|
|
|
 |
Family and Friends Letters 2008.
Dec. 2, 2008
Dear
Friends and Family,
The Day of
The Dead is a holiday
celebrated/observed here. It is not held
in honor of a famous rock/jam band, but
rather actually what the title says. It
is held in honor of dead people. The
celebration manifests generally in
visiting the cemetery where the dead
rest and having a picnic. In Spanish
nobody “plays” the piano, guitar or
violin. They “touch” them. If someone
plays an instrument well, you say, “They
touch it very good”. If you are talking
to someone on the phone who says they
know you, but you can’t remember them
you can ask them to give you the
“freeway” or “runway” meaning, please
explain how I know you.
They are
finishing a new boardwalk or “Malicon”
of inlaid stone bricks that when
finished will front the entire bay here.
In order to do this they have to remove
several concrete obstructions, several
walls and the most daunting a concrete
haul out for boats that was built only
fifteen years ago. This haul out is
perhaps the finest piece of construction
on the island, reinforced with intricate
cages of ¾ inch rebar, built by an
American company. It’s only visible
defect has to do with the quality of
sand they used to mix with the concrete.
The concrete is eroding away from the
gravel at and around the tide line. To
remove it, the workers are using chisels
made of lengths of one inch rebar and
hammers. Eight of them have been working
for two weeks with, as you can imagine
small results.
The weather is
changing right on time this year unlike
last year where we had to wait until
practically the end of December for this
change. The seasons change slowly here
in the following manner. The ocean
currents fight each other a seesaw
battle for a month or so. The water
warms up one day from 65 to 75 degrees,
then returns to 64 for a week, warms up
to 76 for a few days, then returns to 68
for a few days, warms up to 77 for a
week, then returns as it did today to a
frigid 62. Tomorrow or the next day it
will warm again for a longer period.
It’ll take a few more weeks for the
change to take hold. The air temp
follows suit though 10 degrees warmer on
the cool side and about equal on the
warm side. In six more weeks we’ll have
80 degree water and air.
Blue
footed boobies are called Lancers (piqueros)
here for the way they drive themselves
into the sea. Our office fronts the
beach. We now have a web cam which shows
the view on our web site. One evening as
I was closing up I encountered a group
of ten German tourists. There was a two
day old sea lion pup who had crawled
just this side of the small sea wall,
waiting for his mom to return from
feeding. These pups are cute as cute can
be and trusting. One of the men was
petting the pup as if it were a dog
while others in the group were taking
flash pictures of him. If a human
touches one of these pups, the mom will
smell their sent and won’t nurse it.
Flashes have detrimental effects on sea
lion’s ability to see. They didn’t know.
They were without a guide, had no
Spanish, little English, apparently
nobody had explained even the most
fundamental regulations of the National
Park and they had killed that pup as
sure as if they had crushed its head
with a rock, probably blinded it too.
They were brought here by one of those
evil, foreign owned travel agencies. We
had to listen to it bleating outside the
office for two days until he/she finally
died.
On a lighter note, we eat a
lot of oranges when they are in season
as there are maybe fifty orange trees
for every human inhabitant. These
oranges do not divide neatly into
sections as does your basic Navel
orange, they are more like large
Valencia oranges so what we do is peel
the zest off the outside, leaving the
orange covered in the pulp directly
below the zest and then eat it like an
apple, working around the core. It is a
little messy, but far less than trying
to peel them completely and separate
them into sections.
Here the moon
passes its phases almost vertically. So
as it waxes from a new moon it is
frowning at you, as it is waning toward
a new moon it is smiling, the smile
getting wider each night. The other
twilight the moon was smiling at us,
with two planets above, Venus and Mars.
The stars weren’t yet visible, just this
face in the purple-grey twilight sky,
two eyes slightly offset with a smile.
 
A new species has been
discovered in the Galapagos. Small
footprints were first discovered on a
remote beach on the far side of the
island and
later after months of stalking
scientists finally got a picture of the
creature fleeing toward the ocean.
Siempre
Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey
November 23rd
Dear Friends and Family,
Lisa connection update- “Four fingers” is the
nickname for fisherman Edison Bonillo. The other
morning with the bed of his pick up truck full
of freshly caught lisa (a kind of mullet a foot
to two long, cost fifty cents a piece) he was
driving around the pueblo at first light selling
his work of the night before. My wife was
walking our son in his stroller. With a fifteen
month old we are both up before dawn, every day.
Neither Four Fingers nor my wife had a bag so
they put twenty of these fish in the stroller
poach, maybe twenty five pounds worth. My wife
had an idea. A little back story here: What the
locals do with lisa is gut them, scale them and
cook them whole. This is a whole lot of work
both preparing/cleaning and eating. You have to
clean out the gut cavity, scale them, cook them
and then when you eat them you have to work
around bones and skin. We just fillet them.
Quicker, cleaner, faster, we waste some meat for
the sake of convenience. We’ve been burying the
carcasses in the garden, but have had such a bad
infestation of fire ants this year (the ants
find the carcasses and make a nest in them and
then you can’t work in the garden without
getting attacked) that we’d begun just putting
the carcasses in the trash. My wife’s idea was
to clean them on the rocks at the beach which is
fifty yards from our house. The idea had
occurred to me, but I hadn’t wanted to walk that
far and thought our garden could use the organic
matter. The genius of her idea had nothing to do
with walking distances or fire ants; it was to
show our son the frigate birds. These are big
black birds that remind some people of
pterodactyls. They have six foot wing spans and
will swoop and catch any offal thrown in the air
and once interested will eat out of the hand of
an outstretched arm while hovering. They fight
over flying pieces of meat after you throw them,
you can hear their wings flapping and colliding.
When you are working away cleaning fish there
might be six or eight of these giant birds
flapping around not ten feet from your head. You
have to guard your fillets from them and hope
that their poo which they sometimes realize
while flying doesn’t land on you. And of course
the pelicans show up and the blue footed boobies
only because they see other birds working. So
there you a have man with his fillet knife
working away under a cloud of frigate birds,
surrounded by attending pelicans on the ground
not six feet away and beyond them maybe thirty
feet away blue footed boobies watching with
interest. The man is throwing fish parts to the
Frigates and fish heads to the Pelicans. You
have a wife and a fifteen month old son looking
on. After about fifteen minutes you have the
fifteen month old son who in his pajamas is
scrambling over rocks to reach the water while
his parent’s attention is elsewhere. Shortly
after that you have a sand incrusted, happy kid
in soaking wet pajamas and diaper within the
surf among the rocks and ten pounds of lisa
fillets. Our son hardly even noticed the birds
or the fish. Maybe next week.
