Chapter
One – Houston
The trouble
started some thirty thousand feet in the air above the Oklahoma panhandle. “Uh,
folks, we’re going to be put in a holding pattern above Houston. They’re, uh,
having some weather trouble there.”
Our connecting
flight to Managua was scheduled to leave a mere 45 minutes after our arrival in
Houston, so my mother and I looked at each other doubtfully. We had already
advised my brother and his girlfriend to proceed without us should we fail to
make the connection. Enjoy Managua without us, brother! We’ll be living it up
in beautiful Houston, Texas.
“Maybe the
flight to Managua will be delayed,” Mom suggested. I conceded that it may well
be, but as travel makes me, not quite morose, but at the least a little jaded,
my hopes were not high.
Some minutes of
circling later the captain returned to his mouthpiece: “Looks like they’ve re-opened
the airport. We’ve got a radar vector in to Houston, so we’re going to take
it.” This news was met with excitement. The airport is open! We didn’t know it
was closed, but OK! And a radar vector! Whatever the hell that is! Let’s go!
Left unsaid, “this is going to be a bumpy ride.”
It was a bumpy
ride. There was lightning to the left of us, lightning to the right of us,
lightning in front of us, volleyed and thundered. Yet we stormed forward
through the stormwinds and stormrains and stormclouds and electro-charged storm
death beams and made it successfully to the ground. Taxiing down the Houston
tarmac we could see thousands of fish-eyed travelers, noses to the windows and
gates of every terminal. “It’s a trap,” I said in my best Akbar, not for the
last time that evening.
Once safely into
the trap, we confirmed the delay of our Managua flight, and could not locate
James and Jane. Their own flight, it seemed, had not made it to Houston. Their
plane was already several hours late, as they were meant to arrive well before
us. We prepared to mourn the loss of a young man – a loyal brother and son – and
his young love, but a text message cut short our grief.
“You can’t text
from the plane!!” I said, incredulous to the tone of two exclamation points
(but not three).
“I’m pretty sure
it would crash if you did,” my mom agreed.
Me: “They must
have crashed already.”
The Mothership:
“Can ghosts send text messages?”
The text: “We’re
on the tarmac in San Antonio.” Followed by, “It might be some time. The pilot
says he doesn’t know when we’ll be cleared to leave.”
“They’re not
going to make it,” I offered, helpfully, as I glanced at the current flight
status for our Managua departure. The Jays – James and Jane – had an hour to
make it from San Antonio to Houston, disembark, and reembark on another plane.
“Unless their plane is the plane to Managua,” I suggested, again helpfully.
We consulted an
arrivals screen. It said their plane had landed 15 minutes ago. I let James
know the good news that he was, actually, already here. “Ha ha very funny,” he
said. I don’t think he actually laughed, though. Airplanes make him cranky.
We asked the
Manauga gate lady. She looked tired. I looked around. They all did. Every
single United employee – roughly five or six in total – working at the Houston
George Bush Oversized Metaphor for Questionable International Diplomatic Policy
looked positively harangued. The airport had been closed down for hours, it
turned out, and the line at the United customer service desk was already
filling to comedic lengths. It snaked left, then right, then around a corner.
There were people sitting in chairs. There were people standing on chairs.
There were couples meeting, falling in love, raising families, growing old
together, and being replaced by future generations. The line was, I tell you,
slow. And, in their infinite wisdom and the security that near monopoly and a
blatant disregard for anti-trust law – because, really, who enforces that shit
anymore? – grants, United had elected not to call in any additional employees.
Why pay overtime when you can make people wait in an obscenely long line?
The Managua gate
lady looked positively chipper compared to the poor solitary soul manning – or
Sisyphus-ing – the customer service line. She informed us first that my
brother’s plane was in Austin – in stark contradiction to his text message – and
that the plane for Managua had not yet arrived, meaning that our scheduled
departure in 40 minutes was extremely unlikely, if not entirely impossible.
“It’s the same
plane,” I offered again. The gate lady shook her head and smiled.
“Let’s get food,”
Mom suggested.
My Mom and I,
after a thorough scouting of the available eateries, settled on Rubies,
because, hey, I hadn’t been home in California for a few days and everything
else was terrifying. A goodish burger and a goodish beer sounded goodish enough
for a lost evening in the proverbial Bush.
While drinking
my unexpectedly gooder than goodish beer, our flight was further delayed. In
classic airline fashion, it was not canceled. It was delayed thirty minutes at
a time. “Nueve, nueve y media, diez, diez y media, once, once y media.” I
figured I’d better practice my Spanish numbers, what with Nicaragua on the (increasingly
distant) horizon and all.
Fortunately, the
delays meant the Jays might just reach us. “Nope, we’re still in San Antonio, on
the tarmac,” James contradicted via text. I vaguely recalled some law about not
keeping passengers on the tarmac for more than an hour – it had been nearly
four – but figured, once again, that United had basically said “to hell with
laws” years ago.
Having eaten,
The Mothership and I returned to besiege our gate. That there was nothing on
the other end to besiege – no plane, no people, no precious gems or noble
titles – mattered little. We would besiege it nonetheless. And so, not unlike like
a catapult-man ready to let loose a flaming boulder, I took out a book and
began to read quietly.
Later, much
later, my brother’s plane landed in Houston. “I’ll find your gate,” I texted
him. “Ha! We don’t have one,” he replied. He was right. I went to his assigned
gate and there was another plane there. I spent the next hour or so darting
around the airport, holding conversations with other travelers in my pitiful
Spanish – because, it turns out, a lot of people in George Bush’s airport speak
more Spanish than English – and riding the tram back and forth between the C
and D terminals.
At some point in
all of this the flight to Managua was officially and shockingly canceled.
United emailed us right away with a message that said, in so many words,
“Suckers! Good luck finding another flight to Managua! The next three are all
already booked!” Despairing at the length of the real customer service line, my
mom got into the virtual line of United’s customer service call center. Because
she’s from Hawaii and therefore has to fly anytime she wants to do anything
other than lay on the beach she’s in United’s fancy Premier club or whatever
they call it, so she only had to wait on hold for two hours.
During those two
hours, my brother’s plane finally found a gate. A mere 10 hours after taking
off from Newark, he had arrived with his (very cranky) Jane in Houston. “Hey
brother,” I said, “Our flight to Managua’s been canceled!” He was happy to see
me, too.
