Puppy's Barbershop, Cuba

“Puppy's Barbershop:You're ugly when you arrive, but you're handsome when you leave.”

My eyes wandered from the handmade sign, past photos of a younger Puppy, along the fuchsia bicycle with a handmade child seat on the crossbar, to the 1950s barber's chair where a young macho was having his coif maintained by the patient Puppy of signage fame.

Their conversation was relaxed, familiar, and so lightning-fast that much of it went right over my head, which was covered with an amount of hair that had felt fine in San Francisco, but in Cuba felt like one of those big Russian fur caps, which just don’t do well in the tropics. There’s a reason it was the Cuban Missile Crisis, and not the Cuban Giant Hair-Hat Crisis.

Next to me sat a sinewy older man in no particular hurry, occasionally chipping a word or three into the conversation, but other than that, just relaxing like thin Buddha in a guayabera. I felt at home among these men, and asked them a question that had been on my mind.

“Would you guys like a McDonald’s here in Trinidad?” I was half-expecting, or perhaps hoping, for a revolutionary rebuttal against capitalist corporations, perhaps a discourse on neo-liberalism’s inherrent destruction of the principles of solidarity, which are so crucial in Cuba. But their answer was far more beautiful than that. Beautiful, and terrifying.

“McDonald's? What is that?”

How does one explain McDonald’s? “It's a hamburger restaurant chain...” was weak, but it's what came out while I tried to translate what else I wanted to say about it.

“Of course! We love hamburgers! And they're really good with pork.” Cubans love their pork, and do it better than any nation I've yet tasted, though I’m not sure Ronald would approve. The conversation moved on to various pork recipes, leaving my mind to wonder how I could have explained the golden arches better.

Because someone needs to.

Cubans, protected for fifty years by an embargo they love to hate, are shockingly innocent of the dangers of globalized commerce. They are not aware that GDP does not equal wealth and prosperity for the people, and if there's one thing Cubans are remarkably good at (in addition to baseball, cooking, music, art, dancing, laughing, storytelling, relaxing, and looking cool) it's caring about The People.

There is a sense of solidarity on the island that is unlike anything I have ever seen. So of course, Cubans hear that these giant multinational companies want to come in, and they think “It will bring in a lot of money, and therefore be good for Cuba.”

I fear for the day Ronald starts selling his burgers alongside the paladares of Havana, and can only trust that the Cuban people, or at least their leaders, will know the danger before it is too late. Or, failing that, that they’ll remember what good food tastes like.

Maybe it was the steps already taken to protect this island sanctuary, or their impressive adaptability and resilience, or maybe it was just the languorous pleasure of an afternoon in the barbershop, but as Puppy finished removing my sweltering hairstack, I felt a calm optimism.

In fact, maybe Cuba will teach Ronald a thing or two. Maybe he'll arrive looking ugly...

Campeche nights, snakes and ebola

August afternoons in southern Mexico are punishing, but when the sun goes down off the coast of Campeche, the air takes on an apologetic softness to reward you for surviving the broiler hours. As the sky cools down and the streetlamps warm up, the colors shift from baking browns to glowing reds, under a healing blue that lays low above the Plaza de la Independencia, where people have gathered since 1541.

For a few nights I joined that gathering. Food vendors lined the periphery, selling the various corn meal permutations, fresh-caught seafood, and meat marinated in bitter orange and cooked with achiote and habanero peppers, campeche style.

I’d usually start with a tamale, test myself on something spicy, then make sure there was no shark meat in tonight’s brazo de reina (I’ll eat most animals, but those persecuted lords of the deep: no way) before buying a piece, which I’d eat under one of the large and lovely trees.

The cathedral watched over the plaza like a king at his own coronation, fundamental but removed, essential yet somewhat awkward. The stone steps were warm, almost loving, when I sat until ready for buñuelos de aire, the fritters covered with honey that made my fingers stick to my pen, or Muéganos, another fried dough delight, this one covered in piloncillo (cane sugar) syrup. Or there’s always the marzipan made from dried pumpkin seeds...

