Santo Domingo Diaries

Fishing

2025-11-05T11:08:00.004-04:00

Fish Tales 2024/5

Fresh Water

I accidentally turned down the fishing aisle of a Walmart one Saturday last year and came face to face with a bright yellow telescoping spinning rod with reel and line included for $24. That's how it started. It would fit in a small backpack or in a pannier on my bike. It could catch fish for me along the Erie Canal, the Konkapot River, or the Housatonic, or almost anywhere else I could imagine. It could travel with me to Spain or to Santo Domingo and along all the byways and bike paths that I would explore along waterways that held fishes. It could bring unknown fishes up to me to be known.

That night I bled my eyes blind watching YouTube "How to Fish" videos and slept with little plan.

Sunday morning, coffee and laptop, I reckoned a bike route along a local reservoir that might harbor fish. At the last moment I thought "License?", looked it up and downloaded one to my phone on impulse for $50. Lucky for me because 2 hours later a Game Warden, against all odds, carded me, and with my first perch in hand I was found legal to fish and to keep 'em.

My father had often dragged me, a reluctant youth, out fishing along local streams on the golf course abutting our house and on borrowed rowboats on Lake Buel but to little avail. I learned to row, to piss overboard and to bait hooks with dug night crawlers but little else. We caught no fish to my memory. That first small perch I caught, hooked jerking and tugging and leaping with life and hope to stay in its own waters was a connection to life and survival I had never felt.

All the local waters were known to me from family outings as a child, places to drink beer and bring girls to, shores on which to meditate, eat sandwiches, and as general escapes. But now, with rod and lures and baits, a new world opened and I now hunted fishes. Trout hid invisibly in streams where I had skinny dipped and I never knew. Bass lunged at my lures sounding to the bottom and wound the line around pond weeds trying to anchor themselves in safety and pickerel leapt and slashed in mid air to cut my leader with their gill plates and bite my hand that tried to land them. A giant pike along the shore of the Housatonic followed my lure to within 6 feet from where I was standing on the shore, bumped it with its snout, shrugged and then slipped away, a lithe submarine.

I crept up to the edge of the Konkapot and saw a likely bolt hole in a nestle of rocks underwater and flipped a flimsy plastic lure into it. Explosion of water and a 21" Brown Trout lay heaving at my feet. I released it and wished I kept it. A metaphor for my many loves lost. They tell me a trout that size from that brook is trophy size, not the only trophy I have lost. To this day wish I kept it.

Upstream on the Konkapot, right in Mill River, is a pool that, that summer was landlocked from drought. Sighted lots of fish and one lunker, a rainbow I believe. One day, quietly on the bank, with a comfortable place to sit, I tossed in no fewer than 6 different baits over a period of 5 hours, right in front of the fish who surveyed and dismissed them all. It never dove for cover, would circle high in the pool then wander off into the shadows of the boulders below. Next bait same thing. This went on all summer from cool mornings to warm afternoons to cool evenings. Maybe the trout will still be there next summer.

I bought a Tenkara fly fishing rod, short tricky and stealthy with a fixed line and no reel, and found a spot on Seekonk Brook where I could cast it without too many snags. I climbed over the bridge down onto the riprap boulders, waited still and silent and stealthy for a while, and, on my first cast, snagged in an alder. I reached out over the stream to grab my line and scared a huge brookie up out of nowhere and he startled me just as bad, him slamming off the banks and kicking up rooster tails of sand from the bottom trying to get out of that pool. I went back to that bridge 20 times, and saw him often but he never looked at my offerings, neither fly nor night crawler.

Hubbard Brook, nearly nameless on maps, leaks out of the golf course in Egremont and oozes its way through swamps to the Housatonic River in Sheffield. My school bus route, 60 years ago, crossed it many times but now, as an adult on a bicycle, with my yellow Walmart fishing rod tucked into a pannier, I stopped on the bridge, more of a culvert really, near the town line. My elbows on the concrete rail, my back to traffic, fewer than 4 cars/hour pass, I flipped a rubber flat worm into the barely moving water with no hope other than to kill time. I knew kids who used to fish there 40 years ago but no kid on a bike had stopped here since then. Bang 14" Brookie and it came home with me and I grilled it on the tailgate of my truck in the driveway on an Esbit fuel stove and it was great.

Borrowed a kayak and put it on Gilligan's Pond. Small pond to drive past fed by Hubbard Brook and dammed on the lower end but long if you paddle upstream. You can bring a 4 year old with a bent pin and catch bluegill under the spillway below the dam, guaranteed, anytime. Rocks covered with heron shit, sure sign of fish. And there are bass.

I used to log with Bill Markham from Brush Hill and he was historic. Huge boned, broad red face and deep hoarse liquor voice-- "Whikey keep you young, Danny," he used to tell me. He had won longest dick contests at logger conventions when he was younger, I was told, and have no reason to doubt it. I watched him dance down the length of a felled red pine, limbing it with a chainsaw as he went singing a song I can't repeat. On the ride home from logging each day we would drink 3 long island iced teas in a Winsted bar with Pete Cassidy. Bill would never drink beer from a can because once he found a mouse in one. Brush Hill. I looked it up this summer, when I started fishing, and learned there is a pond at the dead end of that road-- 3 Mile Pond. I wasn't thinking of Bill when I wended my way up Brush Hill with kayak on truck, thinking of bass fishing, but when the road turned to ledgy ruts and I was easing the tires over the washboard I happened to see a sign "Brush Hill Cemetery" and stopped to have a look. Ancient broken cemetery and I recognized a few names, but, gazing out over and above the snapped, corroded headstones I noticed a few more in an unfenced meadow above. Low and behold, Bill Markham and his wife buried there with an engraved fieldstone marker and a beautiful view. Wife was the only one of his wives who could tolerate the whole Bill, if you know what I mean. So Bill told me. No reason to disbelieve it.

It is the next Summer now, and the fish I was seeing in Seekonk Brook last year are hard to find and the ones in the Green River on Rowe road come and go. The drought became official in mid September and the water was clear and low. One afternoon, almost by surprise around 3PM I caught 2 brookies and a rainbow trout in the same spot and saw a few others. A week later, without rain, more could be seen but would swim off but slowly when they spotted me with few nibbles. A few days later I suspected they might be penned in the pool because there were more of them and they disappeared like darts when they saw me with only the smallest ones testing lures that wouldn't fit in their mouths. To my surprise the next day there were dozens of trout of all sizes in the pool moving calmly from sunlit bare gravel to branchy cover. None were interested in my lures and I tried many. Eventually a risky cast hung a lure up on a fallen ash branch and, when I broke the line off I left 10 feet of leader (forever plastic) dangling in the water. I came back a few hours later with a hand saw, crawled and crabwalked over the fallen logs in the river until I could reach the base of the branch, saw it off and drag it back to shore and remove the wasted tackle. When I was walking back to the road the landowner of the posted property happened to show up walking his dogs. I figured I'd be arrested for trespassing and damaging timber again. "You fishing with that?" he said when he saw the crosscut saw in my hand. His name is Eric and we parted friends.

Saw a motionless big trout in the same pool, small trout and creek chub swimming all around it, and tossed a bait over its head, nothing, drew one across its bow, nothing. Finally dragged a split shot right over him and the instant it touched it him he shot off into the next pool. Do they sleep?

I reconnoitered downstream and it's for sure, they can't travel that way. The river spreads out and leaks through thin gravel with no exit for trout until it reaches the next narrow. I believe they could jump the small twig dam upstream, but why travel upstream in drought? There would be no more water than here.

This morning I returned with half thawed squid bait strips and cut them up into bite size morsels with braid scissors. I have tried baiting hooks with squid here in freshwater, both in lakes and streams, but with no luck. There was no reaction at first this morning either when I broadcast the scraps into the slow current, but when the first big rainbow took the first bit, fishes of all sizes circled in-- rainbows, browns and creek chubs, and maybe others I couldn't identify.

I returned in the evening with more minced squid and startled a heron off a downstream sandbar and was glad. More squid for my trout and the heron be damned. Stealthy freeloaders. Kingfishers flew up and downstream chattering, waiting for their due. Fish are food for many, and I, too, will return tomorrow to try to trick a rainbow onto my hook with a wooly bugger or a shiny spinner or a royal coachman, but it won't be with a piece of squid. That used to be the difference between us and the baser animals.

Spotted a dead fish from the same Rowe Rd bridge and scrambled down the bank to check it out. Turned out to be a Brookie with its head wedged hard into an underwater crevice between two rocks. Hard to pry it out with a stick. No idea how it happened. Frantic, hard dodge evading a king fisher? Wasn't eaten or scavenged or scarred that I could see.

The drought worsened. I walked farther downstream than before and after only thirty yards the river dried up completely and I saw no standing water, not a pool or a puddle for a half mile until I reached the bridge on Boice Rd. There were some little fish in the first tiny, stagnant pool I came to and I gave them the last of my minced squid.

I helped a friend of mine clean out his dead brother's house and he gave me an 1950's pair of Burton 7x18 binoculars. They focus sharply down to about 3 meters so I took to scanning the steam bed when the light was right and the reflections weren't too bad and I saw some fish that I never would have spotted with my naked eye. Brookies getting ready to spawn, lying near their redds and defending them from creek chubs and small Fall Fish. I saw one Brookie nestled between some rocks off the up stream side of the bridge that I wasn't sure was a fish so I tossed small stones at it for ten minutes to try to spook it and finally decided it was a dead piece of wood. I went back the next day to be sure and stared at it for a long time through the Burton's and it startled me when it suddenly swam away and into a bolt hole nearby. Felt bad about pestering her with gravel the day before.

One afternoon the light was perfect for watching bluegills in Gilligan Pond Spillway. There were at least 50 suspended still in the water facing upstream. I startled a heron off the dam and when it squawked those bluegill vanished instantly into bolt holes leaving 50 sets of ripples like they had no green cards and someone had yelled "ICE!". How did they know it was a heron? How did they associate the squawk with the predator?

Salt water

After bicycling past many people fishing on canals and rivers and lakes in New England and NY State I now bike the coast of Santo Domingo along the Malecón to the west of the Río Ozama and Avenida España to the east and there are people fishing and spots to fish from.

I bought a telescoping marine spinning rod and reel from the cheap Chinese website Temu for about $30, scout likely places to fish from, see a few fish caught and get some advice. I begin by using artificial lures because that is what I know but have no luck. One day a guy fishing near me caught a small moray eel and gave it to me to use as cut bait. I now buy frozen whole squid from a supermarket and have better luck. Nothing likes a moray eel.