We reunited with
The Mothership, who had, by now, memorized the gripping United hold muzak. She
was in the process of composing a new harmonization for the main theme when she
finally reached a human and started finding new flights for us the next day.
They put the Jays on a flight to El Salvador, and Mom and I on a flight to
Belize, both with mysterious Central American airlines we’d never heard of.
From these foreign ports, we were assured, we would arrive in Managua at some
point the following day.
It was getting
near midnight at this point, so we made our way to a hotel near the airport.
James contracted Houston’s least competent and, not coincidentally, most stoned
Uber driver – we’ll call him Scooby – to pick us up at the baggage claim. He
had a hard time finding the baggage claim, so we spent a good fifteen minutes
running from one side of the airport to the other looking for him once he
finally made it to the airport. While we waited for Scooby, Mom and I asked the
baggage people about our baggage. For the first of approximately ten times in
the next twenty four hours we were told a very specific lie: “It will be on
your new flight.”
Once aboard
Scooby’s station-wagon, our erstwhile driver executed a stunning series of
wrong turns, demonstrating along the way that three rights make a left, and got
us to the hotel. I decided it would be smart, before checking in for the night,
to check on our flight to Belize. It turned out it had already been delayed,
meaning we were going to miss our connection to Managua. As fun as being
stranded in Belize sounded, Mom and I decided to give customer service another
try. The hold music wafted through our hotel room as I hatched a plan to visit
Alaska by myself for as long as possible, as soon as possible. I even booked a
cabin outside a small town six hours north of Fairbanks. It seemed the only
sensible thing to do given the circumstances.
Eventually,
finally, at roughly three in the morning, United transferred us to an American
Airlines flight to Miami, leaving at way-too-soon o’clock. Foolishly, we
hustled out of our hotel room, got into a cab, and made our way back to the
airport. As it came into view I felt a pang of nostalgia. It had been far too
long since I had seen George Bush International.
Leaving the cab,
Mom and I strode to the American Airlines check in, maintaining our poise even
as we passed a tragically closed Starbucks and the half-dozen or so souls who
stood simply gazing at it with a look of utter defeat in their eyes. We were
not the only sleep-deprived would-be travelers in Houston that day. We entered
our new flight information. We navigated the labyrinthine and unfamiliar user
interface (because, really, who flies American?). We pressed the buttons and
punched the keys! We saw that our flight to Miami, originally scheduled for
5:30 in the morning, was delayed until 12:30, and that our flight to Managua
left Miami at 12:00 sharp.
“I think we’ll
miss the Managua connection,” I said, helpfully returning to the original theme
of the journey.
“I guess we have
to call United again,” my mom replied with a surprising lack of excitement. She
dialed the phone. The muzak played once more.
“I’ll call the
hotel. You think United will pay for all these cab rides?”
“Shh, I’m
working on a second tenor harmony.”
I explained to
Yvette – the front desk lady at the hotel and perhaps the only competent person
working in the whole of the greater Houston area that fine evening, or morning,
or whatever you call it at 4 AM when you haven’t slept – that we were coming
back.
“I saved your
room and still have your keys,” she replied. “I had a feeling you’d be back.”
“You’re
miraculous. Why don’t you work for United?”
“Do I really
have to answer that?”
“I guess not,” I
said, realizing how wrong it would be to send an angel into the pits of hell.
Despite our
third cab driver’s Scooby-like confusion about how to get there, we arrived
back at the Holiday Inn shortly, and Yvette handed us our keys. At least, I thought, I can sleep.
“No you can’t,”
my mom said, reading my thoughts because she’s a witch, “We’re on the 9 AM to
Managua.”
“But that one
was booked?” I was puzzled. That one was booked. I was sure. They told us so,
multiple times. They even taunted us about it. It was booked, I tell you!
“Nothing makes sense anymore! When do I leave for Alaska? When can I go to
sleep?”
“Let’s get back
to the airport.”
It was late
enough that the Holiday Inn’s airport shuttle service had started, so we
avoided yet another cab ride. As we walked past the front desk and turned in
our keys, Yvette smiled. “Enjoy Nicaragua,” She said.
Chapter
Two – Jicaro
Your bags will be on your new flight. Your
bags will be on your new flight. Your bags will be on your new flight.
Dear reader, you
will never guess where our bags were when Mom and I arrived in Managua, or more
pointedly, where they were not.
“They’re not
here,” I observed.
“Seems that
way,” Mom agreed.
We went to talk
to the United baggage representative.
Now, there are a
few things you need to know about Managua, Nicaragua at this point. First, it
is the third largest city in Central America. Second, its airport has only six
gates. Third, we had flown over an erupting volcano during our descent. Ok, you
don’t really need to know the third one, but it was pretty cool. “This makes it
all worth while,” Mom said at the time. I wouldn’t go that far, myself, but it was
pretty cool.
Anyway,
important things one and two are important because they tell you something about
Managua; it’s not exactly technologically advanced. Consider: the airport at
the third biggest city in the US has, well, I’m not sure how many gates, but
it’s at least seven.
The United
baggage representative in Managua, therefore, had access to the following
tools:
1) A
pen.
2) A stack
of delayed baggage forms.
3) A
desk with a huge crack in the surface.
The man in front
of us, who also could not locate his bags, asked the rep, “Can you just check
on a computer to see where my bags are?”
“Sir,” the bag
rep said with a smile, “I don’t have a computer.”
Indeed, she did
not. But she happily filled out a few lines of the delayed baggage form – and I
really do mean a few; most of the
form she left blank – and gave us a phone number to call before sending us on
our merry way through customs.
“Will we ever
see our bags again?” I pondered wistfully.
I thought back
to the flight that morning. We had been delayed – surprise! – because, as the
pilot said, “there are a few bags from last night’s flight that we have to
load.” I was certain, certain, that
he was talking about my orange duffle and mom’s green roller. I was certain
that, all those times they told us that our bags would be on our new flight
they were telling us the truth. I was certain that I would have my toiletries
and my underwear and my precious Hawaiian shirts.
“You put your
toiletries in your checked bag?” James would later ask reproachfully. Shut up, James.
Anyway, without
checked bags we burst through customs and into the hot Nicaraguan sun. My jeans
– which I would be wearing for quite some time to come – were not ideal in the
90 plus degree heat and rabid, rainforesty humidity of Central America in
December, but, hey, I couldn’t change without my bags.
