Distracted by the Shiny

Zippity do Dah

Posted on November 16, 2010 by C. Patrick

“Aiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee! Whyyyyyyyyy!!!!?”

Okay, let’s start at the beginning. The beginning was getting onto a bus headed for a Guatemalan coffee plantation, where I would also be … wait, that’s not quite the beginning. Let’s go back a bit further.

“These are the tours?” I asked, looking at a sheet of paper listing a variety of entertainment options available in Guatemala. The person I’d asked nodded. These were the choices:

1. I could go on a tour of Antigua, once capital of what we now call Guatemala, at least until a volcano flooded them out. No, you read that right: flooded. There are three volcanos in the neighborhood of Antigua. One of them had a caldera that had collected a large reservoir of water over the years. There was an earthquake and the caldera burst, sending the proverbial wall of water down onto the city. Everyone who had thought that they were all set because they’d bought volcanic eruption insurance? Well, not so much.

Anyway, Antigua was supposed to be very pretty: cobblestone streets, beautiful architecture, markets with “authentic” Mayan-descended people. In foreign countries there are ALWAYS “authentic” natives somewhere close by. Strange that visitors to the United States don’t go on tours where they are promised that some Native Americans will dress up in traditional garb and try to sell them stuff. Oh, wait, there’s Texas. Never mind.

2. I could pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $580 and fly (hopefully, for that price, in my own personal Lear jet) to the northern part of the country and visit two of the largest ruins of what had once been the Mayan Empire. This tour looked great. I was keen to go. I was psyched about it. A day spent poking around ruins, taking cleverly-framed pictures? Oh yeah.

Except that I only had $60 to spend on a tour.

3. I could go to a coffee plantation and see how coffee beans were grown and processed. This would be fascinating, since I was such a big coffee drinker and … wait, I don’t drink coffee. In fact, I’ve been off of caffeine for about three years now, but even BEFORE that I didn’t drink coffee. My girlfriend back home drank coffee, though, so at least I could, I dunno, buy her a t-shirt with a giant coffee bean on the front or, I dunno, maybe a coffee mug.

So far, my choices were: pay good money to go to a city that I could catch a bus to for free; spend enough money that when I got back home my house would be in foreclosure; go visit a plantation that grew stuff I had virtually no interest in … OR

4. Go to a plantation that grew stuff I had virtually no interest in PLUS, for a small added fee, IF YOU ORDER NOW, a zip line canopy tour on the side of a volcano.

I’d never been zip-lining before (Is that a verb? Noun? Gerund?), but driving past the one in Branson, Missouri, had whetted my appetite. Also, there was a character in a novel I was working on that did a lot of things like zip lining, so I figured the personal experience would be a good way to add realistic detail to the story.

We rattled up the side of the volcano on stereotypically-narrow roads in open-sided trucks that looked like they were about to be used to storm the Costa Ricans in a takeover bid. I was able to look over the side of the truck and straight down to the bottom of the volcano’s slopes.

Neither of the two trucks slid off into the abyss, however, and we disembarked safely. Then it got scary. The idea of zip-lining involves strapping yourself to a cable that has been strung between two very tall places, the place at the receiving end not quite as high as the place at the, erm, leaving end. Then you slide between said places, suspended only by a harness and the trust that the cable had been engineered by someone who hadn’t been involved in Minnesota bridge construction.

A guide helped me to don the aforementioned safety harness, which was essentially a set of a half dozen canvas straps that seemed to have been designed expressly to pinch sensitive parts of the male anatomy in uncomfortable ways. There were various carabiners hanging off the ends of some some of the straps — the guide told me not to mess with those. However, I was allowed to put on my own helmet. Well, the guide set it on my head and fitted the strap under my chin, but I was able to complain about the fit afterwards.

The author is all geared up and ready to go zip-lining.

A short wait in line and then it was my turn. First, more guides hooked my carabiners in some arcane and intricate ways to a cable strung between what looked for all the world like tree houses built high in the forest canopy of the volcanic-ash-fed jungle.

“Hold on here,” the female guide said, showing me, “and here. Hold tightly.” I nodded. She pointed to the camera hanging around my neck. “You can take pictures if you want.”

