THE IKHANOSPHERE Q408
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THE IKHANOSPHERE Q408 |
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Dec 25 / Puerto Jimenez, Osa
It was one year ago today that I registered www.ikhanman.com and began to nervously imagine it and scramble with what it might look like. As I sit one year later inside a remodeled Crow's Nest where I can now cook, wash dishes, and take a hot shower, the year concluding has been a bit of a watershed. It was this year that I closed out my account with the City of Baltimore, renewed my passport, driver's license, finally got my truck legal, took a road trip up and down the spine of Central America, made two long trips to the States, and acquiesced to the next logical business aesthetic, Poder Osa, landing and fulfilling in the process two solar jobs large enough to be worthwhile. As I work today on the second of the OWW reports for my Nosara client and puzzle over the crazy quilt pattern of my life, I have the arrival of Orpheus and Aladdin to look forward to in the coming days of the new year, a renamed CafeNet El Sol in full ascendancy as a tour and travel agency, www.corcovadoguide.com netting me around two grand a month, that money stream one invented from the medium, and the water, power, and green engineering launch pads long warmed by the oxidation of rocket fuel beneath my tread, it is a put up or shut up kind of time for me, a moment that fills me not with some miserable self-satisfaction but instead with the reassuring shoulder monkey pointing out the joneses over on this side, the Pulitzer winners over there, the merely self-made nouveau riche in their retro-cosseted corners, the dutiful and exemplary fathers of satisfied children sprinkled like punctuation is not in an ee cummings poem, the exotic, hot, loyal, intelligent, longsuffering, deferent, nymphomaniac trophy wife popping up like a wack-a-mole always in my peripheral vision and vanished in direct site, and the ghosts of incarnations past humming in my ears, blowing into my nostrils, shoveling insipid Thai food and spicy Yorkshire pudding onto a jaded palate, the fear and assurance of inevitable decay that set in years ago seizing me up like a ragamuffin doll from the thirties, an expatriate anachronism marking time in just another beery backwater that this concerted destination sort of morphed into somewhere along the way.
Yet it excites, beguiles, and surprises. Yet it endears. Woe, Thor, is me.
Dec 16 / Puerto Jimenez, Osa
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Dec 15 / Puerto Jimenez, Osa
After years of bluster and threats, I have now lain out a 50% deposit on the labor and selected the tile and a work plan for the completed remodel of the Crow's Nest. What a momentous occasion. As shoes rain down on the leader of the free world and standard bearers of Wall Street investment integrity dissolve tens of billions in something so uninspirational as a little Ponzi scheme, as Obama declines any responsibility for Blago's contemptible corruption and ice immobilized New England, the Crow's Nest swells with the aroma of imagined eggs frying in butter, of the crispness of cold cucumbers and purple onions bathed in bleu cheese dressing, of water boiling for my own iced tea.
What a time!
Finished the Posada Verde report last night and have now only the Nosara report to go. Today featured a swelling influx of reservations drifting in like flotsam atop a swelling and evil tide. Mostly nickel ante today, but lots of them, perhaps $150 in miscellaneous commissions earnings and one package that will be in the $3000 range that is already settled that I just have to itemize and bill. The past few days have featured tactile obligations extending nearly to the hour where the music downstairs begins to fall off, mostly the resource evaluation, leaving me no time to ruminate, pontificate, elucidate, nor twirl my pinky around the pinkish sphincteresque whorl of my navel. I have a crew doing final electrical installations in Matapalo, another one starting up in the Crow's Nest in the morning, and I am showing properties tomorrow.
But the second report is breathing down my neck with hot breaths, and I am chomping at the bit to wax pontifical on www.osapower.com. The lightness that I feel in having made the great step in the Crow's Nest retrofit is an unlikely feeling. I had anticipated the awkward feeling of committing myself to financial burdens that were not absolutely necessary but in the aftermath of having gotten myself all wet with the doing of it, I feel the other way around: liberated by the freedom it will imply for my soul.
Now I will have a room to get a girl and go to with. How cool is that?
Dec 12 / Upper and Lower Matapalo
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The Driveway The Casa Tres Palmas 360" Pan Life's a Wave
Dec 10 / Nosara, Guanacaste Costa Rica
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Dec 09 / Posada Verde, Santa Cruz
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Dec 08 / Tamarindo
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Dec 08 / Santa Cruz
Dec 05 / Puerto Jimenez
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There is a giant invisible vortex that is whirling and pulsing, vibrating and shaking, rising and falling, that is all around and within me and it is the synchronicity of a series of sudden realizations, which despite knowing all along, only came into a kind of odd focus today:
1) The world's
economy is in tatters, and I am far from immune from the economic consequences.