Ingala (the government branch that enforces the
laws regarding who can live, come or vacation
here), The Charles Darwin Foundation and The
Galapagos National Park invited us to attend a
presentation they were all giving together about
the need to work together toward a common goal.
The head of the Charles Darwin Foundation here
on San Cristobal stopped by the house to give me
the invite just as our son made a break for
racing across the street in front of his car. I
snatched my son up, threw him on my shoulder and
greeted Juan Carlos at the car window. I had
never seen these three agencies giving a
presentation together so I assumed it would be
another one of those mind numbing meetings where
people talk and talk when really, as I could
gather from the invite all they had to say was,
“Under the direction of the national referendum
that passed last month, we are obliged to work
together more closely and to prove it we’re
having a meeting and passing out very expensive
books to all of you invitees to whom we feel
this information is important”. The public was
also invited to attend, but chose as far as I
could tell, not to, though if they had they
would have been treated to wine and hours
derives after. I had to put on a nice shirt,
shave etc. Bere and I take turns going to these
things, part of our community involvement, plus
the local TV stations always run a piece on
these meetings, always accompanied by a shot
panning the audience and inevitably we are
prominent in this so that once a month we are on
TV here. The last one I was in was about the
opening of a new TV channel along the lines of
“The Family Channel” in the US. That channel
never did get up, owing to a blown transformer
and the consequent burning of their equipment.
This meeting though actually was important to
attend. The presentation focused on the
importance of realizing that the socio-economics
of managing the people living in a World
Heritage Site has as much importance as managing
the wild life and enforcing regulations because
the two go hand in hand. You wouldn’t think this
would be a new perspective in the Galapagos, but
it is. There were maybe two hundred people
there, all the who’s whos, the governor, mayor,
heads of the three above mentioned agencies etc.
and of course many of our friends. I don’t know
if we were the only “commercial” (as in working
company) invited, but we were the only one
present. Perhaps the others didn’t care if they
got on TV or not.
Jokes as well as most sayings do not translate
well English to Spanish. One of my favorite
jokes, “What does a person have in their eye if
they have a bee in their fist?” Answer: Beauty.
“Beauty is in the eye of the bee holder”. In
Spanish “The beholder” gets translated into
either the witness or the experiencer, neither
of which begins with “abeja” which means bee.
There is a derogatory joke I like that does
translate, I first heard it years ago as a
“Pollock joke”. In this age when we are all more
educated and sensitive you don’t hear too many
Pollock or Blond jokes, though attorney jokes
still seem to float. Anyway, I changed this
Pollock joke only a little for the following
translation which does get a laugh here. “There
was a Quitanian (person from Quito), a
Galapaganian (person from the Galapagos) and a
gringo taking a desert survival course. On the
first day the instructor asked, “If you found
yourself alone and lost in the desert and could
have only one thing with you, what would it be?”
The Quitanian answered, “A compass so I could
find my way out.” The Galapaganian answered,
“Lots and lots of water so that I could survive
until I found my way out” and the gringo said,
“A car door.” “A car door?” the others asked.
The gringo explained, “If it gets too hot, I can
roll down the window.” Attached is another
example of the friendliness of the animals here,
a dolphin who likes its belly rubbed so much it
will swim into your open arms, belly up. The
second is a sight many of you have seen, the
same dolphins on their way to a dinner
engagement.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
|
October 4
Dear Friends and Family,
Feral cats are a huge problem here in
the Galapagos. A friend of mine who
works for the national park recently
returned from a three week trip to the
far tip of the island eradicating feral
cats. The tip of the island is roughly
40 miles of lava desert waste land away
from the nearest human habitation. The
birds and lizards the cats eat are easy
prey as they have never had to deal with
wild cats stalking them. Many of the
people here are poorly educated and or
apathetic about the care of pets. So
there are naturally feral cats living on
the outskirts of town. There is an
agency that takes care or tries to take
care of these. So every few months,
there will be some wild cats hanging
around as we live on the outskirts of
town. What you do is go to this run down
looking office, tell them about the cats
and they make you write and sign a
letter, a formal “denunciation” of the
cats. You would do the same thing at the
police station if you had an
irresolvable problem with your neighbor.
Yes! I denounce these wild cats!
Here on San Cristobal we have pretty
good water delivered through the pipes
as it comes from a fresh water lake and
there isn’t anything in between. Still
we buy our drinking water from what I
like to refer to as “The Sparklets Man”.
He drives around in his truck, all day,
everyday with five gallon bottles of
“purer” water. It has gone through an
extra filtration process. He honks his
horn outside your house and you yell to
him if you need water or not. You can
not “spend” time in Spanish. You pass
time, use time, have time, dedicate
time, but you do not spend time. Time in
Spanish is not currency.
This season is the “garua”
(misty/drizzly) season where it will
often be drizzly in the highlands and
occasionally down by the sea. Here on
the equator when the sun shines, it is
intense and hot, something like the sun
through a magnifying glass. It only
takes a couple hours of sun on black
asphalt to heat it up something like I
would imagine those ceramic oven tops.
When the drizzle comes in after a few
hours of this super heating of the
asphalt road the crosses the island it
steams, for hours. You have the drizzle
coming down and the steam going up. It
is pretty trippy to drive through.
Almost every Sunday, a guy drives around
with the bed of his pick up truck filled
with lisa, a kind of herring I believe,
all about a foot or a foot and half
long, cost fifty cents a piece. We buy
five dollars worth. I fillet them up. We
burry the carcasses in the garden and we
have maybe ten pounds of fish and it is
pretty good tasting.
The big news here this week is that the
referendum on the re-write of the
country’s constitution passed. For the
officials of the State of the Galapagos
and the rest of the states of the
country for that matter, this is huge
news. The Federal government now has
control of what they here to for thought
of as “their” own jurisdiction, not
necessarily meaning the people or
environment. Here in the Galapagos that
may transcend to ACTUALLY limiting the
number of people that come here. They
are talking about mandating that tours
spend at least seven days here whether
touring on land or on a cruise or
increasing the Park entrance fee beyond
the increase of $100 to $200 per person
that will begin next year. Personally,
while we’d like to keep costs down for
our “hearts”, this would reduce the
number of people that show up “unguided”
and do silly things like throw rocks at
sea lions, etc.
