In Bali With Baggage: Rince

by Jonathan Goldstein on

[read earlier parts of “In Bali With Baggage” here]

As I wander Bali for the next few days, I can’t stop thinking about the pink lotus incident, how bending down to pick up that flower inaugurated a flood of emotional introspection. On my last day here, I stop into a restaurant and have an iced coffee and, as I’ve been doing a lot of lately, pull out my notebook within which I’ve been trying to figure it out. This is some of what I’ve jotted down so far:

Even one’s own fear, when looked at with compassion, can be something to embrace, like a crying child.

Borghes describes a dream of Dante’s where he awakens feeling as though he’s both discovered and lost something infinite. I feel a bit like that, too.

What is my true fear? To be exposed as a fraud? To lose all self control? The respect of others? To reveal something shameful to others that I don’t know I’m exposing.

It was like the galaxy had aligned itself, through an act of cosmic timing, to have the cat and the flower come together. And I had to travel a far ways to reach it. It was a matter of shedding layers of the regular life that over time desensitizes you to the world around you.And now what? Now that I have had this moment of clarity, what to do with it? When Moses was handed the word of God, he took it to the people while Jonah ran from it. And look what happened to Jonah. You can hear the world of God – have the truth downloaded into your brain – but then what? Certainly this is a beginning, but what now?

It was while pouring over the moment at the temple, poking and prodding it and of course also worrying that I was fetishizing it, that Rince walks in. He looks like a skinnier, laid-back Shia LeBoeuf. He has the at-ease-ness of someone who feels OK in the world, in his own skin. He is 25 years old and though well-traveled, he is without that neediness, that slightly smarmy charm of the traveler who’s been traveling too long, by himself and compelled to constantly be interrupting conversations, on the make for new companions to stave off loneliness.

My assumption is that he’s been here forever, but when we get to talking, through my initiative and not his, I learn that he’s been here only three days and it’s his first time in this part of the world. He’s come here to learn to surf. Maybe this deep cool is a surfer thing, or a people-driven-to-learn-to-surf thing.

Rince explains how he’s just flown from Hochi Minh City after a month-long motor bike journey from Hanoi.

“When you travel for a month, then you don’t have to worry,” he says. “If tomorrow you don’t do anything, if you want to lie in bed all day, that’s OK.”

When I ask him if he was ever afraid while making his trip, he says that the Vietnamese are the kindest people he’d ever met. And in some rural parts he travelled through, they’d never even seen a white person.

“The world is a playground,” he says.

Is this the wisdom of being 25, or will Rince always see life in this way?

When I was 19, fuelled on books like “On the Road” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” all that desire for play, experience – everything at once – exploded in me in the form of a Greyhound bus trip across North America, from Montreal to LA with my friend Avi. It took us a month to get there and a month to get back. It was my world-is-a-playground moment and I was not afraid. Not really. Whether I was sleeping in a field in New Mexico or hitchhiking on the back of a pickup truck in the rain, there was a romance there, a story I was looking forward to telling that diluted the fear. I was in tune with the uniqueness of every place I went to, the uniqueness of each moment. The smell of a hotel lobby in Cheyenne reminded me of a soap I’d smelled in childhood. Everything felt special. Every new thought was immediately catalogued in a notebook. What happened to me? As an adult I stopped seeing the world as a playground. I came to see life as days you try your best to get through with as little pain to yourself and others as possible.

I remember how in “On the Road,” Sal Paradise and his friends spoke of those squares who worry the whole trip about where they’re going to eat, where they’re going to sleep while they, the original hipsters, just knew they’d be OK, that those things always just take care of themselves. That that was inevitable. When I read the book at 18 I felt I knew this and never thought I could forget it, that I could never be one of those squares. Now of course, I see Sal and his buddies as a bunch of mooches, the kinds of guys who didn’t have to worry because they probably had a friend like me somewhere, built for responsibility and worry, with a couch to crash on and a fridge full of groceries.

I am reminded of DH Lawrence’s description of Starbuck from “Moby Dick”: “dependable, reliable – in other words, afraid.” What a brilliantly nonjudgmental way of putting it. Being dependable isn’t all bad, but it can be a drag.