2) My own semi-recent personal existential paradigm is revealed by the
mirrors to be nothing but smoke
3) My reliance on so little indemnifies any actual personal suffering, and
4) My diversification (jack of all trades, master of none) leaves me well
prepared to navigate the doldrums and keep it relatively interesting.
Maybe it is just coincidence. Last night I tried Barb's place and sat down to spectacular ribs, absolutely top-shelf. In her chatting she mentioned a plus in her new incarnation over the Jade Luna scene, and that was that she could decide to not open one day, she could do that now, whereas she could never do so with a fine dining establishment, talk of the town, with reservations and all. And tonight, guess what? She was closed. Saturday night. I guess I did not really need ribs two nights in a row, but they really were that good and the potato salad, dirty rice, and cornbread were very good as well. So I turned the newly washed Ruby Racer down to the harbor to tuck into a nice steak on the waterfront. I arrive to find one other table with three men, one of them the owner, hockey on the tube, gorgeous little waitress sitting on a bored stool, bored. Pablo, the chef meets me at the car to tell me all that they do not have. No steaks. No rib eye, no filet mignon, no Delmonico, no porterhouse, no cochinito pibil. "All I have of meat," he announces before I have even gotten out of my truck, "is hamburger."
I wound up going for the hamburger, and it was very good. They put the television on the Huckabee show on Fox. The waitress was clearly just beginning, very young, very pretty, totally incompetent. The bathroom was disorderly, not dirty, just not up to the standards of an otherwise empty restaurant in which all the employees are idle, warming their hands. And on the bill, besides doing the math wrong and overcharging me C500 they charged 13% taxes but were doing it on a store-bought receipt book, rather than on numbered receipts required when you collect government taxes. Surely, that is just an error and not a calculated tactic to clip customers and/or the government 13%, however you looked at it. Surely somebody will point out that what they are doing is a criminal offense.
Eric of ET asked me what I thought of the season, and it seems regular to me, but not to him. Unusual, his comment, like last year. Meaning that we were off. I have been too busy with solar installations to care much about the volume of tourism traffic, and while the world economy cannot help but rub up against Costa Rica's and leave an ugly bruise, lodges are full for Christmas bookings. All the hotels in town are full. It has been a brisk season for me with reservations. But I think many of the Christmas travelers had their plans mostly made or commitments before the real crash came in September.
Real estate has been flat all year long. I should have realized that the pulse I felt was symptomatic of a great sucking about to be upon us. I am probably fortunate that I landed the solar contracts when I did. While the latter one would have likely been inevitable as it was a house, the former is for a lodge, and very easily the decision to sink this huge investment into building bungalows and outfitting an eco-lodge may well have been reconsidered facing a challenged economy.
The plunge in oil prices is the coldest blade of all. For one thing the drop in oil prices that shadowed the global financial crisis by a week or two suggests that maybe oil prices are not market driven so much as price-fixed and that big brother is really out there and he is not a government but a lamprey attached to the jugular of our vitality. Second, the decline in oil prices de-incentivizes the alternative energy market at a time when I am ready to go all in on. The danger is that if both these are really true, then oil-producing nations have it within their power to hypnotize us into continued blind consumption and throw off the great advantage in public awareness and conscience that has been swelling from the ground in the past two years.
But the past two weeks with so much at stake have gone very well. Tomorrow I jump in my truck and head for Guanacaste or Chepe at a minimum. I have two days to get to my next job. That's enough time to muse over it all and make some sense out of it and suck at least the sweet part out of the fresh piece of gum. Here on the eve of the road trip, I have completed my billing, am up to date on my reservations, have Lalo four days of work assignments, finished and delivered to the painter my design for the new Osa Corcovado Tour and Travel sign, and got enough of a start published on www.osapower.com that the sign going up on Monday on the Matapalo road just past the nun's home will have a web site with at least an outline to contact. Tomorrow I will spend some more time from a hotel room, and on Monday I will have to have the girls get me another phone for the Poder Osa phone line and have the calls transferred downstairs for them to field in my absence, given the imminent emergence of that new number and business operation onto the public domain, if not necessarily imagination.
There will be some that won't like it a bit. There will be others that will get a good chuckle. But it's not either of those that I care about. It's those out there ready for new blood down here to liberate them from dependence upon the sclerotic options this past decade has spawned on the Osa. I hope that I can train a fresh light on the market and exchange fluids with its economy and exchange encomiums with the god-fount.