While I decided which of those best fit the night, I’d watch the locals taking their slow paseos around the park. In the center, a band thumped out traditional music from the spotless gazebo, gazed at by a small flock of kids too old to chase the balloon man, but not quite ready for the nightly soccer tournament.

Young parents pushed toddlers in three-wheelers, chubby little heads turning to follow the progress of the toy vendors, infinite infant attention fixed on the toy horses pulled on thread leashes, and I was impressed to never see a single temper tantrum or hear one wisp of whine. Eventually a flock of bubbles would drift by, and distracted delight would sweep across the wee one’s faces.

Sitting on the outer edge, I was often among the grandparents, abuelitos remembering their own days pushing strollers and cleaning scraped knees. We’d all smile at each other, no need for words. Around us, the summer’s last crop of crickets would crawl and hop across the warm stone, their song mingling with the trumpets and tuba on stage.

When I’d had enough, lids and limbs grown heavy, I’d return to the hostel, a colonial residence both dignified and personable, located incredibly right on the corner of the plaza opposite the cathedral. I’d sit in the open balcony door with a cup of tea and watch with the cathedral as the families went home, and the stars took over the music.

It was among my favorite accommodations of all time, inexpensive, clean, replete with character and right in among the authentic local living. It closed two days after I left.

It was 2009, and the Swine Flu craze had already killed most of the competition, this was among the last. I would sit on that balcony, stunned at all the people who had fled from this experience because of a disease they had a sliver’s chance of contracting. Humans are awful at risk assessment, and the news media makes the smoke of a match somehow cloud out the sun.

Memories of those Campeche nights, and all the people’s memories that didn’t have a chance to happen because of overblown fear, come back to me now as I gear up for a new career in European tourism, hearing with dismay that Americans are traveling less this year due to fear of ebola.

Ebola?!? We’re talking about Amsterdam, Paris, and Rome, not Makeni, Moyamba, and Monrovia. I understand that disease is scary, and I believe we should be supporting the areas with outbreaks and the search for a cure more than we are, but we are a long way from needing to hide in our basements.

(The other fear that is keeping Americans home, ISIS, is overblown beyond belief. Unless you’re planning a trip to Syria, ISIS will never be a factor in your vacation. I believe you’re safer traveling in Europe than you are staying home and commuting with the berserkers who hate their jobs and drive like it.)

The name Campeche comes from Yucatec Mayan Ah-Kin-Pech, which means “Place of snakes and ticks.” Sure, those both exist, just as do ISIS and ebola, but in all my time there I saw neither, and neither will you.

Dear fellow Oakland protesters, and others.

The type of legitimate protesters I went to join

Dear fellow protesters in Oakland, thank you for coming. I know you’re angry, so to not waste your time I’ll get to it:

What is the point? Your point. Your purpose. Your goal. Why are you here?

Are you here to express your frustration with race and class relations in this country, advocate for justice and change, and oppose the militarization and impunity of a segment of the police?

Or do you just want to burn shit?

Because the two are mutually exclusive. Standing for the former entails NOT doing any of the latter, and doing the latter destroys the voice of the former.

Are you here to protest, or riot? They are fundamentally different. Is your enemy hate crime, or Starbucks? Do you want to build something better, or just smash what’s here? Do you want to oppose those responsible, or just harm your neighbors?

My opinion? This War on Trash Cans accomplishes nothing but toxic fumes. This aggression towards all police officers does nothing but further inhibit dialogue and progress. I see demonstrators and police pushing each other into simplified extremism, and it makes me sad. I’ve known good cops. Men and women who I was glad were there to back me up.

When will you learn that violence does not have the effect you wanted it to when you were an angry 16 year old? It’s time to grow the fuck up.