Meeting Rince makes me feel like maybe I shouldn’t be so worried and afraid all the time. And even as I think this, I can’t let go of my undying, hardwired and ingrained belief in the ironic workings of the universe within which I live, a place where even considering such a thing will have irritated the evil eye, ensuring I will now be mugged and left for dead in an alley.

When Rince and I part, I walk to the beach, and along the way, something that looks like a large cockroach scurries across my path. Again I feel the familiar sensation of my stomach tightening and I embrace it – a Buddhist bell calling me back to my true self. I struggle to see the truth, the beauty, the me-ness in mistaking a date pit, blowing in the wind, for a bug.

[Illustration: Dmitry Samarov]

Gore Vidal’s Old House

by Mary Jo McConahay on

In later years…President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Longworth, congratulated me every time we saw each other: “You got out. So wise.”
“Reflections on Glory Reflected,”
— Gore Vidal, in United States: Essays 1952-1992

The day Gore Vidal died rain fell hard on the roof of his old house alongside the ruins of Our Lady of Carmen in Antigua, Guatemala. Braids of thick plaster twisted gracefully around chipped columns, dripping after the downpour that signaled the end of the canicula. Those golden weeks of sun and hummingbirds in the midst of the rainy season were over.

Of tens of thousands of yearly visitors to Antigua, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, few realize that the late author Gore Vidal lived here during the impressionable first years of his writing career. I lived around the corner from his old house for eleven years, and happened to be visiting a friend in Antigua when news came of the author’s death on July 31. I felt moved to walk over to the old neighborhood through town, alert to “that sharp smell” that Vidal once wrote was the scent of “most Latin towns: green papaya, dust, damp stone and plaster, and something else, unidentifiable, yet insistent, ubiquitous, death sweet.

In 1946, the author, then just twenty-one, took $3000 from the payment for his first novel, Williwaw, and bought a crumbling 16thcentury convent next to the ruins of Our Lady of Carmen.

In such corners of Antigua, a town of some 45,000 about an hour from Guatemala City, amid fine homes, galleries and a popular central parque, ruins from five centuries of earthquakes remain in place, reminders of history and natural forces that are inescapable.
Vidal hired an American architect living in town to turn the abandoned convent into a comfortable home. Foreigners and wealthy Guatemalans still build such places here, colonizing the proud old Central American town anew after each temblor or war, re-using stones first placed by the Spanish conquerors. Walk the streets, be cautious of windows with wrought-iron grilles that jut over sidewalks, keep an eye for any set of high, wooden double doors that may be open. You may see it then, an ancient, uneven wall kept in place mid-garden, or a fountain three hundred years senior to the flagstones that surround it, colonial vestiges considered badges of honor by residents.

Gore Vidal’s old house is not marked by the kind of wooden doors grand enough to admit a carriage, as others are. It looks more modest from the outside, a single story. Simple doors, a window like a porthole, the name of Jesus Christ in a rendition popular after the twelfth century, carved on a stone lintel. More convent than residence, but not unusual-looking among these streets.

Two blocks away is Antigua’s central square, where Vidal surely must have strolled with other townspeople early evenings, when noisy starlings crowd the trees. The Spanish laid out the square in colonial times, when Antigua was capital of the Vice-Regency that stretched from southern Mexico to what is now Costa Rica. Spanish planners reserved one side of the square for each force that ruled daily life: religion, symbolized by a white cathedral atop tall steps; government offices over a porch of arches; armed authority in the ornate Palace of the Captains General that has housed soldiers and police; and commercial shops, today ranging from sellers of books to pineapple juice to flash drives. In the center of the park stone mermaids feed a fountain’s pool with water from their breasts. Look up and you see “volcanoes…like the prongs of a crown,” as Vidal wrote, surrounding the city.

When I used to pass Gore Vidal’s old house in the 1990s, after he had long since moved on to Italy, I liked to imagine the conversations that might once have gone on inside, the history, the hi-jinks. The day the author died in Los Angeles, I had to wait to see the place again until the fierce rain stopped, walking carefully as thunder receded, avoiding small pools in the streets.

Antiguans called that day’s storm a tormenta, a really strong one. The tormentathat broke the caniculaleft the cobblestones steaming before Gore Vidal’s old doorstep, as stones steamed all over town, because they were still warm from days of sun. The mist gave heavy square buildings a sense of weightlessness, as if it they were floating above the ground.

