Tropical Idyll - Utila

Reclining in languid ease, brushed by floral trade winds, eighteen miles off Honduras’s northern coast, an island six and a half miles long and three miles wide—two thirds of which wallows in swamp, the rest sporting coral reef, mangrove, sea grasses, fossilized sun-bleached pale “iron shore” broken coral, savannas and thick jungles, trees of palm, coconut, mango, banana, and papaya—Utila is the Bay Islands’ low rent tropical jewel of Caribbean beach life. One morning we actually witnessed a hummingbird on “island time”, swooping by a knot or so faster than a butterfly, en route, no doubt, to a lazy afternoon hammock. You’re gently admonished to move at a slower pace...:) The island embraces roughly two thousand residents, most of whom reside in Utila Town necklacing the east harbor, and besides local Hondurans, Garifuna, and mingling Latinos, we passed many shuffling, grizzled, wiry, unshaven, wild-haired, glassy-eyed but determined and aged gringos who long ago settled here dodging taxes, debt, cackling, knife-wielding shrews, child support, sanity. But we also encountered folks who chose to drop the hectic and demanding suburb and city for a tropical pace; one muggy morning we sipped delicious local coffee at a small café beneath a house facing the bay run by a mildly elderly couple whom you wouldn’t be surprised to see taking donations for a Methodist Church food bank in Cleveland, Ohio. Hippies, that undying race sprouting up in quiet locales like kindly weeds, also swayed through the island town’s narrow streets and sold leather adornments and silver jewelry. Guidebooks tout Utila as being laid back, haven for backpacker and lonesome traveler, and a sacred destination for scuba divers desiring to explore the island’s cooling pale emerald and cerulean waters, coral walls and valleys of undulating sea sand teeming with parrotfish, barracuda, spotted eagle rays, sea turtles, the shy nurse shark, which is why we landed here for four nights over Semana Santa. Anything to get away from the annual Central American spring rites of farmers burning forest lands to clear room for agriculture; thousands of fires all over the countryside and mountains, clogging the air with thick white dirty smoke for weeks and weeks...) I neither washed nor combed my hair for five days, and life seemed no worse for wear. Slip on a bathing suit early in the morning and you’re dressed until bedtime, pulling on a faded T-shirt and digging your toes into flipflops when sauntering to the restaurants—open-aired, techno-Reggae bouncing, and cheesy pirate themed banners and flags, one of which borrowed from Renaissance faire’s “The whippings will continue until morale improves”. No one stands on ceremony—certainly not the cuisine. But we arrived, as mentioned, to scuba dive; we submerged six glorious times during our time here. But when we weren’t diving, eating, and sleeping, nothing much else beckoned on Utila. We wouldn’t pass for teenagers: no texting, planning for the beach rave, trolling the harbor main street narrow as a city alley, dodging reckless tuk-tuks, ATVs, scooters, motorcycles, golf carts, and pickup trucks, nursing hangovers. Glossy advertisements and guidebooks delight in the untouched sandy cove, the breezy sheltering palms, the promise of quiet hours, perhaps an invisible attentive native who alights whenever you wonder how refreshing a Pina Colada would taste. “Get away from it all” goes the command. Best of luck finding that on your budget. We were either fortunate or unfortunate to book the Pirate Bay Inn at $40 a night, smack in the middle of the town but fronting the dock where Captain Morgan’s Scuba Diving launches its outings, so we were mere sandy steps away. More expensive lodgings could be had, but these were farther outside of town, which puts you farther away from the restaurants and scuba dive launchings and establishments open to replenish the rum you thought would last the week. To really “get away” means to relax, and this implies satisfying one’s desires, even whims, at one’s chosen, unhurried pace. Leisure sees needs melting into simple, gentle wants, and attending to these wants unbidden by deadlines or the strict expectations of other. Life is good, goes the affirmation. If you crave a beer at 9:00 in the morning, pop open a coldie. Nap when- and wherever. Those expectations and deadlines are the “all” away from which you strive to get. And the more money you spend, the more oiled and smooth running is this illusion enacted for your benefit that you are indeed away. But in fact those expectations and deadlines and shopping and cleaning and cooking and frantic tasks marking your grind back home get subsumed under cost of your Tropical Getaway. The work is done for you, as you’ve paid to keep the service industry humming. Getting away from it all can also imply an escape from having to deal with people. But we only paid $40, and during the hotly vibed holy week the price got us basically a dorm. The room blessedly had air-conditioning, but the remote to activate it was another $10 a night. Our hotel was smack dab in the town; there was no getting away. Strewn about in hallways and benches and barstools were the young, tanned, and hopeful. The hotel adjacent was undergoing renovation, so post-breakfast reading in the Adirondack outside our window shared the air with electric saws searing, babies squealing from boredom, hunger, the thick wet heat, or dread that they’re destined to inherit one of the island’s dilapidated souvenir shops swaying on the tourist drag, the whine and whirr of exhaust-spewing vehicles, the cacophony of aforementioned techno-Reggae booming beats roaring from shops and restaurants as though vying for dominance…the daily sounds grating and intrusive, the stench of light industry and minor transportation bearing necessary goods to make your stay livable and perhaps memorable, these are the strains wrought in jagged harmony while you, too, are awake and doing your living...:) The dive boat pulls out of the harbor, glides through the bay passing shallow aquamarine waters, shimmering white sandbanks and shadowy reef, then heads northeast into open sea. Carrie and I climb up a ladder to the bridge to join the silent captain. The request to join garnered a barely perceptible nod. We are searching for whale sharks, the Caribbean a windswept blue beneath a canvas white sky. The boat rumbles and rises up and over swells for forty-five minutes, the captain scanning the distance for signs: a slight ruffling on the white-capped horizon indicating tuna feeding in a frenzy on smaller fish, which in turn swirls of the krill, and the resulting “boiling” patches spreading on the sea attract the gulls. Onboard we all scan the four corners. I watch the captain turn and follow the flight of a gull easing over the stern. Sunshine warms my shoulder and forearm. A long moment later the captain returns his gaze, unimpressed by the gull’s powers of discrimination. Rising and falling, rising and falling. Suddenly the captain locks on a point on the horizon starboard. Slowly the big boat veers. I see nothing. But the captain yells “There!” to a spot half a mile away. A minute later a gull races over the bow, and the captain calls out “I saw it before you did!” Soon we slow and the boat moves into the heart of the roiling sea boil. Tuna spear the air by the hundreds. We look hard on the waters. The captain points, and just beneath the surface glides a whale shark, perhaps 18-feet, a shimmering dark gold ethereal shadow. We climb down, don snorkel, mask, and fins with five or six others, and sit waiting at the low stern. The captain positions the boat, gently, gently. “Go, go, go!” he bellows, and we ease into the sea. She rises to us silently, wide as a small open-mouthed planet, golden with green textured spots, and with large-hearted grace she arcs away from this pack of bobbing and wide-eyed humans. We turn as she swims on, stroking and kicking till our lungs ache, gazing upon her gentle sway against pearl blue open and endless sea, and then she descends....

