitch man for Alacitas’ miniatures, some of which he carries on his arms and back. The Eke’ko also references Pachamama, the Andean earth mother, and is appropriately venerated as the sustainer of life.

Another item associated with Alacitas is the “periodiquito,” a miniature edition of Bolivia’s major news dailies. These mini-jounals, which began at the end of the 19th century, combine an approach reminiscent of The Onion— one headline reads “For Tiger Woods, Eighteen Holes are Not Enough,” with biting political satire. This year president Evo Morales appears as a super hero called Egoman, the futuristic Evotar and a bumbling detective, looking for corruption in his administration. Evo’s unsuccessful rival in the last election is held up to particular ridicule. Manfred Reyes, who surreptitiously fled Bolivia last year, has his escape ascribed variously to: disguises, a tourist with pot belly and shorts or a tall chola with exceptionally long skirts, but more likely reverting to his true nature as vampire who winged it out of the country in search of new prey.

Just Read the Signs

2009-08-23T12:48:00.001-07:00

“Just read the signs; we have very good signs.” These were the last words we heard from our Budget Rent A Car agent in Frankfurt as we set out on a three week spin through Germany and France. High speed motor highways are as emblematic of the EU as the Euro, and despite the high cost of gasoline, western Europeans are almost as car happy as we are. But driving there, by the English-speaking, has its perils, as we found out.

Peril number one, the chameleon Autobahn.
Autobahn 5 begins at the Swiss border and tracks the Rhine to Frankfurt before turning northeast to cross the Hessen plains. Seventy kilometers along the route, I was finding my stride behind the wheel of our leased BMW sedan and congratulating myself on my astute navigation. Just then I noticed that the route sign read “4.” Had I missed a turn?

It turns out that there was no turn. Unlike North American Interstates, where route numbers are persistent, European highways act like chameleons. Autobahn 5 simply disappears, maybe like a river in the desert, and number 4 nonchalantly replaces it. If you don’t believe me, look at the map.

Peril number two, the roundabout access ramp.
European highway engineers eschew the cloverleaf to reroute freeway traffic. They use the traffic circle, instead, directing vehicles into a gyre that spins them toward a new direction. Theoretically this approach is an elegant one; a single exit offers the driver multiple alternatives connected to the circle. But as a practical matter, the traffic circle forces a driver unfamiliar with the routes to simultaneously manage where to exit, traffic already in the circle, and traffic entering the circle from multiple points. I often made two or three complete revolutions before managing to escape what amounted to gravitational forces emanating from the circles’ centers.

Peril number three, when dead reckoning fails.
Not always understanding the nuances of signage, I sometimes depended on a general knowledge of European geography. In Germany I reckon that Munich is “south,” and Hamburg is “north.” Those “very good signs” we heard about usually keep this kind of orientation in play. But what happens if the signs offer a choice between a known and an unknown, as they did once on the beltway that surrounds Berlin. I knew that the Munich choice would lead south, and since we were headed north, it had to be the other, unknown, choice. Well, it turned out that the unknown choice also led south, down a road that eventually narrowed to a lane.

We finally righted ourselves through a comic exchange with a garage mechanic. After determining that we would not be able to converse in symbolic language, he grabbed our map and using two jabs of his finger showed why a picture is worth a thousand words. With one gesture he located where we intended to go, with another where we were. I turned the car around, drove north, reentered the Berlin beltway, and found the proper exit. This time I had made the right turn.

Peril number four, when you can’t get there from here.
Often the case in medieval cities and for us in Strasbourg. We arrived from the north, crossed the River Ill and entered a maze that the Queen of Hearts would be proud to govern. At one point my wife saw a taxi and suggested that we hire it to lead us to our hotel. Too late, the cab sped away. Finally, we decided to ask directions and took our city map into a bar across the street from our parking place. Since the bartender had no customers, he spent several minutes explaining scenarios. Seeing us satisfied, he walked us to the door, but on watching me unlock the car exclaimed “you drive?” “My directions no good.” Finally, he advised us to recross the Ill, follow an expressway that circles the city to a point nearly 180 degrees north of where we stood, and try it all again. It worked, but we left our car in the hotel garage until we left Strasbourg three days later.

Peril number five, interpreting the signs (a.k.a., linguistic nuance).
I have already introduced our linguistic ineptitude. It came into play in France as we drove along rural roads in Alsace. Here the traffic circles present drivers with some cryptic choices. For example, the exits of one read “Colmar;” the next “Strasbourg;” the third “autres directions.” Apparently for French signers, if you weren’t going to Strasbourg or Colmar, you must be going somewhere else. We were also bemused by the use of the “/” symbol painted across a city name to signify the end of a municipal jurisdiction.

