THE IKHANOSPHERE APRIL 2009
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THE IKHANOSPHERE APRIL 2009 |
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Apr 30: Puerto Jimenez, Crow's Nest
Perhaps I need a part of this site password-protected where I can speak freely.
Perhaps to normal people it is self-evident that you cannot speak freely at will without great consequence occasionally for better, often for worst. Surely it can't be any different on ikhanman than it is on Huff Po or anywhere else in virtually real time: the things closest and most meaningful to me are too tender for a public baptism. Years and months down the road, fair game surely. In our society such a change ha-s come that the sensations come in from all quarters and spawn a kind of sentient dementia in me, a sort of Euclidean chaos in which the giant dust storm rising off the American heartland as if from Kansas in Technicolor is real and both too grand and too virginal to be able to make any conclusion other than that it was about damned time!
I awakened this morning in Uvita and will sleep in the Crow's Nest. Yesterday I awakened in San Jose to the dull throbbing news that Dan was not coming. I was not going to be able to retrieve him upon his arrival and whip through the streets of the capital with a brazen assortment of restaurant and bar accessories and construction site leftovers, that we were not going to be able to revisit in the cycles' serpentine weave a kind of origin for us, not an original one, but an important one in the theoretical and epistemological foundation of our friendship. The news was stunning, and surrounding me appeared a musical chord that hung in the air. It was an E minor, all lugubrious and Edgar-Allen-Poe-ish in its thematic resonance, and it was like the universe had shifted, not good, not bad, not indifferent, just broodingly into a different place whereupon the complement of notes shifted into a sadly felicitous A minor seventh chord.
By tomorrow I may be all the way around the bend to D major seventh. Back home the rollout of Juanita's hangs like low-lying rain clouds, black over the town, threatening its moisture upon everyone. Here on the eve of tomorrow's pagan holiday, appropriated by the Communists as Labor Day, the town looks inward toward that pink husk where before a more primal beast rose. Beyond its newly painted bars, there is the inescapable awareness that the beast walking around and mewling in the unseen room next door is not a primal one but a sprite of bacchanalian sophistication, a geist of impudent genius, a purveyor of a Thalean dialectic of trans-somatic absorbic transcendalisticism in a brave new era of euphemistic wander-bluster.
From those about to die, we salute you!
April 28: San Jose, Dunn Inn
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April 27: Dominical
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April 26: Dominical
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April 25: Dominical
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April 24: Dominical
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Apr 23 / Dominical
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Couples and groups pass by in either direction speaking various languages, many oddly garbed. A stage has been erected on the beach, and it is rumored that live music is to arrive soon. The breakers roar, and a line of fishing boats twinkle on the horizon. They are fixed on the surface of the ocean, but by morning they will be gone, at least if the last two nights are any harbinger. There is probably more marijuana being smoked within a 500 meter radius of me than along the whole of the San Vito / Coto Brus corridor. If you can't beat 'em, I always figured. . .
We are 85 meters out of 725 total distance, buried. The rain came around one on the mountain, and we had to stop. If the rain will hold off we can move fast. If it rains we're sucking. We are putting cable one meter deep down the very center of a private driveway. We have transformers to install on either end of the cable run. We are delivering grid power to a home in the forest, free of power lines. It is very steep, and the soil is red clay. We have a backhoe, and the road was just recently finished. It is one of those exactly opposite of proper order type of circumstances.
All material is as of today on site, and this afternoon we hit our stride, and tomorrow looks to be a ferocious day, but not if it rains. Back home the painting, I am told, is mostly finished, the kitchen in the process of reconstituting, the tables assembling themselves, and tomorrow, with a power outage announced until one thirty, the girls are throwing their energies toward a clean up and organization of Dan's new house.
I do not want to blink for fear I might miss it. We are moving already at the speed of life and I smile into grinning universe swirling and whorling, cascading and cavorting, lumbering and sprinting steadily and forever by. Damn it feels good to be!
Apr 22 / Dominical
Osa Water Works Dominical Beach field bunkhouse and headquarters
Apr 20 / Pto. Jimenez
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Apr 19 / Pto Jimenez
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Apr 18 / Pto Jimenez
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It felt like a good day; it felt productive. After all: 1) tile in the main room is 75% done; 2) ceiling painting is 70% done; 3) wiring is 70% done; 4) demolished the booth row in the Morgan Room; and 5) cut our teeth on the painting style in the morgan room.