Cross Dressing

If one searched within, not fingering for delectable notions deemed "spiritual" but simply felt with imagination what the body conceals beneath its ever-aging skin, one could fashion an iconic cross from a geometry of bones. Touch the sternum. Isolate a holy cross from the rib cage. If the desire to wear the cross dangling from your neck was yours, you need look no further. Indeed, the symbol of your faith is within.... Bones last longer than you do. You need not even crouch and sweat on an earthen floor, whittling wood under a scorching Nazareth sky to fashion naturally an artful cross to hang your hopes. Others fallen before you provide ample building blocks, sucked clean by worm and preserved in quiet dust, to string and nail together dull bleached bones to raise crosses of varying sizes. How loudly, stridently your construct proclaims your faith to the world is up to you.... If your bone cross is to hang down from your neck, size matters. If your cross will be worn outside your shirt or blouse, it can swing easily and unencumbered (though rocking and reeling on a subway ride may pose hazards to the eyesight of lucky soul next to you who'd grabbed the seat). Those who consign their symbol of faith to the warmth of their skin, providing proof only to folks around whom they trust when venturing shirtless, will tend to gather smaller bones, those once fingers, say, lying loose and scattered in caves and hillsides and dry riverbeds.... In either case, the cross of bones worn will do more than sing your whispered faith; they will mirror the old man skeleton within, that hard testament to your own brief wanderings, lovings, fightings, dawnings and evenings here in your cities and countries, a lasting narrative that you once traveled on through, scratched out a path on this planet whirling through cold dark space, and perhaps those wanderings were meaningful. Of course, the cross of your Christian faith is imbued with more, much more. Yes. But the old man will have the last laugh.