James: “Why did
you even check bags in the first place?” I said shut up.
“No, seriously,
why did you check a bag, Paul?”
Ugh. I only
answer this question, at this point, because it is so essential to the rest of
this journey that it cannot be avoided. Though I risk detouring into other
stories – including some that are not even my own – I fear a diversion cannot
be avoided. The short answer to why I checked a bag to Nicaragua is that I
spent the week prior in Denver with my Aunt, my mother’s sister. It turns out
that the weather in Nicaragua in December and the weather in Denver in December
have little in common. Two climates over 11 days makes is hard to fit into one carry
on and one personal item, especially if you, like me, tend to bring a library’s
worth of books on any trip.
“Wait, how many
books did you bring with you?” I don’t want to talk about it.
The longer
answer for why I checked a bag is that there were a lot of things I wanted to
bring with me to Denver and Managua. For example, the board game Dixit. I’ve played it with lots of kids
– I’m a middle school teacher – and while they enjoy it, they’re uniformly
terrible at coming up with clever phrases to match the pictures on the cards
each player is dealt. Where an adult might say, “misery loves company” to
describe a picture with a solitary mime crying a solitary tear, or “where’s my
swiss army knife?” for a picture with a pockmarked, cheesy-looking moon in the
corner, a ten-year-old will instead say, “green!” because the card has a lot of
green on it. I really wanted to play with my mom – who has a PhD – and my
brother’s girlfriend – who is also an English teacher – and my brother – who’s
a pretty bright guy, too, I guess.
“Hey, at least I
didn’t put my toothbrush in a checked bag.” Yeah, yeah. I get it.
Of course, I
also anticipated playing with my eight-year-old cousin in Denver. Ethan has
adored every game my mother or I have ever brought with us and taught him to
play. Dixit proved to be no exception.
We even ended up getting him a copy for Christmas.
All of which is
to say, I had to bring Dixit, ok? And
I needed my purple shorts, and I needed to bring my present to the Jays – a
book, because I’m a nerd – and various shoes, including hiking boots,
flip-flops, and something semi-formal for any New Years festivities, and, and,
and… not to mention sweaters and cold-weather stuff for Colorado.
And yet, here I
was, in Managua, getting into a car, about to drive an hour south to Jicaro, a
world famous ecolodge on an island in the massive Lake Nicaragua, without any
of the things I was convinced I needed for the trip. I had no clothes, even,
besides the increasingly rank shirt – already approaching 72 hours of service –
on my back, the underwear – 48 hours – under my jeans, the jeans themselves –
well over 100 hours – and the shoes and socks on my feet.
“You mean you
didn’t even put a single change of clothes in your carry on?” Damn it, James.
How does one survive in Nicaragua without
clothes? I pondered on
the car ride south.
Looking out at
the people of Nicaragua, it was clear that many were living answers to my
question. They said, in the way of all tropical peoples, “you survive just fine
without clothes.” That’s not entirely fair, though. Though scantily clad, the
people of Nicaragua were, nevertheless, clad, especially in the city of
Managua, the metropolitan hub of the Central part of Central America. Indeed,
it bemused me to note that, in front of sheet-metal shacks sat men and women in
distinctively American clothing, affixed to American cell-phones, surrounded by
American advertising. I was almost, but not quite, shocked to see that almost
all of the billboards had pictures of white people on them. Manifest Destiny
never dies, I guess, my own presence in Managua a case in point.
Arriving at the
lake after an hour of awkward semi-conversation with our driver, who spoke only
minimal English, and whom I was much too tired to try to engage in my own paltry
Spanish, Mom and I boarded a boat to Jicaro. Yes, you have to ride a boat to
the ecolodge. I sat in a back row seat, placing my computer bag – my carry on –
at my feet. The water beside me was precariously close to the edge of the boat.
I thought about the massive stack of student essays I had in my bag, wondering
how, if I lost them, I would ever finish my semester’s grading.
“You brought
your students’ essays to Nicaragua in your carry-on instead of an extra shirt
or toothpaste?” Sigh.
“An A for
everybody,” I announced to no one in particular as the boat motor revved into
action, already anticipating that, having lost my checked bags, the Universe
would find a way to confiscate my other bags as well. I swear that I did not
secretly wish to be rid of those papers. I swear it.
When, some
minutes later, we made it to the dock and my papers had somehow,
disappointingly, not ended up at the bottom of the lake, I drank a generously
proffered and mysteriously sweet drink from the hands of the bartender I would
later learn was named Marlon (after Brando, yes), vaguely paid attention
through a brief tour of the island, hustled myself to my hotel room and fell
asleep. “Welcome to Jicaro,” I dreamt, “where, hopefully, clothes are
discouraged, or at least optional.”
Chapter
Three – El Lago
That evening,
Mom and I found ourselves once again waiting for James and Jane to arrive. We
sat at the Jicaro bar, a good sight better than an airport Rubies, granted, with
Marlon – who, I now noticed, had striking blue eyes despite being otherwise clearly
and wholly Nicaraguan – and Eduardo, a skinny man in his mid thirties who could
easily pass for 22. Driving through Managua and its surrounding suburbs, if you
can call them suburbs, had given me a general impression of the country.
Specifically, my general impression was that it was poor. That evening, Marlon
and Eduardo – self-proclaimed members of the middle class – gave me and my
mother a more precise impression of their homeland.
Neither man
could afford to live in Granada, the closest city to Jicaro, and, it seemed,
the wealthiest city in the country. They both commuted roughly an hour to their
job servicing mostly American tourists at a resort which was simultaneously
low-key and wildly luxurious, complete with hippy-pleasing amenities like fresh
local food prepared daily, recycling bins in each “casita” – yes, it was the
kind of place where each room is actually a little house – tap water purified
on site, and a swanky salt-water swimming pool. Chlorine bad! The absence of
televisions and the limited, at best, internet on the island made it feel
almost rustic, but the steak served at dinner was a reminder that Jicaro was,
in fact, a resort.
Sitting at the
bar in my jeans – rolled up to my knees so I looked like a hobbit – drinking whatever
Marlon felt like mixing, I could not help but feel pulled in two distinct and
uncomfortably contradictory directions. On the one hand, I felt a real, human
connection to these two Nicaraguan men. Eduardo, for example, had two children,
and was new to Jicaro. He had studied tourism and spoke excellent English. He worked
hard, clearly, and spoke eloquently about his country and his aspirations for
her, about his love of his kids and his wife, about his respect for his
colleagues, including the manager, Regina, the woman who ran Jicaro. He was a
man doing a job, and spoke to me and my mother not like we were tourists, but rather
like we were his friends.