The Malecón of Santo Domingo stretches about 16 miles east/west bordered by sidewalks constantly under repair and ,on the south side, lies the Caribbean Ocean, which, I am told, is full of fish. I am also told it is only a sea, but, after fishing from a kayak on Gilligan's Pond and Lake Buel, it looks like an ocean to me.

My fresh water fishing experience involves stealth, hunting, moving, wading, thinking like a fish, looking under lily pads, around corners and eddies. The Caribbean Ocean is nothing like this. The shoreline here is mostly composed of very jagged eroded limestone cliffs from 5 to 20 meters (like 60 feet) tall. Some of the cliff is undercut, some is vertical but often it slopes steeply down to the surf, which makes retrieving a fish by dragging it up over the rocks very difficult. I choose spots that drop sheer down to the water, that have a place to sit and have a minimal chance of tripping near the edge. There are often PVC tubes cemented at an angle in the stone to use as rod holders. There is little shade.

Something heavy on the line, I peer over the jagged cliff, reeling, resting, reeling, can't see far enough over the cliff but as it comes into sight I see it is a moray eel more than 2 feet long. At first, as it clears the water and gets even heavier, it hangs straight down but then begins to spiral itself up around itself and up around the line and spins, wrapping the line around itself countless times, impossible to untangle. Depending on the species their slime coat can be toxic to human skin and their uncooked blood is poisonous. Their bite is not venomous but is strong and deep-- a trip to the ER for stitches and disinfection would be likely. I cut the line with scissors as I swing the thing out over the water and send it back. A local fisherman tells me that, once they are back in the water and buoyantly weightless again, they can untangle the line themselves. I don't know how he knows this.

A guy on a neighboring seaside cliff is fishing without a rod by twirling his line by hand in a circle over his head, like a lasso, and flinging it out into the water. The line has a half dozen tiny hooks tied along it and has an 8d nail tied on the end for a weight. Some folks use spark plugs for sinkers. His hooks have no bait. He retrieves it with quick jerks of his hand, spooling the line around an empty plastic soda bottle. He says, "first thing is to try to snag some sardines then I have bait for fish."

There is a spot near the Punta Torrecilla lighthouse on the east side of the Rio Ozama where you can see needle fish in the water. One day, much like the day I spent in Mill River, I threw 6 different baits and lures right near them and, just like the trout in the Konkapot, they shrugged their shoulders and eased away. Later someone told me that needlefish have very small mouths and you should size your bait accordingly. Or go spearfishing.

Now it is October of 2025 and I am back in Santo Domingo. I arrived the first day of the relentless rain of Storm Melissa, no wind, but now it is the fourth day of constant rain, sometimes light drizzle and sometimes hard, but constant. Last year fishing here I caught only Moray eels, a puffer fish (even more toxic than morays) and one Lane Snapper too small to keep. This year I have a plan use a slip bobber to keep my bait up and away from the Morays. If I catch another one I am going to have to learn to fillet it, and I would rather not.

Canal de Castilla y León Bikealogue

2024-06-16T09:13:00.002-04:00

Today is Wednesday the 17^th of April, 2024 and I’m on a train going south to Leon with the bicycle and panniers . Kind of fun the train travels exactly along route AS375 which is the route I took going north from Pola de Lena north to to Oviedo when I road the Via de la Plata last year. The 10 mile descent was a switchbacked, 2 lane road with grades of 12%-17% and with tractor trailers screeching by brakes smoking. Mine were smoking too!

2023 northbound on bike.

Puerto de Pajares

The descent from Hell last year.

I will get to Leon on the train around six and hustle right to the albergue to try to get a bed. Had some wonderful pinchos (pinchos = free tapas) at Bar Begonia, and a few others. Bar Gitana had a lovely bartender, very charismatic.

Etapa 1 Leon-Sahagún

So awake at 6:30 AM and the albergue throws us out by 8:45 it’s about 36° which for me is very cold. I am now having coffee and pastries waiting for it to warm up at Café Ananya. Set off for Sahagún. Rolling sort of flat landscape and I was on gravel about 40% of the time. Many pilgrims all walking the other way along the Camino de Santiago Frances, I am the only one traveling east. Because I pass all of them I must’ve said Buen Camino to 500 people today.

I stopped for a glass of wine and a Pincho in Burgo de Ranero about 18 km from Sahagún. In Sahagún I walked around waiting to get into the albergue gate and the town gets smaller the more you walk around. But everybody very nice. All the bartenders are waiting for the high season of the Camino de Santiago. The albergue is very nice, lovely beds, and very few people. Every bed has its own electric outlet. And the showers are nice and

Dormitory in an albergue

warm. Talked to a French couple who are in the bunks opposite me and talked to an Irish couple in the Irish bar, which had no Guinness. Restaurants never opened but I survived pretty well on pinchos.

ETAPA 2-- 4/19/24

Very cold leaving Sahagún, but I had a coffee and a tostada in a bar while I waited for it to warm up. My route most of the day was along the Camino de Santiago, so I waved hi to another 500 pilgrims. At one point there was an ambiguous arrow, and with the corroboration of Google Maps, I followed a dirt road that I thought was the bicycle route of the Camino. The dirt road got narrower and narrower finally reduced to two tracks with lots of grass in the middle rough gravel had to walk sometimes no nothing in sight but I had gone too far to turn back. The path dwindled to tractor tracks and I had to walk the bike for a kilometer of it.

Finally I came into a backyard in the tiny village of Población Arroyo which was really just a group of farms, no businesses of any kind. Just inside an open large overhead door of a concrete barn four farmers talking to each other and were startled to see someone riding a bicycle down out of the fields. They gave me directions to find a road like they thought I might be an idiot, but I managed to get back to blacktop which I followed to Frómista.

The albergue in Frómista was open with a nice yard with a place to hang laundry and sit in the sun. But the real highlight of Frómista were the voluptuously curved, quadruple locks. The visitor center was open, and I obtained a PDF, a nice one, of a map of the Canal de Castilla with landmarks and crossings marked. Construction of the canal began in 1753.

Locks (esclusas) in Frómista

Same locks from above

I had morcilla matachana finally in a restaurant next to the hostel. Fried crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside.

ETAPA 3 4/20/24

Very cold in the morning again about 35° and I started off at about 9 o’clock all gravel and a lot rougher than the gravel of the Erie Canal towpath. Very few people, I only saw maybe five bicyclists all day and a few people walking. I detoured into several small towns, one of which was Olmos de Pisuerga. Just as I entered the town, there was a small bar open and the woman there was very surprised to see me and asked me how I found it and how I knew it was open. I told her it was just by luck, and that I would publicize her on Facebook. She had only opened a week or two before and is the only open bar for 10 km in either direction. A coca cola and on my way.

The bridge that leads to Olmos de Pisuerga

Aqueduct Abánades carrying the canal
over the River Valdavia at Melgar de Fermental

As I was nearing the end of the day my rear bicycle tire threw a rock off into the bushes with a sound like a pistol shot, I waited for the sharp hiss of a flat. I made it to the next town with the large bulge in the tire still holding air. I had a beer in the bar and asked about a bicycle shop. Everybody laughed and also informed me that Alar de Rey was 2 km up the road and that I was in San Vicente which had no businesses except the bar. So I finished my beer and biked gently to Alar de Rey, went to a bar and asked advice. No bicycle shop and worse, nowhere to sleep. So I bicycled on road back south (and downhill!) toward Herrera de Pisuerga where I found a lovely private albergue for only €20, which is cheap for the private ones—- the municipal albergues only charge between €4-10. I had pizza for dinner in the bar La Estación, friendly Morrocan bartender. The next morning Sunday morning, I reinforced my tire on the inside with a tire patch and fibre packing tape and set off toward Burgos.

Free secure bike parking at Herrera de Pisuerga.

On the way to Burgos the bicycle was shifting oddly, but manageably. 15 km down the road I stopped at another tiny town, Sotresgudo, that had an open bar and ordered a coffee and a piece of potato tortilla. Very nice bartender. I started off downhill and went about a half of a kilometer and suddenly my rear shift cable snapped. So I made it back to the bar which is called Bar Yoin and the bartender called a friend who is a mechanic who came in about ½ hour (on a Sunday) and ingeniously jury rigged my cable well enough so I could make it with two gears to the first town with a bicycle shop which would be Villadiego another 15 km and kind of hilly which was noticeable due to my lack of gearing.

I went to the restaurant La Cueva in Villadiego and rented a room from the same owners in a hotel called Safari. The bicycle shop was supposed open tomorrow, Monday. The small bridge right near the hotel looked to be just a modern concrete bridge, but when I walked down under to the edge of the river Brulles I discovered that it was a beautiful Medieval three arched stone bridge. There were a few benches with grass growing up around them-- perfect spot to have a beer and reminiscent of the Green River at Rowe Road.

River Brulles

When the Cueva restaurant reopened at 8:30 at night, I had garlic soup and morcilla for €15 and it was almost more than I could eat. Monday morning slept in and then had coffee in the kitchen of this big house/hotel The Safari, and then went to the bar by Cueva and had another coffee and then knocked on the door of the bike shop. I called the number on the door and they answered and said they would not open today. So I waited a half hour or so for it to warm up a little bit, and then biked off with my two gears towards Burgos.

ETAPA 5 Villadiego-Burgos

Some steep hills but I never walked. There came a decision whether to stay on the N120 or take the A231. I thought the “A” meant “Autonómica”, a type of local road but it turned out that in this case it meant “Autopista” i.e limited access interstate. I was about a half a kilometer in with no way off before I realized my mistake. The speed limit was 120 km an hour with tractor trailers hurtling past and cars honking at me. There was a wide breakdown lane with a protective rumble strip but it was scary. I was also worried about police either arresting me or fining me. Finally I saw a parallel side road (the N120) in the distance. I biked on until it angled closer to the autopista and finally chose a spot to cross. So very carefully I crossed my two lanes of traffic, luckily there was very little traffic. I could see nothing on the horizon when I crossed, and then I tossed the bicycle over the guard rails in the middle divider strip, and crossed the other two lanes, hid the bike in some tall grass and scouted out a place where I could get off the autopista. All along both sides of autopistas here there is 8-10 foot tall page wire fencing to keep deer off the road, no gates no openings. I found a spot about 30 yards up the road where the fence was laid down about halfway and there was also a man with a tractor irrigating or spraying some crops. I asked him advice and he pointed. Yeah, you can get to the N120. Great-- went back and got my bike and he help me get it over the fence. I biked down some farm roads and finally made it to the relative safety of the N120.