The Land of Shined Shoes

2009-05-14T18:26:00.000-07:00

Shined shoes are the stuff of literature and political legend. Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman rode on a smile and a shoeshine, and Alejandro Toledo famously rose from shoeshine boy in the 1960s to President of Peru thirty years later. In the United States shoeshining has largely vanished from public space, retreating to airports and luxury office buildings. But the trade remains very much alive in Latin America.

Latin Americans like a luster on their footwear. It connotes self-respect and a sense of style, and it employs a small army of service workers. Some ply their trade at fixed stands, located in areas of high pedestrian traffic. For a small gratuity, their patrons enjoy the comfort of a padded seat as they supervise the shine or read a courtesy newspaper. Far more numerous are the roving shoe shine boys who leave no corner of the city unvisited and no one wearing shoes unsolicited. You can’t miss them, and they certainly don’t miss you.

I have sworn off smooth leather shoes for my Latin American travels. Shoe shiners are likely to accept a gruff “no son lustrables” (“they’re unshinable”) from someone shod in running wear or rough suede. But shinable shoes and a sweet disposition, both worn by my good friend, Paula, attract shoeshine boys like pheromones.

In March Paula and I visited Peru and Bolivia where we scoured bookshops in Lima, Cuzco, La Paz and Cochabamba for our university libraries. We escaped Lima without a single shoeshine; I don’t know how. But in Cuzco our luck ran out. As we waited for the Centro Bartolome de las Casas to open, an eleven-year-old by the name of Christian called attention to the condition of Paula’s clogs. He described, in unflattering detail, how dirty they were and how he could help restore their luster, and their owner’s dignity. No amount of protest on our part would shake Christian’s resolve, and, finally, Paula caved.

For the next half hour, as we sat on a step, Christian demonstrated his skills, pulling bottle after bottle from his kit. “This one cleans the soles,” he assured us, “and this one makes the leather like a mirror,” he said, applying one final coat of polish. In the course of his work, he told us that he was in the fifth grade and that he lived in a neighborhood north of the city, a twenty-minute walk from our location. We were taking it all in and enjoying ourselves until Christian finished his work and named his price. “25 soles,” he said, without a hint of mirth. That’s about $8 US, an outrageous charge for the streets of Cuzco where a good meal can be had for less. I assumed that this was a purposeful joke, intended to take in tourists who might be arithmetically challenged. But no, Christian insisted that 25 was a fair price for such a great shine. I believe that we ultimately settled on 15, and I am sure that Christian is still telling his friends about how easy it is to outsmart gringos.

Paula’s clogs have never been the same.

Back in the Big Easy

2009-02-01T05:59:00.000-08:00

To date, New Orleans’ reputation in the arts rests primarily on music performance and literature. (I’d add haute cuisine to that list of artistic accomplishment.) The city has never been known as a fine arts mecca. Oh sure, Edgar Degas paid New Orleans a brief visit in the 19th century and produced work that merited a museum named for him. But from there the list of New Orleans artists runs to regional painters and folk practitioners. In Katrina’s wake (so many sentences could begin with that phrase), a small group of art impresarios organized Prospect.1, a multi-venued, two-month-long biennial intended to bring the city squarely into the international art scene. The exhibition opened November 17, and from that date forward, my wife and I whetted our appetites for a visit by reading what were uniformly positive news accounts. Finally, on Prospect.1’s last weekend, we went to see the art and to avail ourselves of the collateral pleasures that New Orleans always offers its visitors.

The difficulties of travel from Ithaca are one of the staples of this blog. Winter snow adds an additional element of risk for those using small airports and taking multiple flights to reach their destinations. For this trip, we decided to improve our odds by booking a passage through Syracuse. While hardly a major hub, Hancock International hosts twice as many carriers and roughly three times the daily carriage of Ithaca. However, to fly from Syracuse, Ithaca travelers must brave sixty miles of highway, some subject to heavy snows, and, sure enough, heavy snows were forecast for the day before our flight. We reasoned that, given our scheduled departure (mid morning) and bad weather drive time to the airport (who knew how long?), we would be best served by driving to Syracuse the night before, spending the night near the airport and checking in as early as possible. Events were to support our reasoning, but good luck figured heavily in our success. We met people in our motel who had used our strategy only to be stranded for two days.