“But you told me to hang on tiiiiiiiightllllly Aiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeee! Whyyyyyyy!!!?”

For some reason, I had agreed to hook myself to a string that was who-knew-how-high above the ground and then slide down it like I was Indiana Jones or something. What had I been thinking? There was spinning involved, there was bobbing, there was waggling, there was more yelling. Pretty sure I was upside down at least once. Or at least the picture I managed to take was upside down.

Sliding down a cable at high speed many, many feet above the ground. Yup, good idea.

Then we did it five more times, each successive zip line longer than the one before it and higher off the ground. By my rough calculation, the last one was five miles above the surface of the Earth and somewhere in the neighborhood of seventeen miles long.

But afterward, when we had bounced back down the mountainside in our Costa Rican invasion trucks and survived that too, I learned about my friend and yours, the coffee bean. It was very relaxing.

A different zip line was pointed out to the author on the way down the mountain. It was strung BETWEEN two mountains. He was told that it was for ‘experienced’ zip liners

Posted in Observation Deck | 2 Comments

Beyond the Littoral

Posted on October 1, 2010 by C. Patrick

Generally, when people say that they love the ocean, they don’t really mean that they love the ocean, or even that they love the beach. With a few exceptions, like those crazed people who sail around the world by themselves or only with a pet gopher or ferret, what they really mean is that they love the littoral.

The littoral is where land and sea come together, be it at the beach, or beneath a cliff, or upon a grassy promontory, or wherever. This is the place where the sea laps, crashes, washes, thunders, boils, and does a hundred other littoral-related verb-y types of actions. The places where and the ways that sea and land meet are vast and varied. There’s a lot of oceanfront property out there, after all.

The littoral, where land meets the sea.

But oceans themselves are varied, too. They each have personalities, quirks, moods. By the end of the calendar year 2010, I will have spent four years of the last decade on those various oceans. I like to think that those oceans and I have gotten to know one another a little bit. Well, rather that I’ve gotten to know them a bit. They don’t really notice us people, y’know.

The Atlantic was my first. I wasn’t on it very long — we were headed for the Caribbean, a very different body of water — but it was educational. My memories of that first meeting go something like this:

Dark, choppy water beneath a sky filled with sunlight-laced storm clouds.

High waves that washed our ship back and forth like the proverbial cork.

Gunmetal depths that I could not see, but rather felt.

Subsequent visits have not changed my perspective. The Atlantic is always moving, always on the verge of being angry, always reflecting storm clouds.

The Caribbean, on the other hand, welcomes the seaborne traveler with blue deeps that are so blue that you cannot believe that the color is real. It’s HD TV color. Fuji film color (anyone remember Fuji film? Film? VHS? Anyone?). Hallucinogenic color. The Caribbean skies are puffy-cloud skies; skies that are affronted whenever there is a storm and that quickly take back possession of the air lanes when the storm passes.

On the other side of the world, the Mediterranean is a sea of pastels and metaphorical rose petals. Even crisp, early-morning light is converted, somehow, to something softer, to the palette of a Renaissance master painter. The waves of the Med are softer, too, softer than nearly any other body of water. When the Mediterranean rolls, it rolls in long, languorous motions like waking up on a Sunday morning with nothing more strenuous to face but to fetch the paper and pour a cup of coffee.

South, in pirate territory off the Horn of Africa, the Indian Ocean is vast and surprisingly quiet. It knows how strong it is and doesn’t need to prove it until it has to. Even when it does, the Indian Ocean doesn’t show off. It isn’t flashy. Instead, she becomes choppy, trying to roll whatever irksome pests are on her back onto some convenient land somewhere.

Up in the Persian Gulf, the water becomes white. The gulf is white, the sky is white, the sun is a white brightness that expands to encompass the whole body of water. But the Gulf is also almost waveless. It stretches out and out and out, just like the deserts that surround it, more an extension of those deserts than a competing entity, even though they are made of seemingly incompatible substances.

Now, further. Ah, the Pacific. Whatever you may have been told, it is definitely not pacific. Whoever named it, named it out of irony. Passionate, is the Pacific, easily taunted by storm and cloud and earthquake into violence. Not as dark as the Atlantic, though; the Pacific puts on a good act until enlivened into giant wave crests and deep, dark troughs.