Nov 30 / Puerto Jimenez
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The word for the world is water. It began to rain at 11:15 p.m. last night, starting off as an unpretentious sprinkle. I had a prowler that was making mischief on my landing, tugging on the extension cord that lights up my Christmas lights, seeming intent on using it to open my jalousie windows. It was right next to my head, so the creak startled me from my sleep, and I rose and pulled the curtains back to discover a head and fingers down in the stairwell, messing around. I was unable to identify the malefactor, but I know he had black hair, so that cuts down the possible culprits to 99% of the population. By the time I could get into my shorts and downstairs, he was gone, and the mist falling was so light as to be barely describable as drizzle. Within thirty minutes, the rain came hard, and it rained all night. I awakened to discover the electricity off at six a.m. as the rain pounded outside and went back to bed to continue the reverie with my subconscious, encounters that are always pleasant for me. I finally couldn't stay in bed anymore and got up in the cold and dank to discover that it was past ten, and the light was giving off more of a seven a.m. vibe. I worked for a couple hours on battery |
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while the rain continued to pound. At noon I went to the colectivo soda for breakfast. They gave me a casado instead of a pinto, but with the eggs I ordered, and it had so many things on it that I wished I had taken my camera: rice, beans, picadillo of palmito, salad, fried sweet banana, boiled plantane, two eggs fried easy, three slices of baguette bread, and a bowl of mondongo, which for those of you that are not up to snuff on your Spanish language organ dishes, is tripe soup. Mondongo is considered a cure for hangovers, so it was perhaps not a bad choice for Sunday morning. To me it tasted about as I imagined the last meal of the cow it came from tasted after digesting for a while. That is to say, not so wonderful. I had the news that three cars were drowned in the Carbonera River, one of them the El Remanso Lodge pickup truck, which was apparently dragged away and rolled or otherwise seriously compromised. The driver of that truck is a young kid that always speeds around town and is a hazard to the public, and I have never been able to understand how the lodge ownership can put so many people in danger by permitting this young kid to drive their truck. Perhaps they just don't know about how reckless and dangerous a driver he is. Well, they do now, and nobody was hurt in learning the lesson, other than a brand new Toyota king cab pickup getting its shiny new finish rubbed around a bit in the mud and grid and sand of the world.
At 4:30 it is still raining. If it rains tonight, we will have to blow off our job start tomorrow in Matapalo. For video of the scene from the landing of the crow's nest, click here. Have set up a link exchange with Odel, the park ranger in charge of reservations. His Corcovado blog is not an official site of the park, but it is cool and dovetails well with the effort behind Corcovado Guide.
Nov 29 / Puerto Jimenez
A glimpse of the new road base, video taken just this side of the Conte River.
Nov 28 / Puerto Jimenez
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Wrapped up Villas Laguna Vista yesterday, full 2.8 kilowatts of charging source, 3.5 kilowatts of power at all times, 840 amp-hour battery bank, power distribution to one house and five cabins. Today visited the Life's a Wave home in Matapalo to make final arrangements for our job start there on Monday and waded into unanticipated wiring job to pick up which a prior contractor was unwilling or unable to unwilling to complete. Wrote the Paco Sanchez introductory scene and have been mulling over the Padre Pedro and Klondike Sutter introductions. It is not a very savory and empathetic bunch, but I think there is conflict and rising action, and I think the epiphany is going to have the requisite qualities. Reservations continue apace, and my email space is a multi-lane thoroughfare with inbound and outbound traffic from five or so very active domains and another fifteen domains that get a little traffic. I am no longer able to responsibly manage my correspondence and do anything else. My approach is to reply to everything in the instant except for complicated things that I flag, and if I fail to reply to any of the routine requests at first receipt, my likelihood of coming back to it--unless flagged--is remote. At least I do not yet consider email the problem. Boy that would be a cynical assessment of where the world is. I definitely love email. I also love this particular machine. The brand new laptop that I bought as a replacement is just sitting on the filing cabinet, unopened and unused. And Office Depot has not sent me my rebate yet, either.
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Nov 22 / Puerto Jimenez
Today was one of small progress in paperwork and correspondence. I also got the home energy analysis for Gene completed and remitted. Nice to have a lingering box to check off and move on. The sonic companionship of the Juanita's sound system has stretched the fabric of the hammock holding Juanita's and me in a precarious perch over the Puerto Jimenez street. I live with it in its senseless rise and fall in decibels and genre. It is the latin-techno thrumming at full volume that sets off inside me a sharp-clawed animal eager to get out. Then it subsides and occasionally an accidental brush with musical taste sends the unusual surprise up through the floor and into my domain. In the quietus I can imagine again my cohabitation with an entity with its own manners and rules, a basic paradigm against which I am the truly odd-man out. Maybe the realization will assist in a pragmatic acceptance of occasionally intolerably loud music from downstairs.