Marlon,
meanwhile, was more reserved, but demonstrated his pride in his family by
producing a picture on his phone of his own young children, as well as one of
himself back when he used to have long hair like mine. He worked each day at
Jicaro from 2 pm to 10 pm, slept on the island until roughly 4 am, then took
the first boat back to the mainland so he could drive an hour to his home and
spend the morning with his wife and kids, seeing the latter off to school and
relaxing with the former for a few scant hours, before returning to work. He
was a tall man, and clearly quite strong, but also a bit shy. His English was
less refined than Eduardo’s, but, in contrast to his more vociferous colleague,
he wore a genuine smile on his face at, in my brief time knowing him, all
times. Both men were, however much distance and language and cultural difference
separated us, men not so unlike me or my brother.
On the other hand,
I could not help but feel alien to their world. I live in Huntington Beach,
California, in an apartment that, at 500 square feet, is small by California
standards, even for a man living alone, but enormous to the point of excess by
Nicaraguan standards. At over $1300 a month, my rent is roughly what the
average Nicaraguan makes in an entire year. It is not unusual for me to spend
more than $15 on a meal, a preposterous sum in Nicaragua. Of course, most
preposterous of all is visiting a place like Jicaro, a literal island, sure,
but also a figurative one: an island of American wealth and privilege in El
Lago de Pobrezo Nicaraguense.
Poverty is not
sadness, however, and Nicaragua never, from the first to the last, struck me as
an unhappy place. Marlon and Eduardo were well-educated, intelligent, and happy
men, as were so many of the men and women we met on our journey. Eduardo was,
too, a self-proclaimed modern man. He shared household chores with his wife,
taking his turn at the laundry and the dishes, cooking meals and helping to
raise his children. He dreamt of making a difference, someday, becoming a
teacher and passing on his own hard-won knowledge, of English, of how the world
works, of how the world could maybe work a little bit better.
I do not doubt
that Eduardo, were he an American, would have attended a Cal-Berkley or some
such, probably on scholarship, and penned essays on systemic injustice,
institutional racism, and gender equality. As he was, however, he need not
theorize. Instead, he lived it in a way no American – even the most
privilege-conscious – ever could. He lived it because he had to, and because he
believed in a better life for himself and his children, and a better world, or
at least a better Nicaragua. He was not a revolutionary, or an idealist. He was
simply a man who understood that making the best of and for himself meant
making everything around him a little better than it was before he got there.
If that meant washing his family’s clothes – to the ire of most of the men and
even many of the women in his neighborhood – he would do it.
Men like Eduardo
and Marlon are rarely famous. For one, they are not white or rich. For another,
they are not politicians or political agitators. For yet another, they are Nicaraguan,
not Cuban or Mexican or Costa Rican or Venezuelan or Dominican. Nicaragua is
one of the world’s forgotten countries, its six million people just a blip next
to Mexico City’s twenty-two million. And yet, it is such men as Eduardo, as
Marlon, that the world is actually made of. For a moment, talking with Eduardo,
I imagined myself in his eventual shoes, teaching not my well-off Fountain
Valley private-school students, but a mixed-age class of forty or so Nicaraguan
children. I thought, I know more about
teaching than Eduardo ever will, sure, but he knows a lot more about life.
I thought, I’m glad he wants to teach.
He’ll be good. Damn good. He already is.
Marlon and
Eduardo both stayed well past their usual departure times waiting for James and
Jane to make it to Jicaro. When the Jays finally did arrive, we went out to the
dock with all of the staff who hadn’t turned in for the night to greet them. It
was charming and almost, but not quite, ceremonious. Then, after a quick hello,
everyone went their separate ways, the staff disappeared, and the weary
travelers soon made their way to bed.
Before bed,
though, James had an important duty to perform. His arrival was auspicious for
me. Although he, like us, had not been able to locate our bags in the Managua airport
upon his own arrival – it turned out they were in Houston, still, and would be
there for days to come – he is not so much taller than I that I could at least
borrow some of his clothes. I didn’t have to ask, even. He just threw some
shorts, an extra swimsuit, a change of underwear, and a t-shirt at me once he
had been shown his own casita. While it wasn’t quite the array I had in my own
bag, it was an improvement over what I was, and had been, and feared I would
always henceforth be, wearing.
Chapter
Four – Idyllism
The next day,
our first proper day in Nicaragua, was punctuated by three particular episodes.
First, Jane was stung by a monstrous hornet. Second, The Mothership and I
attempted – not unsuccessfully, but neither triumphantly – to go shopping for
clothes and basic necessities in Granada. Third, we kayaked around the lake at
sunset.
I say the hornet
was monstrous, but I don’t know that anyone actually saw it. Jane was asleep
when it stung her, twice – which, really, is a pretty dick move for a hornet – and
by the time she had transitioned from “Ow, this dream sucks,” to “Ow, this
isn’t a dream” to “Ow, I’ve been assaulted!” the culprit was long gone, his aerial
invasion complete save for the paperwork back at base.
So the hornet was
huge. Not even a hornet, really. More of a monster hornet, with bat-like fangs
and humming-bird wings. It must have been.
The welt that
quickly formed on Jane’s arm was in that ambiguous place between “ice it and it
should get better; don’t be such a crybaby” and “we better get to the ER before
this lady dies.” Since no one saw the suspect commit his particular crime, no
one was quite sure what kind of weapon he wielded, and whether its poison was
of the deadly variety. Then again, leaving the island would be so inconvenient.
And it’s kind of an unspoken rule of travelling in third (or second, or
whatever) world countries that you should probably avoid availing yourself of
the local healthcare unless you absolutely can’t help it.
At the risk of
losing our translator – and therefore the most important member of our
expedition – we elected to let the sting be (get it? be?) for the time be-ing (ok
I’ll stop). For the remainder of the trip the welt maintained a healthy status
quo of not-quite-bad-enough to make us panic. Said Jane, often, “Ow” and “My
arm itches.”