Visitors in the late 1940s say Vidal left one great, ruined pillar lying where it had tumbled two centuries before, so guests had to walk around it to enter his living room. After he sold the house in 1950, a new owner divided the house into two, with separate entrances and addresses, but I have seen no such fallen column in either place.

Anais Nin visited her dear friend Gore in this house, even nursed him through a near-fatal case of hepatitis caught eating from pots in the market. Once I sat in one of its salons during a cocktail party, and pictured her in that very room, dressed fashionably in square-shouldered, post-war style, sitting with legs crossed at the ankles, shoes to die for on those little feet. In my imagination, she was writing in her diary.

While Anais Nin visited, a dashing college student named Dominick Dunne, the same who would become the famous crime author, came to stay for some days with a friend of Vidal’s. Dominick and Anais began an affair – in which rooms? — then ran off to Acapulco together. Meanwhile, host Gore was busy writing a novel, Deep Green, Bright Red, about an imagined U.S.-engineered regime change in a Central American country.

Vidal had come to Guatemala during a revolutionary post-war government that based itself on Franklin Roosevelt’s declared Four Freedoms, an era some locals still call the Ten Years of Spring. A young congressman and writer, Mario Monteforte Toledo, often visited the congenial American when Monteforte came from the capital to see his Maya Indian mistress. Over afternoon pitchers of beer in the patio of Gore Vidal’s old house, Monteforte, who would become one of Guatemala’s most honored novelists, attempted to explain how entwined the U.S. government was with U.S. business interests in Guatemala. That foreign commercial enterprises complained dangerously loud of fewer profits and less control over their work forces under the new government.

Vidal, a patrician Tory, argued that the United States, which had just won the Good War, had no reason to interfere in its democratic neighbor’s politics. Even if new laws cramped business as usual for U.S. corporations such as the United Fruit Company.

Young Vidal had arrived in Guatemala already understanding the concept of oligarchy, because he belonged to that of the United States, cousin to a president, a vice-president, stockbrokers, a news baron, lawyers, “everyone in the United States who matters,” he wrote. I have often wondered if Vidal’s experience while living in the renovated convent knocked the beam from his eyes about the cynicism of some Washington policy, and set an attitude for a lifetime. You need only read him to see he understands the concept of “empire,” because he lived in an outland of the American imperium.

Four years after Deep Green, Bright Redappeared in 1950, a C.I.A. coup replaced the democratically elected Guatemalan president, installing a line of friendly generals that ruled for decades. The day Vidal died, I stood on the curb across the wide street and considered the rich life in the author’s house at the beginning of his career: sex, politics, the magical work of writing.

Others followed Vidal in transforming the antique walls of Our Lady of Carmen for personal use. Vendors have turned one section into a warren of tiny shops where tourists are welcome, walls hung with intricate Maya weavings, necklaces of shiny beads, hand-tooled leather belts. On Saturday mornings the crafts spill out the doors to spread for sale on the cobblestone street.

Late on the night the author died, I drove past the house once more, with a friend. This time the street lay empty. Through the car window, with the obfuscating rain falling once more, the remains of the Carmen church looked fearsome. I tried to stare through the new storm. Sacred stone stricken by a shaking earth. Disordered, fluted columns collapsed upon massive broken blocks, angels who once looked from high cornices become fallen, scattered shards. I rolled down the window, wanting to see better. The rain had released scents from gardens hidden behind tall, thick walls on surrounding streets. The fragrance of night-blooming jasmine was overwhelming.

Veteran journalist Mary Jo McConahay is the author of Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest (Chicago Review Press), winner of the 2012 Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.

In Bali With Baggage: Monkeys, A Cat, A Lotus Flower

by Jonathan Goldstein on

[read earlier parts of “In Bali With Baggage” here]

Madai and I study the tourist map and decide our next stop will be a place marked as “The Monkey Temple.” It is in Ubud, in the midst of a forest overrun with monkeys.

As we make our way, I find myself growing giddy, like a kid. One thinks one has hung out with monkeys because one has seen so much of them on TV and in movies. Wearing diapers. Dropping flowerpots on people’s heads. Sitting in the passenger seats of mac trucks and pulling on that steam whistle. But to actually be in their presence is both mesmerizing and nightmarish. They flit around like human-faced squirrels and, seeing them for the first time in person, they strike me as being as improbable a creation as a unicorn, perhaps even more improbable because, when you think about it – one horn instead of two? It almost makes more sense. But beings who look like us but have tails that they can use to swing from trees? To see it feels like a lucid dream.