So the next time you wander along the littoral, wherever it may be, take a look out farther, see what you can see. Maybe you’ll see what you expect.

But maybe you’ll be surprised.

... And the sea.

Posted in Observation Deck | Tagged Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, oceans, Pacific, Persian Gulf, travel | 2 Comments

A Cold, Blue Dawn

Posted on October 1, 2010 by C. Patrick

I’m not a wake-up-to-watch-the-dawn kinda guy. I like sunsets better. Sipping pina coladas on the beach while a big, red sun sinks into the waves is more or less the perfect end to any given day. Dawn seems too cold to me, like a Parisian fashion model stalking down a runway. Partly, this is because it often is cold in, you know, the morning.

Still, sometimes I find myself in a position to watch the dawn, and when that happens, I try not to miss it. This morning, for instance. I was on a beach in Jacksonville, Florida, well before daybreak. As I sat there on the steps of one of the many wooden staircases built to give access to the beach, I watched the lights of buoys, markers, and fishing boats out in the darkness. They flickered like firefly mating calls. South was the glow of the city, distant at the faraway curve of the beach. Above me was a bright, horned moon; to the northeast was the Big Dipper. The waves of the Atlantic roared, even though I could only see hints of their shapes lit by the white glow of moonlight.

After a while, a line of lightness appeared in the east, a deep blueing of the nighttime black. A cloud bank on the horizon took a shadowy sort of form. The waves continued thrumming. A chill breeze continued pushing at my back.

The blueing crept higher in the sky, replaced in the lower firmament by a ruddy blush the color of that Parisian fashion model’s eye shadow. The Big Dipper began to fade from view, although directly above me the waning moon was still bright, surrounded by a corona of stars. The clouds to the east became more distinct, some fading into the background of distance, others showing themselves as long, black lines against framing redness.

Tiny birds zoomed across the sand at the edge of the tide, many of them darting fleet-footed on the ground, but some of them flying so low that it seemed as if they were running on their wingtips.

The blueing expanded, reaching out toward the sides, arcing around me, even while the ruddiness began to contract, to focus upon the spot on the horizon that the sun was steadily approaching.

Surfers appeared from over the grassy, still shadowed dunes behind me. Their long boards were tucked under their arms; sleep and anticipation fought for supremacy on their faces. The birds began to call out as if they were welcoming the surfers.

The firefly lights out on the Atlantic resolved themselves into the forms of ships, some much closer than I would have guessed an hour earlier in the pre-dawn black. The Big Dipper had vanished completely. The moon had lost its circlet of stars. A yellow band appeared between the blue and the blush, signaling that even though the sun wasn’t yet visible in the sky, dawn had all but turned into day.

There was one last flaring of neon across the clouds low on the horizon, and a brightening to near-incandescence of the clouds closer and higher. Everything in the sky became crisp and clear. It was a sky that cried out to be savored with coffee. But I’ve never been a coffee drinker.

Then, as the surfers caught their first big waves — waves they sometimes rode the length of and which sometimes turned on them, burying them momentarily beneath thick sheets of cold water — the ruddy red blush contracted even more, and then more, until it became a hemisphere rising up in the distance.

The sun had awoken one more time.

I watched it as it bellied up out of the eastern Atlantic, becoming full and red, then full and yellow, and finally shrinking to a white brightness that was painful to look at, forcing me to turn my gaze to the joggers and seashell hunters that had mysteriously and magically appeared on the beach while I had been busy watching the dawn. After a moment, I joined the wanderers, seeing if I could find any interesting shells or other flotsam left behind by the receding tide.

It had been a beautiful dawn.

Still, give me sunset and that pina colada. At least you don’t need a coat. So excuse me a moment while I wander down the beach a ways, find a place to read, and wait for the sun to work its way to the other side of the world.

~*~

Dawn as seen from the beach in Jacksonville, Fl.

No sunrises were harmed in the writing of this essay. If you’d like to tell the author about your favorite coffee blends, feel free to use the comments section, below.