We are just back from a six week
marathon trip that included the joy of
seeing the marriage of my sister in Los
Angeles, a very sweet visit with a
family that traveled with us last year,
too much business, an incredible three
weeks with our son’s grandparents and
literally ten flights with a fifteen
month old, several of them longer than
six hours. As you can imagine, we are
all happy to be home. It was a
surprising joy to watch our kid be so
excited to be here again with his own
toys, his own room. First trip to the
beach, I missed grabbing him as he ran
past me down the sand berm, full body
first into a surging wave which knocked
him over, head down underwater as it
washed him back up the thirty feet he’d
just run down. I caught him as the surge
was taking him back toward the sea. He
came up laughing. I think we all feel
the same way.
Attached are one view from Hotel Casa
Blanca with the Maltese Falcon in the
bay and the other is a sea lion dreaming
while sleeping on the fairway of the
18th hole.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
September 2
Dear Friends and Family,
These islands are famous for their weird
animals that have practically no fear of
humans, even seem curious sometimes, but
even the regular every day animals are
always doing odd things. We have a night
heron, doofy looking bird walks around
like a Nazi soldier on Thorazine,
hunting bugs that are attracted to the
lights. This bird will walk around right
under the patio table. The other morning
I watched a lava lizard eating a
cockroach, whole. The cockroaches are as
big as mice and they fly. Mature Lava
lizards are eight or ten inches long,
about half tail. It took him an hour to
swallow the thing. You can call the
birds to you with noises, well at least
“Darwin’s” finches and the Galapagos
Mocking Bird. “Swish-swish-swish” for
the finches and a squeaky sucking noise
you can make on your hand for the
Mocking birds. They’ll come land on your
friend’s shoulder if they are standing
still enough.
It is entirely acceptable to go up to
anyone’s house here and ask for a drink
of water.
Nelson, Smith, Wilson, Whitman,
Hamilton, Jackson, Edison and Stalin are
all very popular first names for men.
Mercy is popular for women.
AP Adventures, the travel division of
Disney is now going to be selling tours
of the Galapagos. As you know one of the
gravest problems we face here is the
introduction of invasive, non-native
species. Apparently we can now add at
least two others to the list: apodemus
disneyus and dendroeygna disneyus
(Mickey Mouses and Donald Ducks). You
can imagine how happy the Galapagos
National Park and Charles Darwin
Foundation are about this. For us, well…
Imagine if Disneyland offered to be your
guide at Nordstroms, picked you up at
your house in a nice car, took you there
and made all the commissions off the
items you purchased, but were not
responsible for the care of the
merchandise nor the store.
Our 15 month old is named technically:
Roland, Robert, Schleicher, Norris,
Crespo, Van Horn and I always add “of
the Galapagos”, which for some reason
cracks him up. When his mom is pissed at
him she says, “Roland Robert Schleicher
Norris!” That cracks ME up.
I’m “phoning” this letter in. That is
we’re in the US these weeks for my
sister’s wedding, show my folks their
grand kid etc. Seems odd to send this
off from here.
Attached is the cover of a song you all
know, with a latin beat and the words in
Spanish. See how long it takes you to
recognize it. It is a pretty catchy
little song.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
August 2
Dear Friends and Family,
Our soon to be fourteen month old son
loves nothing more, when the surf is up,
than to charge down the burm of sand
into onrushing waves, which knock him
off his feet and wash him back up that
burm. This drives his mom absolutely
frantic as what happens is he gets
knocked down, his head under water as
he’s washed back up the burm. He comes
up for air as the surge abates,
giggling. Then as the water recedes, it
tries to sweep him back into the sea, at
which time I hopefully catch him, set
him on his feet on the sand in the
receding water and he turns to the sea
again, running toward the next wave. His
mom is no longer allowed to play with us
like this because she is constantly
making these sudden sucking in of air
completely panicked noises and when he
gets particularly roughed up, she rushes
up to him, jerks him out of the water,
“Oh my God, are you alright?” Basically
scares him half out of his wits. Most
other people on the beach are also
nervous. What if I missed him and he got
sucked out into the next wave? Turns
out, I know from more than a few
experiences what happens is he floats
and holds his breath. Re-reading this I
imagine I’m making some of you nervous
too. The waves are only a foot or two…
you probably have to be there... you’re
probably considering writing a letter to
social services, I would. The thing is,
you set him down on the beach, he plays
in the sand for about a minute, looks up
at the water and heads for it at a trot.
What are you going to do? I know, he’s
only fourteen months old. He does these
kinds of things all day long. Eats dirt,
leaves, flowers, puts rocks in his mouth
for fun, climbs up on chairs, furniture
etc. No means go to him. At least in the
ocean, at the beach it is mostly soft
landings. I’m a new dad. I have no idea
really. Really.
We’re working on some changes to our web
site. If not by the time you read this
soon after we’ll have added: a photo
gallery of several hundred really
spectacular photos taken by one of our
guides, culled from thousands he’s taken
over the years. We’re commenting weekly
on the news about Galapagos as it comes
out of the US and reporting the “news”
from here, these are archived, along
with these letters to Friend’s and
Family from April 2007 to present.
There’s a very important paper written
by the Charles Darwin Foundation,
“Galapagos At Risk” a socio/economic
analysis. The man who wrote “Plundering
Paradise” gave us permission to use as
much of his book as we wanted, so we
have several chapters of that available,
we have a webcam which broadcasts from
our office. It has the base of the
original pier, the beach, sea lions,
boobies etc. and Punta Cerola in the
distance. There is also a novel I wrote
about beginning our lives here, titled
“Living Galapagos”.
I have needed to have a license to drive
our atv around for years. It hasn’t been
an issue because, well we live on an
island and I taught English to the
police for some time, but it became an
issue when a new group of police were
shifted in and one of them was insulted
by the fact that one putridly hot day,
quite accidentally I was driving around
without a shirt or helmet (there is no
traffic on our cobbled streets and
nobody drives any faster then 15 mph).
He was sweltering in his uniform and
required undershirt. In order to obtain
a license to drive a motor cycle (moto)
in Ecuador now days you have to take a
class provided by the police, 5 sessions
of two hours each. They were waiting
until there were enough people to hold
the class here in San Cristobal. So
every Monday, I had to check in to see
if they were going to have the class
that week. I did this for six months,
punishment enough in my mind. They
finally had the class and I made the
first Monday night session and learned
that the head is not like a melon as
some people believe, but more like an
egg. So helmets are like an egg carton.
