Lifestyle Inertia

March 22, 2016 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Precisely one week ago I was sitting in a canvas yurt filled with strangers. By the time the sun went down the woodstove was hot, the beers were very cold, and we were starting to make friends with people we’d never met before.

Each of us knew a person or two before we met for dinner in Ketchum, but no one knew everyone. Avalanche conditions in this little corner of Idaho were spooky, and feeling out risk tolerance as a newly formed group forged a kind of bond early on. In the first twenty four hours we became friends over card games, stories, and private jokes.

We also shot a lot of photographs; at least half the group identified as a photographer in some way or another. I’ve spent the last few afternoons sorting through pictures of a ski trip that fit even the most rigorous definition of fantastic. The weather was perfect, the skiing was tremendous, and living in a yurt is about the best way you can spend a week. But while I was sorting through photos my mind wandered to what might be next. I’ve been back in the groove of life in Missoula for fewer than 72 hours, but can’t help but scheme on the next thing.

I may have a predisposition to restlessness. I’ve at least got a bad habit of quitting good jobs to leave the country. But I plan hundreds more trips than I take. Since we shussed out of the Pioneer mountains a couple of days ago I’ve laid plans for a ski trip in the Sawtooths and another in Kootenais. I’ve penciled out ski tours across Switzerland and Poland. I’ve researched and begun writing proposals for a month in Japan, and, because of course it stands to reason that a month in Japan will segue smoothly into a bicycle tour of Thailand and Laos, that itinerary ballooned to approach three months.

Twenty minutes after sliding out of my ski boots at the end of this last trip I was racking my brain on the best way to reorganize my assets into a sailboat worthy enough for a year long cruise in the Pacific. Never mind that I get seasick.

Looking back through pictures and journal entries from trips of the last year or two scratches a certain itch. Memories of loneliness, mosquitoes, and diarrhea fade and are replaced by the sunsets and powder turns that we photograph to remember. There’s a nostalgia for time we’ve spent on the road and friends we’ll never see again. But in planning the next thing there’s excitement and hope.

I don’t pretend that even a fraction of the adventures I scheme on or plan will happen. That’s part of the fun. If you reject the real constraints of budgets (money, time, and responsibility in equal parts) and imagine a trip unfettered by an anemic checking account or a 2,080 hour work-year or a dog you adopted from the pound in the midst of an existential crisis (bless her heart), you get comfortable with thinking beyond the back yard. If you allow your mind to wander enough you might find, eventually, that an idea or two resonates and begins to ache.

If that idea aches for long enough, you might allow yourself to think about the next step. You might find that you can eek out a living while working from the road. That the 40 hour work week is something that’s best left behind. And even that you really can just drive across the border while your mangy pound dog glares at you from the back seat. You might even swallow the hard pill that inertia is not confined to objects with mass, and that the only way to make tomorrow different from yesterday is through deliberate effort.

And who knows, maybe I’ll see you in the south Pacific.

At the Heart of Angst

January 12, 2016January 26, 2016 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

“I think I’m ready to get a dog,” I told my mother. “And plant a garden. I think I’m ready for tomatoes.”

The time I spent in Latin America was formative in the way that only travelling alone can be. It was an opportunity to party with Belgians, sip mezcal with smugglers in a candlelit bar, and smoke Cuban cigars on the roof while volcanoes spewed lava under a full moon. I read Hemingway and Dosdoyevsky and watched pirated DVDs of shit TV when I was too sick to hold a book. It was a chance to be in a kind of social vacuum, away from friends and family, to look at what I like and who I want to be. After six months I found that I wanted to be at home.

When I got off a plane in Seattle, my hair was greasy and long. I had dirt underneath my fingernails, and what clothes I still had with me were stained or torn. I smelled very bad and had dozens of dollars to my name. Half a year as a trekking guide in Guatemala left me weary from the road and ready to put down roots.

For a while I was happy to build a life in a little mountain oasis with a dog and a row of tomatoes, but a few years later I quit a good job to drive to Mexico for a while. The garden had mostly failed, and the dog seemed happy to come along.

In the car I had good company and a folding chair and a long book, but the expectations of the trip were different from my time in Guatemala. I wasn’t so much looking for anything in particular so much as the experience of being on the road. Of moving every day and not thinking beyond what kind of ceviche we might have after a nap.