We managed to find a hole in the weather, and both our flights flew through it. US Airways delivered us to Louis Armstrong International right on time, and we marched out into the balmy weather that held for the entire weekend. A South Asian cab driver took us to our hotel, Soniat House in the French Quarter. For the record, New Orleans cabbies much prefer street numbers to coordinates. My directions, “corner of Charters and Governor Nicholls, please” produced only a blank stare, and the attempted clarification, “near Rampart Street,” proved equally ineffectual. I had a similar experience on the last morning when I took a cab to one of the houses that we had gutted after Katrina. Am I missing something?

One of Soniat’s calling cards is a room service breakfast of juice coffee, and biscuits, served with local strawberry preserves. Fortified with this and a good night’s sleep, we set off to make contact with Prospect.1. Turns out that this was not so easy. First, it didn’t seem to us that New Orleans locals were totally enthralled by the biennial. Perhaps they didn’t see it as a big revenue generator, in the way that Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest is. Perhaps they were reserving judgment, but for whatever reason, neither our hotel concierge nor the staff at the New Orleans Historical Foundation was able to direct us to where we needed to go. Finally, we managed to reach P.1 headquarters, a small desk in a large empty building in the Warehouse District. There a perky, young woman provided us with complimentary passes, an orientation and directions to shuttle bus stops.

The idea of Prospect.1 was to make the whole city an art venue, and there were exhibitions all over town. But many of them, and most of the signature ones, were in the Lower Ninth Ward. That area is still blighted, three years after Katrina. Large swaths of land lie fallow, cleared of its homes, schools and business establishments and of most signs of civic life, including public transportation. The P.1 shuttle service provided an orientation to the art sites and a whirlwind tour of them, but it did not stop long enough for passengers to absorb what they were seeing. We wished we had rented a car, as some of the other visitors did, but we ended up settling for a second visit to the area on Sunday. A pedestrian-paced tour revealed that the Lower Ninth might be on its way back.

The “Brad Pitt Houses,” winners in a design contest sponsored by the Hollywood actor have sprouted up near the Industrial Canal. These brightly painted, raised dwellings offer a flood resistant, energy efficient vision of repopulating the area. Another approach, stressing very low-cost construction, comes from Common Ground, an NGO that has established a beachhead in the Lower Ninth and teaches organic gardening and recycling along with home building. For now these initiatives look like the demo homes at the front of a subdivision. We’ll be watching to see if property owners are impressed enough to buy into them.

I am not a great fan of contemporary art, especially its nonrepresentational forms. So I treated many of the P.1 exhibitions as walk bys. For me the photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick at the L9 Center and an installation of film clips on Royal Street that illuminated the French contribution to Louisiana culture were the most enjoyable stops on our tours. But, with our without art, the Lower Ninth is a venue all by itself. On our Sunday morning visit, we took a slow walk around the area, scrutinizing Mark Bradford’s Arc, the signature piece of the biennial, and the haunting metal and mirror sculpture inside the shell of the Battleground Memorial Baptist Church.

On our way out of the city, I picked up a Times Picayune to read on the plane. The editorial page was largely a post mortem on the biennial. Civic leaders and members of the local art scene reflected on the significance of the event and openly speculated on whether there would be a Prospect.2. I certainly hope so, and I hope that when they return in 2010, the artists will find a less devastated New Orleans.

In DC

2008-12-13T07:58:00.000-08:00

Nearly fifty years after I saw it for the first time, Washington still thrills me. Its monumental architecture, the permanence of its geography, the excitement of being close to the seat of government are an intoxicating brew.

Washington was the first city of any consequence that I ever saw. In 1962, with an appointment as page to the Honorable E.C. Gathings of Arkansas, I got on a plane in Memphis, flew to Washington National airport and followed directions provided by the Congressman’s secretary to Mrs. Smith’s boarding house, near the Capitol. For a month I worked on the floor of the House of Representatives, delivering messages between Congressmen and their minions and other duties, as assigned.

It was very much a CSpan experience. I never saw anything even vaguely resembling a debate. The chamber was often empty, except for the presiding officers and those with business in the chamber. When I did see the nation’s representatives, I usually did so in the cloakroom, a large space filled with booths and tables where pie, coffee and chat were served up in ample portions. I also glimpsed the very privileged world that Congress took for granted. In those days the Capitol was a world within the world—meals, drinks, recreation, grooming, travel arrangements (and who knows what else—this was before Wilber Mills’ downfall) were all provided in the vast underground that connected the House chambers with the office buildings across Constitution Avenue.