Not sure if the orange and lime green accents on a pastel yellow base quite cuts it, but it is done now and moved pretty well. I have a color pattern planned for the remainder of the walls and security grates and kitchen shelving racks, and I have the paint to do it. All are scheduled to be back tomorrow except for lovely Aracelly. Tomorrow we should be able to finish the tile in the main room, and the painting in the other rooms and complete the wiring and get the sink base fabricated, perhaps complete the sink installation. It leaves for Monday demolition of the knee wall and painting the main room. I might be able to open the bar for business as early as Tuesday, the day I leave for Uvita. Not sure if that is such a good idea.
Apr 17 / Pto. Jimenez
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Today was a hump day of sorts. On Tuesday Cuco moved out. On Wednesday we stripped Juanita's to the bone and moved it all next door. On Thursday we tiled the kitchen. Today we painted, scraped, wired, welded, and raised the main restaurant floor with concrete. Tomorrow we continue to paint and tile the main floor, bringing it to the level of the second floor. Perhaps tomorrow we go ahead and take down the knee wall separating the two and slap a lot of paint. I will commit to the number of chairs and a table arrangement and work out the contract on the table fabrication. I have the wood, at least the surface wood, so the investment is in skilled labor, not materials. The transformation is going to be dramatic.
Cuco did two arguably good things in his tenure. Mainly, he eliminated the liquor cabinet and pushed the beer cooler backward into that space, leaving more room behind the bar. A net favorable also is the closing off of the far corner into additional space behind the bar. Not sure if the bar space conversion is a net positive but when the added corner bar and five seats are added in it is at least not a net loss. Everything else that Cuco did infrastructurally was either panty-waisted or garishly faux big bidneth aspirations.
I now have a bartender, a chef, and tomorrow I interview a cook's helper and a waitress, the former recruited by the chef, the latter recruited by me. I thought I would lose it this morning with my floating tradesman, identity obscure to all but who might know my crowd and speak my language, but in the end he pulled through like a trooper, and if he does the same tomorrow, it may offset any slimy drips that fall off his ethanol halo even the earliest hours of the morning. His step-brother speculates that there is a bottle kept at bedside.
At three a.m. a sedan plowed into the Tigre River embankment where the new bridge is in process, one dead, one critical, and two with a second-tier story. Welcome high-speed hazards. The roads have never been dangerous before, and the people are not accustomed to the high-speed traffic, and when it is paved there are likely to be a spate of individual tragedies as the town makes its cultural acclimation to the arrival of the high-speed universe. As the first Internet Cafe and still the purveyor of the greatest bandwidth on the peninsula, I am part of this curious problem.
As Doug celebrates his new gainfulness and I celebrate the preternatural affinity of the new President of the United States for his job, I bow at the devotion of the CafeNet sisters, Lalo, and my friend, Erick Lam, and at the remarkable flow in an era of ebbs. With Dan on his way to Paradise, there is a sense of the inevitablein the rise of Juanita's. It is less dramatic than the phoenix but more stable, like part of a continuum that will not be denied.
In other pressing events, the transformers for the Uvita job were completed, the cable sourced, a hefty deposit received, transport scheduled, a house on the beach reserved, a backhoe on stand-by, three peons sourced, and the A-Team edging closer daily to a Monday deployment to our high-voltage destination.
'If you don't like the heat,' I have heard it advised, 'then get out of the kitchen.' I guess I like it a little hot.
Apr 13 / Pto Jimenez
My Juanita's tenant pulled a prest-o change-o on me yesterday and upped his exit date by one month, leaving me with two days notice on Juanita's. The States' Trooper confirmed a late April reservation block, and Juanita's may never know what hit it. I am keeping it under wraps, so remember, kind readership: sssh. Mum's the word. Beyond that I cannot expound on the deeds of the day as they all involve top secrets of state that must unhappily remain under wraps until the necessary things that they protect come to pass or punt.
The return to Madhuvan is now carved in legal tender, sown upon the land like winter wheat at the first frost. The job there is eclectic and touches upon far reaches of unusual realms of resource management and is like a globe hovering in a trapezoidal world, like a major seventh resonance piercing a malevolent fusion of asynchronous harmonics. We will see what the ambiance proves to be on the Dominical install next week, but I cannot complain of how it went in Palmichal, and it is all part of the adventure to work it out along the way.