A nomadic inclination is natural, I think, for humans. Ten thousand years ago we wandered across the Bering Straight after game. Pre-Christian civilizations spanned Eurasia, Colonial Europeans mapped the globe, and two centuries ago new settlers trickled westward across a continent already claimed by a different sect of wanderers. Restlessness is as fundamental a part of the human experience as oral history and sharing fire.

But it’s not quite as simple as that, because we’re also driven to stay put and build. We discovered the wheel, and the written word flourished in the relative calm of agrarian society. Whether we’re piling sticks for a shelter or cultivating a field for grain or engineering a high rise apartment, what sets humankind apart is our industry and our drive to improve our place.

That disparity is at the heart of angst.

Not that long ago I drove through Idaho with the dog. The radio didn’t work and cell coverage was a distant memory. I was simply alone with a panting companion. At a gas station in Ketchum a man well into his 40s came to the passenger window, and the dog woke from a nap to greet him.

“Just you and your buddy, huh?” he asked. A Volkswagon van has a way of inviting conversation. The man drove a fifty thousand dollar Chevrolet, and in the back seat his young son was spreading chocolate ice cream across the upholstery. He looked through the van and saw the bits of camping gear spread out. He saw ski boots and a propane stove and a broken paperback, and his eyes glazed over with a kind of longing or instantaneous regret for every decision he’d made in his life. He wanted to talk about the van.

What he didn’t see was that I was sick. My eyes watered and my throat bled, and the van didn’t start when I turned the key. There was no bed in the back. I’d been sleeping alone in the desert, but never more than a few hours a night. There was sand in my toothbrush. I didn’t know if the engine was blown, or if the problem was electrical. If I needed a jump or a new battery or if the starter had finally gone. I did know that I didn’t have the money to fix it and that even under the best conditions the only place I wanted to be was still a day’s drive away. That I longed for a comfortable pickup truck with air conditioning and a good radio and that cruised at 80 miles an hour on the highway.

A man’s eyes turn desperate when he’s been on the road for too long, but if he sits still they soften and let the spark die out. I’m not exactly sure how we’re supposed to spend our time, but maybe that’s the point.

Disaster Strikes

January 7, 2011 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 5 Comments

During my time in Guatemala, I have fallen victim to a number of setbacks. My luggage was run over by an airplane and subsequently destroyed, my checking account was reduced to $1.49 by an ATM scam, and I’ve spent numerous hours recovering from imprudent street food decisions. I’ve managed to recover from these inconveniences gracefully, but none so far can compare to the Universe’s most recent affront. Last night my flip flops were eaten and rendered unwearable by the neighbors poorly disciplined and unruly pair of dachshund puppies.

This may seem petty and inconsequential when viewed in light of the crippling poverty that envelopes this country, and the cheerfulness with which its inhabitants lead their lives. Maybe it is petty and inconsequential, but I hate shoes. Even more than I hate shoes, I hate socks. In a way, it started generations ago; I have had the good fortune to inherit my parents’ good breeding. But just as purebred showdogs are sometimes prone to hip dysplasia, I have very sweaty feet. In this tropical climate in which I live the regular donning of shoes and socks is simply unacceptable. I have visited various shops as well as the open air market in search of a suitable replacement, but my feet are four sizes larger than those of the largest Guatemalan. Cursed again by my champion pedigree.

This injustice will not rest until the culprit is broken upon the wheel or otherwise castigated. The trick will be to identify which rodent was responsible. I have a great deal of respect for the right to due process, and have confirmed that it was one of the two neighbor dogs by two concrete pieces of evidence: They are the only dogs who ever have access to my apartment, and they left their criminal signature: they also ate my dirty underwear. They’ve been sneaking into my apartment to eat my underwear for months now, and their indulgence this time will be there downfall.

I guess this is another lesson in the impermanence of material things.

“Bonk-Thirty: The Guatemala Edition” or “A missed opportunity”

December 11, 2010 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

As a recreational cyclist, one who moved to Guatemala to pursue a job that relies heavily on cycling, I’m probably due for a post that assumes cycling as its foremost topic. This realization coincides nicely with my first Central American bonk, which is convenient for making a decent story.