I left that summer’s experience in haste, as I was beginning my three years at Woodberry Forest School, and the Head Master seemed to think that my attendance was more important than the life experience I was getting in the halls of government. Washington was a very different city in the early 1960s—before integration, before urban renewal, before the Metro. But from those two months, I gained a feeling for the geography of the Capital zone very much akin to a GPS and an appreciation for the museums and other cultural meccas of the National Mall—real eye-openers for a boy from rural Arkansas.

On this trip, I came to evaluate proposals for the National Endowment for the Humanities. That, in itself, was enlightening. Who knew that five manuscripts for Homeric verse still existed and are in need of conservation or that Yiddish speakers from Galicia and regions of the former USSR not only survived the Holocaust but Soviet persecution as well? With projects like these to talk about, time goes quickly, and I had a few hours the next day before I needed to catch my plane, incidentally at the same airport where I touched down in 1962.

I was especially interested in seeing the “broad stripes and bright stars” that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. The flag was once the principal tableau of the National Museum of American History, unfurled right at its entrance. But fabric’s obvious deterioration necessitated a major conservation project, and it has only now returned to the museum five years later. To prevent further damage, the curators have provided a climate controlled cased and dark room for its display, but what an artifact! It’s huge, over forty feet long, even though its size was reduced by early souvenir hunters who clipped several inches of stripes and one of its stars. And the exhibition has a bevy of supporting cases with information about the flag maker who sewed it for $400 and change and how the artifact made its way to safe keeping in Washington.

To mark the reopening of the museum, the White House has lent its copy of the Gettysburg Address—the only one “titled, signed and dated,” as the caption says. Since my own institution boasts one of the four other copies of the document, I had to take a look, and there are differences. This one is written on three separate sheets of paper; Cornell’s is a folded letter with the text appearing on both folios and the recto of one piece of paper. But the words are the same, beginning “Four score and seven years ago” and reminding us of the high ideals that marked our country’s founding. Let us hope that the new administration, now establishing itself to face challenges only slightly less prodigious than those faced by Lincoln, will help us reestablish our moral compass.

Deja vu in Quito

2008-11-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

I had an invitation to speak at an Ecuadorian studies meeting that took me to Quito for six days at the end of the summer. The papers were the usual mélange of subjects, with highly-varying degrees of experience and expertise, but the theme that ran continuously through the week was how small the world is. I made at least half a dozen unexpected encounters, (almost)all of them pleasant.

The Facultad de Ciencias Sociales was my gracious host, providing airfare and accommodations at Hotel Quito. My wife and I have warm memories of this place from my Fulbright lectureship 1992 when we would take the kids to the hotel’s Sunday brunch and avail ourselves of their facilities. Otherwise I managed only a minimum of nostalgic events between the conference, a visit to Ecuador’s excellent military mapping facility, the new National Museum and the used book shops in the old city.

Before the conference even began, I spoke with Will Waters, one of the organizers, and learned that he had graduated from Cornell in 1981 and worked with the late Fred Buttle whose ex-wife is a friend of my current one. All right, that’s two degrees of separation, but it gets closer. No sooner had Will and I parted than I spotted Nelly Gonzalez, my counterpart at the University of Illinois, who was in Quito buying books. She plans to retire in the fall, so this is her last trip on Illinois’ dime. Nelly offered up memories of her long career over coffee and pastries.

After attending a session on Ecuadorian migration, a phenomenon that experts believe has moved 20% of Ecuadorians overseas in the last ten years, a young woman came up to me and introduced herself as a Cornell graduate in sociology. She went on to reveal that she is the daughter of an Ecuadorian mother and a Peace Corps volunteer and was en route to visit her grandmother in Ambato. In the course of our brief conversation, she told me that she had three children and an engineer for husband. It only later occurred to me that the engineer must be Raul Casas, whom Peggy and I sponsored in the mid 1980s. We went to their wedding in New Jersey.

On the second day I gave my paper and a radio interview. At the talk, I was pleased to notice some familiar faces in the front row, half-a-dozen of my former students from the Fulbright lectures I gave fifteen years ago. We adjourned directly to La Choza, Quito’s canonical Ecuadorian-food restaurant (lapingachos, seco de chivo, locro de papa-- the whole nine yards), where another ten or so alumni joined the group. I was delighted to learn that they have battened. Many head university libraries in the city and one is Ecuador’s Librarian of Congress. I realized a long time ago that the thing I most regret about my career choice is not having the opportunity to contribute substantially to student’s intellectual growth.