It was soon time
for The Mothership and I to venture into Granada to attain at least some of the
things that our wayward luggage’s waywardness had deprived us of. Without out
our wounded translator, my own Spanish would have to do. We presumed that the
Jicaro people had conveyed adequately to the car people what it was we were
trying to accomplish.
Shopping in a
foreign country, if you’ve never done so, is weird. Really weird. It’s amazing
how many assumptions we have about basic things like how stores are laid out,
what they contain, what everything costs, how to interact with salespeople, and
generally how to go from “I need this” to “I now have what I need.” Overtly
there’s not a huge difference between a supermarket in Granada and a
supermarket in California. But in oh so many subtle ways they’re oh so
different that only my seven years of Spanish back in middle and high school
saved me from no less than three disasters in the hour or so of shopping my Mom
and I did.
Disaster one
nearly occurred while my mom shopped at what seemed like a boutique clothing
shop next to a grocery store. That the prices were listed in dollars was a dead
giveaway that this was not a shopping hotspot for your average local. Much of
the merchandise was clearly geared towards rich 20-something Nicaraguan women
and young tourists, so my mom’s progress through the selection was slow,
especially since the store keeper’s English vocabulary consisted primarily of
the word “beautiful,” used to describe pretty much anything and everything in
her store.
After a half an
hour the driver and I were getting antsy. We exchanged knowing and meaningful
glances. He asked me if we needed to get clothes for me, too. Looking down at
my distressingly and increasingly dirty jeans I said, yes, that would be a good
idea. He began to escort me elsewhere while my mom finished her adventure. This
was where disaster nearly occurred. First off, I’m not sure how my mom would
have found me had I gone elsewhere. Secondly, I needed her credit card.
United, though
villainous in most regards throughout this tale, at least does have a policy
where, if you use your special United credit card to buy stuff that they lost
when they lost your luggage, they’ll reimburse you. My mom, therefore, needed
to buy anything we wanted to buy with her card. It’s not that I couldn’t have
paid for my own clothes, but on principle I really wanted United to pay for
this one, you know? I explained all this in a flawless Spanish sentence, and
the driver sullenly returned me to the boutique. Shortly thereafter he called
for back up and left us in the hands of a different driver. He made a big show
like he was sorry to go and had some other appointment, but I think he was just
tired of waiting.
The irony of all
this is that my mom’s United card was rejected when she tried to pay with it.
Checkmate, United. Well played.
The second
narrowly averted disaster occurred when we finally left the boutique and
arrived at the grocery store, which had a small clothing section. Fortunately,
it wasn’t all women’s clothes. Unfortunately, it was only women’s and
children’s clothes. I forgot that everyone else in the world uses the metric
system and missed the memo about kids’ clothes, so I nearly bought a bunch of
way-too-small underwear before putting dos and dos together to get quatro. I
also nearly bought some girl’s shirts that probably would have looked great on
me, but may have sent the wrong message.
Recalibrating my
expectations, I surrendered my hope of truly restocking. Instead I found a
shirt, a pair of underwear for a monster-kid, and a pair of flip flops. It was
something. Elsewhere in the store there were plenty of toiletries and other
necessities, so while I had to resign myself to being even less fashionable
than usual, I at least wouldn’t have to lose my teeth.
Shopping amidst
the toiletries, I came across a package of what looked like underwear, and
thought for a minute that I was saved. I picked up the package. I considered
it. I tried to parse the label and the small print. I thought. I looked around
the aisle. I made awkward eye contact with another shopper. I thought some
more. I realized that I was holding a package of adult diapers, some decade-old
Spanish from Sra. Planck’s class flooding back into my mind. I put the package
down, averting a third disaster.
So, while the
shopping trip did not go swimmingly, I did manage to improve – very slightly –
my clothing situation. Now, instead of two shirts, I had three. Instead of one
pair of my brother’s underwear, I also had a pair of my own that hopefully
might fit. I had floss and toothpaste. I had a pair of flip flops, so I could
stop running around Jicaro without any shoes. I had failed to find any shorts
or pants, but, hey, my jeans didn’t smell so bad that anyone had complained
yet. Meanwhile my Mom had found a strange new assortment of overpriced pseudo-designer
clothes from a fancy upscale shop. So that was a win?
Neither of us
was particularly happy with the results, or with the time it took, or with United
Airlines. But, hey, surviving without clothes in a foreign country isn’t about everything
working perfectly; it’s about surviving.
As for the
kayaking that followed, some hours later, it was the strange mix of cynically
touristy and innocently idyllic I was coming to expect from Nicaragua. We
admired the sun setting over the mountain as we strained against the lily ponds
and dark lake water, trying to remember where, exactly, Jicaro was. We were
astounded by the sounds of howler monkeys on the shores of some islands, and we
were gustily barked at by guard dogs on others. We learned to identify which
islands were owned by rich individuals, which others were owned by resorts, and
which few were retained by the locals.
The strange
geography of Lake Nicaragua was such that a private mansion might sit only a
few hundred feet from a small, half-dozen hut shanty town. Somewhere on the
lake there was an abandoned resort, with ruined statuettes sticking menacingly
from the nearby water. Elsewhere there were Jicaro’s active competitors, with
their own swanky swimming pools and, presumably, their own unique ways of
attracting the almighty American Dollar. Elsewhere still there was a school
that Jicaro supported, which means that they raised money and built cutting
edge educational technologies like bathrooms with running water.
Like the night
before, talking with Marlon and Eduardo, kayaking around this small corner of
Lake Nicaragua was an exercise in colliding worlds. This time, though, it wasn’t
just my world running into the Nicaraguan one. Instead, we paddled in the
interstices between worlds, the lake serving as border, highway, neutral
ground, and observation post. Easy as it was to discern which islands belonged
to which kinds of people, it was much less clear how and why the divisions were
what they were. It wasn’t just a matter of size, or the levelness of the
terrain, near as I could tell. Most likely each island had its own complicated
political and social history, spanning back through generations of ownership,
squattership, salesmanship, and, heck, perhaps even armed conflict. It was not
hard to imagine, while kayaking around the lake, some small naval skirmish
erupting in Hatfield v. McCoy fashion.
Of course, while
kayaking, my thoughts weren’t nearly so philosophical. They mainly consisted in
exhortations to keep paddling, we’re almost there. Our guide was Jicaro’s
longest tenured employee, and in the grand tradition of tenure he didn’t give a
shit. He made fun of us from the start, joking that he would be leaving us
halfway through the tour and seeing if we could find our way back to Jicaro.