The fencing along the auropista

Colorful graffiti under the A231

The wind today was howling well over 20 miles an hour all the time with gusts that, since you can’t see them coming, almost blew me off the bike. Eventually my road converged with the Camino Frances, which is sometimes the same as Eurovelo1, and I saw some hikers and some other bicyclists and asked them advice. Should I take the dirt road Camino or stay on blacktop and they said stay on the blacktop Camino is very bad so I did, and I made it to Burgos and checked into the albergue €10. There was some confusion about which bed was mine in the dormitory but finally settled into bed 364. Big albergue.

One of the employees gave me the name of a bike shop that could replace my broken cable but it was a three hour wait for it to open at 5PM so I settled in a little bit, charged my phone and bicycled to Decathalon, a fantastic chain sporting goods store, where they fixed my cable for free did not even charge me for the part and I bought some warmer clothes. Now I’m sitting in the plaza and just had a sandwich, bacon and hotdogs with mustard, and a glass of Ribera red wine.

ETAPA 6 Burgos-Castrojeriz

So from Burgos very cold again in the morning I headed out for Castrojeriz and spent most of the day on dirt road single track lanes with grass up to my knees through fields of rich green wheat on one side and fields of bright yellow rapeseed on the other.

Castrojeriz is small, steep little town with a castle perched high above. I went to one bar near the albergue but it was expensive and full of tourist pilgrims so moved to the next bar La Taberna-- you know the second bar is always the best. It was small and funky and good price. The day has been cloudy all day, a little less wind, but never warmed up. In the morning the volunteers in the albergue threw me out at 8 checkout time as usual and I loaded the bike but left it parked outside the hostel and hiked up to the castle. Tough short steep climb up the front way, I was grabbing at roots and branches to keep from backsliding. Formidable castle dating to the 9^th Century with Roman, Visigoth, and Medieval constructions. 360º views with a Cinereous Vulture (no photo sadly) perched on a rampart. The trail back down the back way was longer but less treacherous. There was a hard frost last night and at 10AM plants in shade were still frozen.

Castle on hill on the right

Castle in middle in distance

On the way up

From the top

Etapa 7 Castrojeriz-Frómista April 24th

By this time it had warmed up enough to set off on the Camino de Santiago back toward Frómista. Today I was traveling west, the same way as all the other pilgrims so I passed some who I had met while biking east on the Camino and was able to renew acquaintances. Met Brendon in the morning in a bar having a sandwich, he’s from Chicago, but with an Irish accent from Dublin. End of The day I’m sitting on the canal having a beer and he caught up to me and I had an extra beer in my backpack and shared it with him. The notable part of the ride was the extremely steep hill, 12% on loose gravel right out of Castrojeriz and then the downhill side was asphalt but 18%-- long ankle twisting push up and white knuckle braking on the way down.

View of the gravel climb

I had a tuna empanada for breakfast at the bakery in Frómista and talked to the guys I met yesterday on the Camino. All towpath heading down the Ramal del Norte of the canal today to Palencia. Very bumpy but not dangerous, but very annoying and loud. Fantastic locks all day and I stopped at all of them. Somehow missed a double lock in Grijota.

An arqueta, housing overflow
valves for the canal

Saw one other biker on the towpath, young German guy bike camping the eurovelo from Portugal back to Germany. Very nice guy. We talked for about 15 minutes and then went on our own ways. He is camping and is cold. At the last lock just before entering Palencia I stopped and had a sandwich of liver pate and tomatoes, and opened a bottle of white wine before I went into town to look for a room. So I get into Palencia and there are no rooms. I look here I looked there. Finally somebody recommended Hotel Monclus and for $40 I got a room probably the cheapest in Palencia. I biked to the local Decathalon and bought a cell phone holder for the handlebars (the first one must have gotten torn off while working the bicycle over the fence on the A231) and also went to Mercadona (favorite grocery store in Spain) so I have food-- bread, smoked sardines, sweet roasted red pepper and thin sliced cured Ibérica ham. Trompicón dive bar pincho/tapa place. Full of local characters, no frills, tasty pinchos and I’ll go back.

Morcilla

Etapa 9 Palencia-Valladolid. April 26

Eurovelo 1 marker

So now it’s Friday morning I get up I get the bike ready I put my new cell phone holder on the handlebars, get a cup of coffee and a churro and off for Valladolid. The path was a lot smoother than yesterday’s joint jarring, bone rattling rocky path. Pretty much on Eurovelo1 and only saw one other biker, who was in a hurry and didn’t want to talk. Lots of great locks had a sandwich next to one of them. Weather was a little warmer than before.

The End of the Canal

Valladolid. Valladolid is not on a Camino therefore no cheap albergues so I booked an Airbnb for $24. It’s on the 4th floor but the bicycle fit, barely, in the elevator. Great tapas Bar de Zamora and Bar de Corcha best so far and great wine from Toro vineyards which are nearby. I’m writing this Saturday morning 27 April and it’s not raining yet but I’m going to stay a second night since daylong cold rain predicted for tomorrow.

Canal Etapa 10 Valladolid-Toro

Sunday, April 28, 2024 I am in bed waiting for the weather to warm up a little bit. It’s 8:30 in the morning. I am in the 4^th floor Airbnb of Delive. Yesterday I spent most of the day walking-- went to the river, saw the Medieval bridge, had wine and wonderful tapas, especially the micuit duck liver.

The Puente Mayor, Valladolid

Micuit de Pato!!

I took a siesta in the afternoon did not sleep but rested. It rained pretty hard from about 11 to about 3. Cold and miserable I was glad I did the second night here in Valladolid. All of the tapas were terrific, but the most fun was the last bar, where a Dominican woman was working. Her name is Orkidea. and the bar is Geminis.

I had planned the next leg of the trip only to Tordesillas but it’s too short a day (even for me) so I will go on to Toro about 67 km. Sunday bicycling to Toro the first half was on a gravel path Eurovelo1, kind of slow going with thunderstorms visible in the distance but when I got to Torrecilla de la Albadesa it clouded up real dark and windy right over me. I was just about to have a snack and when it started to rain I found a church that had a roof over the entrance. I sat on the steps just as it started to pour with hailstones the size of chick peas and at the same time the front door opened about 40 people lots of little kids and the adults throwing candies and coins on the ground and little kids are running to get them. It might have been a baptism. So I ate my sandwich and tossed some céntimos on the ground for the kids and waited about an hour with the rest of the congregation for the rain to let up. I turned off the gravel Eurovelo though and hot- footed it north up to the N122 for a faster sprint to try to stay ahead of the showers. In Toro (again no albergues or hostels) I stopped at the first open bar Sunday afternoon and it turned out there was a hotel upstairs so for €48 (my limit was going to be €50) very nice room, showered got dressed, walked around the Plaza Mayor, the Espolon there’s a Promenade around the outskirts of the city very high up you can see 100 miles and it’s at least 270° view if you walk around beautiful. Stopped at a bar, Ecuadorian woman, and her sister and many others and we drank a lot of red wine and now it is Monday morning.

One view from the Espolón, Toro. The yellow field is rapeseed.

Etapa 11 Toro-Zamora April 29, Monday

I’ll have a short bike I think to Zamora mostly on dirt about 35 km. Bright and sunny today. Well, it was about 40 km but 90% on gravel and some of it was really hard bouncy elbow jarring stuff. But it was beautiful, not right alongside the river, but through great huge fields of wheat and vineyards, short stubby vineyards, and the wheat was topping out and there was a huge climb didn’t look so big on the map profile, but it was a pretty good climbing loose gravel and there was some walking involved. I saw no other people from Toro to Zamora.

I got to Zamora and my favorite bar (known from last year’s trip) was just closing an hour early because Juan had something to do but I’ll go back at 6:30. Met a few bicyclists in the Plaza Mayor and checked into the albergue and I’m on a top bunk. I think roughly 600 km to this point total trip. Tuesday, April 30. Had a wonderful revisit with Juan and Maria in Colima North great pinchos, and talked with a Dutch couple and are now friends on Facebook bicyclists. The hostel was very nice volunteer Swedish, very sweet woman, 72, but I would walk to Madrid with her.

Etapa 12 Zamora-Benavente

Breakfast in the hostel and so I started biking at about 8 o’clock on smaller roads than I took last year for the same destination. Very nice easy biking, small blacktop roads, with very little traffic. There were dozens of abandoned dovecotes, many with the tiled roofs caved in, in Villarrín de Campos. Incongruously there was one new one under construction. The pigeons were for racing, meat, eggs and the guano was used as very high quality fertilizer.

Approaching Villarrín de Campos

Dovecote

Some dovecotes are round and some are square

New dovecote under construction

I bought a bottle of wine in one town and stashed it in my bag for later, and then took the via verde (bike trail) the last 7 km to Benavente. The municipal albergue in Benavente is famous for its bad reviews which is why I avoided it last year. The albergue is unstaffed so, to register and get the key, you have to go about a mile into town to the Office of Tourism. I had arrived at the same time as an Italian fellow was really tired with a big backpack so he gave me his passport and his pilgrim stamp book and I did the walk for him and I signed him in and came back down. He paid me the four dollars when I got back and went up and looked at the room then and put his backpack back on and left. Three other groups of pilgrims came and decided not to stay. Now there are just three of us in the whole place with 20 beds it’s like a private hotel. The guy who snores is gets his own room! It’s cold and dirty and there’s no hot water but it’s terrific.

Etapa 13 Benavente-Astorga May 1

About 70 km with the first half gently but consistently uphill andthe second half flat but consistently hard wind against. I was sometimes on the Camino de Santiago and sometimes on other little roads some very rough gravel.

Bodegas-- underground wine storage
with ventilation chimneys.

The last few kilometers were along the railroad line sort of behind town, but I came into town right at the hostel.

View from my upper bunk at the albergue in Astorga

New favorite wine from Bierzo.

Thursday, May 28 AM kick out from the hostel after microwaving my leftover bacon empanada. As usual, the temperature was about 34° at eight in the morning Leon is only a 50km ride and I could see my breath the whole way. Komoot, a navigation app did a great job again except there was a short gravel section I had to walk due to gravel the size of golf balls, and 8% incline but most of the trip was fairly flat with a helping wind.

Had a little trouble finding the correct train station in León. Google maps sent me to the FEVE station but the station I needed is RENFE station a great big station was hard to find. I waited on line for about an hour talk to a few people and bought my train ticket for Oviedo tomorrow they charge me three dollars for the bicycle $10 for my fare. Then checked into the hostel, and one of the women remembered me from a town before because you know these volunteers move around. Then I went up to Begonias, which I think is my favorite bar here although I only know four or five and head to carnitas in the calamari sandwich, and a glass of the same Bierzos I had in Astorga and loved. Tomorrow Oviedo.