And if all this weren’t enough, on my last day in the city I ran into Juan Jauriegui of the University of San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia. Both of us were browsing the shelves of an antiquarian bookstore in the old city. The last time I saw Juan, he had asked me for a reference to FLACSO’s PhD program. He’s now half way through, with the thesis to go.

I ended the trip with an unpleasant encounter, a rendezvous with one of Quito’s many thieves. He managed to make off with my backpack as I insouciantly worked away at an Internet café. The fingersmith (whom I never saw) got neither my passport nor much money-- hope he wasn’t too disappointed.

Meanwhile Back in Bolivia

2008-11-02T08:40:00.000-08:00

Evo Morales’ stunningly decisive victory in the 2005 national elections came with a promise to increase the economic and political power of Bolivia’s Native American majority. His triumph reprised that of Hamas on the West Bank in forcing the United States to deal with an unfriendly but democratically-elected regime. The Bush administration has grudgingly conceded Morales’ popularity, but it remains unwilling to recognize his legitimacy. By refusing to appreciate that Morales and his allies represent a profound desire to change the status quo through peaceful means, the United States clings to a policy with little support in Latin America and one that will continue to erode U.S. influence in the region.

Since his election, Morales has been confronted by a loose coalition of national and regional politicians opposed to his platform. Despite ongoing negotiations, intermittently mediated by Catholic prelates and representatives of the Organization of American States, positions have only hardened in the past two years. What began as a legitimate dispute over how Morales and his allies would govern escalated into the pattern of street demonstrations, roadblocks, and building takeovers characteristic of Bolivian politics. In September Morales and his adversaries seemed willing to take the country over one of the Andean nation’s many cliffs. Violence spiked, culminating with the massacre of 18 peasants at Cobija, in the Bolivian Amazon. And, in the midst of the upheaval, Morales declared U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg persona non grata.

Bolivia’s relations with the United States are colored by its traditional reliance on large amounts of economic assistance and our ambassadors’ proclivity for inflammatory remarks made to the local media. Morales has chosen to employ his own brand of verbal pyrotechnics which fires up his base but are often quoted in the North American press as evidence of his instability. The appointment of a career diplomat as ambassador was initially viewed in Bolivia as the beginning of a new relationship with the United States. However, Goldberg quickly proved himself a vociferous advocate for coca eradication and became embroiled in the struggle between Morales and his political opponents. In August of 2007 Bolivian officials accused the United States of channeling money to conservative opponents of the government, and Morales himself later threatened “radical actions” against ambassadors who meddle in his country’s internal affairs. Goldberg’s departure was triggered by his subsequent meeting with prominent members of the opposition, giving the impression of U.S. support.

At the end of October, Bolivia began to walk back from the brink. Violence subsided as did the political impasse. A new constitution, which embodies many of the issues central to Morales and his allies is before the Bolivian legislature. And demands for greater regional autonomy, especially control of petroleum and natural gas revenues, will be decided within the framework of political discourse rather than through street violence. But it was an alliance of South American nations, notably excluding the United States, that defused the crisis.

The Bush administration’s relationship with Bolivia is based almost solely on coca eradication. So when the State Department’s Annual Report on Major Drug Transit or Major Illicit Drug Producing Countries, released on September 15, found that Bolivia “failed demonstrably” to enact counter narcotics strategies in the year 2007, it threatened to suspend several aid programs. Bolivians were quick to disagree with the report, pointing out that the annual increase of coca production in their country was smaller than that of Peru and much smaller than Colombia’s, neither of which was sanctioned. Eleven days later, President Bush requested that Congress suspend Bolivia’s preferential tariffs under the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act. As the New York Times noted in its editorial of October 6, these decertifications seem more a reaction to the expulsion of Ambassador Goldberg than part of a coherent foreign policy.

While the United States threatened sanctions, a recently-constituted regional organization undertook constructive action. UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, met in emergency session four days after the Cobija massacre. On the same day that the State Department released its Annual Report, seven heads of state and representatives of four other South American nations quickly hammered out a nine-point plan that strongly supports Bolivia’s democratically elected government and urges all parties to enter immediate negotiation. UNASUR’s unequivocal backing of Morales, its refusal to recognize any of his opponents as legitimate representatives of the state, and its insistence on the territorial integrity of Bolivia broke a two-year old stalemate.