The day began innocently enough as I set off in the back of a pick-up truck towards the small town of Santa Maria de Jesus, on Volcan de Agua. My goal was to learn a route that had been scouted several months ago by a different guide and marked with red paint. Kevin, another guide, joined me as far as the trailhead but returned with the truck, as he hates bikes. I dropped into the beginning of the descent extremely skeptically. Up to this point the riding has been decent but by no means noteworthy. The trails are not designed or maintained for riding, and are used almost exclusively by local farmers as modes of transportation between their homes and their fields. Furthermore, the beginning of this ride was littered with household trash that was staggering even for rural Guatemala, and I was already crabby because I was sure that riding in this area alone I would be robbed and have to walk home in riding shoes and a montanacyclocross.com kit. My mood degenerated more when I came to the first split in the trail and found that while the turn was, in fact, marked with red paint, that that paint mark was located directly in the center of a rock that laid directly between the two trails. Rats. Fortunately, two farmers were resting in the shade nearby and through limited frustration, broken Spanish, and enthusiastic gesticulation I determined the proper way. My skepticism of this trail continued for another minute as I was stuck behind two Mayan ladies carrying twice their body weight in corn. However, it lasted only a minute and as soon as I made my pass I was unleashed upon an Eden of singletrack bliss. I was far enough from the town, now, that the litter had diminished to the infrequent discarded Tortrix bag, and there was absolutely zero indication from the quality of riding that this trail wasn’t designed, engineered, and built exclusively for riding mountain bikes. Flowing banked corners were punctuated by root drops and rock gardens before entering into a river of cooled pahoehoe, which through a geologic lens was nothing short of awe inspiring. Short, technical climbs sustained elevation throughout the descent, making the ride almost tantric as it continued despite relativley modest change in elevation. Eventually the singletrack flowed into a dirt mountain road, which through years of neglect and torrential rain had managed to form a series of doubles which were easily cleanable even by my modest (read: essentially non-existant) capacity to leave the ground. Road gave way to road, and by the time I returned to Antigua I was on cloud nine, reveling in this discovery of decent trail. In my euphoria, I set off immediately towards another small mountain town, El Hato, to investigate reports of trail there.

My plan for the day had been to research and learn the ride from Santa Maria. Check. It had taken less time than anticipated, however, and my plan expanded to ride to above El Hato, find a trail to another town, San Mateo, and ride the road back from San Mateo to Antigua. It seemed simple enough, I was feeling good, and my breakfast of two pieces of banana bread and two endurolytes seemed ample to continue fighting the good fight. Incorrect. Perhaps this is a good time to discuss road building trends in Guatemala. The mountains here are very steep, and the “engineers” seem to have been focused on getting the most bang for their buck when it came to paving supplies. There are no switchbacks to speak of, and almost no roads that follow the contour of the hillside. The roads here go straight up, and straight down. The first climb out of Antigua to El Hato is challenging but not entirely uncivilized, and having ridden it before I was

mentally prepared. It’s about a 5k climb and only the first 1.5-2k are very steep. After that it settles into a difficult and consistent grade that is well suited to riders who prefer to settle into a tempo and go. I’m one of those riders, and I generally enjoy this climb. I arrived without Incident in El Hato, which was pretty much the end of the fun part. Recalling instructions from another rider, I continued around a bend and was greeted by a cobblestone hill that I can, with a clean conscience, describe in the same breath as the word “Koppenberg.” I composed myself briefly and assaulted this stone wall with the full utility of my small chainring. I had considered switching my bike to a single speed before moving down here for ease of maintenance. That would have been imprudent. After summiting this road I was battered down for another ten minutes by equally steep, albeit paved climbing. I eventually found what turned out to be about 3k of singletrack which can at best be described as mediocre. A much more interesting discovery happened halfway through this traverse to San Mateo when I realized that I was about fifteen minutes shy of a bonk. Double Rats. I rolled into San Mateo as the lethargy and moodiness began to take hold, and sought out a tienda to replenish myself before the cruise home. As soon as I purchased my Pepsi and fried pigskins, I was accosted by a number of grown men who started asking for money. I gave them the second half of my snack and headed back to Antigua. Then shit got real. The road out of San Mateo, it turns out, is not a simple cruise along the ridge to El Hato. It is a 6k climb of above 20% that frequently exceeds 30%. It did not take long to be become quite clear that the Pepsi was not going to cut it. After what seemed like an eternity of climbing in my granny gear and doing those pitiful little switchbacks from curb to curb (the ones that silently yell, “please run me over with that bus and end this miserable disgrace to my Coat of Arms.”), I made it to the ridge and descended with irresponsible alacrity through through El Hato and back to Antigua. Once there I wallowed for a while in self-pity before ordering two lunches from the nice ladies across the street, devouring those, and passing out with Xela in her bed. It wasn’t until I awoke that I learned of my greatest regret since arriving here.