Just an excuse for their ugly little tags

As you may have guessed, angry violent “protester”, I am sick of your shit. You are not a protester. You are a hooligan. And I will not stand by you. So tonight, as the helicopters again drift overhead, despite my desire to finish what I’ve started and demonstrate my conscience, I am staying home. It’s not because I’m scared, not afraid of being arrested again, but because last night looked to me like a movement degraded, a legitimate grievance lost in petty vandalism, and I will not participate in that, even tacitly.

To those actual protesters, both previous night, and probably tonight too, I thank you for caring. Apathy is the great enabler of discord and abuse.

And to those who have come to Oakland to hide behind your coward’s mask and make trouble in someone else’s community… Violence breeds violence, so please don’t tempt me.

Gifts in Granada

That last post about Tarifa came from an old journal, a paragraph not relevant enough to include in my book, but I enjoyed giving it a little life somewhere else. Another such moment popped up a day and a page later, in Granada. After a long morning walk among the flamenco byways and impressive graffiti of the Andalusian city, I had found a small neighborhood park to rest for a moment.

Losing all my own pictures and having
to use other people's is driving me crazy

Granada was messing with me, one moment of still sunlight would make me wish I’d worn shorts, then the next a winter wind gave meaning to my jeans-ing. I was temporarily in the warmer former, in that place where as much grass grew in the paths as between them, when a child ran up to me.

Yellow sweater, yellow stockings, and a green shirt...with yellow triangles on it. All eclipsed by hair so blond, Rapunzel read about it as a child. Given her gouda complexion, I was expecting Swedish when she opened her mouth to address me, but instead I heard Spanish.

“Hello!”

“Hello, how are you?” The words were the same as high school oral presentations, but the premise had never been: You’re talking to a strange ethereal five year-old in a park in Granada. Introduce yourself and carry on a polite conversation.

“I’m well. Do you speak English?”

“Yes I do.” To prove it, I switched to my mother tongue to say “And do you speak English too?”

An intent pause as she examined my face. A giggle. A solid look at my feet before continuing, in Spanish. “Why are you barefoot?”

Grumble. I liked my angle of this one better.

I sited the beautiful weather, and told her I’d walked a lot that day already. She considered this, then repeated her question, verbatim, and added “My grandpa doesn’t let me take my shoes off.”

Oops. I’d been in this situation before, the accidental bad example, during my hippie days at university when my ten-toed sasquatch presence implicitly countermanded the edicts of new-parent friends. Time for damage control.

“Your grandfather is right. There are a lot of stones here, you might hurt yourself on them...” I’m sorry grandfather, I’m trying.

A moment more careful examination, then she ran off, returning with a double handful of stones. She showed them to me, then dribble-dropped them at our feet and cheerfully informed me: “Rain!” A solid giggle. Warmer than the sunlight.

But it is a good thing I'm not the only one
who noticed Granada's beautiful street art.

“Wait for me!” And she ran off to my right, disappearing behind a bush. I stood blinking, dazzled by the sun and the unexpected contact with an unfamiliar age group, then she was back, appearing from my left with a handful of leaves and twigs. She sang me an unintelligible tune that ended with a shout of “Christmas!” and the plants flung in the air. More giggles. She repeated the loop-song-toss cycle, first with grass, then with rocks. The last round, the ditty may have been about someone’s culo de caca, not sure what the deal was with that one, though it still ended with “Christmas!”

I was about to ask her about it, but she ran back to play with the other children, and left with her grandfather a little while later. I resumed my journey, so did she, so did the entire city, but it’s nice to remember a golden moment of a giggling child on a sunny day at the end of winter.

Alone together in Tarifa

If Spain were a big, worrisomely lumpy breast, then Tarifa would be the downward-sagging nipple, poking across the Strait of Gibraltar at my goal for the day: Morocco. But Tarifa was also the home of the wind, and the first two ferries were already cancelled when I arrived at the harbor in the whiskey-colored lamplight before dawn.