Can't a Man Get a Decent Salad Around Here?

Dateline: Paris, France, July. We were looking for that unique, elusive culinary experience, Carrie and I, in the Marais neighborhood--hoping to stumble off the beaten tourist routes. We'd been walking for hours. A warm evening, we strolled the quieter streets of stone, whiff of urine reaching us from alleys and doorways, narrow art studios and shuttered shops. The wind drifted us this way, that way, until we located on a slow side street a hip, shiny, busy restaurant, "Glou". Pairs of diners gabbed and laughed within steel, glass, soft pastel painted walls, smoked on sidewalk tables over gleaming salads and grilled succulent steaks. A tad pricey, but we plunged ahead and tiptoed in. Paris swarms with beautiful people, and the young and urban and rather local and professional frequented the place. We felt a bit frumpy, but felt at east when given menus by a pretty, vapid young server. How shall I say this diplomatically? We were afforded ample time to peruse the menu, me glancing over my shoulder occasionally scouting for the server. The retro menu offered new French cuisine, along with stalwart classics. For starters, I picked a salad of octopus, fennel, and arugula. Sounds promising, yes? Perhaps, I imagined, it would look something like this: Glimpsed in mind: arugula, fennel, and sea creature splashed with, say, champagne vinegar, Brittney Coast sea salt, fresh pepper, this initially tossed, then a light drizzle of virgin olive oil, tossed once again, then a festive dousing of fresh lemon juice followed by a light rain of lemon zest. The image came as a divine blessing; I saw the ingredients and concocted their harmony. What finally arrived was a poor imitation: the whole was drenched in olive oil (why would you do that? You, hey, idiot, I'm talking to you; put the, will you put the damn iPhone down and answer me? No, look at me!). If there lurked even a hint of sparkling lively vinegar it had been maliciously kicked to the side like a groggy parolee shuffled onto a Greyhound bus with a one-way ticket to the exburbs of nowhere. Where the arugula should have had a peppery herbal bite, oil; where the fennel could offer a delicate root sweetness, oil; when one should have tasted the octopus's recent memories of floating in an ocean wilderness, oil. One-dimensional, criminal, hopeless, and bloody inexplicable in a pricey restaurant in the Marais neighborhood in Paris, France, one of the queens of the culinary world (addendum: I have since been chided by a few friends who shook their heads and pointed out that I was still in a tourist area, that the French are not known for salads so why would I order one etc. True, and beside the point). Doubly criminal, I actually foolishly ate most of the salad--at least the arugula, a bit of octopus, the fennel--before realizing how bad it was. Note what a romantic imagination/expectation can wrought? The wooden tables, the carefully arranged lighting, the vibe of a side street culinary find that sizzled the air and buzzed the street all conspired to make me believe I was experiencing a delicious salad, bewitching my very own knowledgeable salad taste buds. As I peered down miserably into the pool of oil in which bits of pink octopus bobbed like sunburned Englishmen in the viscous Mediterranean sea, I felt betrayed, wronged, the cheek of Jesus stinging from a traitor's kiss. I called the waiter over. "This is the worst salad I've ever eaten," I announced. Not really true, come to think of it, but I was heady and pissed and over the line. She called the manager over. I patiently explained to him--who should know better--how this salad should have been orchestrated. After I'd pointed out the oil puddle on my plate with accusing finger, manager weakly replied "Oh, you do not like that much oil in your salad?" My head twisted like Linda Blair's on a bad night: dude, I brazenly offered, there IS too much oil in the salad, and it's ruined; this is objective fact, not a flutter of personal preference (I mean hello: there shouldn't be an oil spill in the plate, period). Who, I wondered, was the rookie who created this mess? A wiry fugitive from a banana boat bent on self-destruction? Was he on his iPhone the entire time? When the check finally arrived (note the continued adjectives modifying time duration) we found the salad had been comped, small but welcome mercies. We walked into the warm Paris evening uninspired, a little wiser, and then it hit me: the enchantment had dissolved. I needn't pilgrimage to Paris for a fine meal--though fine meals could be had in Paris, and we had a few (not many, but a few spectacular ones). No, let me get to that place where I will cook the fine meal myself. Perhaps then the beautiful people of Paris will come to me.

Thanksgiving It's Friday!

    I see the red brake lights flashing like danger flares a quarter mile up, and my foot reluctantly slides from the gas pedal to hover over the brakes. I’m driving the I-80 freeway coming into Pinole, which is a suburb city about a twenty one minute drive from San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. I crossed over the Bay Bridge in pretty good time, I thought, cutting out of work a bit early to miss the Thanksgiving holiday traffic this Wednesday afternoon (I lived and worked in San Francisco at the time, working hard, always poor). I was looking forward to seeing my family in Sacramento, Mom, Dad, and younger brother, Jonn. 

    Since I’d moved to San Francisco some years before, and worked on weekends, going to school during the week, I didn’t have many chances to visit family and old friends. So I was looking forward to a relaxing few days, eating, drinking, and laughing, frequenting my old haunts with friends who still hadn’t fled Planet Sacramento. Driving my white, square Plymouth, which looked like some government inspector’s vehicle, I sped past Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, and Richmond dreaming about a glass of good wine, my dogs romping around, my family all smiles. 

    Then the red brake lights. Traffic. Must be a stall in the left lane. Happens all the time. We’ll crawl for a while, go around the poor shmuck with a flat tire, or the two clowns examining their fender-bender, then off we’ll go, KFOG blasting on the car radio, cool November sharp slant of sunlight in the air, the briny wind sifting off the Bay, and a few miles ahead the sunset in my rear view mirror; I’m rolling home at last. 

    But there was no accident. No stall. No overturned big-rig. No police sting drug bust. 

    From Pinole we crawled, and crawled, and crawled, brake lights flashing hotter as the night came on and the air cooled. Past El Sobrante and Rodeo. Past Hercules, Crockett, Benicia, Vallejo. We slithered and huffed and lurched all the way to the Carquinez Bridge. After paying bridge toll, suddenly the traffic lightened, and wide freeway opened up. We floored it, our cars roaring like rockets at lift-off, thinking angrily we’d make up for lost time. 

    But then, no, not again: brake lights. The gods were toying with us. Traffic ground to a halt. And then we resumed the crawl. Past American Canyon and the turn off to the Napa Wine Country. The freeway by this time was four lanes heading east, and all lanes were clogged. This tragedy was made worse because highway 12 coming from Napa, Sonoma, Petaluma, and Santa Rosa poured more desperate cars into our choked freeway. My patience was gone, evaporated like dew under a Sahara desert sun. I cut over to the right lane—I may have cut some old lady off, didn’t care, out of my way!—and took the next suburban turn off, which connected to a road over the freeway and into a new housing development. I suddenly felt like the intrepid pioneer, an adventurer, carving a new path through the suburban wilderness, finding the secret passage up and over the Coast Range Mountains, some two-lane country road used only by farmer’s wives doing errands to the feed store, and wayward ministers driving their VW van en route to Wednesday night Bingo. Get me out of this suburban development, and I’ll be home free, dropping down into Winters in the Sacramento Valley, then speeding country roads all the way to Davis, and Sacramento’s only fifteen minutes away at that point. 

     So on through the suburban development I flew, barely slowing for speed-bumps, and tearing up their freshly poured asphalt. The local road dropped me and my spitting out of range KFOG into a forested country road: eureka! This was an older road, roaring past nameless established towns. Just keep driving east, I told myself. Turn right. Straight. Slow down for the horses. Another right. Straight. This kept going for a half hour. I must be making good time! I told myself. Suddenly after a few more turns, I found myself entering another new suburban housing development. The old country road came to an end, turning into another freshly paved clean street with young trees and street names like “Dream Circle” and “Patriotic Lane”. What the hell? Up one street, down another. Up another, and another…         

    No exit. There was no secret passage. I may have screamed. Cursed the gods. 

     What I did was double back the way I’d come. All the way back. Having lost what would end up being an hour of my life, just to get back to the same place in the freeway, an hour later, and no closer to home. A few hours later I finally lunged into my driveway, 6501 Vernace Way, corner of 48th Avenue, South Sacramento, tired, impatient, gloomy, hungry, wild-eyed, and in desperate need to punch someone. 

    Luckily, my dogs were happy to see me, and my Mom and Dad sympathized sincerely, lamented the traffic, was glad I was home, poured a fat glass of wine (my brother nodded dully, briefly, then returned to the TV). After I’d returned to semi-normal, smelling from the kitchen corned beef, boiled potato and cabbage meal my Mom knew I loved so well (Irish staple), I announced to my gathered kin that from here on into the future, I wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving on Friday. At first they all looked at each other as if I said I was moving to the Midwest to become an atheist trans-gender coal-miner. But then I explained that, remember people, I was the one driving from the Bay Area to share Thanksgiving with the family. I had to fight the traffic. Did it really matter what day of the week on the calendar we celebrated giving thanks for the food and being together as a family? Do we even know that the Pilgrims sat down with the Native Americans on a Thursday? We don’t even know any Native Americans, let along invite them to dine. Being teachers, both my Dad and Mom got Friday off anyway. My brother I’m sure couldn’t give a rat’s ass either way, as he only lived in an apartment a few miles away. So let’s shift Thursday to Friday. Same turkey, same mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, stewed greens, green beans, pumpkin and apple pie, but a day later. What do you say? 

     They couldn’t say or do anything but assent: my logic was flawless. 

     So from then on we had Thanksgiving on Fridays, and it worked out fine. Times changed. My father passed away, so it was just my Mom and brother (who’d matured). Then I got married, and my brother married, and the new additions adapted to the Friday Thanksgiving tradition at my Mom’s. We just had to bring out the extension for the table to widen for the five of us. But the food was delicious. My sister-in-law cooked amazing collard greens she learned from the Deep South. My wife found a recipe for winter vegetables baked in cream, heavenly. The wine flowed, the laughter rose. 

     In the later years my wife and I would take our Thursday holiday and drive to Point Reyes National Seashore to gaze on the Pacific’s wild blue ocean, or walk out on the peninsula to whisper past the grazing, silent, proud mule deer. We’d lunch on fresh oysters from Tomales Bay and a crisp Riesling. Few people were out in the world (they were all stuck in traffic, desperate, brake lights burning into their eyes). We returned home blessed, retrieved the good china, and made a special Thanksgiving dinner, just the two of us. We clinked wine glasses, giving thanks, our cats curled up on the couch. 

    The next morning we’d drive a freeway uncluttered all the way to Sacramento. House unchanged, the silver maple in the backyard taller, grander. The winter’s cool Delta Tule fog hushed over the quiet light. The dogs, older now, would jump around a bit. My Mom would smile from the chair, older too. My brother would rise to shake hands and give my wife a hug. We’d shop, no lines, and cook through the afternoon. My Mom would say a prayer, thanking the powers that be for our being together as a family. Then we’d raise our glasses for a toast. In another year or so my mother would also pass away, following my father across the San Francisco sunset, over the Golden Gate Bridge, to the western lands in another time. But for now we raised our glasses, feeling blessed, a family, here and now, together.

Diebenkorn at the de Young: Let's Watch Representation Melt into Bold Contours of Form and Color!

Richard Diebenkorn, Abstract Expressionist, retrospective at the de Young Museum, summer 2013, "The Berkeley Years: 1953-1966". Abstract means to draw from or separate. In this sense, every art is abstract...a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts. ... Seems to me the power of AE is the tension developed between possibilities of representation and its dissolution in powerful swaths of contours of color. In representing works with human figures they are passive, quiet, introspective, emotionally immersed, in the latter painting paired yet ambiguous in their relationship and intentions for being present--for a pose, for art's sake? Far from the pride evoked in the subjects' gaze, dignity in earthly peasants or humble folk generally, Diebenkorn's people are not expressly passionate. Isn't representational painting terribly tiring? they seem to murmur. In "View from the Porch 1959" the represented view only later comes hazily into focus...or "view": vertical railing lines spear the canvas suggesting the squaring off on geometrical sections in non-representational painting. Your preconceptions shimmer and hover and disappear like ghosts returning to darkened musty parlors. Unspecified tension in waves through nearly empty room. Faces aren't rendered; woman's hand at her elbow suggests impatience (with perhaps being a subject?). Something frantic about drops of brown against background of head (me looking closely leaning in)...painting on a narrow canvas using small table or even a stool...couch behind: woman has either just gotten up, withholding sitting down, or has been standing for a time in pose. She could walk out any time; whether it would surprise the man or not, who knows. These two figures, off left, empty space. A narrow glimpse of verdant fields, and brown fields lying fallow. Turquoise rug with yellow background atop dark brown canvas; windows ambiguous as whether glass of an empty canvas... These are the magical "Berkeley Series" named in numbers (22, 38, 44 etc). Colors and even forms are allow--freed--to portray their own coherence and coalesce in a vibrant balance. Shapes abstracted from traditional landscape, hills, fields, blue ocean, deep horizon but to cohere into a painting is the artist's responsibility, desire. A figure against the ground--this is landscape: colors of machinery and civilization against rural cultivation (see Kiran Chandra's "This Place, That Place") and nature--gray burn iron white stiff red fluttering cream purple hint of flesh, lines of roads, paths, fence boundary...themselves borders of the canvas