So the trip is done. 14 days of biking, almost exactly 800 km of stage riding with a few more riding around town. The canal biking is quite a bit harder than the Erie canal. The towpath is much rougher. There were no stretches as smooth as the Erie canal.

It is now Saturday, May 4 and I am in the apartment of my friend Suso after my train ride from León to Oviedo, where Suso met me and then trained on to Áviles. I would call the trip and unqualified success. There were a few moments of excitement, for example, the broken shifting cable, the tire damage and the interstate adventure. There were some moments while following Komoot routes where I thought the road might just stop in the middle of nowhere. Very glad I chose not to camp because of the cold weather almost every morning was about well between 31° and 37°F. The temperature only rose above 50 a couple of times it might’ve been 61 or 62° at three in the afternoon on one day. But mostly bright sun, with a few clouds, a little bit of rain, which I mostly avoided.

Albergues/Hotel prices—

Leon €10

Sahagun €7

Fromista €14

Herrera de Pisuerga 19.90 private albergurue

Villadiego Safari €45

Burgos albergue €10

Castrojeriz €7

Frómista €14

Palencia Hotel €40

Valladolid Airbnb €25

Valladolid €25

Toro Alba hotel €48

Albergue Zamora €5

Albergue Benavente €4

Albergue Astorga €7

Alb. León €10

€252 total lodging 16 nights so average €15.75/night.

2020-06-12T01:56:00.001-04:00

So it is about 1980. I am 26 fresh out of Umass super academic but ready for earthier occupations. Masonry. The Annecharicos, Italian 2nd generation masons, they learned it in Italian but their accent was pure Sandisfied, Mass. Well, I was a kid but we worked shoulder to shoulder building stone walls, brick paths, pouring foundations. We used homemade forms for the foundations, 3/4” plywood, steel dogs and cleats and the fuckers were heavy. Which was my department, slight as I was. Lugging those forms up out and down into the cellar hole. I tended 2 masons, Rudy and Charley, laying brick chimney two storey house with an 8 pitch roof. Brick clamps and buckets of mortar, ladders, old school. Mixing in a wheelbarrow mixing in a 1/2 bag mixer. I was not a slave, I was into it. We scoffed at unions. I carried 12” blocks off the back of the pick-up when we knew that the union would not let 1 man even lay a block that size himself. But we worked for rich people in the woods and we didn’t mind. Like I say I was a small guy but I brought 5 sandwiches to work lined up on edge in my lunchbox every day plus a thermos of coffee and a quart of club soda, plus all the hose water I could drink.

So at end of day, depending on where we were working, that is, if we passed a package store on the way home, and in those days Sandisfield had 5 package stores counting bars, now there is 1 (if it is still open), we would buy a 6 pack of beer and split it. Sometimes stop at Daffer’s on the way. Daffer was a brother-in-law of Rudy and Charley and had been mob tied. Had once spent 3 years in Rudy’s barn without coming out once for fear of getting whacked. Anyway he wound up with a small bar in Sandisfied. Not all the clients at Daffers were as civilized as we were. There was Dewey Plank, peg leg with a nail in the end of the peg, had a nose like a hand grenade spray painted red and pissed at the base of his own bar stool. Could drink a 6 pack of Budweiser between the New Boston Store and Daffer’s going the speed limit driving. Sometimes too we would stop at the Silverbrook Cafe. Got thrown out sometimes too for Rudy’s mouth. We even got thrown out of Ely’s Pizza once in Great Barrington once for supposedly creating a disturbance. Ed Ely used to paint regular tennis balls fluorescent yellow lined up in aluminum rain gutters on his porch with spray paint to sell to tennis pros he thought. He sparred with Rocky Graziano when Rocky was trying to quit drinking and fight again too when Charly Annecharico had his cellar hole decked over but no walls framed yet. They put ropes up to keep him from falling off the deck and barred him from Daffer’s, which was a 2 mile walk. But it didn’t work from what I heard. But Ed Ely was tough, although a little punch drunk . I remember him best when I was working at Carr Hardware and Ed would walk in, he’s in his 70’s, a little stunned looking but still ripped in the abs, with a snarled wad of copper tubing in his hand that had been soldered together over the decades or maybe centuries with limestone dripping off it and no regular angle to any of the joints at all and ask me if I “had one of these on the shelf”.

Ok, point of the story. We are working for the Goodnow Estate, regular customers of Annecharico Mason Contractors and it is winter and we are digging a foundation by hand under a colonial house. Pick and shovel, wheelbarrow out to the footing area and then shovel it again into a backhoe bucket. And it is cold. And the backhoe was homemade and mounted on the back of a White’s dump truck. We’d take turns one guy pick one guy shovel and 3rd wheel it out, then rotate, different guy pick etc.The Goodnows did not want their lawn disturbed. The depth of the cellar was not specified, so Rudy had us dig it just deep enough so he would not bump his own head and Charly was the same height. I was a few inches taller so my forehead was covered with knots from hitting my head on the joists for most of the winter. And Charley Pease was a few inches taller than me, imagine. Got so when I hit my head they would not even look up just say sorry.

But we were tight. There was one night I fell in love and it didn’t work out so well and eventually got to work on time in the morning without sleeping and with a biblical hangover. Threw up while shoveling, everyone paused momentarily in reverence like moment of silence, I got back to shoveling and we were bonded and the day was long.

But then another day, bitter cold and the wind even bit in through the sheltered crawlspace where we were digging. End of day and Toad, the caretaker, (never understood his nickname

“Toad”, smart raconteur looked like John Wayne matinee idol), charming huge and good natured, fired up a small wood stove and brought out a bottle of hard cider. Flask of grappa followed, winds blew outside and we hunkered and warmed the shivers out and told stories and lies both bent down in the crawlspace. Well after the cider and the grappa and the other talk came the talk of the Fucking Jews and the Fucking Niggers in Great Barrington and I had no where to shrink into. I had idolized those guys for their senses of humor, their ease with dealing with geologic mounds of earth, understanding of hydraulics, diesel motors, quarter sawing hemlock and oak logs, laying bricks and blocks straight, pouring concrete slabs flat with the drains on the low points and keeping your corners plumb and advising me in matters of love and sex. Life has never been quite the same. It has not changed.

La Frontera and Whiplash

2016-12-21T22:47:00.003-04:00

It is raining and dark outside Colmado Chiquito in Ciudad Nueva but I am under cover and my bicycle is too, leaning against the lottery kiosk. I have a neck brace on and am nursing a beer while waiting for the downpour to let up. There is a 2 pound plastic grocery bag of yucca weighed out on the counter for me. This colmado always has good yucca. I know because I used to live just two blocks from here when I was with Perla.

To carve the bark off the yucca tubers I have to kneel at the kitchen counter and work at eye level to keep my neck from cramping up. The yucca boils tender in about 30 minutes and I eat half of it along with some black bean and pork-bone stew that I had saved in the fridge.

Last year I became addicted to bicycling and, by chance, joined the Logia Ciclista Internacional de Santo Domingo, a bicycle club of artists, renegades, neer-do-wells, communists and ex-pats that tours the barrios and colmados and bicycle workshops of the city sometimes with picaresque results. There are about 25 members of the Logia all told, but active members number around 7 and we are all famous and it is Sunday mornings when we are most active. We have a private Facebook page but I cannot imagine that Carlos Mario, El Jefe, would refuse access to any curious pilgrim. We typically meet around 9:30 in the morning at Hugo's Colmado on the corner of Meriño and Portes in the Zona Colonial and you are welcome. We bicycle about 3 miles between colmado stops and, while much of the conversation is about bicycles, food and women; it ranges as far as Blake, Bukowsky and Buddy Holly. Donald Trump is never mentioned. I will tell you how I came to have this neck brace on.

Bayahibe

Last December just around this time Kike (not Kiki from Villa Mella), Chiñou the Gallego, and I made the hungover decision to bike to Bayahibe, a small fishing resort town in the eastern portion of the island. In the morning we rode from our neighborhood up to Duarte and its dusty crazy complex of bus and guagua stops and stowed our bikes in the hold of a giant bus that would take us as far as La Romana. From there we struck off on our bikes through the city to the highway through swarms of Honda 90 motorcycles, fruit carts, coconut venders, wheel chairs and goats. We turned off on the old abandoned highway and found ourselves pedalling alone for the next 50 kilometers. The few people we saw on this biway asked us if we were afraid of robbers. We had one flat tire.

In Bayahibe we rented a cheap room with two beds, locked the bikes up in it and strolled off through the town. Two girls followed us through some of our wanderings and we shared street sandwiches and a glass of beer with them. I remembered the way one of the girls held her head while she listened and the curve of her posture which was somehow both lazy and athletic at the same time. She held her sandwich with two fingers.

Back at the room we decided that since I was the oldest I would get the single bed and Kike and Chiñou would share the double. Sometime during the night Chiñou, apparently acting on some drunken hallucinogenic dream groped Kike who responded with a sharp elbow in Chiñou's ribs.

In the morning I was ready to continue our bike tour on to Boca de Yuma right off but was voted down and so we went to the beach and drank beer. After the beach the town again but now it was Saturday night and the rum flowed more freely. Chiñou, the youngest of the three, struck off for decadent discoteques with our two followers of the night before while Kike and I cruised free rum sampling booths on the sidewalks and danced with the dancing girls in local colmados.

We tweaked the sleeping arrangements for this second night in Bayahibe by renting a second room for Chiñou, who had aspirations for liasons, with Kike and I now to share a bed in a separate room for economy's sake. At 3 in the morning Kike, being gunshy from his experience with Chiñou the night before rolled up all the towels from our bathroom to use as a berm between us. Lights off. We hit the hay, berm in place. One hour later lights on and Chiñou is at the door with the girl with the curvy posture saying she refused to be in the same room with him and could she sleep with us since she had nowhere else to go. We said yes. She slipped in between us and thus her nickname La Frontera; the Border. We passed the night as tired innocents. Nothing happened as the kids say.

I awoke first and went for coffee and rolls. Sustenance. Hangover. Walked La Frontera to a house a km away where some kind of aunt or cousin lived , gave her bus fare to get home, and we talked on the way. Her name is Xiomara. Single mother. 1 year old daughter. We exchanged contact info. I said I liked her forma de ser and she said she liked mine.