Hours of unrelenting wind cancelled ferry after ferry, until my last chance was the 5:00, four hours away. Tired of hard plastic chairs and neon lights, I wandered down to the beach below rotting cliffs, where the stone ribs of the Mediterranean stuck up on shore in a ragged shirt of dying drying seaweed.

Somehow over the years I lost my photos of this part of that
trip, so these are from elsewhere, in this case, and Kayakoy,
an abandoned village in Turkey.

Down among the fallen rock and discarded shoes stood a line of forgotten fortifications, broken walls with nothing much to do, but makeshift doors and the barking of barely contained dogs testified that somebody was doing something here.

The King of the Shattered was a circular bastion, gun slot barricaded with broken beer bottles and spent cigarettes. It seemed almost whole, though the roof was gone. It’s always the roofs that are the most mortal. Evicted from the beach by a rising tide, I turned to see the door of the bastion now open, framing a man in olive (canvas) pants and a camo jacket with the East German flag on the left shoulder.

We nodded our greetings in passing, but then he sent some Spanish mumbling and crumbling my way. Most of it caught in the wind and landed somewhere in Cyprus, but he added a machine-gun gesture. A wind-scoured moment passed before I realized he was telling me the history of the building. Why not, I got no place else to be. Pleased by my interest, he became an eager tour guide, albeit uninformed and unintelligible.

Windy afternoon in Iceland

His steel hair didn’t speak comb, and he had the watery eyes of someone who had spent long hours in conversation with alcohol, but their sadness was harmless. I looked down at my own olive (canvas) jacket, felt the wind in my overgrown hair, and wondered how the eyes of a traveler who’d spent too many weeks alone might look to him.

I asked to take a look inside and he gestured me forward with a shy smile of a few broken teeth, and the sweep of a quaking hand. In a mess of more broken bricks and crumbled mortar I found his treasure: five underweight chickens of missing feathers and hideous feet.

When I took out my camera, my host disappeared in a hunt-and-peck of words about someone finding out he was there. I wondered who?  I put the camera away and he reappeared, now with a few small eggs decorated with feather fluff and chicken shit, which he carefully slid into a plastic bag. Was he going to give them to me?

Same abandoned village, Kayaköy, Turkey

We hung there for a still moment, two men and five chickens, a bag of eggs awkward between us, while the wind raged just outside.  The thought that he was my future was too heavy, too possible, and I drifted out the door. We dispatched a few last words at each other, with customary incomprehension, and parted as friends.

As I pushed through air that didn’t want me there, wet sand scraping inside my socks, on my way to a barren room for one, my brain deciphered his last words:

“Perhaps you will come back, and next time take my picture.”

This man, alone in this place, as I was lonely on my road, had wanted me to take his photo. Something in our contact had reached him. Maybe he wanted someone else to see him. To recognize him, and hold a camera up to prove it. I knew how that felt.

I considered staying another day to see if the wind would relent. Perhaps go back down to that broken beach and look for him. Maybe take his picture. But that moment was gone, so I caught a bus to Granada, early the next whiskey-colored morning.

(If you are in the San Francisco area, I'll be reading this piece, or something like it, tonight at Book Passage, around 7:00 PM)

Where to find, where to miss, and how to kill the divine

My view that morning

The coarse wool of my djellaba was scratchier than the sand blowing against my bare legs. Maybe the other way around. One does not customarily wear shorts in the desert, but I welcomed the contact, the tactile connection to this landscape where the life stayed hidden and the death stood obvious. The sun was still under, but the wind was up, slowly burying me in Sahara. The steady movement, as I stayed immobile, reminded me of Pacific beaches, where outgoing waves slowly sift you into the sand, a memory from this place’s opposite twin, the sensation’s antipodal kin.

Everyone else still slept while I climbed the tallest dune around our sheltering valley to watch the Saharan sunrise. Seated on the ridge, as the last of the stars dissolved in the growing blue and the curves of this sere place consented to my eyes, I felt an unexpected stirring.