Worlds in a Sandbox and a Street

I want to remember a time in life when I was an integral part of the world: when a child at play--indeed in the proverbial sandbox in our backyard in Sacramento. My young friends, brother Jonn, and I built elegantly planned roads of curves and turnouts, underground car ports, sad dwellings of found materials for our Matchbox vehicles and imaginary citizens. At play was not a diversion but the creative point of living a long afternoon. Bridges spanned hand-dug rivers into which poured water from sticky green garden hose. Intricate care was taken to smooth the roads and distance the dwellings. None of us in the south Sacramento neighborhood possessed miniature railroad gear to pilfer from--trees, depots, people--to make our town more colorful and "realistic" -- What did we bother with realism? There was no interest in "recreating" what a miniature town should resemble. We recreated nothing. We carved and patted and smoothed sanded roads, dug and fortified dwellings for small toy vehicles; the narrow roads were real as were the tiny gasless cars and pickups our imagination fired and wheeled not to develop imaginary worlds but to create and build in the real one: our town had no center, no economy, no police force, no rest home, no library, no adults, no animals, no arrogant, no lonely. We had narrow winding roads engineered for toy cars to smoothly glide from their stick-covered shelters to nowhere. But the roads were smooth! They curved elegantly. As night came on we worried over the coming storm we overheard the weather man on TV news warn about when we drifted by the living room to the bathroom to pee. Night falling, wind rising, we tucked our vehicles inside their dwellings and sheltered with makeshift garage doors. We didn't want to leave our sand and water world, return to warmth of lights and family and television and our place-mats at the dinner table. We relished darkening and threateningly cooler winds, iron in the air, desired not the ordered stage but to watch over our sand and water dominion out back by the puffy white Viburnum opulus (Snowball bush)... -- The internet kills play. Play is unprogrammed, unrehearsed, open-ended, relatively untimed, and so timeless, bounded only by the borders of the twin tyrannies of sleep and school. It is a testament of the purity of play that I remember few details of how we passed the time of childhood. Ditch Em, the game, would have recurred. This activity consisted of breaking into two or three "teams" of around three boys each--whomever we could scour from the neighborhood that particular afternoon after the game popped into somebody's head while lounging on the porch. Our teams had no uniforms, no names, no hierarchy. Brothers were never allies. Ditch Em--did we create this name or inherit it from ancestors?--began when someone unpicked and random yelled "Ditch Em!" and we bolted with our tribe in opposing directions. Could be running down a long block, catapulting over the chain-link fence of our elementary school, hoisting up onto the wooden-planked backyard fence (didn't matter whose backyard), heaving into the silver maple, dropping onto the back lawn and crossing quickly, then up and over a neighboring fence (didn't matter whose fence). All backyards had hideouts: honeysuckle and pussywillow, hemmed-in weedy empty dog pens, burrowing under citrus metallic-tanged shade of sturdy thronging juniper bushes, the dusty oil dark cool of garages. The motive and mission of the game: to see and remain unseen, to scout and monitor enemy positions, their stealth movements. The endgame was to gain the controlling eye, to adjust your movements, retreats, advances, and escapes according to your enemies'. To know and be unknown was the point and only power. Usually a few blocks radius whirling out from the corners of Vernace Way and 48th avenue encompassed the boundaries. With bikes, it could be miles and miles, and then knowledge of enemy movements shone like diamonds in your mind. You traveled and hid, spied and ducked, burrowed and waited and listened. If your team was spotted, you made fast and furious escape; for although there was an initial and formative spurt of chase by the enemy when they surprised, no capture ensued. There was only the advantage of knowing. Pursuers and pursued would slink and sneak again into hiding, create and maintain strategies of concealment and witness. Summer rolled on.