His delivery was so serious that I nearly believed him, and his demeanor so
matter-of-fact that I didn’t even feel upset about it. I thought, more or less,
“Oh, ok, that’s fine. The guy who knows his way around will abandon us
somewhere on the lake as the sun goes down and we’ll have to find our way back
without him in the dark. Sounds good.”
On the trip
itself, he kept asking us where Jicaro was, then laughing at us when we pointed
in the wrong direction. It was never quite clear whether his teasing was
entirely good natured. I was, in fact, mildly surprised when he didn’t abandon us in the middle of the
lake.
Now, throughout
this long, wonderful, odd first day in Nicaragua, I was cultivating my identity
as a man of few clothes. The kayaking trip aided me significantly in this
venture, as it utterly ruined one of my three shirts – a new one I had only
just acquired the night before from my brother. Lakes, while beautiful, are
filled with fresh water, and fresh water is filled with living organisms, and
living organisms are filled with interesting smells.
Kayaking, by its
very nature, tends to moisten whatever clothing you’re wearing at the time, and
so a whole third of my wardrobe returned to Jicaro soggy, teaming with
microscopic sea life, ready to bloom, pungently, in the coming hours and days.
Indeed, one of the plastic bags from the shopping trip soon became my repository
for smelly things, like my too-well-worn jeans. I may, in some desperate moment
later in the trip, have considered actually wearing clothes from this
terrifying plastic bag, but I preserved my dignity and the olfactory systems of
my fellow travelers by refraining.
Mostly.
Chapter
Five – El Jardin
Our stint at
Jicaro was meant to be longer, but our delayed flight meant we departed after only
one full day on the island. We were off, the following morning, for El Jardin.
This was one of the last hotels available over New Years in San Juan Del Sur,
Nicaragua’s closest thing to a party town. Why we were going to a party town
for New Years escaped me, as none of the four of us are what I’d call partiers,
but we went barreling south with yet another contracted driver all the same.
Like many of our
drivers heretofore, this one had no idea where he was going. He had the name of
the hotel, but was unable to locate it when he got to San Juan Del Sur. Visions
of Scooby flashed in my mind. This Nicaraguan version of Scooby became quite
frustrated with us for not being able to tell him where our hotel was, though I
don’t know why he expected a bunch of Americans to be able to locate a
mysterious hotel in a city we’d never been to (or, I must admit in my case,
heard of) before. Eventually all became clear as we learned that the hotel was
not actually in San Juan Del Sur, but
was rather outside the city, past where the paved road ends, up a precariously
steep hill, overlooking a bay on the other side of the ridge from which a giant
statue of Jesus looks down upon Nicaragua’s party capital in disapproval and,
presumably, forgiveness.
Being outside of
the city, El Jardin was home to a great many bugs, insects, and other
small-scale wildlife. Plus two Labrador retrievers and an odd assortment of
Belgians who owned and ran the place. This hotel, while charming, was quite
different from Jicaro. For example, the menu at the “restaurant” (read: a
handful of tables and a tiny bar) was hilariously European, featuring spaghetti
with pesto, beef stroganoff, and lasagna. Ambient conversation was as likely to
be in French as in Spanish, and the swimming pool definitely had chlorine, a
fact that did not dissuade the dogs, Cosima and Pandora, from drinking from it incessantly.
The manager at
El Jardin was a gorgeous, twenty-something Belgian girl named Rose. I say she
was gorgeous, but it’s hard to tell whether she actually was, or whether she
only seemed that way because of her youth and her proclivity – apparent when we
first met her by her non-managerial outfit of a loose, mostly backless t-shirt
with no bra – to wear very few clothes. As a man of very few clothes – albeit
in a less voluntary sense – I felt a natural kinship with Rose. She clearly
knew how to survive in Nicaragua without clothes.
Additional
complications, in determining Rose’s true attractiveness, included her Yvettian
competency at her job – an underrated aphrodisiac – and my increasing sense of
general desperation, owing to three things in particular: first, my lack of clean
clothing; second, my need for a place to do my ever-looming grading (which had
once again somehow managed to not fall into the lake on the boat leaving
Jicaro); and third, a vague but perennial fear I’ve been cultivating for the
past two years since my divorce that I’ll never fall in love again.
James sensed all
of this right away, of course, and with a younger brother’s shark-like nose for
weakness assigned me the preposterous “tarjeta” of seducing Miss Rose.
Seduction is not, sadly, one of my talents, so I had no doubt that I would fail
the assignment. To be honest, I didn’t particularly try. And, anyway, I
rationalized, I don’t want to seduce anyone. That’s not me. I’m a relationship guy, not a fling guy. Plus, I further rationalized,
the Universe is just messing with me. I already know a substantially more
beautiful Rose back home. La Rosa Del Jardin was just an ambiguous cosmic
metaphor for that Rose, the Rose.
I trained my
skills as literary analyst on this metaphor, but the Universe remains a fickle
and hard-to-decipher author, so I made little headway. In the tried and true
tradition of resigning before the impossibility of an impossible crush, I
decided that this Nicaraguan Rose was merely a microcosmic blossom sent by the
Universe to taunt me with her name.
Absorbed in such
thoughts, I went to dinner at the hotel restaurant with my family, a nest of
wasps from the table next to ours, and a giant spider who was clearly failing
in wasp cleanup duty. As Jane was still, at this point, afflicted with an angry
red welt, the wasps were a source of much consternation. It matters little how
delicious one’s pesto is when one is pestered by the aerial terror of a giant,
dangly-legged, Central American monster. I treated these wasps with
indifference, but James has always feared bees, and Jane’s traumatic recent
past conspired to push us to tables further and further from the source of the
wasps. In so doing we found ourselves closer and closer to the window through
which the wasps were leaving to go about their waspy business, so ultimately
the meal turned into a hokey-pokey affair, what with the jumping up and down
and turning ourselves around. In truth, no table was safe.
In retribution,
albeit scant, for my preposterous and existentially troubling tarjeta, I was
quick to point out whenever the spider disappeared from view, as this too was a
source of some anxiety for my urbanite brother and his urbanite girlfriend. I
would subsequently wonder where it went, and speculate that maybe it was
somewhere near the legs of our table and chairs. When it was visible, I would
approach it and examine it closely, reaching my hand out as if to poke and
thereby agitate it, reveling in the aghast question, “you’re not going to touch it, are you?”