No matter our language, English, French, Balinese, we can all appreciate monkeys. Clowns of the forest! Unless of course they’re biting into your nose like the dough ball on a pizza pie. And this is a possibility I cannot help feeling acutely in my groin. In fact, each time I take some video, I feel the possibility of slipping into Youtube memehood. Holding out a chunk of banana one minute, having a monkey scrape away at my face like a Lucky 7 scratch card, the next.

When I go back to the car, I find Madai sitting with some other drivers, feeding monkeys and laughing. Except for the feces-pitching and constant threat of unexpected violence, how much better would it be to always have monkeys around? Especially if like Madai, you do not fear them.
Our next stop is a temple in Batuan. It is beautiful and awing, filled with statues and artifacts, but because I’m sort of a behind the scenes kind of guy who as a kid was always looking for the wires and mirrors at the magic show, I walk outside the temple’s courtyard to take look at the alleys that lay beyond it. I’m curious about what might go on in the alley of a temple, what the nearby houses look like, and as I stand there, my hands held behind my back (a relatively new move of mine that I developed to seem/try to be more at ease in the world), I see, from the corner of my eye, a flower flutter down from the sky. But when I look up, I don’t see any trees.

The flower has landed on the other side of a narrow drainage gutter and when I begin to walk over to it, to pick it up and smell it – for that’s what it seems a man with a flaneur’s gate who walks with hands clasped behind his back such as myself should do – I see that it is a pink lotus. As I stoop to pick it up, something big and black scurries through the gutter and quickly, I withdraw my hand and leap up. As I do, I feel a familiar sensation in my stomach. Fear. My fear. I look down the length of the gutter and I see it turn to look at me. An alley cat. A tabby.

I can’t quite explain it – and believe me, I’ve thought about this a lot since – but I am suddenly seized with the feeling of “this is who I am.” To describe this feeling, this revelation, might be as foolish as trying to describe the ineffable atmosphere of a dream but, fool that I am, here goes.

Just then, I felt my fear as a fact. Like having brown eyes or a slight build. Attached to the fear was not the Siamese twin of shame for feeling it – which for me, steers the fear into explication and a defensive posturing and thus, shtick. There was only a naked, pure recognition of it, a recognition of it as being mine.

But then, there was also the reaching out for the flower, the attempt to seize life’s beauty. These two impulses, tendencies, are the halves that form my whole. Fear and aspiration. Fear and the pursuit of something else. Pleasure, perhaps. It is not a very profound insight, but it is direct and clear, as though I am standing outside myself, like I am reading it in a textbook or standing on the roof of a house and seeing it from above. And balancing between these two states is how I live, every second of the day. I guess I’ve always sort of known it, but at this moment I’m feeling it. Feeling that the fear isn’t external from me, something to be removed like soul smegma, but it is me. I was not waiting to see who I was once the tug of war was won, but that the tug of war was me.

There is the person you tell yourself you are, through the stories you tell yourself and others, but then there is also the person you discover, or that you feel as a feeling of your you-ness, that sneaks up on you.

Here it was with a perfect haiku-like economy: the cat and the lotus leaf.

How strong it was, how fortunate I was to be alive to it, to see the significance of everything that was happening, everything that was spiraling off that initial moment made me weep. Fear felt significant. Spending money and meeting new people felt significant. Life felt significant. Everything about the day, about the trip, about life, all of it leading up to this moment and then past it, felt significant. It was in fact good that I was alone, because this moment might not have happened otherwise, and certainly could not have happened had I been safe at home. Suddenly the whole trip felt worthwhile. Of course it was worth traveling. The question was as basic as whether life was worth living. Of course. Of course.

An old woman suddenly appears and unlatches these gargantuan doors that open up onto the courtyard. The doors look like they’d been closed for centuries, and I walk through them and into the temple.

Back at the car, I put my hand on Madai’s shoulder. This was to show him I liked him. Even though we didn’t speak the same language, at least there was that, and that seems like the point of language anyway, to let each other know that we are enjoying each other. And then there is that other point, too.