Of course churches can be beautiful.
Reminiscent of the divine even.

I’ve long known myself as a disciple of the ocean and devotee of the redwood forests where my soul was born and my body grew up, places where I felt the presence of the divine far more than I ever had in any manmade coffin of stone or wood, but now, here, on the other side of our galactic rock, I had found another holy place, built of dry textured grains, saturated in burning and freezing, the dust of bones from the places where humans began, but had abused into infertility. And it was undeniably holy.

On a sand dune in Morocco, as in a surf swell in Monterey or a sylvan glade in Mendocino, it was clear to me, illuminated by more than the morning sun, that religion is an improper response to the divine.

Beautiful churches, reminiscent of the divine

The divine is fundamentally unknowable, and religion claims to write it down. The divine is essentially personal, and religion wants all to abide by a standard doctrine. The divine is eternally changing, and religion tries to spike it to a stationary cross. In the end, that's what religion does to the divine: it crucifies it. Impaled on nails of dogma, bound to a fixed position, delineated in an X marks the spot. But the divine does not work that way. The divine is cosmic wind, ocean currents, spring growth and autumn shedding, and now, I added, the migration of Saharan dunes.

I looked down from my moment’s seat atop a slow-sliding deity at the camp below, where my fellow short-lived humans gathered, and thought That is a church. A mosque, a synagogue, a temple, a cathedral, a tent: these are where we upright monkeys find mutual support, shelter, and community. These things are important. Crucial. Beautiful. Even holy, in their human way. They are to be respected, enjoyed, and cherished.

Beautiful churches

We gather together in these places, seeking to know the divine, but over time we grow fatigued of looking at mystery, which never seems to change, never speaks, never seems to notice us, and eventually our vision shortens, and we find ourselves mistaking the setting for the goal.

When we have forgotten the point so completely as to think that our rituals and forms ARE the divine? When we take that confusion as a justification for violence, spiritual or physical, against other seekers (and we are all seekers, even and perhaps especially the Atheists and Agnostics) that is when we have taken a misconception and made it truly blasphemous.

It is not blasphemy to disagree, it’s when we inflict that disagreement on others.

Gaza

This all seemed very clear, in the quiet howling wind of a Saharan morning, and it was easy to think I was the only one listening. But I was not. Talking heads encourage me to believe that Islam and Christianity are at war, but they are not. Some Muslims and some Christians are, minorities both, but those are the squabbles of the sleeping, the martyring of the misled. Religions are just windows, and fanatics can only break them.

We're all just standing in the same tent, trying to understand the sensual slopes outside, the benevolent menace and looming placidity of an incomprehensible power outside. Some might push and shove, thinking they have the best views, telling others what to see, but in the end, we need to leave the confines of the tent and walk the slopes for ourselves.

Havana nights

It wasn’t the belly full of savory ropa vieja or the day spent in the sunshine glow of Cuba’s capital city. It wasn’t the colonial facades of buildings, crumbling in Caribbean splendor, nor the classic cars cruising past with heartfelt rumbles. You might think it was the mojitos, but it wasn’t that either. It was almost the notes of jazz, samba, and son that wandered the streets alongside the slapping of sandals.

It was very nearly the air, sultry as only the tropics can be, that lick of breath that knows your body better than you’ve ever dared to look, the perfect medium for the unapologetic sexiness of this island.

It was none of those apart, it was all of them together. And...more. Whatever Cuba is. That’s what it was.

I couldn’t put my finger on Cuba, but Cuba laid its hand on me. It skipped the pleasantries and went straight to caressing my awareness, groping my perceptions and sliding right up along the length of my love of travel.

The first night, the ineffable Jeff Greenwald (who has traveled more than FedEx) was telling me that Cuba reminded him of just how good travel can be. I understood the sentiment exactly.