I may be single,
but at least I’m not afraid of spiders. Compelling, I know.
Chapter
Six – New Years
The following
morning Rose was even more beautiful than she had been the night before. As we
ate breakfast – outside this time, away from the insectile menagerie of the restaurant
proper – she came by wearing these awesomely geeky glasses, her expression less
severe than it had been upon our arrival, her bearing generally more friendly,
her outfit similarly sparse. It wasn’t until much later in the day that I
learned that this new Rose wasn’t Rose at all, but rather was her friend Moana.
Fortunately, I don’t know any other Moanas, so I was safe from
over-interpreting the Universe’s intentions this time.
It was New Years
Eve, and our car ride through San Juan Del Sur the day before had convinced us
that the best way to spend the day would be going to a beach far from the city
proper. San Juan Del Sur is like an extremely poor-man’s version of Newport
Beach or some other Southern California surf town. It was chock full of what can
only be described as “bros.” As they geared up for their New Years revelries, we
fashioned an itinerary that would end up being as close to perfect as could be
imagined.
The beach we went
to after breakfast looked like something out of an advertisement. It was
pristine, marred only by some touristy food shacks playing competing American
music (one hip hop, one classic rock). The water was warm, the waves were
clean, and the surfers were, mostly, beginners. I felt an itch that I haven’t
felt pretty much the whole two years I’ve lived in Southern California. I felt
an itch to surf.
I should explain
that I used to surf quite often. I lived in Hawaii, and surfing – I’m somewhat
embarrassed to admit – was actually a part of my first real adult job. So maybe
it wasn’t really a real adult job.
Anyway I was never a great surfer, but I was passable. Over time, though, and
when I left Hawaii, I gave it up. I always loved surfing, but I could never
really stand surfers. So many places that I’ve surfed I’ve found the other
surfers in the water to be not exactly unfriendly, but vaguely wary and
territorial. But here, thousands of miles away from my home, in foreign waters,
surrounded by rank beginners being pushed into waves by Nicaraguan surf
instructors, I felt I could – nay, needed – to get back onto a board.
Like an idiot, I
thought I would be fine on a board much like the one I used to ride in Hawaii.
At 7’6”, my board was not a short board, but was about as short as a longboard can
be while still retaining the name. As a result of my ambitious board choice, I
spent the first half hour of my surf experience remembering how tiring it is to
paddle constantly and how easy it is to wipe out when you don’t make the drop
into a wave. Eventually I managed to catch a couple of waves – I wasn’t about
to give up – but the experience was a stark reminder that I’m not 23 anymore.
Lest my surfing
sound like a failure, I hasten to clarify that it was, to me, an unmitigated
success. I may not have surfed well, but
I did surf. With sand in my hair, water in my ears, and with the pleasant
soreness that comes after such exertion – plus the existential calm of being at
a beach, where my lack of clothes was well out of mind – I relaxed with my
compatriots eating a quesadilla and drinking a mediocre Nicaraguan beer in one
of the touristy shacks near the beach. Surrounded by other Americans and awash
in endorphins, I almost forgot where I was. Which, maybe, is what travel is all
about. It’s not just about going somewhere cool or interesting or different,
it’s about going somewhere where the where doesn’t matter, where you can just
forget and put aside all the stupid reasons you have for doing certain things
or not doing others, where you can just be.
Hmm, that sounds
dangerously like a California surfer bro.
The last day of
2015 was young, yet, as we returned to El Jardin only to be whisked away for a
horseback riding tour shortly thereafter. The chariot upon which we departed,
this time, was a truck with room for two in the front seat. My brother and I,
therefore, stood in the back, in the truck bed, and raced along the dirt road
back towards the beach we had just departed – albeit this time I was clothed
in, you guessed it, my trusty jeans. I don’t know how dangerous it was in the
back of the truck, but I am certain that we would have gotten pulled over had
we been in the US.
I don’t know
that horseback riding is, as the kids say, “a thing” in Nicaragua. It is,
however, a thing for my brother. He has always loved animals, and has always
been obsessed with cars. Jane, in an inspired moment, explained to James that
if you combine the two you get, basically, a horse. So on one of their many
trips together they went horseback riding, and now my brother is hooked. Also,
it turns out that horseback riding in Nicaragua is absurdly cheap.
Our tour took us
up a mountain and down to a beach. No words can do justice to the
preposterously Hollywoodish feeling of emerging from a back alley onto a
secluded beach on horseback, trotting along the edge of the waves, and scaring
the shit out of a turtle that was hanging out on the beach until you showed up
on your giant neighing, pooping, monster. Our guides admonished us for scaring
the turtle, even though they were as much to blame as we were.
As we made our
way from beach to beach, we were photographed by locals and tourists alike. Our
lead guide – who mostly road at the back – hardly seemed to care, but our other
guide, younger and vainer, made a bit of a show of it. He would slow up then go
cantering along stretches of open sand. He would wield and flourish his crop.
He would smile and wink. He was, it must also be said, sullen and brooding for
much of the tour, regularly assaulting nearby plants with his crop and avoiding
all conversation even with the entirely fluent Jane. He probably had a Rose of
his own he was preoccupied with.
Upon our return
to El Jardin we ate a delicious New Years dinner and fell asleep. James failed
to arise before midnight, but Jane, Mom, and I celebrated the admittedly arbitrary
holiday by narrowly avoiding getting stung by a scorpion near the pool. This
prompted my mom to relate her famous story of saving her colleague Anna from
almost certain death in Costa Rica after a scorpion sting. Anna was rendered increasingly
and rapidly paralyzed by the sting, as the responsible species is capable of
killing in roughly an hour. As my Mom and Anna were roughly an hour from the
nearest hospital at the time, it took some fancy driving to get Anna to medical
care in time.
The moral of the
story, as my Mom tells it, is to check your luggage and shake out your clothes.
Anna was stung not by a scorpion from the area where they were working, but by a scorpion from elsewhere in Costa Rica that had been hiding in her luggage
for days.
Jane was
mortified. She looked at the itchy welt on her arm. She looked back to where
the scorpion had disappeared over the wall around the pool. She looked towards
the restaurant with the wasps and the spiders. She wished us happy new year one
last time and announced that she was ready for bed.