November 21, 2008
Puerto Jimenez
The most ethical and gratifying of earnings are also the easiest: savings.
I don't know why it has taken 47 years to figure that out, but the realization grows out of the pirouettes that I am required to perform for an $18 routine commission, an amount I spend at a dinner out without batting an eye. Maybe if rather than live in my office I tried to support a house or paid rent and utilities and lived somewhere, I would be less cavalier about dinner expenses. But dinner is the least of it. Regularly I blow through hundreds of dollars in daily business costs, pealing out currency to pay bills and tapping in a king's ransom every day in online payments. There is an accumulation of savings beneath a wall of parsimony and a groundswell of economy against which even sudden reversals in revenues cannot succeed in reducing me to tatters. There is a level at which personal discipline can keep a crippled boat afloat. A great preoccupation with coin grew today from the bank's mistaken revocation of my credit card affiliation status, which enables me to process payments within 24 hours. It all turned out to be a mistake, and I was able to get it restored, as the bank's move was targeted at new businesses and the threat of fraud rather than businesses that have been historically served by this particular service. A change that I requested a couple months ago flagged me mistakenly as belonging to a separate, doomed category, as it turns out. I marched right down to the bank moments after learning and was not made to wait long before being granted an audience with the bank manager, the top dog. I had no expectation of actually reaching an acceptable resolution and was steeled for the finality of "no, and don't ask again," and so it was quite a nice surprise when I walked out with everything reinstated, my world suddenly whole again. When it is all taken away in one fell swoop, it makes you think of how important the small things are. Like Baby David used to point out: "There's a lot of money in quarters."
Dropped Lalo and his brother at Agujas to start the chop and took the Torphies up for a glimpse of that terrain before taking them over to see the Canaza garden lot and then the five hecs of maritime there. Back in town I did the milestone billing at Villa Vista and paid deposit and cable to get us underway for a Tuesday start. Will be staying at Playa Lapa in exchange for a complete shining up of the whole electrical system there. On tap for Matapalo the Monday following and will be headed to Samarra and Guanacaste to do two resource evaluations for the same client on December 9. The filtration equipment hit Miami, leaving only the Sunfrost remaining for this shipment of goods. Dmitry comes by tomorrow to possibly purchase batteries to add on, and then we will get the next shipment into the waters. Reservations and inquiries are the punctuation of the grammar of my quotidian drill. I have built, and they have come. The number of inquiries for one specific place is astounding. www.soldeosa.com/jademar is hands down the most solicited hotel that I carry. I only added it to the stable in late September, and the flood of inquiries is relentless. People also like www.jimenezhotels.com/cabinasmarcelina. Out of all the choices in Jim Town, it is this one that the people most identify with. . . Not sure what it means, but I continue to provide.
It would appear an insanity to be writing fiction, or writing at fiction. I am working tonight on Gato Mazantas, having carved out Beatriz Panuto the other night. I think the idea is about novella in length. A day in the life of 1980 vintage Dos Brazos. I guess we'll see if the idea gels or has merit. It is a pretty bleak picture, and I would want to wipe away the world's bleakness ideally, certainly not draw it into focus and develop it beyond an amorphous image into its crystalline essence. Well, can anybody do that anyway? Writing the scenes, however fruitful or relevant to anything else, have the unhappy result of making me feel good. It reminds me of a jogger's masochism in search of an endorphin fix. Like running, writing fiction is a presumptively harmless activity, so if it makes me feel good I should probably do it, despite any potential shelf-life issues it may have or commercial vacuum that it may create as if by mere rumor.
In the windup to the high season, the tempo of all things is on a gentle rise, the stakes unknown as always, like those of life itself. Everything is on the edge of its imagined self, and the dreams that parade through the nights are tense with curiosity and humor. The dead never arise in my dreams, there is never a different president than the real one, and the subject is always the same person, me, and I often wonder if there might actually be more rules and boundary conditions in my subconscious than within the real and fickle world at large.
I should be so fortunate.