While it is still too early to declare the Bolivian political crisis resolved, the quick actions of UNASUR offer Bolivians a chance to resolve their problems through political means. U.S. policy in the region, tying economic aid to drug eradication, is narrow in its approach and punitive in its interpretation. It has failed to offer democratically-elected governments the means to foster domestic peace and stability, outcomes that serve the interests of all concerned. It is time for a new administration in Washington to offer a new approach to Latin America.

A Wild Trip, May 2008

2008-09-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

Just before we left to visit our daughter in Chicago, my wife’s cell phone recorded a message from the airline. “Your flight from La Guardia to O’Hare has been cancelled, call 800 644-4000 to reschedule.” Although we did not sense it at the time, this simple transaction flipped a cosmic switch from green to red. Thereafter our travel ceased to observe any semblance of order.

Calling the 800 number deployed an automated answering program. “To make a reservation, press one; to check flight schedules, press two; if you are calling from a rotary phone, stay on the line, and an operator will assist you.” Through trial and error, I learned that the third choice eventually leads to voice recognition software that identifies the caller and his problem. “Say your confirmation number,” chirped a perky sounding robot voice that followed up with examples of suggested syntax. “For letters, say ‘A as in Alexander;’ for digits, ‘the number five.’” My speech proved unintelligible to the machine, and after three failed attempts, the program switched me to a location somewhere in South Asia where Ms. Patel took over my case. Now speech recognition became my responsibility. She haltingly summarized my interaction with the computer and determined that our flight had, indeed, been canceled. Then in a cheerful voice, Ms. Patel announced that she could get us seats on a flight that left the next afternoon. “It’s the Memorial Day weekend,” she explained. Though she admitted that the cancellation was due to a mechanical problem, Ms. Patel stubbornly refused to consider flights other than those of her employer. Feeling myself wearing out, I disingenuously played the paternity card. “We’re going to see our daughter graduate from college; tomorrow afternoon won’t do!” With that a supervisor intervened and authorized us to fly outside the network. The upshot was two reservations from LaGuardia to O’Hare at the crack of dawn-- only one night lost.

Bad weather at our point of departure gave my wife a chance to talk to an airport reservation agent in person. Soon we had abandoned LaGuardia altogether and had tickets in hand to Philadelphia with a connection to O’Hare scheduled to arrive at midnight. We felt pretty cocky; all it took as face-to-face communication. But not so fast.

As we walked down the ramp to board our flight in Philadelphia, the gate agent called out: “sir, oh sir.” The computer showed that though we had tickets and seats, we were not checked in. Our arguments that we had tickets in hand failed to trump the computer’s silent authority; we were stuck in Philadelphia for the night. Actually, sticking in Philadelphia would have been a blessing. Turns out that the airline uses a motel in Glouster, New Jersey, for its distressed passengers. After waiting twenty minutes for the motel van to arrive, and learning from others in our situation that they had been waiting for nearly an hour, we crossed to the other side of the airport and hailed a taxi. The ride took twice as long as it should have. The driver did not know the way; his GPS was on the blink; and he refused to communicate in any meaningful way with the four people in his automobile, two of whom had directions taken from their Blackberries. A part of the problem, perhaps, was that the driver had ingeniously equipped his steering column with a tiny TV on which he was watching soap opera reruns. We finally reached the motel at 12:30. My wife and I dashed to the checkin window-- the motel locked its lobby at midnight and refused to open the front door. However, our traveling companions decided that the accommodations were not to their liking. The male of the two was very concerned that all the rooms had “exterior doors.” They struck off for points unknown in the taxi, and we set off to bed. With four hours sleep under our belts, we took the shuttle to our 7:30 departure and reached Chicago without further ado.

I’m writing two days later on my way to New Orleans, and both of my flights have been right on time. Maybe this time an invisible hand has flipped the switch.

Lines on First Reading into Tolstoy's War and Peace, June 2008

2008-09-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

I read on the road, a lot.

Woody Allen has a famous joke made at the expense of speed reading. On completing his course, Woody read Tolstoy’s famously long War and Peace in an hour, and when asked what it was about, he answered, “Russia.” Not so fast there, Woody! Although it is set in Russia, that’s not what War and Peace is about. The novel has many themes, some indigenous to Tolstoy’s time and place, others remarkably forward looking, most universal and timeless. Though I managed to pass three score and two years on earth without picking up this heavy tome, after slogging through all 1,138 pages of the Modern Library edition, I can understand what all the excitement is about. (I must confess, though, that I almost abandoned my reading, despairing at the dozens of characters and their Russian pet names. Figuring out that I only needed to keep up with the Bolkonskys, the Pierre Bezukhov and the Rostovs was liberating.)