Imagine what would happen if eggs didn’t
come in cartons? Also I learned about
the various types of licenses, license
plates, grades of fines that we have
here in Ecuador and other equally
fascinating menutia. The next night we
had a small emergency with one of our
groups so I couldn’t attend “moto”
class. The following night I went to
explain my situation to the instructor,
who was late and I was only able to
speak with the aforementioned offended
officer. I’d have to wait until the next
course was offered so that I could
receive all of the lessons. Each one was
very important and needed to be followed
in sequence, he informed me. Okay, I
figured I had a six month reprieve. On
the following Monday I saw the
instructor of the class on the street
while driving the atv. He flagged me
down and told me to go straight to the
police station. Talk only to his
secretary. The reason was that my
license was ready for me to pick up and
he knew the offended officer was away on
duties. And I think maybe as polite as I
am, they had had about enough of me
swinging by every week.
Now days, as the days and water are a
little cooler, we take our kid to the
beach just before sunset rather than
just after dawn. So this means we all
get up 5:30-6:00 AM every day, goof
around a little then I head off to the
office, brief case and cup of tea in
hand, out the gate, passed the park,
over the bridge to the office which
fronts the beach. I feel very executive
and frankly kind of proud, cup in hand,
brief case and all, just your average
businessman heading to the office until
I think what a doofy picture it would
make, gringo in slaps, shorts, tank top,
do-rag, likely needing a shave with a
cup of coffee in one hand, brief case in
the other as he walks past palm trees,
trying to change the Galapagos, one
visitor at a time.
In the last letter I sent out I
mentioned one of our “hearts”, lacking a
good photo of a blue footed boobie, so I
sent her to the base of the old pier in
front of our office. She sent me the
picture along with a note of thanks so
I’ve attached it and another taken
outside the office of the base of that
pier. I took the picture because of the
lighting on the boats in the distance.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
July 3
Dear Friends and Family,
The other afternoon on my way to speak
with one of the local fishermen about
their trip with a group of our “hearts”
the next morning, I was stopped by the
police. “Rickie, I’m sorry you have to
pull over and park your moto. No one is
allowed to drive until six PM out of
respect for the environment”. It was
five-fifty PM. Wow, I thought and began
imagining the consequences. Was the
entire world really not driving for one
hour and I had somehow managed to miss
this news? I asked. The answer was no.
Just in Ecuador? No. Just in the
Galapagos? No. Just in San Cristobal?
Yes. It brought a smile to my face and I
had ten minutes to think of what might
happen if the world really did stop
driving for one hour out of respect for
the environment, that even if you didn’t
want to it would be enforced by the
police through out the world, course
they wouldn’t be calling people by their
first names nor likely apologizing, but
still…
G8 has built for free three giant wind
turbines here on San Cristobal to
augment the diesel generators that
supply our electricity. It is a
wonderful, generous thing to have done.
The bad news is not really news to
anybody here. The wind blows harder
after dark in the highlands where the
turbines are. The wind blows less in the
hottest time of year when demand is at
its peak (air conditioning and
refrigeration are most needed). We have
no manner for storing the excess
electricity that the wind turbines
produce largely when no one needs it,
but we do now have wind turbines that do
reduce our use of diesel to some degree.
We also have a vastly more intermittent
electrical supply than we did before.
They can’t seem to manage the patching
in and out of the turbine generated
electricity with our diesel generated
electricity. The electricity gets cut
even more randomly and frequently than
before the turbines. The other not news
is that the wind generators break down
often and service personnel and parts
have to be sent for. Perhaps the most
important factor that contributed to the
accomplishment of installing the
turbines was the tireless and
practically thankless work of men who
lobbied, hassled and coerced this idea
into reality, men who salary themselves
out of “non-profits”. In theory, if they
were working in the private sector they
would be compensated equally for less
altruistic work.
Our current Governor, ex head of the
National Park for what may have been its
most challenging/pivotal decade was
having breakfast in the café around the
corner from our office. He was eating
alone. I said “Hi” as I entered, shook
his hand and sat down to talk with one
of our guides at a different table. I
did this as a matter of courtesy to him.
There were a couple of things I would
have liked to talk about with him, but
they were not so important that he
couldn’t finish his scrambled eggs in
peace. San Cristobal is the Capital of
the Galapagos, but his family lives on
Santa Cruz and he prefers to spend his
time there, only comes here for hectic
business trips. The local politicians
and businessmen would prefer that as
Governor he made his residence here in
“The Capital”. When he is here his
moments of peace are few. He has come to
our house a few evenings on the pretext
of business (we are working to send
tourists to Floreana where his family
owns a good share of the private
property there and it is where he was
born and raised, current population, 87)
but I suspect his objectives at our
house have more to do with getting away
from it all than with business. We are
somewhat outside of the political
maneuverings etc. do not keep up on
gossip, do not have anything to ask of
him other than that he continue doing
how he has done. Depends on who you talk
to, but this man is either a kind of
real life super hero or a kind of Don
Quixote. It would take hours to explain,
there’s a few books you can read. Google
Eliecer Cruz. He told me once he wants
to write a book of his own. That would
be THE story of the reality of the
Galapagos today. What I ought to do is
get our picture taken together, have him
sign it, frame it and put it up in the
office. He would cringe at the idea. His
wife would wonder why more people didn’t
do it.
Our semi-new office on the beach front
has yielded up some unexpected treats in
exchange for my having an office job for
the first time in my life. We can watch
the planes as they cross the bay to land
at the airport, they’re right there out
the glass front door gliding in, we have
developed relationships with the sea
lions who like to sleep on our door step
(as with dogs), twice I’ve seen eagle
rays mating not ten yards off the beach,
directly out front is the old jetty that
based the first wooden pier ever built
here and this month there’s been a lot
of bait fish in the bay so there’s a
gaggle of blue footed boobies perched
there constantly in a row with their
butts hanging over the water, put the
binocs to your eyes and their turquoise
feet shine like a picture out of a guide
book. I even sent one of our hearts
there the other week, because she hadn’t
been able to get a good shot of a blue
footed boobie. Better still, is the
hammock we hung on the back of the
bathroom door which we can sling after
locking the door. Not that we do very
often. It is just knowing that we could
that is priceless.