November 19, 2008
Puerto Jimenez
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Cansancio is such a better word than its Anglo-Saxon equivalent, exhaustion. They are not equivalent, though. Days like these are special and like special vintages must be savored with dignified appreciation. The solar shipment hit the Cradle of Western Civilization around 8:15 this morning. I had been up since 6:30 and had gotten the unusually low number of reservations correspondence tended. Lalo and I unloaded and then the jupones showed up, and everything that was supposed to be there was present and accounted for. This strikes me as little short of amazing. Nearly $30,000 in wholesale equipment originating from Florida, New York, Colorado, and Alabama converged through first Miami, then San Jose, show up in a truck in Puerto Jimenez, everything in place.
Terrapin had been dead, no power for more than one month due to both bad batteries and a problem with the pelton wheel. At four-thirty in the afternoon as the first clients of the season rolled into the first yard, we got the power back up and running, the pelton, a new charge controller, new batteries, not a moment too soon as the next guests arrive tomorrow and the ones after that two days later, not counting walk-ins. The closeness leaves me with a strange feeling, like I barely dodged a dull instrument of blunt force. Whew! It did not save me from being be-friended by that rogue lapa at the lodge that is my begrudged namesake.
We dropped the batteries, inverter, and controllers at Villas Laguna Vista. It was all asses and elbows among a crew of 22 men working seven days a week and until ten p.m. nightly. It was like entering a kind of warp and into somebody's bizarre dream, five cabins in various states of completion, twenty days until the contracted completion date for the contractor, the first paying guests booked for a few days later. It looks like a wellspring of concern. Our job is important but very minor in scope compared to the job of the builder and the job of Kenya in getting it all ready.
At Playa Lapa the world was tranquil and serene, the gardens groomed, the entranceway inviting, the home welcoming and clean, drapes and coverings over the furniture, the power system brimming. The satellite dish was gone, and I can only assume that the company took it down when I had the service disconnected. But it is strange. Playa Lapa owns that dish. And today it is not there.
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November 16, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim Town, Costa Rica
Boy, I really hate getting up early. I really do. I don't dislike it. I hate it. I fear it. It makes me change. The obligation to rise early hurts me. I should just learn this lesson and not put myself in the odious position. I must study on this. In all candor I went about it well. I got to bed before eleven last night, had a decent supper, slept well, had an employee's mother scheduled to call me at 5:30. I normally take my watch off at night, or anytime I am seated at my desk and feel it touching my skin. Last night I put it back on and pushed the button to make sure it still lights up. All systems go. I first awakened at 4:00 a.m. Way too early, and I slept until 4:30. After that I zoned in and out in ten minute intervals, miserable in the deprivation of Morpheus's nourishment. By the time my call came in at 5:20, I called it a night and brewed coffee. I had everything lain out and ready from last night but then remembered my passport, as last time I had a close call in Golfito with an immigrations officer on a routine boat check when I was not carrying mine. It turned up missing, and by the time I found it (right where it was supposed to be and overlooked on first inspection) I was five minutes late out the door and reached the pier at 5:45 just in time to watch the boat that I had intended to catch pick up speed in its burbling burst across the placid gulf. So I board the six a.m. launch and sip my coffee and read as the boat boards, reclusive behind the two layers of separation ensured by the dark shades of my lenses and the barrier of the book opened before my nose. I am in Why the Caged Bird Sings, a first rate narrative with a rich and evocative use of language that just knocks my socks off. I felt great all the way over, the disrupted sleep like so much water off a duck's back.
The client was waiting for me, and we dismissed the hour as too early for breakfast and went straight out to the property to see the water. It was burbling up out of the ground as a beautiful little spring, very picturesque, just welling up from the ground and draining through a couple meanders to empty into the edge of a swamp of about 20 acres all covered in verdant grasses, large enough to support a modest fish farm. Then we went and saw the building site. He showed me where the road was to go and we walked out to the knoll and looked out over the lowlands and the small zinc-roofed hamlet of Purruja, which translates to "mosquito" for those of you curious, and beyond to admire the placid waters of the tranquil gulf and the low-lying mystery of the distant Osa mountains, the jailor of my heart. We talked it all over. I estimated that the spring capture with pump and piping and a home pressurization system up top would probably be in the range of $7500, approximately the same amount as putting in a shallow well much closer down in the bowl where the all the water was, and that a well up on top would probably be around the same maybe as much as $10,000, equipment extra, say another $3000. As always I pitched rainfall capture as worthy of consideration but could tell that it did not make much of an impression. The idea of solar power alternative was not particularly persuasive either. Next we went and saw a civil engineer that does house plans and permits, and I sat down and helped the landowner through the meeting with the language. I hate that sort of thing and was very proud at how well I hid my real feelings and simply helped out, graciously, rather than tossing my head and sighing painfully and all that other novel of body language that I like to compose every time I am asked or expected to translate. I did the whole thing as a courtesy and did not charge the guy a penny. I had to wait only a half hour or so before the boat headed out across the gulf again. My only expense: four hours of time and $8 in transport.