Tolstoy exists in the popular imagination as an odd genius, a man who abandoned a life of privilege-- and his wife and children in the process-- to live among Russian serfs. In addition to his brilliance career as a writer and social critic, Tolstoy toiled briefly as a solider and a jurist, and had many avocations, bee keeping among them. His life experiences gave depth to Tolstoy’s many characters and inspired him to use the apiary as one of his primary tropes.

Religion, romantic love and death repeatedly, profoundly shape Tolstoy’s plot and characters. He emphasizes emotion in the female sphere by giving his female characters greater range of emotional expression. Maryra Bolkonsky embodies mystical piety. Not content with prayer and the traditional Orthodox rituals, she meets with religious pilgrims at her Bleak Hills estate, smuggling them into her apartment by the back staircase. Pierre Bezukhov, the most feminine of Tolstoy’s males, dabbles in Free Masonry, eventually abandoning its rites but absorbing its message of the fellowship of human kind.

Death drives the novel’s plot from beginning to end. Pierre, the illegitimate but only son of a rich and powerful count, unexpectedly inherits both the title and a fortune with the death of his father, and spends nearly one thousand pages committing acts worthy of the spirit of Dolly Levy, spreading rubles around like manure. Andrei Bolkonsky’s wife dies in childbirth, leaving him bereft and their son in the care of the Bolkonsky relatives. Andrei, himself, cheats death at the battle of Austerlitz but falls, mortally wounded, at Borodino before he and his regiment enter action. His lingering agony gives Tolstoy an opportunity to contemplate how both the dying and those who care for them deal with this most final of life’s events. Andrei’s passing resolves not one but two dilemmas, clearing the way for the marriage of Pierre and Natasha Rostov and of Nikolai Rostov and Marya. Petya Rostov, joins the Russian resistance to Napolean’s invasion at a very tender age and dies in a meaningless engagement with French forces in retreat. His fate reminds us that death can also occur without purpose, even in literature.

No one could doubt Tolstoy’s admiration of those who inhabited the lowest echelon of Russian society. The peasantry is ubiquitous in War and Peace-- appearing as field hands, retainers, military conscripts. These men and women have a way of dealing with the world that allows them to achieve dignity, even in their often-difficult circumstances . In War and Peace, the closer one dwelt to serfdom, the nobler one’s character, if not one’s lifestyle. Though individual peasants never retain Tolstoy’s attention for long, his development of characters such as Platon Karataev, a predecessor of Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, embody the enduring Russian soul and spirit.

Tolstoy offers less flattering portraits of members of the aristocracy whose lives revolve around the court and the empty gratifications of pleasure and whim. He shows particular contempt for the historians of his age who explained the past in terms of the actions of its great men. Neither the crowned heads of Europe nor Bonaparte, who crowned himself, seems relevant to the events of the early 19th century. The spirit of the army, rather than tactics or logistics, invariably decided battles, and the people rather than their leaders made the nation. Tolstoy’s view of history would ultimately achieve prominence in the profession a century after he proposed it.

Above all, Tolstoy’s work demonstrates his abilities as an observer of people. At one point he describes the action of a female character: “the short, downy upper lip was continually flying down to meet the rosy, lower lip when necessary, and parting again in a smile of gleaming teeth and eyes.” She’s talking! War and Peace also brims with descriptions of physical and emotional states and how the exterior reflects feelings within. Blushing often afflicts his major characters, sometimes in times of stress but most often as a consequence of male/female interaction or its imaginary evocation. Pierre blushes anytime that Natasha comes into view or enters his thoughts. Tolstoy employs blushing as a scarlet badge to identify those characters for whom he feels most sympathy. Pierre, Natasha, Marya and Petya constantly blush while Count Vassily and Ellen never do, and Andrei does so only rarely. As a blusher, myself, I was impressed that Tolstoy’s characters passed so quickly from white to carmine and that they never seemed to have their thoughts or actions impaired by triggering hormonal release. I’m envious, but not just for this.

New Orleans, June 2008

2008-09-14T12:56:00.000-07:00

Water defines New Orleans, so much so that the natives use “riverside” and “lakeside” to define the cardinal directions of north and south. In August 2005, water, roiled by Hurricane Katrina and abetted by faulty engineering, entered the city. A year and a half after the deluge, when a group from our church went to work in the city, New Orleans still struggled to regain its footing. It had roughly a third of its pre-hurricane population, a severely-damaged infrastructure, and an economy too weak to change the status quo.