The attached photos are: one of the rare
Galapagos Hippopotamus and his best
friend. Most of you have seen our logo
of the tortoise with wings. Only in the
Galapagos can tortoises fly and pal
around with hippos. The other is our son
on the beach the other day. Note his
buddy waiting to play at the water’s
edge.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
June 3
Dear Friends and Family,
"Hogar" = home, perhaps more accurately,
the place where you feel at home in this
world. If this place, this “hogar” is
San Cristobal, Galapagos, you have the
experience of people always leaving. You
don't have to live on an island to feel
that way, but it helps. With our
business we do have the rare privilege
to go to the airport to meet new friends
unloading from an airplane almost daily
and we do also have the privilege to see
them off. The former is generally more
touching. It is always sad to see people
you’ve grown to care about in more than
a professional way go. It is natural to
be happy to meet someone, but it is not
the same as saying good bye.
Emotionally, almost daily, we go to the
airport to say good bye to someone we’ve
grown to care about and often enough,
intentions and words aside, it is
forever.
We have some married friends who live in
a very rustic Cabana type thing. She was
born Indian (as in India). Her father
was from Costa Rica. She is a water
color artist, poet, furniture designer
and the matron saint, mother, friend,
mentor to the local gals lucky enough to
swim within her gentle, generous
influence. He’s an environmental
engineer from Spain, here to help the
farmers develop new world techniques and
markets and build waste deposal
facilities for the island, serious,
bald, pot bellied, concerned and a
really good man, learning to play the
violin at fifty-three. We go to their
funky termite infested cabana to listen
to Vivaldi, drink decent wine and soak
up the gracious, generous spirit of the
place. He makes a Piea in an aluminum
frying pan on the barbeque. In their
crappy old propane oven she will have
baked an apple crisp that just melts
your heart. One day we took them to the
airport too.
An era is ending in San Cristobal. There
is a date. Things will be far different
after June 1, 2008. It is the end of a
way of life here. Some people think this
is “progress”, “normal”, “you have to
make sacrifices”, “you loose something,
but gain something ‘better’”, “the
universe hates a vacuum”, “you can’t
fight city hall”. Things are constantly
being born in this world and ending. We
are supposed to appreciate that there in
rests stability, in constant change. We
naturally use events as dividing lines,
forgetting the germination of these
events was actually the turning point be
it a week or five years before they
bloom and make us pay attention. In this
case for most of you, you’ll put your
hand to your forehead and say or think,
“Oh my God!” On San Cristobal, beginning
next week you will no longer be able to
ride in the bed of pick up trucks! For
those of you who don’t know, most of the
taxis are four doored pick up trucks
here and as everyone knows, the best
seats are out back. I could explain
about a leftist government, for all its
good, comes all its bad, the government
in everyone’s business. In this case a
nationally mandated insurance for motor
vehicles is the culprit, absolutely
needed on the continent, completely
superfluous here.
Maybe ten days a year if you live on the
equator you can look out to sea, toward
the next land fall, in this case if
you’re looking west south west, a group
of tiny islands thousands of miles of
ocean away (The Marquesas) and have all
that ocean lapping at your feet as if
that immense volume of water was only a
small lake. It doesn’t happen anywhere
else in the world except for those who
live near the equator. It is as if you
are standing in front of a five hundred
thousand square mile swimming pool. You
can stand on the beach and see the small
fish swimming ten feet below the water,
thirty yards off shore with nothing more
than a tiny lap of a wave coercing your
feet.
It rained this year, so in the low
lands, that eight months out the year
look like some kind of tortured lava
rock desert with dead trees and cacti,
there are suddenly pastoral vistas of
green meadows, albeit meadows with
cactus trees in them, but there are
places where it really looks like there
ought to be some cows or horses grazing,
maybe some deer amongst them.
A taxi driver was talking to Bere the
other day about the way I sometimes
carry our eleven month old around on my
shoulder. I hoist him up there mostly
because it’s easier to carry him that
way and it’s cooler for both of us. He
drapes his arm over my head. The taxi
driver said, “It’s like the kid is some
kind of king or something and your
husband is too proud of him.” Those of
you who know Bere know that this good
man got read up one side and down the
next. Odd thought processes are not so
odd here. I’ve been working on an
article for travel magazines and in one
of the drafts I had a part about how
we’re trying to move forward but
“Naturally, there are a lot of tentative
alliances, betrayals, conflicting views,
infighting and petty jealousies. We’re
island people”.
You would never have thought from their
name, that Blue Footed Boobies would be
all that athletic. They get their name
from a clown, blue footed clowns was how
it translated more than a hundred years
ago. No one would ever call them clowns
in their daily lives, only in their
mating rituals and aren’t we all? Now in
Spanish they are known as “Blue Foots”
or “Lancers”. They dive into the water
like pelicans, except with extreme
velocity, up to seventy miles an hour,
I’m told. They can dive/drive twenty
feet deep. I once had the rare
opportunity to see from a cliff above a
gaggle of them working a small cove. The
water here is clearer than most people’s
swimming pools. We watched them
plummeting out of the sky and then their
trails once they penetrated the line
that separated clear air and water. When
underwater they look like a tiny torpedo
with quick steering. When they surface
they pop up like a submerged volleyball.
Watching this hundred or so of them
working, some plummeting from the sky,
some shooting through the water, some
popping up, some taking wing, all
happening at once, it looked like a kind
of crazy fireworks show that was
piercing dimensions coming and going.
The attached two photos are of them.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
|
April 28
Dear Friends and Family,
It is no different in the Galapagos than
anywhere else in the world, with minor
exceptions that when you have a ten
month old child, your life is very
different than it was before… like say
when he was six months old. Now he
sleeps through the night, goes down 6:30
and pops up at 5:30, though has learned
nothing is going to happen until 6:00,
so he goofs around in his bed waiting, a
veritable angel in Huggies. He’ll be
standing there on his bed hanging onto
the railing. Most mornings you feed him
a little, put on your swim suits, put
him in his back pack and head off to the
beach on the ATV. Yesterday he was
playing with a baby octopus caught in a
tide pool, would watch it change form to
look like a piece of kelp, lay flat on
the sand and turn the color of the sand,
or against a rock and suddenly become
part of the rock. He’d pull the little
bugger away, tentacles grappling around
his tiny hand and then let it go again
to see what it would do. His mom was
practically hysterical when she
approached us after her walk. I was
waiting to see when he would put it in
his mouth like he does with everything
else. The morning sun hits the sides of
the rocks facing east, so just after
dawn you’ll see the marine iguanas,
clinging to the sides of those rocks,
staring straight ahead, up at the sky.