That regret, of course, is missing a horse race on All Saints Day a few towns over. This is not your regular Kentucky Derby slosh fest, but something special. The sort of thing that might have convinced Hemingway to hold out long enough to have a look. My details of this race are sketchy at best: told third hand over a bar, but are ample to ignite any imagination with a pulse. Imagine, for a moment, that you could combine the Beer Mile with the Italian Palio. Now add that lawless, chaotic din and the irreverent disregard for the provision of life and limb that typifies the Central American third world. Now, you have the All Saints Day horserace. The premise goes something like this: local contestants toe the line next to their horse on one side of town. The gun goes off and the men drink a beer as fast as they can, mount their steeds, and race across town to the other side, where another beer is waiting. The race goes back and forth across town until a winner emerges. And that’s the beauty of this race. I don’t know what sort of time constraints there are on the competitors, but there must be some, because unlike the Beer Mile, or the Palio, or almost any other race out there, the winner is the last man standing/riding. It goes until all but one individual has incapacitated himself and withdrawn, which is a truly beautiful concept. With this race in mind, you can count on my returning to Guatemala during the first week in November at some point in the future. Any takers?

No Surprises.

November 18, 2010 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

I’m sorry that I haven’t updated in a while, hopefully this post will be enough to satiate the masses for a time. When I came to Guatemala, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I knew that Antigua is a fairly tourist heavy town, and that my utter inability to speak Spanish would be inconvenient but not debilitating. I knew that I’m not supposed to drink the water. I knew that I’d probably be a little taller than most people. Generally, I wasn’t surprised by much. My Spanish has, and is continuing to improve, and most people in town speak more English than I speak Spanish. I don’t drink the water. And I am significantly taller than everyone. Sure, there were little nuances that I forgot about, but wouldn’t say surprised me. For instance, not being able to flush toilet paper. Upon further reflection, however, I was a little surprised about the extent to which I’m taller than this entire country. The nation’s infrastructure is designed around a mean height of 4’5″. Which is somewhat inconvenient for me. City buses, for instance, have an inconceivably small amount of leg room. Even the buildings are built on a smaller scale, and I’ve included photographs of a few of the things that I’ve hit my head on so far:

This is the door frame in my bathroom:

Here is the door frame to by bedroom:

Here is the door frame of my other bathroom:

Here is the door frame to my closet:

And my kitchen light:

I’ve hit my head on my curtain rod a number of times:

As well as on my shower head:

And my spice shelf:

Really, this is the sort of thing I’m dealing with:

Certainly, I had premonitions of a number of the situations with which I would be met upon arrival to Central America. However, to say that there were no surprises would be something of an exaggeration. Certain features of my apartment illustrate this quite nicely.

For instance, I never expected it to come with a home gym:

Or a Parisian chandelier:

Or a fine North-Asian oil painting:

I can’t but count these surprises as pleasant ones, that contribute to my quality of life on a daily basis. There have been other surprises that have been slightly more disconcerting. A shelf, for example, that seems to have been built from a child’s playhouse door:

It’s possible that this is not, in truth, a child’s door, but actually the door used by a fully grown tiny Guatemalan. This idea is in many ways much, much creepier. The apartment was advertised as furnished, which is indeed the case, and I have also been furnished with a number of ornamental animal skins:

This second piece deserves a more in-depth examination. The fur is accompanied by some sort of alter containing a plastic binder clip, and hand-carved maraca, and what appears to be a broken whitetail mount:

A more rigorous review of the mount, however, reveals that it is not broken, but that only one antler was mounted. And it was done upside down. Only God knows the significance of the binder clip. Perhaps this alter is designed to ward off some ancient curse?

Whoever was responsible for the animal-office alter clearly did not wholly trust their Pagan efforts to keep my humble apartment safe (perhaps from the tiny Guatemalan who’s door was stolen for my desk?), as my toaster is permanently affixed with a statuette of the Virgin Mary: