A Place for Everything and Everything In It's Place

At the yard sale last week, I put a stack of CDs in a small plastic tote. I didn't expect anyone to be interested.

Things got busy with the selling and answering questions, and I noticed a few people walking around with a couple of CDs. Finally, I saw a man carrying around the whole box. Two thoughts came so closely together that I don't know which was first.

One thought was: Wow, I didn't realize those would be so popular; I should have put a price on them.

The second thought was: I don't think I put the lid for the box out there. Now I have an extra lid!

Even though that was 5 days ago, that thought still plagues me. I'm going to have to collect the boxes at some point. Boxes with no lids, or lids with no boxes ... How can a person live with such asymmetry?

It is now 30 days before we need to be ready to leave.

Most of the big items from our home were sold at a yard sale a few days ago. Ever since then I've been on Facebook Marketplace selling the rest.

I had thought we were fairly conservative in terms of our materialistic tendencies. Now I know better. I woke up this morning about 2 hours early and couldn't sleep for all the visions of junk on the floors of my house.

Most of the furniture was moved outside for the yard sale.

Kitchen shelf

 We put suitcases where the drawers used to be, and I'm putting everything into piles according to type, in preparation for another yard sale and other forms of recycling. One box of pictures and other small, sentimental items will go to the grandparents, and maybe a few other treasures will find a place with other relatives. Otherwise, we all will take one large suitcase and a backpack, and maybe a small carry-on for at least some of us.


While it does feel good to downsize, it is an incredible feat of endurance and emotional detachment to eliminate what feels like 98% of our belongings.

Eating

Our American friends had moved to Reyes four months ago. They gave us grapefruit (toronja) from a tree in their yard, and we gave them Snickers bars.

They also had a cacao tree and took us to try some. Inside the cacao pod was a sweet and slightly sticky substance, covering the little nuts inside. Nature’s Snickers.

Another candy-like food we tasted was grubs. We had taken a 3-hour tour along the Beni River with Escorpion Tours. The company was started by an indigenous man and his children were the tour guides.


We went upriver to the entrance to the Madidi National Park entrance and met a park ranger and a wild tejón. The rangers had cared for the lost tejón until a group of other tejóns had come by. It joined the group and left, but after 2-3 days it returned. (Please don't play with wild animals. Although the tejón climbed on the guide, it was continually trying to bite him.)

The tejón was playing with what looked like tiny, undeveloped coconuts. Jon remembered that the tour guides knew about eating grubs and, after Jon asked him, our guide went off for a moment and returned with several large nuts, about twice the size of a large walnut.

Breaking open one of the nuts, the guide pulled out a grub. Here’s what happened:

I tried one too:

I might try it again one day. The guide said the grubs were also good when roasted like marshmallows. Coconut-flavored roasted marshmallow grubs on a stick. Yum!

Later on that same tour, we hiked through the jungle with our indigenous guide. He showed us some edible fruits, which we sampled. He explained how to use some of the plants and leaves for medicinal purposes. He helped us identify several rubber trees and we rubbed some of the sap between our fingers until it formed a tiny rubber ball.

The last plant we found was a vine called uña de gato. Cat’s claw. You can drink the water inside the vine, you can filter water through the center of the vine, and you can boil the bark in water and drink it. This bark-infused water is used to help heal various ailments including, among other things, Lyme disease.

Mud and Dogs

Mud and Dogs

Reyes is a beautiful city, surrounded by mud. During the rainy season, the unpaved road from Rurrenabaque to Reyes is, as our friend called it, mantequillado — like warm butter.

This is the only picture I have of a muddy road. Imagine this about 6 times wider with large trucks driving all day on it.

I watched the side of the road as we drove. It was just like the countryside anywhere: modest houses, cattle ranches, and clotheslines. And then my vision blurred, but it wasn’t a problem with my eyes. It took awhile to realize that the mud I had been staring at had become a thin body of water, the exact same color as the mud. Plants growing in the canal-shaped pond obscured the boundary between land and water. And the thing that made my mind go fuzzy and my eyes turn inside out was the reflection. I could not grasp that water the color of mud could reflect the plants and the sky. Yet it does.

This picture also doesn't match what I was writing about. You'll notice the light does indeed reflect off of it.)

Surprisingly, the streets of Reyes are clear of mud. They are paved, well-maintained, clean streets. The town square is manicured with flowering plants. The houses are in good repair. 

Reyes is so civilized, in fact, that dogs can sleep undisturbed in the middle of the street during rush hour. Not until the bumper of our pickup truck was literally on top of a dog did it acknowledge our presence and move out of the way.

You may be noticing a theme with the pictures by now. This dog is obviously not in the street. This is also not the city of Reyes. The dog, however, is lazy.

In contrast, people in the street are an entirely different matter. For example, signs that mark pedestrian crossings in the United States show a person walking, or two people standing by a crosswalk and waiting. In Bolivia the pedestrians on the signs appear to be running for their lives! Which is what actually happens when you try to cross the street.