New Orleans is one of the country’s premier cities. It commands the vast river network that drains North America from Pennsylvania and Montana to the Gulf of Mexico. This strategic location, the particularities that cotton, cane, oil, port-of-call and tourism bring to the local economy and the rich mixture of language and ethnicity, subsumed in the deceptively simple expression, “creole,” make it one of the most distinctive locations on the planet. Katrina’s waters, and the nation’s inability to completely repair the damage they did, add another note of distinction to New Orleans’ repertoire.

I’m back in the city now, a year after the work crew from Ithaca visited at Easter 2007. Things look better but not good. The city’s principal gateway, Louis Armstrong International Airport, has a freshness created by paint and cleaning that removes the hurricane look-and-feel and smell. The roadways seem less a work in progress, too, even during the morning rush hour. According to official statistics, the city has regained 2/3 of its pre-Katrina population, but that part of the recovery has stalled. New Orleans is a long way from recovery, and there’s not much visible construction underway.

I’ve come for the SALALM meeting, hosted by Tulane University and taking place at the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter. Wanting to see how much flood damage had been repaired, and wanting to add my drop in the bucket, I arrived a day early and spent the day before the sessions volunteering at St. Paul’s Homecoming Center, a group with an appealing web site. I was the old guy in a crew that, with a dozen middle schoolers from Maryland, cleaned up an overgrown lot in the Lakeview area northwest of down town.

The day began with a cab ride from the hotel to the worksite. The driver was Haitian, her knowledge of the city, sketchy. St. Paul’s provided directions from the French Quarter to their headquarters that involved only an exit from the freeway and two right turns on surface streets. I must admit that I was not paying attention, watching the neighborhoods rather than the road as the driver missed the freeway exit that was our primary point of reference. After a time she started to ask me for directions. We just avoided a disaster, taking the last exit off I-10 before the highway passes over the swamplands that separate New Orleans from Baton Rouge-- twenty miles without a turn around. As we headed back south, the driver and her dispatcher carried on an animated discussion in patois about where she went wrong. It began with screaming but gradually transformed to laughter; all’s well that ends well, and armed with new directions we found the work site pretty quickly.

The work group’s task was to mow and rake a large lot where flood-damaged houses had been demolished and removed the season before. The clean up has now moved past gutting houses to making neighborhoods more attractive for the people who have moved back into them. That is certainly an improvement. The abandoned houses are much fewer now, and unkempt lawns stand out as eye sores rather than the status quo. Like the RHINO group last year, St. Paul’s, an Episcopal organization, furnished the logistics. We volunteers received standard garden tools-- two lawn mowers, rakes, clippers and large plastic bags. In addition, the organizers provided a flock of gasoline string trimmers whose two-cycle engines mimicked the sound of angry wasps. The teenagers swarmed to these.

The temperatures reached the 80s by 10 AM but did never cracked 90, and the humidity was a relatively low 47 %. High pressure has kept New Orleans unseasonably dry, a good thing for us gardeners. By two o’clock, we had finished the lot and even did some extra work on a house across the street that retained its spray-painted “X” on the door and water stains on the exterior walls.

The taxi back, by a New Orleans native, was a very different experience. First, because he knew the way to the hotel; second because he had lived in the city for some forty years and saw Hurricane Katrina in a larger perspective. He remembers other storms, especially Betsy that hit the area more directly, caused extensive flooding, and brought more wind damage. The difference with Katrina was, of course, the levee failure. His take on the “recovery” is that most of the work has been done by volunteers (this may have been for my benefit), and he is very angry that government at all levels-- he was particularly unkind to Bush and Nagin-- have done practically nothing. At the end of the ride, he confessed that he has essentially given up. He is staying in the city because his attempt to change his life with government-underwritten training as a long-distance truck driver was no life at all.

No matter how much you know about the Katrina, you have to come to New Orleans to appreciate its huge dimensions. On my Haitian trip, I passed several landmarks: the Superdome, where storm survivors led a miserable existence; arching sections of I-10, once desolate refuges for flood survivors; and the infamous Industrial Canal that channeled flood waters into the Lower Ninth Ward. We also saw several maps that document the flooding. With the exception of the high ground deposited by the Mississippi, “the sliver by the river,” the entire city went under-- from a few inches to several feet and from a week to forty days. The water is gone now, but it left its stains, on the facade of any building not yet repainted and on the conscience of anyone with eyes to see.