For my part, I
did not fear finding scorpions in my bags or my clothes, as I had none in which
they could hide. The next morning, however, Jane and James found a scorpion in
their baggage. It was time to leave El Jardin.
Chapter
Seven – Managua
Have I mentioned
that my Mom is a witch?
We call her “The
Mothership,” which sounds very technological and fancy, but it’s all a ruse.
She’s actually a witch. She’s descended from witches, after all. Her mother was
a professional astrologer – borderline psychic – and her mother’s mother was
the village “streganona” back in Italy. That is, she was, in short, the
official village witch. It runs in the family.
The Mothership
knew to warn Jane of the scorpion in James’s bags, or else she put the scorpion
there. Cause and effect can get confusing in cases of witchcraft. Heck, I
wasn’t quite ready to ascribe the presence of Rose at El Jardin to the vagaries
of a fickle Universe. The source of such conjurations may have been much closer.
When we arrived
at our final hotel – a strange modern affair called “Contempo” in Managua
proper – for a final night ‘ere our departure my mom became convinced that she
should go to the airport to look for our bags. The phone number we had received
way back upon our arrival from the baggage rep had not worked for days; it just
rang and rang with no answer. It seemed certain that our bags were lost,
perhaps forever. There was some scant hope that they might make it back to
Hawaii eventually, but I had given up hope.
But when a witch
insists that she absolutely has to go to the airport to find the bags, well,
you let her go. My brother wasn’t happy about it. He interpreted the whole
thing as much more of a crisis than it really was, and worried that our
decidedly monolingual mother would not be able to make it to the airport and
back unaided. The Mothership, however, brooked no reproach. She was on a
mission, as only one with supernatural insight can be, and so she departed in a
cab, leaving the rest of us to lounge by yet another pool, or else in our chic
hotel rooms, while she pursued the seemingly impossible.
Contempo’s rooms
are all named. Mom and I were in a room called “cafe,” complete with a bowl of
coffee beans, a very odd pit of wood chips, and a set of bamboo rods in one
corner of the room. James and Jane were in a room called “poesia,” or poetry, which
had a massive red couch that looked like it had been cobbled together from
upscale British sitting-room chairs. Their room also had a throne because, hey,
why not? All in all, I felt that wood chips were a less striking amenity than a
throne, and wasn’t sure that all rooms in Contempo were equal. What Contempo
had that none of our previous habitations had quite managed was functioning internet
and desk space. So while Mom was off on her mission I got down to the important
business of grading. Just kidding, I played Hearthstone. That is, until it was
time for the massage.
Now I know what
you’re thinking. A super cheap massage at a Central American hotel with thrones
in the guest rooms and piles of wood chips (perfect for hiding scorpions, I’ll
note) in random corners … Sounds shady, right? Hey, I didn’t book this stuff.
Even so, I wasn’t
about to wear a swimsuit or, worse, any of my hopelessly dirty clothes during a
massage, especially after the masseuse eyed me judgmentally when it looked like
I might not fully disrobe. I don’t know the proper etiquette for these things –
I don’t exactly get massages often – but I figured, hey, I’ve survived this long in Nicaragua without clothes
metaphorically, I guess it’s time to make the metaphor literal.
The masseuse was
all business, even if the massage was mediocre and the music was shockingly bad
(elevator music covers of 70s and 80s rock songs like Rockin’ the Casbah). It was a surreal experience that was not easy
to take seriously, a sentiment echoed by my fellow travelers when they each had
their turn.
What stood out
for me, however, was that right in the middle of the massage my Mom returned
from the airport. She poked her head into the massage room, much to the
consternation of the masseuse. “Success,” she said. “I got them.”
“What?” I asked.
“Our bags. I got
them.”
She left, the
massage eventually finished, and I returned to the hotel room to find my duffle
waiting. I put on clean underwear and my purple shorts and a t-shirt that
wasn’t filthy. I was happy. Although I had come to terms with my lack of
clothing and had accepted that my bags were gone, I also never doubted that The
Mothership’s witchy intuition was right, and that she would find our bags.
James was more surprised, “No shit?” he said.
Later, at dinner,
Mom explained that she found our luggage in a room filled with lost bags. There
was a solitary man calling all over the United States, trying to find the
owners of this wayward luggage. He was one man saddled with the lost and
delayed bags – mostly from Houston – trying to figure out where to send all of
it. He was, we heard, quite happy to be rid of two bags, even if it left only a
small dent in the work he had to do. He was but one man doing the work of many,
after all, and any assistance was welcome. Apparently United doesn’t like to
pay overtime in Central America either.
Later still,
after dinner, I changed into a new outfit – because, hey, why not? – and we
played Dixit. Better late than never.
Epilogue
– Returning Home
When I made it
home to Los Angeles I had a moment of fear. The LAX baggage claim looks more
than vaguely like a third world nightmare. After nearly a week without my
baggage, I feared that, now, back home, I’d undergo a similar separation from my
basic necessities. Missing a toothbrush would be much less of a problem in
California, where the stores were familiar and se habla Ingles, and of course I
have other clothes at home, but I’d just as soon rather not navigate United’s byzantine
customer service.
Fortunately,
this time my bags arrived without incident, so I said farewell to my Mom and,
on my way home, reflected on my largely clothesless journey through Nicaragua. I
rode in a shuttle, listening to my fellow ride-sharers – a father, his wife,
and his teenage daughters – complain about how far out of the way Huntington
Beach is from Irvine (it’s really not), and I couldn’t help but notice how
different their journey was from mine, how different everyone’s journey is, and
how little we notice.
For all the time
I was in Nicaragua, the absence of my baggage was, if not at the forefront of
my mind, a constant pin prick. Almost no one I interacted with, however, would
have had the slightest idea of that. Similarly, I’m sure that Jane’s hornet
sting was hard for her not to notice, even if it was easy for me to forget
except when she reminded us by, for example, harvesting aloe vera from a plant
at El Jardin.
I don’t consider
myself much of a traveler, really, not like the new-place-each-weekend Jays, but I do see what people mean when they say that
traveling builds empathy. It’s not that being without my clothes in Nicaragua forced
me to put myself in the shoes of the people I met so much as it forced me to take
myself – literally and metaphorically – out of my own shoes. We may never be
able to truly see things from a perspective other than our own, but at least,
sometimes, we can be reminded that our own perspectives are limited.
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