You might see ten or twenty of them
within your field of vision, silly
looking, really. We go at dawn because
the sun is not so intense, the air is
cooler and it is a pretty nice way to
start the day, bathing in the sea,
playing around on the beach with your
wife and kid in San Cristobal,
Galapagos, Planet Earth.
Sunday mornings, as with much of the
rest of the world we go out for
breakfast as a family to the local IHOP.
Of course we have no International House
of Pancakes here, but our favorite
breakfast spot has café dining on the
street, both normal breakfasts (for
here) and a morning soup called
Encebollado (onion fish soup). They have
this only on Sundays because Sunday
mornings follow Saturday nights and it
is supposed to have some curative
powers. For me it is just good soup. I
pour enough hot sauce, lime and ketchup
into it and it tastes like Mexico. We
socialize with our friends passing by,
Erey sits in his 4X4 stroller sucking on
pieces of watermelon and it is just like
Sunday anywhere else except there is no
Sunday paper. The very few things I miss
about the US are an odd conglomeration
stuff I never really did that much of
when I lived there anyway. Reading the
Sunday paper on Sunday morning is one of
them. Going to the ball park to watch an
afternoon baseball game I did maybe once
a year, twice in a good year and that’s
about it with the exception of friends
and family and the ability to buy/find
stuff.
The death bells tolled in the Catholic
church at dawn a few days back. Six
bells and a pause, six bells and a
pause, six times. In the silence between
the bells we could hear the sea lions
bellow on the beach, the roosters crow
and the morning birds chirp. We lay in
bed, not talking, listening to the
bells, remembering this woman who we had
known, Donna Carmelita. Her picture’s on
the web site in the page about Galapagos
Family. She had eighty-three years when
she died. Everyone had known she was on
her death bed. Legend has it that she
was the one who brought the Carmelito
insect from the mainland here to San
Cristobal with some fruit she was
importing. This is a nasty little bug,
looks like a nat, doesn’t buzz, lands on
you and sucks your blood until it is too
fat to fly and then just falls off.
You’ll look at your arm and see six or
eight of them, wipe them off with your
hand leaving six or eight blood streaks
and six or eight itchy little bites that
will have a red dot in the middle. She
claimed to own El Junco, the lake filled
volcano which is the island’s water
source most of the year and maybe she
did before the government imposed it’s
eminent domain and took it from her
family. She owns all the land around it
or did own. She was never very nice to
me unless there was an angle. That kind
of thing matters much less when you’ve
learned the particular person has died.
There is a tradition, frowned upon by
the Catholic Church, but it is a San
Cristobal institution. Whenever anyone
dies, they set up a canopy tent outside
their house and maybe twenty to fifty
chairs, depending, for two days. The
body lays in the living room. If it’s a
house in town, they close off the
street. You go pay your respects to the
house, the family and the spirit/body,
some people will sit there for all of
the two days. I’ve never gone to one.
The first year I was here though, while
passing one and seeing some
acquaintances and figuring it was a kind
of holiday gathering, maybe there had
been a speaker who had spoken in front
of the house, I gave them the season’s
greetings with a smile, Feliz Navidad!
When people want to give me a hard time
for fun, they still mention it, six
years after the fact. Those same people
have a few other things on me too.
Living on an island, it is natural to
hoard things to use later.
A jar of “olives with bone” means they
are not pitted.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
|
March 28
Dear Friends and Family,
Business: We had three of the groups
scheduled for May and June cancel so
we’re not going to be as busy as we’d
like. Should anyone be interested in
coming… Those are my favorite months,
weather and animal watching wise and
it’s rained more than normal this year,
so the islands are green all over. One
other business thing, we’ve been running
this Google ad for about a year and I’ve
yet to speak with one person who found
us through that ad. Could you take a
minute and let us know if any of you did
find us through that ad?
My adopted Uncle likes to talk about the
first tourist he ever saw here. We’ve
all heard the story so many times, but
we never grow tired of watching the
twinkle he gets in his one good eye. He
doesn’t get around so well anymore, had
a cane and now a walker, but still his
eye twinkles as good as it ever did. “It
happened in the year of our Lord one
thousand nine hundred and sixty-nine.”
In that year there were no paved
streets, there were three “sometimes”
working cars on the island, there was
electricity only for a couple hours a
day, some days. Sometimes a week or
weeks would pass without it. Candle
light was popular, flashlights were rare
because batteries were even rarer and
expensive. People ate what they grew or
caught, supplemented by a sack of
imported rice or flour and if times got
hard, they could always eat lobster. It
was easy to catch by hand and plentiful,
the poor man’s meat. It was not
surprising for sailing yachts to arrive
occasionally, but these were not
“tourists proper”. According to my
uncle, the first proper tourist
disembarked from a cruise ship owned by
Metropolitan Tours. My Uncle held out
his hand at the pier to a small, very
beautiful woman and helped her from the
dingy to the solid planks of the pier.
She “pierced him” with her smile. She
was accompanied by four other tourists
and a guide who quickly separated the
company from my Uncle’s presence. He
watched them walk away up the pier
toward the only store and smelled his
hand. After her touch it “smelled of
roses”. At this point of his story he’ll
pull out of his wallet a crinkled
magazine picture or if you’re in his
home, point to a framed, glass covered
picture on the wall of a less weathered,
but still ancient copy of the same
magazine picture he has in his wallet.
It is a picture of Jane Fonda circa
1970. “It is for the touch of this
beautiful woman that I never married.”
The next day he came down with a
horrible cold and within a week,
everyone on the island had the same
cold. He’ll finish his story in these
times where we have electricity usually
24/7, water delivered by pipe, five
cruise ships anchored in the harbor and
the people still as in his day
practically unable to touch these
visitors to our islands. And he’ll have
that twinkle in his eye, “This is why
the powers that be keep us separated
from the tourists, to protect us.” He
does not have the words facetious or
ironic. He doesn’t need them. His one
good eye sparkles.
There are only so many telephone lines
available in San Cristobal. If you built
a house and wanted a telephone, you
couldn’t get one. All the telephone
lines that exist are being used. For our
office, we had to rent a line/phone
number from a friend in order to have
telephone service.
In the mornings we often go to the
bakery for our daily bread, steaming hot
rolls, six cents a piece or ten for
fifty cents.
The delivery of fresh water to
everyone’s house is accomplished by a
system of gravity fed tubes. We receive
water through these tubes four hours a
day, four days a week with which we fill
our cisterns. The challenging thing
about this system is that there is no
schedule. You might receive your water
in the middle of the night and next week
on completely different days at
completely different times. We are about
to receive gravity fed water 24/7. This
will be a welcome change though I can
already hear myself sometime in the
future waxing fondly about the days when
we didn’t know when the water was
coming.