Chiñou, destroyed from drug and drink from the night before, stayed in Bayahibe. Kike and I mounted our bikes and pedalled bravely, massively hungover and sleep deprived, out of town. We stopped at a gomero and begged a dreg of contact cement enveloped in a scrap of plastic grocery bag in case we had a flat tire and then bicycled on to Boca de Yuma on a secondary road through miles of sugar cane fields and little else. We stopped for water at a colmado run by a 102 year old woman. In the first town we sat on the curb and shared a beer.

Boca de Yuma, a seaside town popular during the Easter season, was nearly abandoned, it being out of season. We found a clean room with two beds and two fans and slept for 12 hours. In the morning we pedalled languidly around the still sleeping town waiting for a colmado to open to buy a cup of coffee, an empanada and some blood pressure medicine. Once fueled we headed north toward Higuey and an ATM. Narrow harrowing highway with broken borders and pot holes, tractor trailers screaming close by our elbows made the trek harrowing. Motorcycles swarmed through intersections in every direction in Higuey. We got cash and got out.

Outside of Higuey we saw a small colmado with a sign-- Museo de Ron and stopped. Kike was aghast, “there´re brands of rum here I never heard of”. We bought some chatas for the Logia and kept biking till we got home.

Museo de Ron. Kike.

I contacted La Frontera and we exchanged messages for a few weeks. She was living in Guyacanes, so when my friend Mike had a music gig near there I caught a ride from the Capital where I live. When we entered Guayacanes that night there were firetrucks and ambulances blocking the eastbound lanes tending a motorcycle wreck. I called La Frontera from Mike's gig and it turned out that she knew the folks in the accident and one had died. They had been at her house just before to see the baby. She had no baby sitter but I could come visit anyway. Mike finished playing at midnight and dropped me off. Xiomara and I spent the night together sad and confused and happy. It was December 20, 2015.

The Holidays

Xiomara mentioned during the week that she had nowhere to spend Christmas. I had been invited to visit friends in Las Terrenas so I brought Xiomara and her baby, Luz. This was, effectively, our second date. We stayed in the little guest house where the workers stay when Mike has employees working on his compost business. The baby babbled happily in the bed with us for hours while we stared at our cell phones waiting for her to go to sleep so we could make love.

On New Year's Eve Xiomara came to Santo Domingo from Guyacanes to her brother's house on the upper part of Ave. Venezuela. We drank beer and the cheap red muscatel La Fuerza and bought roast pork sandwiches on the corner. Along with some cousins we walked Venezuela, famous for its discos, picked one and went in. When I figured out that I would be the only one who could chip in for the second bottle of rum Xio and I left and found a cab and went to my apartment. Our first night together without the baby in the bed.

I learned was that, although she was born in the Dominican Republic in Jimaní, near the Haitian border, she had no birth certificate and thus no cedula, or government ID so she could not work or finish high school. I met her mother, Carmen, a thin, mousey, drawn woman that night at Tito's and also learned that Carmen did not keep Xio but that she was raised by her Father's sister, Aquilina, in Tierra Nueva, a hamlet more rural than even Jimaní and located closer still to the Haitian border nestled between the two great salt lakes of Hispaniola, one in each country. A year later I would bicycle to Tierra Nueva to meet her adoptive family and celebrate the issuance of Xio´s cedula, after a long expensive hassle with a shyster lawyer.

Tierra Nueva

Mike and I took the bikes off the front seat of the guagua in San Juan de la Maguana, remounted the front wheels and saddle bags and pedalled south toward Neyba 80 km away. Gently uphill for the first

Downhill to Neyba. Mike.

hour but downhill or level most of the rest of the way. Wide highway in good condition almost no traffic and few houses. Occasional livestock in the road and men riding small horses using woven straw saddles. We arrive in Neyba in darkness.

Next morning breakfast of coffee, boiled green bananas, dominican salami and deep fried eggs and we pedal away. The region is arid with cactus and rocky outcrops of rusty limestone but there are spring fed concrete lined ponds, or balnearios, along the route and we cooled off three times (to take a dip here is to echar un chapuzón) as we headed west to Tierra Nueva with the great salt lake, Lago Enriquillo and its caiman, giant iguanas and flamingos always to our left.

Balneario Las Marias, Neyba

We ate lunch in La Descubierta at a small comedor in a cool humid grove near a rill and another freshwater balneario. We took a short detour to see Nueva Boca de Cachón which is the town that was hurriedly constructed to house the people who were flooded out of old Boca de Cachón when the water level of Lago Enriquillo mysteriously and suddenly rose 20 feet a few years ago. Nueva Boca is built in a perfect grid and every house and building is in the same style and there was almost no one on the street. With its bright clear desert light it could be the setting for an old Twilight Zone episode

A green highway sign points to the turn for Tierra Nueva and the road surface changes from smooth asphalt to rough pebbles in tar. To our right sere pastureland leads to a mountain range a kilometer away and to our left is scrubby brush. No cars pass and there are no houses. Goats everywhere. A lone motorcycle approaches in the distance and it is Xio and her sister coming to cheer us on. They are laughing and waving and escort us the 7 km to the town. Xio's long microbraided hair extensions blow behind her on the back of the motorcycle.

The family compound consists of three small, cement block/tin roofed buildings connected in the shape of a U. The floor is concrete in places and dirt in places. Chickens and pigs wander in and out of the little courtyard. We met Xiomara's adoptive mother, Aquilina and a smattering of sisters and cousins. When her father, Tilson, showed up, Mike and I both stood up to meet him and Tilson looked at each of us and asked, “which one of you is Xiomara's husband?” I answered, “guilty, Sir.” and we shook hands.

The next day was Thanksgiving Day. I watched and we talked while Tilson slaughtered and butchered a goat. The intestines, feet and hide were all he threw out. A small boy toyed with the amputated goat's testes, squeezing them in and out of the scrotum. Luz, a little more than 2 years old now, toddled up from the house and cried when she saw what he was doing. We put the meat in a plastic grocery bag and brought it down to Xiomara and she made goat stew.

Note goat hanging to right of bicycle.

After lunch Tilson said to me, “Vamos andar”, or let's go for a ride. We took off on his motorcycle toward Jimaní but turned off on a discrete, rutted dirt track and bounced along over rocks and tree roots until we reached Poplume, Haiti a cluster of mud plastered huts on the edge of Étan Saumatre, the great salt lake of Haiti. No customs no border check. As we pulled into town people greeted Tilson with respect. Tilson is a carbonero, or charcoal maker and employs the people of the village to cut wood for charcoal and to carry the 100 pound sacks of charcoal off the mountain where it is

Poplume, Haiti

made. We sat on plastic chairs and drank Prestige beer while Tilson talked business with clusters of thin men asking about the next day's work. When he was handed an unopened bottle he pried the cap off with his teeth. No twist off bottle caps here. (Xiomara, by the way, has the same gift which is apparently learned and not inherited since he is her adoptive father.) After several hours we got back on the motorcycle and bounced back toward the highway. At a small bend in the trail, still deep in the brush, we were stopped by two Dominican soldiers with machine guns. They greeted Tilson by name, we all shook hands, Tilson gave them 200 pesos (5 dollars) and we moved on.

As we speeded back toward Tierra Nueva on the highway Tilson shouted back to me, “¿A la casa?” and I shouted back into the wind, “¡Sí!” But when he asked a second time I said wherever he wanted to go was okay. We motored into Tierra Nueva and, stopping once to buy beer, drove right through town and on toward can't remember the name of the town another Haitian village near the northern end of the lake. We dumped the bike once on a slippery bend in the rocky ledgy four-wheel drive track. It was dark and moonless when we got to the village and I could only see occasional flickers of candles through open doors of huts. No music played. We used our cell phones to light the way as

Sacks of charcoal

someone led us to a hut with a couple of chairs and a half dozen people hunkered on the floor and on empty beer crates. Someone handed me a Prestige and a girl maybe 16 years old held my arm for a while. Folks chuckled when I spoke the little French I know. Tilson disappeared but returned after a few minutes. We walked out to the beach where he showed me pallets of sacks of charcoal that were to be put on wooden boats and rowed across the lake tomorrow and eventually transported to Port a Prince to be sold.

Somehow we made it back intact to Tierra Nueva on the motorcycle although we had to get off and push it the last kilometer into town due to lack of balance. Aquilina and Xiomara came out and helped us park it, fed us leftover goat in the kitchen and put us to bed.

Logia

There were just three of us for Logia Ciclista that Sunday so we chose a different route through unfamiliar territory. After a quick jaunt into Chinatown for dumplings, which are only available on Sunday by the way and are excellent, we pedalled east over the Puente Flotante over the Ozama River and up past the enormous Faro de Colón and turned left up Venezuela and turned right onto Club de Leones, toward Santana Bicycle Shop. Which was closed it being Sunday. We stopped at several colmados on our slow return home and at the third, Colmado Repecho in the nadir of a short steep valley in the outer reaches of Ensanche Ozama, I needed to use the bathroom. The first visit to any bathroom in any colmado in the Dominican Republic can be an adventure. You often have to pass behind the counter and wend your way through precarious towers of stacked boxes of toilet paper, crackers, returnable soda bottles, broom handles and mop buckets. Sometimes you go through small dormitories where the employees sleep and it is often dark and the walls might be so grimy that you don't pass your hand over them to feel your way along. However, this bathroom was out back. I made the first turn and all was dark. I paused a moment to let my eyes adjust and could barely discern the dim form of a toilet in the back of the room-- my goal! I stepped over the cement block threshold into the darkness, feeling for a light switch with my left hand but my foot landed on a greasy slick floor that sloped sharply downhill and went out from under me. I lurched forward, sliding and somehow hit my head both front and back on my way down-- once on a pile of cement bricks and the second time on a pile of scrapped porcelain toilet tanks in the corner. Shit and urine. I used my handkerchief to clean myself off, urinated and left, blood dripping from my forehead. Left the handkerchief behind. We left on our bicycles.

The next morning I managed to move from my bed to the floor but an hour later the pain in my neck was so great that I could not move. I had my cell phone but could not reach my glasses so called friends not really knowing who I called. I called out for a neighbor who arrived about the same time as Kike. Neck brace, strapped to a board, ambulance and carted down the stairs and off, with Kike, to Dario Contreras, the public trauma hospital. Short lines, short forms, X-rays, no fracture, another short line to get prescription. Guy in the line in front of me was handcuffed to his wheelchair. Bought a soft neck collar for about 4 dollars. There was no other fee and I have no health insurance here.

Two and a half weeks later I can take short bike rides and remove the neck collar often. During the first week I bought syringes of Dexa-Neurotropas and walked into the nearby hospital (Padre Billini where I spent a week a few years ago with amoebic dysentery Visit to the Ward Healers) and looked for a nurse to inject me. Other pain medications included Bergeron, Dolo Ultrafen and Dolometaplex. Some prescibed by doctors and some recomended by friends.