I began to nod on the way back and to feel the weight of my unfulfilled slumber. Back in the nest there was the onslaught of emails, reservations mostly, and a singularly bad piece of unwelcome news. My shipment was still not posted to allow me to pay the taxes and ship down from San Jose. I have guests arriving on Thursday at Terrapin, and if I do not get the shipment before then, there will be no power, and I will be in an awkward position. This intelligence mixed with my sleepiness to propel me into an evil demeanor. With Kati in the hospital in labor, her replacement was running the show and despite weeks of training was falling down on a few basic things, asking for help. I let as little of my black foulness out from around the edges as possible in helping her, and then tomorrow's tour clients showed up, and when my second-tier guide made it in (Rodolfo is in the park on a three day expedition), he seemed to have forgotten everything we went over yesterday. I bit my tongue to keep from saying the wrong thing and him walking off in an offended huff and managed to pull it off and got the clients readied, the guide readied, the CafeNet problems resolved, the emails answered. I got my altimeter battery replaced and dropped off my empty plastic gallon tea container at Ara's house as well as my dirty clothes and returned to the Nest to close the drapes, lock the door, turn down the volume to exclude IM bloops and turn off the ringer of my phone to settle into an ugly little sweaty sun-streamed afternoon nap. I got an hour into it when my cell rang, and it was the Golfito client, wanting to go over with me the quote he had on the driveway, asking my thoughts on it. Amazingly, I was able to push off everything I was feeling foul about and chatted with him and by the time I lay back, I could hear Aracelly's footsteps on the landing bearing my tea and decided to give it up.
Then Lalo arrived an hour later to inform me that the drip gallery was high and dry, not producing water, and that was certainly unwelcome, surprising, and very bad news, leaving me wondering what we are going to do to get Gorgeous George's world class Matapalo home on a water supply that will be robust enough in the dry months ahead. I never caught up on the sleep and am at this writing still not a particularly happy camper. I chose to be reassured by my broker's assurances that the shipment would be released and placed on a truck tomorrow, but deep down inside I realize that it is a decision to push off the concern rather than a source of genuine reassurance. There is no more assurance that I will get those batteries in time to make all my deadlines fall into place than there is that it will or will not rain tonight.
But the worst that could happen is not very bad since I could shift them over to Playa Lapa and provide the owners with unanticipated revenues for a few days as needed or book the Terrapin people at another lodge or at the very worst refund their deposit. So, the sky is not falling. If I had had a good night's sleep last night it would probably not even be slipping.
I have got to quit making commitments early in the morning.
November 14, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim Town, Costa Rica
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The evidence of last night's rain lay in the swollen remnants of the rushing streams in the falling stage of the hydrograph, the drainage pouring in rivulets down the middle of the road, by the debris broken from overhanging trees and littered atop the wet gravel and clogging puddles, by even a pronounced change in the actual course of the river before the Carbonera school. Up at the job site the drip gallery had a curtain of water draped across the newly violated sanctity of the sealed tunnel, the access hole hewn as if from the face of the cliff by the superiority of tempered steel and the determination of man. The ephemeral flow beside it was a waterfall again, and in the buried spring down below, the second intake area, water brimmed from every bedding plane, flowed from all the fracture traces, welled up from below and poured down from above. The whole bowl was a giant diffuse spring, sparkling with the vigor of the rainy season, feeling its oats under the atmosphere's steady blessings, a far cry from the parsimony that will check its begrudged April trickles. Back in town a sameness rose like an impulsive date who it would be improper to ditch and adhered to the surfaces of the Crow's Nest like a blurred smear from a misting of oil upon a ceramic tile. The burble and glee of a Friday evening danced in the streets and the parrots in their twilight passage were propelled to louder cries, competing with the townsfolk to see who could be happiest |
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about the culmination of another hard day of work. It is a measure of psychic abstraction that grips me with the indolence of an oppressive torpor. Where I am and my identity have become jumbled into a strange mixture that may not best serve me in what remains of the mission. . .whatever that might be. Too good to be true, the merchandise was not liberated today as expected, and likewise the for-sure buyer of Juanita's wrote today to inquire about "lease to own" options and admitting to being "down" about his circumstances of having to borrow money to capitalize the pittance of his retirement dreams. I am converted in my availability and willingness to correspond into a sounding board and an echo chamber for the fantasies of a whole class of first-world citizenry locked into their first-world automaton lives but able to look out into a garden that I inhabit, a garden that unimaginable to many of them, is as fraught with disappointment and unfulfilled wholeness as the meshing of cogs in the mechanistic and well-oiled machinery of their societies and their livelihoods and the panoply of their quotidian surroundings. |