It rained a bit more this year than
normal (some years it doesn’t rain at
all). We’ve had some pretty dramatic
down pours where it’s raining so hard
it’s difficult to draw a breath and of
course it’s warm enough that for fun you
walk out in one of these down pours.
There’s been some flooding etc., but
nothing serious. The islands are
green-green.
Bere had her birthday this month. It’s
difficult to buy gifts here, there are
for example no jewelry stores, no flower
shops, actually there is one that sells
plastic flowers so for a gift I bought
her some plastic flowers and chartered a
boat to head out to Leon Dormido. We
don’t often go with our hearts, unless
their guide needs some help and if we do
we’re working and more concerned about
them than having a good time. It was
nice to have the boat and do only what
we wanted. We swam the channel at Leon
Dormido twice. It was full of sharks,
literally hundreds. I’d never seen so
many, just swimming around you, checking
you out with the occasional ray or sea
turtle or sea lion and every now again
groups of darting tuna swimming by. It
was one of those sunny days where the
water had a visibility of forever and
the sun would project rays from your
head into the water before you, just
another day here, another one of those
things people travel half way around the
world to see and we have to have a
holiday, bonk ourselves upside the head
to appreciate it.
A boat sailed into the bay the other
day, three hundred feet long, aluminum
masts and spares. Everything automatic.
They say it can be sailed by radio
control from a satellite. No one even
has to be on board. For exercise Bere
and I swam out and touched it. You can
Google it, Maltese Falcon Sailing Ship
will get you to a site. Costs $325,000
per week to charter.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
|
March 3
Dear Friends and Family,
There are three cargo boats that bring
goods to the Galapagos from Guayaquil.
Two of them have been under going
repairs the past two months so we’ve
been running out of stuff more often
than usual. Propane gas we run out of
fairly regularly anyway, but now it’s
things like sugar, chicken, ice cream,
toilet paper and there is a rush to buy
these things when they do come in so
that if you are not on it, you’ll go
another week without toilet paper,
reminds us we’re living on an island.
Maestro- I was accustomed to thinking of
this as the conductor of a symphony.
Here we use the title for carpenters,
taxi drivers, captains of boats, anybody
who knows what they are doing with a
particular job.
Oatmeal is made into a soup or juice,
one sweet, the other spiced, both
delicious. Nobody eats oatmeal as people
do in the US.
My wife, Bere is the happiest mother
I’ve ever seen. If when we were first
getting to know each other, I’d have
known how happy she would be, I’d have
shown up for a date with her baby in my
arms. He’s now eight months old and goes
for a daily swim in the ocean of which
he has no fear, sticks his own face
under water, wants nothing more than to
be released from our arms. He wants to
crawl across the water.
One of our clients asked me dead
seriously the other day if I had trained
the sea lions. What had happened was she
wasn’t a real strong swimmer, so we set
her up with a boogie board and assigned
her group’s guide to swim with her. I
was called in to help with the rest of
the group. Everyone was in the water,
things were going well, lots of fish and
sting rays swimming around, the group
was having a wonderful snorkel, so I
swam over to a little rock outcropping
where the sea lions like to hang out. I
enticed a couple of two year old pups to
play with me and then swam them over to
this gal on the boogie board. The pups
swam around her, under and leaping over,
stared into her face mask just inches
away and then blew bubbles at her, the
usual stuff. The sea lions arrive here
in the Galapagos pre-trained.
I got to watch the super bowl this year
on a big flat screen TV, in a bar on the
second floor of an ocean front
restaurant. The game was broadcast in
Spanish with some Latin guys imitating
US announcers of football with even more
sophomoric statements and graphics than
you receive in the US and of course it
didn’t have the ads you do in the US
either, but during the commercials I
could look out at the fishing boats
bobbing in the turquoise bay. I was the
only person watching the game. I was
able to watch it last year too on a
regular TV, but before that I could only
listen to it over the internet and
before that of course I didn’t even
think about it. I’m not sure which is
better. I had a wonderful Super Bowl
Sunday one year. I made myself some
salchichas (closet thing to hot dogs),
got some potato chips and settled down
in front of the computer to listen to
the broadcast on KNBR out of San
Francisco. That might have been as good
as watching it on the flat screen and of
course maybe not even thinking about it
at all was the best of all.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
|
February 2
Dear Friends and Family,
Our house keeper, Carmen is a squat
Quechuan gal about four feet high with
bad teeth. She’s twenty-six years old
and she calls me, Don Rick. Our seven
month old son was having a tough couple
days and so finally, with apologies she
asked if she could remove the bad spirit
that was bugging him. What could it
hurt? She took a fresh chicken egg,
wiped it through his hair, waved it
around his head a few times while
chanting away, then quickly stood and
ran out of the house with the egg to the
lot on the far side of the street and
chucked it into a rock. He instantly
perked up and smiled. She’s done it
successfully twice. So now when he’s
cranky, I say he’s having an egg day.
For exercise Bere and I paddle across
the bay to the beach on the far side of
the bay and catch a taxi home. Last week
it was Sunday afternoon and there were
no Taxis, so we began walking home. It’s
hot, the concrete’s hot, I’m bare foot.
Javier, one of the police Captains saw
us, called on the radio and a few
minutes later a police truck showed up
to give us a ride home in the back with
our boards. It says right on the doors
of their cars, “To Serve and Protect”.
Bere asked me the other day if I’d fly
on over to Santa Cruz and meet the New
Governor of the Galapagos on the wharf
at six in the morning the following day.