Stolen Bike

2015-03-26T11:25:00.000-04:00

No more bicycle sojourns in Santo Domingo. I dozed off for a minute on a park bench with the bike on its kickstand inches from my feet and it disappeared. Nobody saw anything.

I went to the Tourist Police office in the Fortaleza and filled out forms. One of the cops there gave me a ride to the Destacamento of the Policia Nacional and I filled out forms there too. I walked back home through the Colonial Zone peering up and down the cross streets hoping to catch a glimpse of my bike.

The next morning I printed up posters announcing a 3,000 peso ($70 USD) reward for the return of my bike and posted a bunch of them in the park where it was stolen. There are very few folding bicycles with 20-inch wheels in the DR which makes mine easy to spot from far away. A Haitian guy who lives in the area read one of the posters carefully and said that he had seen a limpiabota, or shoeshine boy, riding that very same bike and that he had seen me too but had not connected me with the bike. When I pinned my reward posters up on bulletin boards inside the two police stations they attracted a lot of attention. A wiry, shifty informant type who had been hanging out with the cops followed me out of the destacamento and asked for more details and a copy of the poster. He explained that bicycles stolen by limpiabotas generally wind up in either Las Cañitas or Guachupita, both notoriously tough barrios, and that he knew how to find it and get it back. I loaned him two dollars for bus fare. I haven't heard from him.

In the days that followed I searched the streets of Santo Domingo where used bicycles might be bought, sold or traded. I was lead into back rooms of tire repair places and pawn shops where I looked for mine among piles of rusty-framed mountain, BMX as well as kid's bikes and trikes and scooters and roller skates and, incongruously, even a pair of ice skates. I visited bike stores in both fancy and poor barrios and I scanned the online classified listings for Bikes for Sale on Corotos.com, Lapulga.com and Mercalibre.com. I crept slowly in the guaguita through the maze of streets in Villa Consuelo where everything is for sale and piled on the street and spilling out of warehouse doorways-- from giant slaps of rough-hewn mahogany, to piles of wheelchairs, heaps of toilets and plumbing parts, tangles of used copper electrical cables, barber chairs, bales of used tee shirts, towers of cheap foam mattresses, pyramids of bolts of cloth, cut rate perfumes and gold filled jewelry. Forklifts and wheelbarrows crisscross traffic in the crowded streets carrying stacks of plywood, Masonite, 2x4's, tinacos and stacks of nested plastic chairs. Motorcycles everywhere. People say my chances are good of recovering the bike since it is practically unique here. On the bright side I have sold a few Airzounds in my meanderings.

Two nights ago I got a call from an agitated guy asking about my bike and I eventually gathered that he had a similar one. We agreed to meet at the colmado on the corner. Santiago is short, blocky and intense with eyes that look in slightly different directions. He ordered a Bohemia beer which we shared while he excitedly related that he had just been riding his black, 20-inch wheeled folding bike through Parque Colón when he was apprehended by Sosa, the Chief of the Tourist Police in the Zona, because the bike looked just like the photograph of mine on the poster. Sosa is famous here and not for patience or compassion for thieves. It was lucky for Santiago that the brand of his bike, Bfold, was clearly decal-ed on the frame and that Sosa had a photocopy of my ad in his pocket that clearly stated the brand of the stolen bike as Retrospec. Santiago pocketed two copies of the poster and is hot to recover the bike for me and it turns out that he lives only two blocks from my apartment. I hope nobody mistakenly kills him for his Bfold thinking it is mine hoping for the reward.

It has been more than two weeks now and I spend less time in the evenings sitting in Parque Juan Barón or Maria Eugenia de Hostos or Playa Guïbia or some other bicycle meeting spot with a copy of the police report in my pocket waiting for my bicycle to pass by. I think it may still appear perhaps months from now after all my posters have been torn down or dissolved by rain and time. I keep a scan of the poster and the police report in my cell phone just in case. Hopefully the phone will not be stolen before then

More Bicycle

2015-03-04T11:09:00.001-04:00

My Airzound bicycle air horn arrived and it is an extremely effective traffic control. You get about 60 short piercing bursts of penetrating honk out of each 100 psi canister of air and you can refill whenever you like using a gas station compressor or your own bicycle tire pump. It stops busses, dump trucks, motorcycles, cars backing out of driveways and startles pedestrians a half block away. Drivers opening doors in the street recoil back into their parked cars like turtles backing into their shells when the blast hits them. People who have heard me honk before call out from sidewalks or colmado entrances when I pass by, “Pita, pita!!!!” (or Honk, honk!!!) wanting to hear it again.

I have imported 100 Airzounds from the factory in Canada. It is too many but it was the minimum order for the maximum discount. My apartment is full of them.

My main selling strategy is to put 3 or 4 horns in my backpack and a sign on my bicycle and pedal through the city and its parks tooting occasionally to attract attention when I see a group of bikers. This is not a high percentage strategy since very few people here go out with 1200 pesos ($25 usd) in their pockets. I think of it as akin to the Theodore Cleaver plan, named after the Beaver's idea of sitting on the steps of a bank waiting for a nice old man to come out and give him a bunch of money. But you never know!

Thursday I joined up with the group of about 75 cyclists for their weekly nighttime 30 km tour of Santo Domingo. They hire 2 Amet motorcycle cops, one of whom rides ahead and closes intersections to car traffic while the other brings up the rear of the peloton to collect stragglers. If a cyclist falls or gets a flat tire the whole group stops and waits. Front riders shout out, “Hoyo!” to warn of potholes or missing manhole covers. I honked my horn when appropriate and gave out my phone number to all interested.

Interest in the Airzound is intense, but sales not so. Today I will go to Aro y Pedal, the largest bike shop in the DR with 10 stores scattered around the country, to try to sell wholesale.

Last week marked the 36th annual Vuelta Independencia International Bicycle road race in the Dominican Republic. 17 teams participated over 8 stages ranging in length from 196 Km to 84 km traversing the country.

On Monday I hung around the start line before the race talking to racers and a few fans and when the gun went off the bikers were gone in seconds and on their way to Samaná 177 Km away.

On Saturday the race returned to Santo Domingo and I waited near the finish line in the rain at Sambíl Mall. Talking to the official Timer I learned that each racer has a small computer chip attached to his front wheel that triggers a sensor at the exact millisecond that he crosses the finish line that communicates with the timer's computer. A half-hour before the racers were expected the electricity went out. A battered pick-up truck eventually dropped off a gas powered generator and the harried Timer heaved a sigh of relief. The route to the finish line on Avenida Kennedy, a large multi lane divided highway through the heart of the city, was in the right hand lanes but, about 300 meters before the finish, crossed through a space between the jersey barriers to occupy the three left hand lanes hugely complicating traffic control for the Amet police. Cars coming out of the mall's underground parking garage kept entering the bike lanes head-on and a motorcycle suddenly appeared in the crossover area causing the American who was leading the race, as well as a few others, to crash on the wet road. He finished roadburned and near last.

27th Febrero and Ave. Winston Churchill

Sunday marked the 8th and final stage of the race and consisted of fourteen 6 km laps down Avenida Lincoln, across Ave. 27 de Febrero, and up Avenida Churchill; finally an ideal scenario for spectators. I watched the start in a throng of about 50 aficionados and then biked down the empty closed-off boulevard to the first corner to watch the next lap on the inside turn. There were no barriers so I sat alone on the edge of the sidewalk and when the racers whirred past they were only a few feet from me and were going so impossibly fast that I could feel the speed and danger in my chest. After the bikers were clear and the support cars and the trailing ambulance passed I, and 3 other fans, biked to the next turn to await the passing of the next lap. And so on until we all arrived back at the finish line for the exciting conclusion of the Vuelta Independencia, to the relief of all.

If you are interested in purchasing an Airzound Safety Air Horn I can give you a good price.

Bicycle

2014-12-12T08:26:00.000-04:00

Eduardo

Turns out riding a bike is not like riding a bike, in that, you can forget how. After a 30 year lay-off I was wobbly and nervous the first few days that I got back on and when I mentioned that I made it up the hill in the center of South Egremont (Massachusetts) other bicyclists said, “What hill?” I started off on a borrowed 1979 Eduardo Bianchi 3 speed folder with 20“ wheels and, as I gradually regained the hang of it, I started to like it.

I bought a more compact, folding single-speed, coaster brake Retrospec bike that fits on the front seat of my pick-up and brought it with me on my weekends in New York City where I sell rock art photographs and tee shirts on various sidewalks of the five boroughs.

Isham and Cooper, Inwood, Manhattan

After work I would choose a restaurant that sounded good in a magazine review or on Yelp, and that was a suitable distance away, and strike out biking for it. In just a few weekends I pedaled the length of the bike paths on both the East and West sides of Manhattan and crossed the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queensboro, University Heights and Pulaski bridges and ate at some good Mexican food trucks, gourmet hamburger and hoagie spots and Caribbean Jerk Chicken stands.

Brooklyn Bridge, bike path

The Little Red Light House under the George Washington Bridge, NYC

Once, I stopped to rest at one of the many little parks on the Greenway along the Hudson River. I was sitting on a bench with my Spec on its kickstand near me and a couple of men wearing nice slacks, loafers and sport jackets sat nearby, next to their own parked bikes that had fenders and baskets, when a guy heading uptown biked up fast off the sidewalk, locked up his brakes, hopped off the skidding bike, picked it up and smashed it against a tree, picked it up again and hurled it into another tree. He picked it up one more time and bent over it, apparently inspecting for damage, got on and rode away. After a moment the Italian guys stood up and, as they were starting to get on their bikes, one looked at me and said with an accent, “In the Old Country, sometimes, we used to fix things that way too.”

I got used to riding in traffic, stopping for lights and not being afraid when I had to insinuate myself into the left hand lane ready to make a left turn when the light changed and I learned to watch for doors of parked cars suddenly opening in front of me and I rang my Schwinn bike bell when a pedestrian, or a squirrel, looked like they might step out in front of me. The Spec coasts and pedals nearly silently having no gears that make clicking noises so no one hears you coming. When I am biking alone I feel like I am going pretty fast on the level or downhill but I am often passed and rarely pass another bicyclist unless they are distracted talking on their phone or eating a slice of pizza or a sandwich while pedaling. On a longish trip with grades but few hills I average 9 mph.