“The toilet?” I ask, and Madai points over to a door, just behind me, upon which is written in English, “toilet.”

Check back tomorrow for the concluding chapter of Jonathan Goldstein’s series “In Bali With Baggage,” or follow the daily-updated thread here.

[Illustration: Dmitry Samarov]

Flew American Airlines, Nothing Happened

by Grant Martin on

Flight 371, Sunday night, hurricane Sandy lost in our contrails. I’m on the last flight out of LaGuardia and heading into Chicago, the last flight home before New York airports shut down and the city buttons up for the storm.

This will be my fifth flight on American Airlines in four days, starting in Chicago, passing through St. Louis, turning around in Dallas, going back through Chicago and then looping through New York La Guardia.

It’s been a quiet ride. On some flights I flew in coach, in some I flew in first. On the leg between Dallas and Chicago I was crammed into a window seat with a spacious and friendly neighbor. Right now, on 371, I’m choosing to skip the roast beef sandwich in lieu of some apple juice and cashews.

Life goes on for the frequent flier on American Airlines. There’s been a lot of negative focus on the airline over the last few weeks, from an issue with loose seats on several 757s to hysterical complaints from the New York Times. No doubt, American has to get their act together and service needs to improve. Pilots need to stop fussing over their contracts and the executives need to stop worrying about compensation and prepare their company for exit from bankruptcy.

By and large though, the furor over operations starts to fade after taking a few dozen flights. It’s true that there are still a few bad apples – one pilot on my trip sarcastically pointed out that “among other things, the APU in this MD-80 was out of service” – but the flight arrived on time. Most employees and passengers carry on in good will and the airplanes continue to fly.

You can expect the same on American for the next few months. Your chances of cancellation and strife from the bankruptcy naturally will go up slightly as the airline continues to reorganize and unions battle for posturing. Maybe 7 in 100 flights will be delayed instead of 5 in 100. But there will be no catastrophe. Your miles wont disappear. Pilots won’t sabotage planes. In a few months, the industry will settle and we’ll get back to complaining about the buttonhole in napkins and overhead bin space. And throughout that I’ll keep flying, American or United or Virgin or whoever gets me from point A to point B at a reasonable price. You should too.

[Photo Credit: Flickr user Fly For Fun]

Looking For Holiday Airfare? Better Hurry

by Chris Owen on

When to buy holiday airfare is often the most difficult part of the process. Deciding where to go, when we want to fly there and who we might travel with is easy. Knowing when to pull the trigger on buying airfare seems to require a crystal ball. Since most of us don’t have mystic forecasting abilities, we look to what or who we believe are qualified sources for guidance. Experts seem to agree, the best time to buy is sooner than later.

“You don’t have a moment to lose,” said Rick Searcy, CEO of FareCompare in an ABC News report, cautioning travelers, “Holiday flights are going to be expensive.” Searcy believes that prices will be up to 70 percent higher than normal pricing, depending on routes, and those looking for direct flights can expect up to a 20 percent premium price.

So when to buy?

Those who have not bought flights for Thanksgiving travel are already too late for the best pricing. Looking at Christmas travel, Searcy suggests buying before November 10 for the best pricing and consider traveling during off peak times.Other ways to save on airfare?

Try a travel agent- Expect to pay a fee of $20 to $50 per person on top of the airfare but that fee can quickly become a great investment if a travel agent finds great flights at a lower price in less time than we might invest on our own surfing websites.

To get the best results with a travel agent, have very specific but flexible travel plans. Establish what agents call a “travel window,” basically a period of time within which you are able to fly. Note the time you need on the ground for holiday plans and throw in any hotel, car rental or other needs at the destination.

Also, send along past guest/frequent flyer numbers and available points to that agent to have on file and take advantage of if possible.

Pay attention to airline promotions- I got one today via email from American Airlines doubling miles every time I fly on American Airlines, American Eagle or the American Connection carrier from November 16, 2012, through November 26, 2012. Those miles might mean a lot to me and swing my vote toward American if two options come up roughly equal.

Regardless of what airline we fly, what airport we use or when we go, it’s clear that this year prices will be up and availability down as airlines trim fleets to fly full planes.




[Photo Credit- Flickr user matt.hintsa]