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November 13, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim Town, Costa Rica
November 12, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim Town, Costa Rica
Today I met the forest, and it owned me. Today I met the forest, and the forest made me its bitch. Today I met the forest and she was so happy to see me that I fell down through dried brambles of a falling tree to stir up the nest of ants living beneath the brush, allowing me to get intimate with the forest's dirt under all that firewood. Today I met the forest and felt myself as a walrus might in its awkward skip through a congested forest along a slippery slope beneath a sun sliding into the pale-yellow of high afternoon. I came out of my shirt and extricated myself up out of the momentary prison of decaying wood, careful not to mistake rotten handholds for solid ones, careful to distinguish between branches and snakes. Back on top I had to think a minute about what I was doing. For there I was, fifteen feet above the ground in a jungle-gym of decaying wood from two trees that had fallen, my boots offering as reasonable a grip on wet mossy moldy decaying wood as could reasonably be expected. A slip could be theoretically fatal. I could break my leg and face the humiliation of having to be rescued. I could fall on a jagged branch and pierce my femoral artery, or heaven forbid: my aorta or jugular (wouldn't that be a pain in the neck). I could come face to face with a bushmaster, with no wiggle room, nothing to do but fight an animal whose only form of self defense is killing whatever threatens it. I could reach into a nest of bullet ants or discover a swarm of hornets and have no room for retreat, no dignity with which to salve the stings.
But the worst thing was I got all sweaty and itchy and hot and got that feeling like a walrus in the forest and the next thing you know, Lalo and I were there, at the intake that I came out to inspect in September and even reported about in these pages. Nothing like a couple months of torrential rain to change the landscape a bit. We took quick stock of what he needed to return to do tomorrow and planted the shovel we had brought in. It's a four day maintenance job, clean out the drip gallery and buried spring intakes, re-plumb to the mainline, remove eight years of tico-isms and then clean the tank and shock everything with bleach and smoke test it.
I have been corresponding tonight with another hot and heavy Juanita's buyer. That makes three people in talks at the moment. Reservations have been a continuous flow all day long in and out, back and forth, a few payments, a few offers, a few calls, a new guided tour request for Corcovado. And it is not until now that I can open news for the first time in all of today (it's nearing 7:00 p.m.) and see what is up in Obama Nation and what happened in the stock market and delight in the confused opinions of the commentariat, which has not by any stretch of the imagination come anywhere close to a conception of what happened to them, us, the nation, and the world on November 4th.
It is a beautiful thing to watch.
November 11, 2008
Agujas Watershed, Osa Peninsula
A little video of a ride down a driveway of a finca that I am watching.
November 10, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim Town, Costa Rica
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With military precision my day marched beneath Apollo's punished chariot race across the heavens. A whole panoply of shady characters lined the staircase today to find their way up into the struggling chill of the Crow's Nest's temperate simulacrum. Amazingly the news was all good, the promises hopeful, the deals favorable, the moods uplifted, the conflicts minor and amenable to the cornucopia of goodwill that I am able to bring back to returns to this fold. By Wednesday I may be as surly and churlish as the most slippery and dastardly of backsliding blackguards but for now I am the world's ally, the agent of possibility, the maven of maybe, the patriarch of the probable, the cathode of the battery, the very mewl of the contented siren, happy to be alive and on planet earth, delighted to be back in the saddle of personal responsibility. I hired back Lalo, saved one client $600 in legal fees, paid Emiliano's phone bill and hopefully bought a token of complacency and a short measure of ephemeral and fleeting loyalty, set up an appointment with the highway engineer to go and negotiate terms about straightening out the highway into a client's property that I am managing (can you spell N-O D-E-A-L?) huddled with my sign painter for the make-over of CafeNet El Sol into Osa Corcovado Tour and Travel |
(www.osacorcovado.com) and the emergence of Osa Power, i.e. Poder Osa from the great vacuum, like Aphrodite emerging from the Old Briney on the tongue of an oyster. Out of bed by six thirty, my Corcovado clients are all set for their three-day tour tomorrow, and I am fully abreast of all the petty little rumors and minor little power struggles on the streets of Jim Town here in the Cradle of Western Civilization. Back in Obama Nation, everyone seems to still be pinching themselves, and I hear nothing that I dislike emerging from the rumor mills that propagate on the periphery of the pillars of power back there in that churning society that I so love to watch from afar.
