Wandering Star

Been down so long it looks like Up to me

Its been months since I even had the will to write in this blog, and I apologize to those of you who were actually keeping up with me, I dropped the ball in a big way.

When I fled Nicaragua it was tough turmoil for me. I found myself lying to my friends for some of the reasons why I needed to leave. I couldn’t tell them, in Spanish, that I was too lonely to stay in their country… that my travels there were never sustainable and that I had no choice but to come skeedaddle back to the first world.

The morning I left was brutal. I couldn’t sleep the night before, was up way too late drinking myself into literal and figurative oblivion. There I was posing for pictures at El Deportivo, there I was at the portal, about to bounce around for 12 hours or so and end up back in my bedroom, in the cool spring air of the Northeast.

When I left Ocotal on the first bus of the morning, we steamed through the mountains heading towards Esteli. The bus slammed on its brakes suddenly, and the man in the seat next to me tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for me to exit the bus. There had been an accident.

A small Chevy had veered off the road, taken out an electrical pole and had wedged itself into a deep ditch. There was only a driver, a woman in her early thirties, who was visibly pregnant. Her face was cut up, and her body was probably shattered from the force of the impact. The campesinos and bus passengers who had gathered there stepped under the downed power lines, I stepped over them.

There were so many people swarming around the car that it was impossible at first to find anything to do. Finally, a farmer showed up with a 10 foot long steel rod about 2 inches in diameter. He wedged it into the rear tire well. A few of us grabbed onto the other end and started to jack the car up, so that the passenger side door could be opened.

The women near me gasped and sighed as this poor woman driver was pulled out. I don’t believe she could’ve survived the crash, but I don’t know. I never checked the newspapers and didn’t want to know. The driver looked awful. She was loaded into the back of the EU donated Ambulance and began the 30 minute drive to the hospital in Somoto. We all got back on the bus.

In America we blow past accidents. In Hartford, an old man can get brutally hit by a car and people will pass by for minutes while he lays on the ground hurt. In America, it is someone else’s job to clean up the messes we make of our lives. Elsewhere, this is not true.

In other people’s worlds there is no one to come running. There are no $300,000 fire engines with the jaws of life. There are only campesinos with metal bars and a few dozen concerned bus passengers.

I didn’t need to be dwelling on this as I slid back into the first world. It was too heavy. There I was in the airport waiting to board the plane. Holding in my hand a small stack of documents that indicate that I, and only I, deserve to head back to the Land of Opportunity. There I was watching the cost of everything skyrocket back up to Land of Opportunity prices. The beers that cost 60 cents elsewhere cost $3.50 now, and I’m not even in the USA yet.

The transition was tough. That last fleeting glimpse of my bank account, saying goodbye to 30,000 cordobas and saying hello to our consumer lifestyles where that doesn’t amount to more than a few weeks.

The transition was brutal, coming back to finally stand on a scale… love my weight… and then brace myself for the inevitable inundation. The fat circus that is US cuisine starts to go to work on me and surely I start to puff up again.

The transition was humiliating, returning to square zero. Coming back to where I was 3 years earlier when I left Ithaca, having recently returned fron Nicaragua the first time. Then I came home, vaguely excited about the prospect of starting my life, getting a good job. Then those months passed and I started to view myself as worthless. The acidic job market eats away at the individual until the bones peek out from the flesh.

Again I find no work for myself. Again I leaf through the newspaper daily to find that, well, I should never have gone to school for what I went to school for. Again I looked online, again I posted my resume, again and again. What is the point of gaining academic wisdom if the world doesn’t care about that? What is the point of any degree excpet a technical one, a legal one, a masters, a doctorate? This is what our society says “matters.” Our society, the one that blows past the people injured by the side of the road.

I work at a golf course for 4 days. I get fired because I’m too smart. I get a part time gig tending bar at a local place. My first night, a guy who knows me makes fun of my education. He’s joking, “hah, putting that Cornell education to good use?” I smile and go along with the joke. I’m torn apart inside.

My education is like a playground slide, only the slide is cut off 2 feet from the top. So you climb all the way up, sit down, push off… and fall 20 feet down onto your face. Then you stay there, forever, wondering Hot It All Really Happened.

I found a job I really wanted, more than anything. The job is for a local publishing company as a fact-checking editor for a big magazine. I got my haircut. I shaved. I dry-cleaned my suit and printed out referrences, extra copies of my resume. I went to the interview and tried my absolute hardest. She gave me a take-home editing assignment. The next two days I worked on it… 5 hours each day. 10+ hours so I could hand it in promptly, well done.

The weeks pass. I’m told they will make a decision by the end of the month. Well. We’re getting close. I cannot help but be pessimistic. Why not? I’m sure there are half a dozen other well-qualified candidates. Can I roll a 6 on one roll of a dice? That’s how confident I feel.

My birthday is tomorrow. I’m just hoping I don’t get the letter saying “we have decided that a different candidate better meets our requirements”  on my birthday. Which is a very real possibility.

When this falls through I’m toast. That will have been my only good shot at a job I want in years. Then the pariah role that my life has drawn will be solidified in stone. I’ll always be a fun story, a humorous anecdote, the guy people say “I wonder what he’s doing”….   then they’ll all guess, and all of their guess will be so much better than the life I’ll actually be leading.

This is how America makes me feel. Periphal. Anecdotal. Practically useless. These are the shoes I’m filling right now and its a tough way to approach my twenty sixth year on this planet.

So that sums up why there was never another post, why there was never a beautiful summation of what this second trip to Nicaragua meant to me. It all disintegrated so fast, all bled dry to the mean reality of where I’ve been picked to live my life. Empowerment is such a funny thing. One moment the sails rip taught and the ship leaps forward across the sea, and the next, the duldrums come and weeks pass on the ocean with no land in sight.

For what its worth, I’m alive. Can’t take on “and well” right now but who knows. Maybe I’ll roll a six.

Travelling…

San Juan del Sur, goodbye, finally

to
Managua
to

Ocotal… hopefully by 6pm.

I have had an incredible amount of time to think lately, lying on my back in my hotel room sweating out the afternoon and staring at the wooden slats in the cieling.

Most evenings I walk the curve of the bay from rocky cliff to rocky cliff, maybe three miles, just to pass the time.

I came here to Nicaragua to escape a stagnation that was threatening to devour my persona. Crippled by seventeen months of a hated job, I felt a desperate urge to truly enjoy my life, for a change. Nicaragua being the last palce that was fully true seemed the ideal candidate for a revival.

I have traveled from the extreme north to the extreme south, in doing so, I´ve accomplished so much. I have encountered people from all over the world, sharpened my Spanish skills back up to a point, and began the physical & mental transitions I so desperately saught.

It is now almost two months since I left the US. Along with the wonderful gifts life on the road in Nicaragua has given me, come some unwanted attachments. I will make no reservations about this, the road has of late become more of a chore than a release for me. When I was leaving Granada for the second time a few weeks ago, I was struck by this sinking and almost nauseating sensation… where do I want to go? It wasn´t a liberating feeling, I wasn´t filled with the wonder of freedom, rather overdosed with it.

Is that really possible? You tell me. I walked into the center of the bus terminal in Granada and waited for one of the assistentes to come up to me. ¨Oye Chele…. ¿Rivas?¨ As I had planned earlier in the day, I nodded my head and boarded the bus to Rivas. It was that simple, the seed carried by the wind. Had the first assistente come up to me and said ¨oye, ¿Managua?¨ I would´ve gone there instead.

I came here a miserably unfocused ball of nerves. It didn´t take long for this country to grate off the dead skin, and recalibrate me. I humbled myself. I humbled myself spiritually in the presence of intense poverty. I humbled myself physically on the wind-swept upper slopes of Momotombo. I was able to crawl back into the world of Spanish un mundo donde existe otra forma de Travis. Un mundo donde yo he construido una persona nueva, con un idioma nuevo. En este mundo soy mas tranquilo, mas dulce, mas sincero, y mas que nada- menos enojado con las cosas que pasaron mal en mi vida hasta hoy.

I set my departure date the 29th of May because, hell, its what I clicked on. It also fell just inside the 90 day visa-range. I picked that time frame because I was certain I could get done what needed doing. As I sit here early in the morning in San Juan del Sur, I realize that its done.

The physical transformation is well underway, shedding the layers of flesh that I carried with me to scale industrial nightmares and survive bitter winters. Moreover I now have the ability to continue this trend for myself. I brought multivitamins with me here, and after two weeks I almost never took them. I found my cuisine to be so diverse and utterly satisfying that the thought never crossed my mind.

I began to read again, heavily, while here. I found myself in possession of such a wealth of unoccupied time it was the wise choice to prevent myself from becoming stir-crazy. Reading a good book is a blessing, I´m in awe of good writers and in them I see visions of what I am capable of. In bad writers it´s even better, I flop the book to my chest and call them names out loud… I read it all regardless, kindling my desire to prove that I can do it better.

I have new hobbies, you could say, renewed focus on things that provide me with a deeper level of happiness than the cheap means America hawks to its youth. And by cheap I don´t mean inexpensive, because they never are. I have learned that I am still young, believe it or not. Its fashionable for people to simper about their age… and now I realize that I wouldn´t want to go back to 21, even if I could. I don´t want to give up what I´ve learned, I don´t want to go back to that spastic, headstrong mode of unenlightenment.

I finally feel that my life has swung through the bottom of the curve. Finally. So what now?

I´m coming home.

I´ve made that decision for no less than a dozen reasons, and all of them are particularly good. The prime factor is that I now feel drawn to other things, new horizons that I cannot reach from where I am. I have encountered a whole heap of hopelessly selfish endless-summer types where I am right now and I find myself reacting so caustically to them. That is not who I am. I am a worker, and a strong one at that, anyone who ever climbed a smokestack with me knows that. I want to build, I want to create now more than I want to revell.

In leaving Nicaragua early I am leaving exactly two things unfinished. I will not travel to the islands to learn diving. This has the vague fragrance of disappointment, but I know deep down its fallen from my priorities. Beaches are beautiful, and I´ve walked barefoot on about 6 here, but those expanses of sand become deserts after a point. Specifically, I´ve lost the desire to want to learn to dive by myself. This isn´t a defeatist decision, I´m leaving that one out there. I´m leaving it like the gemstones the Goonies left for One-Eyed Willie… no, that´s Willie´s! I wan´t to always look to the southern sky and know that sometime I will return, with someone, to put that last piece in the puzzle.

The other thing I have yet to accomplish is the completion of a novel, which is a funny concept to me. I have written more than a novel´s worth since I´ve been here. I have written my ass off and pushed my poor wrist a decade towards carpal tunnel. My skill and awareness as a writer have multiplied substantially since I´ve come here, and if they haven´t then why the hell are you still reading this? :)
To be completely honest with you I found out that I´m not really a novel writer. I found that out because I´ve read several ¨books¨ that are fictional and yet certainly not novels. I don´t have the patience to do things that way, and I actually believe that the dwindling supply of readers on this planet doesn´t have the time to want to read something like that. A forty page chapter doesn´t fit so well into a crosstown subway ride. I´m still a writer, I´ve just realized its not worth writing if I don´t enjoy the process, if its not in my own style (which I have faith in). You´ll see, I swear.

So those two things aside I have smacked my goals out of the ballpark. I went 3-4 with 3 rbi´s, 2 runs, a stolen base, and a triple shy of the cycle. Again, the two outstanding issues will be addressed in their due time. The last time I left Nicaragua I felt such a love for this land but I wondered, will I ever make it back? Its quite far away, and for me tends to involve pretty big chunks of time… would it be a reality? The dream whose embers smoldered in my mind for so long flared back up and became real.

This time, in leaving Nicaragua, I love her doubly, and I know that I will be back. There are no doubts. Do you know that I´ve spent about 1/50th of my life here!? That´s pretty intense to me, and I know the tail end of that fraction will shrink. This place is a home to me, not a second home- another one.

The title of my blog Wandering Star is not my own cooking. Its from a Portishead song, the refrain of which is
¨Wandering star, for whom it is reserved, the blackness, the darkness, forever.¨ The relevance of that symbol, to me, functioned on several levels. Now I happen to be much less concerned with the darkness, which has always been everywhere, but with the inner light. The star-like qualities that I´m bringing back with me. 

Selah.  

The bad way

Why is it that I always seem to find the bad way to lose weight?

In 2004 it was Dengue fever, trimmed me right down. Now, its bank-induced poverty. This is starting to get bad. According to the FedEx site my package has not moved in 36 hours. Should I have expected anything else? Get royally screwed over by my bank, only to have FedEx line up for their turn? I wrote them, pleading for someone to explain to me what is happening… it might take several days just for my package to make it from Managua, and its not even in Nicaragua yet! 

This is really, really, really grating. This is now the fourth complete day I´ve been trapped here. I hate surfer culture, I hate being surrounded on all sides by spoiled airheads who only wear shirts while they are in the water.  Duude, gotta watch out for that board rash. Nothing worse than hearing a Swede speak English with a So-Cal surfer accent; give me a break. 

So this is point desperation. I´m paid through until Monday morning at my hotel. If it doesn´t come then… gasp…
I´m going to ask someone to wire me $200 so I can just flat-out go home. The only remaining thing I want to do is learn to dive, but I´ll scrap that too if I have to go through more of this prisoner garbage. Seriously.

Its like in cartoons, where a character is starving to the point where everyday objects turn into giant turkey roasts, and they´ll sink their teeth in only to flashback to reality with a shoe in their mouth. Unfortunately, my IPOD is starting to look very delicious, i´m sure there´s a pawn shop nearby… 

The Worst of Times = KNBT

I truly loathe having to write the post I´m about to write. I hate to even think about what happened to me and how furious it makes me. I have been working to relax myself here, to unwind and re-learn satisfaction… and this damn near erased weeks of effort.

I woke up at 4:30 am on Wednesday morning to finish packing up for my trip to Corn Island. I meticulously packed my bag to its most compact, most travel-ready state. Every article of clothing was laundered and folded in a rectangular fashion to collapse easily in the compression bag and conform to the space of my pack. It was all ready. I was about to take the 6am express bus directly to Managua, saving myself the hassle of the dirty terminal at Rivas.

As the sky warmed, I decided to walk to the ATM to withdraw a motherlode of US dollars. On Little Corn Island, very few locations accept credit cards, and the ones that do have a vicious tendancy of charging something like a 5%¨satellite fee.¨That fee isn´t such a bad thing for a small purchase, but when I´m considering a $480 advanced open-water dive certification package, it adds up.

Anyway, I made it to the ATM, popped in my card and pin, hit withdrawal, $USD and enter. The machine whirs for a second and spits out a reciept. ¨invalid account.¨ Dumbfounded, I try the transaction 4 more times and receive four more reciepts.

The anger I felt about this immediately surged up in my chest. Those damned bastards! They´ve screwed me over! I called my mother at 7am local time to ask her to call Keystone Nazareth Bank and Trust to find out what has just happened to my ATM card. She agrees to do so and hangs up, while I stand around the empty streets of San Juan del Sur watching the clock advance to the 6am departure of the express bus.