It was a privilege to meet the people I did in Peru (blogs forthcoming), and El Salvador quickly climbed to the top of my favorite countries. Belgium still tasted like home, and Iceland was so beautiful it was almost crass. But despite these incomprehensibly blessed winter travels, on the BART train to San Francisco International Airport I found myself...tired. Lacking the exuberancy that normally carries my backpack for me.

Exuberance is great...but it takes a lot of energy. In Havana I found something more...sustainable. It was a languorous love of living, a symptom of a culture not ruled by, addicted to, fear. It was waves and wind that will keep coming in whatever strength they please, and will be welcomed or endured as necessary. It was buildings falling down, but people standing up. It was slow meals with nowhere else to be, and songs that will last until they’re done, not a second less.

Those songs lived in my steps, carried my feet from Prado to paladar to plaza. I gave no instructions, to musicians nor muscles, and let both lead me wherever they willed, my job merely to appreciate, enjoy, love whatever they chose to show me on the streets of a Havana night.

And eventually, the verses finished their succession, and the chorus was done for the night. As the melody trailed off, my legs would carry me back home, muscles warm with satisfaction, almost smug with the steps taken and sights witnessed.

I’d pass the sleepy guard and ascend in the Soviet elevator, humming to myself a song I didn’t quite know, but had quickly learned to love.

I have my answer. And my ticket.

I have my answer.

Stranger on a beach, San Blas, Panama

March 2008 I went to Belize. My first international trip (nearly the first time I’d left California) in ten years, it touched off a wanderlust that made me a homeless backpacker by the end of the year.

March 2010, after trying for a couple months to resettle in the US, I gave up and went back to vagabonding abroad.

March 2012, same.

March 2014, would the pattern continue? That was the question. When I moved to Oakland, I asked “Will I cross the ocean in March, 2014?”

Morning on Phewa Lake, Pokhara, Nepal

The answer: yes.

But I came back. It felt good to leave, and it felt good to come home.

Sometimes I feel torn, wanting to be here and wanting to be There. I miss exploring a new place, even as I exult at knowing how to get where I’m going. I remember the simplicity of having three shirts, even as I happily browse my (relatively) massive wardrobe. It’s relaxing to know where I’ll sleep tonight, though I yearn for the days when I don’t.

But as Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

I can encompass it all. And I’m finding the balance.

I can love the air here, the climate that (partially) justifies our exorbitant rents, and smile at skin’s memory of Icelandic glaciers and Malaysian jungle sweat, knowing I will feel the like again. I can practice cooking my mediocre meals, knowing I will again order street food I can neither pronounce nor identify. I can throw a moderately dirty shirt in the washing machine, knowing I’ll be fine hand-washing my own grime someday soon.

I can try to maintain spiderweb friendships made on The Road, but add another layer of cement to the ones here that have already lasted 20 years. And I can marvel at the process as new ones form, hoping they last just as long.

Somewhere in Switzerland, on my 1st big backpack trip 08

I’m doing a rotten job of being around for family birthdays so far this year (with one more to lapse on this next trip), but I’ll be back for belated birthday dinners, and better yet, the random Saturday lunches and movie nights that crop up at a moment’s notice.

And as for travel? I cherish the one-way ticket to a continent of unknown proportions, but now I can shift focus to smaller scales. For now, I will give up the endless wander, and focus on getting to know finite spaces, at home, and abroad.

I look forward to exploring the museums, exhibits, hikes, and niches of the San Francisco Bay Area. And I will spend the rest of this month on an island, learning from and about its people, then come straight home.

Tiny monks in a village near Inle Lake, Myanmar

I wasn’t a complete tourist before, in the most negative interpretation of the word, and have been blessed to meet and know many people. But there’s a layer of insulation that can creep in when your road seems endless; by belonging everywhere and nowhere, you get just that.

Right now, I belong here.

And in a few days, I’ll belong in...another place. (I’ll tell you about There, when I get back Here...)

I’ve scheduled blogs to post every three days for the rest of the month, a mix of travel and Home. I hope you can enjoy them both. The way I do.

Hasta mayo!