Tomorrow I have my great date with the forest. Tomorrow I break a sweat. Tomorrow I gain a beachhead on my ponderous tool shed. Tomorrow I work for it. For tonight, I am thinking possibly pizza or fried chicken. Tee hee.
November 7, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim Town, Costa Rica
Two hundred and six pounds. I knew I had padded the beltline in my electoral exile, but twelve pounds? I press up against my clothing and spill over in places, and I have taken on that quintessential American essence and enfolded myself in it. I have gotten fat. My cholesterol is probably all the bad kind, and when I think of the salt that moves through me I imagine my poor little capillaries brittle and worn, stretched beyond any imaginable semblance of reasonable use. I probably have a pronounced and prominent prostate, and likely a licked and deliquescent liver, sclerosing arterial matter, venal vanity, Kid Rock kidneys, carcinoma in my lymphoma, sepsis in my testes, Youngzheimer's or perhaps middlezheimer's but surely not yet Alzheimer's, a diabetic dialectic, rumors of tumors, and whispers of blisters all comprising this fragile shell enfolding your Humble Correspondent and Old Buddy. 206 pounds of pure protoplasm. That's thirty pounds over a lean and mean fighting weight for me, thirty pounds that may well form the foundation of another couple folds of the American essence to spill out over the waist band in a more friendly and jovial manner. If I am buying clothing with 38-inch waistline, what is the difference, really, to shoot up to a happier 44-inch orbit? I am in obvious need of a date with the forest.
After six weeks my return to the nest in this new Obama era is loaded with lead and floated with helium. The centrifugal and centripetal forces seem to balance out and the energy balance hugs the fulcrum. There is a giant fertile yawn in the streets of town. The air is clearly pregnant and brimming with wealth. The town is drinking it in as the season builds, and it will take a lot of revenues before the dew point is reached and the season's cash flow begins to rain down across the town as a whole. I feel like I am clearly raining quite a lot, spreading the wealth all over hell's half-acres as it were.
November 6, 2008
Dunn Inn, San Jose, Costa Rica
Still occupying a vibrant bubble of manifest idealism on the heels of America's transcendental choice on Tuesday. My take on the mandate and the mood of now: America Wins. Knocking back San Jose errands, I'll make final rounds tomorrow and will fly back to the Cradle on Saturday. It is so great to be back in Costa Rica, caressed by the vibrant sun, tickled by the laughing breezes, the susurrant songs of wheels whirring across wet blacktop, vapor clouds towering like lugubrious phantom keeps marching across the sky. The streets live with the hum and buzz of a hurried humanity, everybody with his or her little schedule, the working clothes on, pressed and neat, the umbrella handy, another onslaught of urban living in the big city. I cannot get enough of it and am thankful for the great trip to the motherland and even more grateful for my blissful return home.
November 1, 2008
Brodey Bend, Arkansas
Back from Camden and a spirited Halloween. Mom's husband had a mini-stroke and would not be happy until he convinced me to become a Republican and vote for McCain. I asked Mom if she had candy for kiddies and she screwed up her nose in disapproval, reminding me that it is a pagan holiday, unbecoming for a good Christian to acknowledge or tolerate. She had candy if kiddies showed up, she owned. Hopefully they would stay away and leave it for us. But the real fright was within the household and held court all night long. I wonder if my heathen liberal ungodliness does not hurt Henry, if I may not have been a partial cause of the stroke. This morning his pastor came over and was able to convince him to accompany them to the hospital. All reports are that it was minor and he is nearly back to normal. Orpheus and I beat a retreat back to the river, a day early. It is kind of odd thinking about it all and my place in the world. I don't think I should plan to go and visit my mother any time soon, least while her latest husband is still around. I don't think I am good for him.
November 4, 2008
Little Rock, Arkansas
October 30, 2008
Dad's House, Arkansas River Banks, Jefferson County, Arkansas, USA
Orpheus is here, and tonight we had a fine dinner and watched Ace and Dan get voted off of Survivor. Tomorrow Big O and I head down to Camden to visit Grandma Margaret. I am done with holding out hope. I am calling the race: Change I Can Believe In!
October 30, 2008
Dad's House, Arkansas River Banks, Jefferson County, Arkansas, USA
Business perspective: Wal Mart meets Sun Myung Moon. A plan for global commercial domination: Green-Go Industries.
October 25, 2008
Little Rock, Arkansas
Winky's driveway: Searcy County, off Hwy 65, near the Buffalo River
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