Rewind to late February. I went to my local branch to ask what I needed to do to ensure that no holds of ANY kind would be placed on my card. They told me to call the cardmember services 1-800 number and set it up. I did. The woman at the 1-800 number took down the dates of my trip, where I would be, and added a note to my account that said ¨do not apply any holds.¨Before hanging up I thanked her, stressing again how ungodly important it is that they NOT under ANY circumstances shut off my card. As a precaution, she took down my primary email address which would be used if anything came up. I felt relaxed and confident.

Fast forward to present. I call my mother back after 20 minutes or so. She answers the phone. Here´s the deal, KNBT merged with Penn National and they sent out new ATM cards. There, in my stack of mail at home, in an unmarked envelope, lay my new ATM card. The one in my pocket here expired 4/21. I paced back and forth cursing those bastards for a minute. I didn´t know what to do, I told my mother I would call her back.

The first option many of you would think of would be to have money wired to me. That might seem like a good idea, but walking around the third world with a ton of cash is a very, very bad idea. I only considered it that day because I would be in largely secure environments most of the day, and would unload almost all of it upon arrival at the dive shop. I had 90 córdobas in my pocket, thats US$4.50. A few weeks ago a guy I met on the Momotombo expedition told me that round trip tickets to Corn Island on La Costeña cost US$147 if payed in CASH at the terminal, saving something like 20 bucks. With that in mind, a few days ago I took out US$200.

Recall that I was planning on leaving earlier, and only stayed because of that fluke encounter with the Flyers game. I want you all to think, like I did, of the many, many circumstances that could´ve led to a WORST CASE SCENARIO for me: were it not for several random coincidences I could´ve been trapped almost anywhere in this country with nothing.

Pardon my language, again, but fuck KNBT, those sonsofbitches! Killer Nazi Bastard Terrorists! ¡Hijueputas! ¡Hijos de la quiñenta puta! ¡Hijos del congreso mundial de putas sangradas! ¡Jodido Malditos! They left me high and dry, they did the ONE thing I begged them to NEVER allow. I never got a heads-up, never had any warning, never got that Promised E-mail.

After a long talk with the owner of my hospedaje, she pointed me in the direction of a real-estate office that is also a FedEx hub. Salvation? I spoke with the man there and got their mailing address. My mother was able to send out the card that day around noon. If I am lucky I can expect it here on Friday, sometime, at the bargain basement cost of $93 dollars. I believe my mother footed the bill, however, for which I am infinitely grateful.

So thank you KNBT for putting me in an incredibly perilous situation. Thank you for doing the worst thing a bank has ever done to me in my life. Thank you for stranding me in the third world! Bless my lucky stars that I ended up with enough cash in my pocket to last until my card arrives….

I hope.

The Best of Times + Colibrí

Well, the Flyer´s delighted me, and made all of my foolish decisions worthwhile with a stunning road victory in overtime against the Caps. I was riotously inebbriated, drinking liberal pours of Woodford Reserve that I brought along to my new favorite bar in Nicaragua. (they let me drink my own liquour there, I think I paid 50 cents for each glass of ice! Amazing)

Additionally I finally made it to that delicious restaurant I missed out on because of Flyers´ game 6. Its called Colibrí, ¨hummingbird,¨ and features mediterranean  cuisine. I don´t have it with me but I wrote a review of the meal I had afterwards. It went something like this: 

A meal, a setting, that dissolves the line between first and third world. The cuisine here can easily challenge that of any trendy Hell´s Kitchen locale. Remarkable attention to detail, perfect service, comforting and colorful. Worth ammending any itinerary to bring you closer to this culinary paradise. 

Seriously, they deserve all amounts of praise. My meal began with premise made sangria and a hummus plate for starters. The main course was Spanish Meatballs in a spicy tomato mushroom sauce with olives and peas. I finished the meal with my salad: spinach and baby greens, croutons, tomatoes, onions, avocado, seared garlic… and to blow away all the competition real basalmic vinegar! (restaurants in nicaragua have a woefull tendancy to serve oil with white wine vinegar).

What a joy that was, it was really the best of times.