One solution to the pedestrian “problem” is called teleférico. In La Paz, a series of tracks that resemble telephone lines are suspended above the city, carrying small “bubbles” filled with people. It might be a slower form of transportation, but no one has to run for their lives, and the dogs can sleep in peace.

Enlarge and zoom in on the trees in the center-ish of the shot. The bubble looking things are people transporters

Etymological Thought For the Day

We went to the countryside to look at some property for sale. It was in an area where the people are imbued with the idea of preserving their natural resources. In fact, the Madidi National Park sits literally steps away from the main road.

We walked through the crags and hills, avoiding the evidence of cows.  In Bolivia, cows are ganados. In proper Spanish the word for cow is vaca. “Ganar” means “to win” or “to obtain.” I'm not an expert on etymology, but it seems to me that perhaps the Bolivians believe that owning cattle is equivalent to winning the game of life. 

Zoom in on their faces. They definitely have an opinion about us being on their farm.

We approached the forest. In a quiet moment when the others had left me by myself for a moment, a word crossed my mind: “semejante”. And immediately another word came to me: “semilla”. 

“Semilla” means seed, and “semejante” means similar. In my mind, I connected the words thus: two things that come from the same type of seed are similar. Entonces, “semejante” significa “del mismo tipo de semilla.”

On Fish and Drug Lords

20 March 2018 Panama: the Link Between the Americas!

After 4 airports in 24 hours, and with no more free WiFi, creativity kicks in. Thankfully, the Panamanian airport billboard committee gave me some help. 

After passing the standard ads for cell phones, video games, and shirtless men/cologne, I came upon this gem:

The basic translation is: “Illegal fishing encourages pirating, it can be tied to drug trafficking, and to the slave trade.”

They might as well say, “If you fish illegally, one day you’ll be working for slavers and drug lords.”

It sounds like a slippery slope, and logically speaking, it is. But just because it’s a logical fallacy doesn’t mean it is always false.

Take Barry Seal, for example. As a pilot for TWA, he started casually “forgetting about” the Cuban cigars in his briefcase, and he ended up working for (and dying at the hands of) Pablo Escobar and the Nicaraguan drug cartel. (The video below was taken as we flew over La Paz. I thought it might be similar to what Barry Seal experienced.)

So, if you don’t want to end up like Barry Seal, always get a license before you fish.

The Woods Are Just Trees

19 March 2018

Charlotte Douglas International Airport

(Please forgive any errors. I have slept very little and am typing this post out on a smartphone.)

I didn’t expect to have a story to tell already. Our flight was a red-eye. I would have settled right in to sleep, but I was nursing a blood clot on my leg and wanted to ask my neighbor to switch seats with me, because it’d be easier. 

Don’t worry about it, my seat neighbor said. Anytime you ask me to move it’ll be no problem. If I fall asleep, just slap me in the face. My friend here does it all the time.

An hour later, the conversation was still going. Seth is a Jewish college kid from Alpharetta, Georgia. Of course Jon and I had lived there. We talked about Lake Linnear, then on to other travels. 

I say “we”, but Jon and Seth moved from one story to the next so quickly all I could do was venture a fast question as one of them was taking a breath. 

What is FSU? Florida State University, in Tallahassee. What are the kids like there? asked Jon. There’s a whole range, depending on where they’re from. Rich corporate kids, weird kids, cool douche-y kids.

I gotta ask you, Jon said. Is there a safe space on the campus? 

Seth didn’t really know how to answer. He said if he doesn’t agree with what someone says, he just walks away from the conversation.

All the guys at FSU are on steroids, he said. They don’t think about 5, 10, 20 years from now. I’m not big, but I hold my own. I’m trained in Krav Maga.

Is that Israeli martial arts? I ask.

Yes, it’s pretty ruthless. The hardest thing I’ve ever done is get to level 3. And he told a story about Cozumel and going outside the “tourist fence.” The thugs didn’t believe he would be a match for them. Yet here he was, whole and in good health, telling me the story.

I take everything at face value. What reason do I have to doubt? I default to trust. Besides, Seth followed his story just a few minutes later with a description of a somewhat humiliating experience with snorkeling.

After awhile, Seth brought out a small object and asked if we would mind. “We all have our vices,” he said.

Is it an e-cig, I asked. Yes. Jon wanted to know if it gave off vapors. 

“Yes. Technically it’s a felony to use one in an airplane.” Maybe the question of vapors made Seth think twice. Or maybe he’d just had enough. He put it away and started looking for the flight attendant so he could buy a drink. 

A few hours later I opened my eyes and looked around. Seth was sleeping with his mouth open, baseball cap pulled sideways over his eyes. The flight attendant reminded me to put my seat up because we were about to land. I noticed Seth’s seat was also reclined. I pushed him gently, then progressively harder with no result. I was contemplating the possibility of slapping him in the face, but the flight attendant came in time and took care of it. He jerked awake, and in short order began to complain about a pain in his ears. 

How many drinks did he have, I asked Jon. One or two? 

More like eight, Jon said. He was hanging out with the flight attendants for a couple of hours.

I felt like I was already in the jungle. The woods? Those are just trees. It’s how we behave that lets us know whether we live in the jungle or in civilization.