And tomorrow is an inventory review and settlement negotiations on Juanita's, a ground-zero reckoning, an odd occasion in a parallel universe. How fortunate I am.
Apr 11 / Crow's Nest
There is a current sashaying through the air of paradise, a taciturn contentment, a reflective fait accompli, the deed done but the memory tumbling across the rocks of time in a cascade of oppressive concupiscence and self-conscious omniscience. In the world all around the possible motives of human decency appear dated with shallow motives bouncing around like pin balls looking for a seat in the 200 point hole, or marbles rolling around on the great Chinese checkerboard of the sky.
Tonight I made chicken curry, sautéing boneless strips of chicken breast in a rub of classified composition, the golden nuggets folded gently into a goulash of sautéed carrots, onions, green peppers, garlic, raisins, shredded coconut, and mixed nuts. I cut one half a jar of dry curry, a can of coconut milk, and a half cup of sugar, served over rice with steamed green beans and carrots and left over apple pie for dessert. Dad has pulled a CD compiled by Grant of family photos from its abiding repose inside his bag to bring onto the Crow's Nest stage an evocation that is a bit haunting, reminding me of my own commitment to digitize all my old photos.
Mom reports a passport in hand, one foot on the jet way, Dad has eleven days remaining in this torpid paradise, Orpheus has invited me to his May 16 graduation in Baltimore, Dan is coincidentally in Baltimore as well, checking fares for a return to a primal toe-hold in a primitive paradise, and the Khan Man shields his eyes from the sun's terrible clarity to examine the remains of the dawn.
Apr 10 / The Crow's Nest
What could possibly be "good" about Good Friday? Isn't this the day they wacked Jesus? Is it "good" because it took his death to allow for his resurrection to permit the birth of the world's most newly virulent and rapacious religion? Perhaps that's why it's "good."
Full on seared tuna steak, home fries, steamed cauliflower, and home-made apple pie, Dad and I watched Slumdog Millionaire. I hooked up the flat screen and my speaker set, dimmed the lights, and we sat in armchairs and descended into the sensorial bombardment of the film. I bought it and The Watchmen off an ambulatory video hawker a couple weeks ago, but Watchmen is in Spanish. Erick had it, and the crew half watched it in Palmichal.
It looks like Osa Water Works is headed back to Madhuvan in May for an installation of: four solar panels, one 240-volt inverter adaptor, 1 horsepower submersible pump, hydraulic connection between two existing springs, pipeline, buried power cables, and perhaps a step up/down transformer couplet to attenuate the line losses on that 620 meter cable run from their Stream Engine up to the power center in number 10 cable. I will get my chance to finally outfit the pelton assembly with dual hydraulic hoses.
The Rana Azul deployment was like a dream interlude, a balloon above a character's head, a flashback or flash forward, a blurry sequence of order and rhythm, a gentling of the chaos, a step into the void. It was not so romantic and mythic as all that but we came in ahead of schedule and somewhere within the ballpark of the budget on a project that had four job sites scattered across rugged, poorly connected country. The radios and trucks were equalizers of entropy, tamers of the wilderness, and my crew of four foremen were like the four aces in a deck of cards, each leading its suit of laborers toward a goal. One week ago today, I thought it was Thursday and that I had five full days in which to tie four goals into a unified whole integer of completion. And when I learned that it was not Thursday but Friday, I went back through the days in my mind and the nights and was unable to disentangle the day that I lost. I let it go after failing and went back again but never was able to bracket the continuum into its standard neat days of demarcation. And after finishing the work and packing everything up and returning nine hours in time and six thousand feet in elevation and miles of anxious tarmac and more than a few officers of the law along the way from the brisk cloud forests of quetzal country to the sordid lethargy of the littoral tropical steam garden of Puerto Jimenez, the whole is like a dream sequence in which the return to reality is to a changed reality, to a whole new deal.
It would be a perfectly fitting time to fall like a doting buffoon in love. I don't remember anymore what that is like, only that it makes everything else seem inconsequential and small.
Apr 07 / Palmichal de Acosta
Video: The completed OWW infiltration gallery
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Apr 06 / Palmichal de Acosta
Video: Infiltration gallery in progress
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Apr 05 / Santa Ana
Video: My City My Life
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Apr 04 / Palmichal de Acosta
Video: The nightly symphony in our little house in the coffee field.