I am now in Santo Domingo which, this year, finally made it to the number one ranking of world cities with the highest traffic related mortality rate. (41 deaths per population of 100,000 with 20 being the international average.) On my first bike outing I cautiously crossed the Malecón on foot, walking the bike, to get to the miles-long sidewalk that runs along the Caribbean and that has few curbs. It is like a boardwalk but built with bricks and concrete. Heading west I kept looking over my shoulder for other, faster cyclists approaching, but there were none. Once in a while a Honda 70cc, heard from a great distance, would pass. I turned right on Alma Mater which cuts through the UASD, the giant public university, and wended my way through the strolling students until I had to return to traffic on Bolivár. Cars, semi-s, decrepit taxis, busses and guaguas and motorcycles, half of which go the wrong way on one-way streets, all vie to beat the yellow, and for that matter the red lights too. The stoplights that work, that is. Years of piling on layers of blacktop have left deep precipitous gutters and there are frequent potholes that would catapult any cyclist into the next lane who hit one full speed. Wherever the street became too narrow I bailed for the sidewalk.

El Malecón, Santo Domingo

On my next bicycle forays into the maw of Santo Domingo I realized that the drivers here are accustomed to looking out for slow moving obstacles in the street. Fruit carts, children, people in wheelchairs and on crutches, shaved ice slushy salesmen (or frieros), cars gimping along on flat tires, livestock, delivery motorcycles, windshield washers, and people selling mangos, avocados and bottles of cold water at stoplights and near speed bumps are common and all need to be avoided. Liability here is generally ascribed to the vehicle that did the hitting, even if the other object was passing in the right lane in an intersection or screaming through a red light. So while the side-view mirror on that Toyota Corolla that just passed my left elbow felt too close for comfort, I believe the driver saw me and missed me on purpose. My biggest fear, and one that almost no amount of alertness can protect against, is of getting hit by a motorcycle coasting silently with no lights through an intersection going the wrong way on a one-way street at night. (As I write this I see in the news that AMET, the traffic police, just gave out 3,433 fines during a 10 day period for vehicles without lights, a little over half of which were motorcycles.) I have ordered flashing lights for the front and rear of the Spec, and an Airzound, a bike horn purported to be the loudest ever made and that runs on 80 psi of compressed air in a plastic canister that you refill yourself every 50 honks with a bicycle pump or at a gas station.

Malecón looking west.

A Rock Art Discovery in Cumayasa

2014-03-11T13:17:00.000-04:00

Before meeting Rafael in La Piedra, Alain and I searched caves for several years in Cumayasa with Chichi. Chichi’s knowledge of local caves came, not from hiding illegal pesticides in them, but from looking for lost livestock; goats in particular have a penchant for wandering into cave complexes, not being able to find their way out and dying. We turn off the main highway, between San Pedro de Macoris and La Romana, after the

The guaguita can just be seen parked to far left

monumental Presidente beer billboard and more or less follow the high tension electric towers past several dumps and charcoal making piles and we turn after the shack where the Haitianos live and bounce down the brutally rutted dirt road through several barways until we get to Chichi’s mother-in-law, Isabel’s house.

Pile of branches ready to be burned for charcoal.

Isabel raises mules and donkeys and has taken in several wan, thin orphans over the years and feeds them partially with bread made from the rhizomes of guáyiga (Zamia debilis), a wild fern-like cycad that grows in abundance here. If the sap is not properly purged from the mashed rhizomes the bread can be

Plantains and papaya planted on limestone

deadly poisonous but Isabel’s, while very dry, is filling and sticks with you. She claims her recipe hasn't killed anyone yet. They also grow yucca (manihot), guandules (pigeon peas), habichuelas (kidney beans) and lechosa (papaya), although I don't know how since the ground appears to be about as fertile as the Moon. They have to find or smash and chisel holes in the jagged limestone crust and fill them with dirt and manure in order to plant anything. Walking through a planted area is an ankle turning, shoe-ripping ordeal.

Chichi is married to Isabel's deaf mute daughter, who I am not sure has a name, and they have one child together.

Chichi with wife and child in their back yard

Unlike Rafael, who took a shine to looking for petroglyphs with us and who explores the caves with us when he does not have somewhere else he needs to be, Chichi leads us to a cave entrance, follows us in to the edge of the dark zone, shudders, leaves, and comes back for us in the afternoon. If we need to rappel into the cave we ask him to wait for us above ever since the morning some itinerant, machete-wielding tigueres shouted down to us, at the bottom of a 30 foot deep drop with sheer walls and no other way out that we knew of than up by the same 9mm rope that we had descended with, that they were going to cut and steal the rope. Luckily we were able to name-drop several local landowners and managed to talk the thugs out of it. They would have probably cut the rope into short lengths to make halters and hobbles for stolen mules or to make towropes for broken down vehicles.

This area of Cumayasa is rich in caves but was not known to be so rich

Petroglyph from Cumayasa.

Unusual with two connected heads,

perhaps suggesting Siamese twins.

in rock art. As in almost all regions of the Dominican Republic, close to half of the caves will have at least one or two, often badly eroded, petroglyphs carved into calcite formations near the entrance, in partial light. These petroglyphs are nearly always faces comprising a circle, two eyes and a nose or mouth and are thought to be guardians of the deeper regions. We don't know why the Taíno (or their predecessors) decorated their caves but they did believe that they were special places; the sun and moon emerged from caves in their creation and the souls of the dead were thought to be tied to the comings and goings of bats in the caves.

During a previous year Alain and Eric LaBarre, another French caver, along with Chichi, had discovered both a painted mural and a finger-fluted boulder in a previously unreported cave that they named Cueva del Peñón. Chichi kept coming across unknown entrances and Alain and I kept exploring, measuring and mapping them and it turned out that many of the entrances were interconnected and that it was not an area of many small caves but of a few large, almost maze-like cave systems.

One drizzly morning Chichi led us to the back of a small property owned by Vidal and that had a small shack on it and eventually we spotted the entrance at the bottom of an overgrown gravelly slope. After being assured that we would not need to rappel Chichi promptly left to go chop firewood with his colleen*.

After taking the GPS coordinates we ducked under a low lentil and crawled into the cool penumbra of the cave. I readied my camera stuff while Alain wandered off to reconnoiter the first rooms and within minutes got lost. When he called out sometimes the echo came from nearby and sometimes from what seemed like from the bowels of an empty, subterranean coliseum. I hammered on the wall near me from time to time and he found his way back

Remains of a lost goat. A strand of

our discarded measuring thread

can be seen to left.

after about 20 minutes. He handed me my end of the string from his Topofil gadget and we began measuring the few nearby dimly lighted rooms and their interconnections before striking off down a slick, smooth, mud glazed decline and into total darkness. At first when I looked back I could see points and dim glows of light from where we had come, but one turn later and all was dark in every direction except where our helmet spotlights shined. While Alain sketched and calculated the rises and runs and azimuths I cast my light around the walls looking for art.

We measured our way off to the right where we soon came to a cliff with a 6-meter drop, too steep for us to descend without rope. As we gazed down into that space Alain thought he recognized one of the boulders on the floor as one he thought of as “camel hump” from Cueva del Peñón. We turned and, punto por punto, worked our way back through a sort of high lobby with a dark triangular opening in the far end. Alain bit off the used measuring thread and sat down to sketch some ceiling details while I wandered off through the lobby. High and to the right of the triangle I saw the first pictograph, “Alain, hay dibujos!” I said.

We left our packs at the base of the triangle and crab-slid our way through the opening into a narrow passageway about 15 meters long and that had a shelf like a stair-tread about 1 meter high extending the length of the left hand wall and above that shelf the wall was covered in rich black pictographs. Some were covered with natural deposits of calcite, which attests to their antiquity. The ceiling was high, evidently nearly reaching ground level since we could see pinpricks of light above.

We did eventually determine that the cave on Vidal's land did connect with Peñón at the intersection by the “camel hump” rock and that the whole system contains almost 3 miles of passageway and 4 important areas of rock art. Alain published his findings in a private publication in French and I published Finger Fluting and Other Cave Art in Cumayasa, Dominican Republic in Rock Art Research, a juried, peer reviewed Australian journal available to download HERE. Rock art image galleries HERE and at www.danielduvall.com

* Colleen is a vernacular term here for machete because many years ago all the machetes were imported from The Collins Iron Works, Collinsville, Ct., USA and they had the word Collins stamped in the steel up near the handle and colleen is the Spanish pronunciation. In those days when you were wading into a machete fight you might threaten to stick it into your foe “up to the colleen”.

Cueva de La Cucaracha and a Robbery (Revised)

2014-02-27T06:09:00.001-04:00

Architecture, La Piedra

The town of La Piedra (piedra means stone in English) is a parched campo with little water. Its rough dirt roads are laid out in grids and most of the houses are built using rusty sheets of galvanized, corrugated sheet metal and cut, un-milled poles for framing. Used blue poly-tarps are ubiquitous as building material and glass windows or even screening are non-existent. There are no actual stores and the few colmados are small, with few provisions, and operate out of homes that may only have power for part of the day. At the end of a day of caving it is often impossible to buy a cold beer anywhere.

Lynne Guitar, who is an anthropologist who teaches at a university in Santiago and specializes in studying the Taíno culture, first introduced us to this area. Several years ago Lynne bought a piece of land in La Piedra I that has a large cave on it that contains petroglyphs and she invited us to map it for her. On Alain’s and my first visit we missed the turn where the mule was supposed to have been tied to the tree and wound up all the way over in La Piedra III where we parked in front of a small group of houses. When some people came out to see who we were Alain asked them what he always asks strangers he has never met before, “Hay cuevas por aquí?” which means Are there any caves around here? The answer was yes and someone went to fetch Raphael.

Raphael (foreground) with Alain in a cave entrance.

Raphael Agramonte, 50’s, short, wiry and angular with a few teeth missing would become our cave guide for the next few years. When he was younger he attended an agricultural school in Santo Domingo and specialized in fertilizer. One thing led to another and he would up in La Piedra. Times got tough and he got involved in buying and selling black market fertilizer which comes in 55 gallon drums and needs to be hidden somewhere— thus Raphael’s extensive knowledge of all caves in the area. He did well for a while and bought several small parcels of land and saved money but eventually got busted, spent some time in jail and lost most of what he had. He now lives with his wife, Morena, and subsists by working with his machete chopeando, making charcoal, and foraging ñame, a tuber resembling a sweet-potato, in the bush which also leads him to discover more caves that no one else knows about.