While the Girls are Off Shopping...

"...wondering who the f*** is on mad McCarthy's porch..." is a snippet from Jack Kerouac's vast grand beatific wild experimental novel Visions of Cody penned in 1951-2 but its glory remained unpublished until 1973, and it's just Ti Jean gazing, examining, watching, peering, wondering, contemplating, running, driving, drinking, thinking, and penning, and I picture him slumped in a porch chair in October: cool, dry, long afternoon slanting light across pale warped wooden planks and just brushing a peeling weathered railing pushed against the azalea thicket. Mrs Smith is carting home groceries in a wheeling squeaky black wire basket, Tide and cornflakes box bumping along behind her, she chewing gossip fed her by Mrs Peterson around the block beneath a sycamore regarding minister Ralph and the new choir director Miss Angel behind the eyes of the sanctuary, and here she spies Kerouac slumped leaning back in frayed wicker porch chair, his pen in hand poised in delicate thin air, paused in fury like a hummingbird hovering inches from the spiral writing pad, pausing to glance from cool shadows into which he'd retreated to record in hermitage silence--broken only by the spooked untamed horses of his mind--a flooding memory of nights and nights ago a nonstop dialogue with poet Allen Ginsberg, the two unkempt and hungry almost running talking at the same time finishing each other's thoughts and beginning each other's sentences, interrupting dreams, beaten leather dark brown shoes flapping and skidding across the rising sidewalks of upper Columbus, sniffing the spicy brine of a San Francisco August, the drifting Bay, yeasty bread, coffee grounds, oregano, honeysuckle, lavender, pine, the two men wild-eyed, grimacing, laughing, raising artful fists to heaven's iron gates and spitting scorn on hell's burning glass boardwalks, sharing Blake Genet and songs of Whitman, Charlie Parker's sax blow of young jazz America, the ring and hum of Autumn night, the running of the bullish, Buddhist helpless and hopeful children burning fuses and not waiting for the ink on crinkled page to dry. This Mrs Smith returning moment's glance sees in the glassy eyes of Kerouac's shadowed slump--not the tempest and lightning flash but the inward gaze--and this short phrase I remember while penning in a spiral Steno Notes 80 pages 6x9 sitting at the Sunset Bar and Restaurant at the edge of Guatemala's Lago de Atitlan in the bustling lake coast Mayan town of Panajachel, and I too am slumped but the gleaming daylight warms and the cool clouds bless. Diamond flickers of sunshine dance upon the metallic green of the water. A Mayan woman sits on a low wall above the lake bordering the coastal paved walk selling peanuts, cashews, almonds in gallon bags. Scoops buried in the bags stand waiting. Colorful Mayan traditional dress of vibrant greens and deep sea blue and fiery orange, and she lets the billowing girls hang. Her dark-skinned husband accompanies her on late lunchbreak, new blue jeans, gray red and white checkered flannel shirt, earth-brown Stetson. They both slowly lower strands of take-out spaghetti into their tiny daughters open mouth (I didn't see her behind the cart she was so small and unmoving). Volcanoes tower on the southwest coast in shimmering dark jungle green. Hot afternoon smoky white and ship's hull gray clouds churn and tatter in the Guatemalan rolling sky winds throwing shadows over the waters and summoning emerald bands of current and sparkling sunshine to race west across the long lake. Mountain ridges slope and stomp on onto Atitlan in greater enclosing hazes to the misty western ridges far along. Taxi boats skate across soft waves to ferry gringos to pleasures in Mayan towns of San Pedro, San Juan, or villages hidden in coves. Heavy white hull gray clouds bulge and plosh across the sky exploding flowers behind the volcanoes and dip and bow in the valleys between peaks, not two separate weather phenomena but a primordial dance of earth and sky.... A mariachi band has like an incoming tide drifted into the bar to serenade the Guatemalan afternoon, steely vibrato cry of horns. I hear the singer fill the valleys of quiet between the swarthy and pleading trumpeting peaks rising. The Mayan nut seller has I spy over my beer lifted her dirty-face tiny daughter up to stand upon shoulders to see and hear the trumpets and song. The little girl cranes her neck to see, toes pointed into her mother's dress...she waves at the music, and smiles wildly.