She told me he wants to develop tourism
on Floriana and he’d like to do it the
way we’ve been doing here. “And so?” I
asked. “Just do how you do, take a
packet, you’ll get the movie.” Here they
say “I get the ‘movie’”, not the
“picture”. I don’t know if maybe that
saying in English is about movies. I
always assumed photographs. Anyway,
turns out our new Governor was born and
raised on Floriana, current population
87. We run a Google ad that reads “The
Real Galapagos, blah blah, Travel as
part of the solution”. The thing about
Floriana is, it is THE REAL GALAPAGOS,
before there were tourists. There has
been only one poorly run hotel on the
island for the past thirty years and now
because of the Governor’s brother there
is also a series of nice cabanas on a
heart breakingly gorgeous beach. There
are coves and snorkeling lagoons, a
private pier. I don’t have words so will
try and attach some photos so you can
get the “movie”. The sea iguanas are
rainbow colored there. One will have
turquoise legs, a pink to red body and a
green/purple tail. There is one road
that heads up to the farms in the
highlands. There are only two farms. In
the Giant Tortoise reserve, the
tortoises walk around under foot. One
tried to eat my sandal. There are
natural springs… picture a rock grotto
maybe thirty feet wide and fifteen feet
high with sweet water flowing out of a
horizontal crack in the middle. I mean
sweet water. The Governor’s family is a
tourist attraction themselves. Always
joking and smiling. They have some
stories. They’re real island people,
like Swiss Family Robinson, ‘cept
Galapagos style. So yeah, we’re gonna
try and get some of our groups over
there and we put together some package
tours for a Swiss travel agency run
apparently by a good friend of the
Governor’s. Bere and I are planning on
vacationing there.
I bought a twenty pound tuna yesterday
for twenty bucks and was grousing about
how expensive it was, until I remembered
the cost of fish in the US. We ate about
two-hundred bucks worth of seared ahi
and sashimi, gave a good a quarter of it
to Carmen and still have a few meals in
the refri.
My wife says, “Miercoles!” (Wednesday)
instead of “mierda” (shit) like shoot
instead of shit or rather she used to.
With the current phase our kid is in the
first word out of his mouth may well be
Spanish for “Shit!” I used to call him
Senor Babas (Mr. Spittle), but lately
he’s been on a mission to stand up and
fall all his waking hours. Usually he
lands on his butt, however seems just as
often it’s his head hitting something on
the way down or if not on the way down
then on the floor. I’ve begun calling
him Senor Choce (Mr. Crash) and when
he’s having an extra tough day I say, “Mierda!
Mr. Crash is having an egg day.”
Hope your egg days are few and far
between.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
|
January 2
Dear Friends and Family,
Here in Ecuador we don’t celebrate the
“New” Year, we celebrate the end of the
last year. It is “El Fin del Ano”. Happy
end of the year to everyone! I hope you
all had as wonderful a year as we did!
I was talking to one of our “hearts”
(visitors) the other day about an
American gal who also lives here. I am
the only male gringo living on the
island. There are two other American
females, one Kiwi, assorted Chileanos
and Columbians. Actually the true
descendants of the original colonists
are the minority, the majority are more
recent imports from the continent. My
wife for example was born in Quito and
received her residency based on the
years she spent here and that her family
owned property before they changed the
laws. Anyway this American gal, a
retired nurse married a local builder
guy (kind of like a bricklayer in the
US). She bought some land. He started
building a hotel for her. A year later
she divorced him which meant she’d lost
her status as a Galapagenian gained in
the marriage. So she married another
“contractor” and he is now finishing her
hotel. I was saying how funny it was,
the odd kinds of people that wash up
here and stick. This nice old man said
to me with a smile, “Present company
included”.
The inter island airline here has only
two planes and has been operating for
more than ten years and proudly
advertise “Without an accident”.
Actually one plane did have to ditch in
the ocean and the passengers were
rescued by fishermen, another skipped
off the runway into the bush and a third
had its door fall off in the middle of a
flight. These are only the things I’ve
heard of and when I asked the manager
about it the other day he said, “Well,
we’ve had incidents, but never an
accident.” I asked what he considered an
accident, “When someone dies, of
course.” With the number of flights they
do, in the circumstances they do them, I
doubt there’s an airline operating in
the third world with a better record.
I bought a basketball. There are some
hoops in the park across the street. I
don’t know why it took me so many years.
The ball size is number 7, so it cost
seven bucks. Size six costs six bucks
etc. Anyway, to play I only have to move
the soccer goal post.
Carmen makes a fresh what they call aji’
or hot sauce for them. It tastes like a
fine gezbacho to me.
We get some odd requests from potential
clients from time to time. Not really
odd were we to be living say on the
Kanapalli Coast of Maui, but here…
Glancing up from a letter written by a
family from Scottsdale, Arizona, out the
window I saw a bare foot kid with two
live chickens, their feet tethered with
either end of a blue nylon rope he had
slung over his shoulder so that as he
walked, one chicken bounced on his back,
the other on his stomach. He was passed
by an entire family of four on one
bicycle. The letter read. “We are
accustomed and accept nothing less than
five star travel, accommodations, food
etc. and wish to spend three days in the
Galapagos. What do you have to offer?”
The only five star things we have are
people and the ‘Naturalesa” (animals
etc.). The high end cruise tours might
be what they’re looking for. On the
largest and most expensive when the
people return to their rooms after the
maids have cleaned them, they find their
towels are folded into the shapes of
animals. We don’t have any towel folding
indentured servants from Columbia
working for us. We do have electricity
24/7 (generally), very clean comfortable
three star habitations run by as I
mentioned, five star people, natural
food and water. The list goes on, but
ends with “the chance to experience
something that will change your life”.
Another letter asks for the departure
times of all the morning flights leaving
Galapagos for Quito as they have a jet
to catch to Parris, France the same day.
Well, there’s the 8:20, the 9:05, 9:35,
10:15, 11:00, 11:30 and 12:30, excepting
Tuesdays and any flights scheduled
before 12:30. Normally one plane arrives
and departs here from San Cristobal
everyday, except Tuesdays which makes
Tuesdays even better than Sundays.
Speaking of planes… The Plane! The
Plane! The jets don’t live here. They
come and go with the tourists. Many
people’s work is arranged around them.
The airlines have a “schedule” but it’s
treated as a “suggestion” or a “more or
less”. These people know they don’t have
to do anything until about half an hour
after the plane arrives. Everyone knows
when the jets come in, like the ringing
of the church bells, the jets come in
flying low across the bay in front of
the Pueblo. There’s a surf break at the
head of the runway, if you’re in the
water it’s a gas to watch the pilot line
up the plane, wings tilting back and
forth, maybe a little crabbing, the
revving of the engines as they always
come in a little short and the noise,
you can see the people in the windows
waving to you. There is a limited number
of these jets that make the trip. We see
the same ones over and over. Every one
of them has either delivered or removed
a loved one from our presence a time or
two at least. I’ve begun to name them,
study their habits, like “Gorillas In
the Mist”. I’m beginning to understand
the quirks and personalities of these
mighty beasts and the cosmic forces that
pull us toward them, allow us to walk
willingly into their mouths.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Erey |
|
|
|
CST#2083876-40 |
|
|
|