On the sixth day of our deployment, the boys are in town cruising chicks at the locally infamous La Sapa Bar, and I am holding the fort down and cooking the rice. I made a new pot of beans this afternoon, but rice makes my nerve endings tingle. I am doing it the tico way. You briefly fry onions, sweet pepper, and optional garlic (don't even ask, you know that for me garlic is never optional), then throw in the rice and let it semi-fry a bit, then cover it with about one third inch of water and boil away. None of this 2:1 water:rice, bring to a high boil, cover, put on low heat and let cook until all water is gone taking care not to touch it. That American way leaves it fluffy and nice, and the tico way at the end you have to stir it until it is right, until the rice has "popped." I think the oil keeps it from being possible to be fluffy and light, and it is easy to burn. Smoked rice, they call it with chuckles all around.
I'm afraid to leave it any longer. It still has the faintest little crunch and is a bit gummy, and I forgot to add salt, but it is passable and for a Sunday morning gallo pinto should be tolerable to construction workers more concerned about the aggravation of their hangovers than the perfection of their day's grub. I say. . . the truth is that food is one of the most sensitive of laboral issues. I have us stocked up on a bunch of things to round out the obligatory rice and beans, and beans are of course no problem since all you do is put them in a pot with water and boil the hardness out of them at full flame. The only thing you can do wrong is let the water boil away. I know what you're thinking. . . smoked beans, right? Wrong. You are allowed to mildly burn the rice, and they have a name for the toasted grains on the bottom of the pan, and many have a taste for this residuum of the rice bowl. But nobody has much tolerance for burned beans. The tolerated error is to undercook them a bit, in which case they are compared most frequently to 'balines,' ball bearings.
The power went out the night before last, and I grilled the ribs in the duck run out back over coffee wood while it poured down rain outside and the boys watched The Watchmen in Spanish translation. I did it over a grill that I made myself out of quarter round rebar and tie wire, and the pork was so tender from the marinade and so slippery from the exudations of porcine lipids that it made it very difficult to a cacophony of quacks by flashlight to keep the little buggers from slipping off the limited acreage of my improvised grill. And just between us girls, three pieces did slip between the grill bars and into the fire, one all the way to touch the dirt in fact, but (sshhh) I fished them out and cleaned them off in the marinade, flopped them back on the grill, and nobody was the wiser, and it all was eaten and with ascendant degrees of relish, despite burning it. The ducks were a bit unnerved by the aroma of flesh grilling, but I found that they were easily calmed with a gentle susurrant hiss. The serpentine sibilance was anything but what you would consider calming, but the ducks piped right down every time I compensated for stoking the fire with the sound to calm their little feathery puckered ani.
Tonight the dogs brought a coral snake into the courtyard of the dairy barn while I was doing Internet, and I confiscated it and have it with me now, planning a nice trick on the boys. Won't one of them get a good surprise tonight late, half-cocked, to find this guy coiled and waiting by the bed or beside the sink or on the shelf by the cookies. I bought ten trout today to celebrate a full six-day work week completed, but the boys wanted to go to town, so I have one of those trout waiting for me to get tired of composing platitudes for the hordes of faithful that arise daily with the fond anticipation of this blog's newest content to shuffle into the kitchen and get that baby into a skillet's simmering pool of butter.
Video: The view from the highest part of the road
Video: A little rain never hurt anybody but gingerbread men
Video: A little rain can wash away a lot of work
Apr 02 / Palmichal de Acosta
Day Four of the Finca Rana Azul installation, and Lalo, Wicho, and I are huddled over beers as clouds roll up the valley and Erick and Alexander have yet to return from across the valley. I parboiled ribs and have them marinating in an elixir I concocted from miscellaneous citric sources, beer, hot sauce, spices, and the bottom fifth of a very ripe pineapple. The rains came the day before yesterday, and we toughed it out over in the dairy barn that night. Morale was wavering over the difficulty of the camp. And it was a bit of a challenge to be stepping lightly around the owner camped out there as well. The saving grace on that first day of the rain was a successful installation of the Internet, making all challenges fold into inconsequence like a rogue wave settling back into mother ocean. Still, the hair on the back of my neck would not lay flat under the discomfort of my crew, and when we came upon the option of this seasonal coffee picker's shack on the other side of the mountain, we pounced. Last night we set up shop after dark having inched through the cloudbank over perilous precipices and through a malicious mist ,
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