One day earlier in the week we visited two caves, both of which we had to rappel into and neither of which turned out to have either pictographs (paintings or drawings on the cave walls) or petroglyphs (carvings in the limestone walls or calcite formations). Close to half the caves in the country contain some kind of indigenous art, usually a crude, often nearly invisible, petroglyph or two on a stalactite near the cave entrance in partial daylight. The first cave turned out to be very small. The floor of the second cave directly below the entrance was covered by a six foot tall pile of garbage (partial list includes pampers, tampons, pig bones, rotten chunks of wood, tires, plastic oozing shopping bags, chicken carcasses, unidentifiable glop and detritus) with no way of avoiding landing in it and sinking up to the knees.

Practically none of these caves have names and because we need to refer to them somehow in our databases the three of us confer on the spot. We might name them after the owner of the property or after a distinctive tree growing in or near the entrance. We called the first cave Cueva Colorado after some reddish iron oxide stains on the walls and the second the Cueva de Cojo, because the owner is lame. Other memorable names have included Cueva de Los Puercos Muertos (entrance clogged with pig bones, hides and carcasses), Cueva de Caoba Condenada (mature mahogany tree near the entrance that Raphael estimated was worth 3000 pesos at the sawmill, sure enough when we returned to that cave a month later, the tree was gone), and Cueva de Mano Mocha because the owner had lost a hand in a machete incident.

Thursday, after buying the usual lunch provisions in Valiente, we picked up Raphael at his house and drove over to the Barrio de La Cucaracha (Cockroach Barrio) to check out a few caves. The first was the Cueva de Bienvenido that was shaped like a very low crawlspace and was in the back yard of Bienvenido’s small house. We crawled and slithered around in it and found a half dozen petroglyphs and a nesting chicken. Bienvenido served us all coffee and gave us some plantains for the road.

The next site we visited looked a lot like Bienvenido’s— two shallow sub parallel wandering ridges pocked with various open-air abrigos or natural rock shelters and alcoves. We clambered down a short slope and wandered through the scrub poking our heads into the little pockets and hollows in the limestone walls until we came to the back of a low horseshoe shaped formation. We crawled in through a low opening, stood up, turned our headlamps on and immediately saw numerous, dark, clear, large charcoal pictographs. We quickly reconnoitered the rest of the cave and found many other paintings and went back to the guaguita to get our recording gear.

We were parked on the side of a dirt road with grass growing in the middle of it, about 50 meters from the cave entrance. Raphael mentioned at the last minute that maybe we should not leave anything of much value in the guaguita because it was a lawless barrio and so I carried all my camera stuff down into the cave.

About two hours later, while I was photographing in an open clearing within the cave, I heard a distant buzzing noise but thought that it was probably a car alarm somewhere far away. The sound continued for 20 minutes or so and eventually Raphael walked up to check and a minute later I heard a shrill call ¡DANIEL, VEN ACÁ, LA GUAGUITA! I dropped my archeologist’s scale and went running and sure enough, someone had jammed a screwdriver into all the key entries of the guaguita and then smashed the driver’s side window in frustration. Broken chips of tempered glass all over, shades of my youth. The bags that we had left behind were in disarray and the seats turned up to expose the engine. They had been looking for the battery to sell as scrap. Luckily a chip of glass had gotten lodged under the horn cushion on the steering column and shorted out the horn which had stuck in the ON position and was blaring and which had evidently spooked the ladrones and was the buzzing noise I had heard from afar. They stole only my favorite flip-flops and my machete. They left Alain’s bag containing 100 meters of climbing rope and my bag of climbing gear worth maybe $500 USD along with the ashtray full of change and our street clothes. We had been lucky.

As I was probing the violated door locks with my key and trying to raise the back hatch, which had also been unsuccessfully jimmied, a small crowd of villagers gathered. Arguments broke out over whom the thief might have been; one woman hiked up her skirt and shook her butt in the direction of an old man in an unspoken answer to some unspoken challenge; naked children darted between the legs of taller onlookers. I left Raphael in charge and went back to the cave and collected my camera gear and got Alain, who was still in the cave obliviously working. I swept glass chips off the seats onto the road and rearranged the packs and we left.

Later we learned that local tigueres and drug dealers occasionally use that cave to torture and kill captive rivals. They reportedly noose the victim on the surface and throw him down through a skylight in the cave so that he is hanged in one of the rooms in the darkness below.

We went back to finish measuring and photographing the Cueva del Barrio de La Cucaracha a few weeks later, but this time we parked in the yard of a trusted acquaintance of Raphael.
Raphael went back on his own a few times looking for someone wearing my sandals but no luck. Evidently the prime suspect kept stealing until his neighbors got sick of it and he was killed about a year later,

The Guaguita “safely” parked

Examples of the art can be seen HERE in a photo gallery of the same name; and is discussed beginning at the 6 minute 30 second mark of the Powerpoint video below that I presented at the IFRAO conference in Bolivia in 2010 with the help of Robert Mark.

Caving in La Piedra

2014-02-18T18:37:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I accidentally deleted a post about caving in the Dominican Republic from this blog and here is my first attempt to replace it.

Throughout all these diary entries over the years we have continued to explore and document caves all over the Dominican Republic looking for petroglyphs and pictographs. Over the past 6 or 7 years Alain Gilbert and I have travelled hundreds of kilometers in my guaguita bouncing down hardscrabble dirt roads, changing tires, adding water to the radiator and stopping at colmados in geologically likely looking limestone-y areas to ask if anyone here knows of any caves.

Alain is a born caver, more comfortable in darkness than light and a member of the Fédération Française de Spéléologie a prestigious French caving club. He is about 5’6“ tall with short strong arms and legs and a belly the size of a bowling ball. Our common language is imperfect Spanish. He knows how to drill a hole in a cave partition using a hammer and a star drill, and set a small charge in it to blow a hole in the wall big enough to crawl through to explore the other side. We measure every cave we encounter and Alain eventually maps every one, whether we find art in it or not. He has map data for over 500 caves in the DR; together he and I have explored about 150; some the size of a closet and others containing upwards of 6 miles of passageways.

When we are led to a cave I take a GPS reading while Alain reconnoiters the entrance and gets his notebook and measuring device ready. This device is called a Topofil and consists of a handheld handmade aluminum box that houses a clinometer, a compass and a spool of cotton thread that unreels from an odometer of sorts that measures how much thread has been unspooled. It works underwater; I have seen him use it when he was up to his neck in viscous cave water. Alain selects a starting point, or punto in Spanish, parks me on it with the free end of the thread, flips his helmet lamp on, and walks off into the cave until he stops at his next selected punto, which might be near a stalagmite or boulder or intersection of passages. He sites back along the thread through a hole in the box to measure the elevation and compass points in degrees and he notes the distance in meters that has registered on the odometer. Then he breaks the thread off with his teeth (We usually leave it on the floor, kind of like a linear bread crumb, in case we have trouble finding our way back out) and we measure the next punto starting from the end of the last, and so on through the cave. With these three measurements and some sketches that he draws of notable nearby formations he can later draw a 3 dimensional cave map that is within 2% accuracy. He uses pen and ink and graph paper of different scales and eschews all things digital. He leaves no corner of a cave unmeasured and, despite his build, one of his nicknames is The Worm reflecting the impossibly small tunnels he can squeeze through when needed.

A Topofil device much like Alain's,
although in much better condition.

One Tuesday morning last year Alain and I set off early for La Piedra near El Toro, near Guerra, about an hour from Santo Domingo. We had been there a few times before but today we were armed with a pencil-drawn map of a new shortcut so that we could try to avoid 5 miles of driving the guaguita over horrendous dirt roads that had been filled in with broken cement blocks (not crushed but only broken in half).

We had to pass through El Valiente, a sad and broken backwater town which is where many tigueres go to hole up until the police stop looking for them. We bought empanadas, crackers, spam-like salami and bottled water from a colmado and then drove though town and off the back end of the pavement near the big water tower onto the depression era hard-red-mud, asteroid-hard stone studded roads that lead to Rafael and Morena’s house in La Piedra III.

The road to La Piedra

Center of town, La Piedra

It turned out that no one was home—Morena had had to go to the capital to tend a sick sister and when we walked up to the house we saw that Rafael had left habichuelas simmering on breakfast fire coals outside the locked-up house. But he had shown us some cave entrances the year before that we had never explored and so I fired up the GPS handheld with our cuantiosas puntos saved in it and we eased off toward a cave on our own.

Wasps or avispas

En route we spotted another cave entrance near the road and so we pulled over, and as we were changing into our grungy cave clothes a small boy rounded the curve on foot, said he knew the cave and shyly offered to guide us. His name was Sauli and he helped us hack through the thorny weeds with my machete and avoid the inconspicuous wasp nests attached to twigs. (The wasps here, as I think I mentioned before, have more potent stings than even the rightly feared White-Assed Hornet of North America. The last time I got stung here it was on the wrist-- I saw colors and my bones hurt up to the shoulder for two days. The local remedy is to obtain a few drops of urine to put on the sting; the ammonia supposedly breaks down the offending enzymes.) After examining the area around the entrance thoroughly for petroglyphs (none found) we measured our way incrementally through the cave, as we do, and surprisingly, at one point, came up against a poured concrete wall 4 meters high and way inside the cave. Sauli said that it was the wall of the cistern.

I am holding the end of the thread and the camera,
Alain is reading the elevation from the clinometer on the topofil
as we take our first punto as we are about to enter the cave.

We wended our way around through the cave and saw other entrances, some of which were half filled with chicken manure and dead chickens discarded from the Pollo Cibao chicken farm nearby. In one of the sinkholes there was a shaky looking, narrow, concrete staircase slick with dead leaves and other detritus that led up to ground level. It looked a little like it came out of

Big heap of garbage under a skylight.

a jungle in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. We followed Sauli up it and emerged onto a tiled patio surrounding an empty swimming pool painted with regulation blue swimming pool paint. There was a nice gazebo at one end of the patio that led to the chicken ranch, which consisted of rows of low, screened barns full of pullets and chicks both live and dead. Here we could see back down into the cistern whose concrete dam we had run into from below earlier in the day. Alain looked longingly down into it, a dark rancid pool 10 meters below with several floating fowl carcasses in it, because he thought it might lead to more cave passages but I told him that if he wanted to go down there he was going alone. The half dozen or so Pollo Cibao employees who had gathered by now also all refused to rappel down into the fetid water with Alain so we retraced our tracks back down into the cave. As we passed through one of the open sinkholes a woman hollered down from the edge above to Sauli, “Where the hell have you been, your mother is half dead worried about you.” When we finally emerged out the other end of the cave, Sauli politely refused the $100 peso tip (about $3 U.S.) I offered him and it wasn’t until I suggested that he could buy something nice for his mother that he accepted it and thanked us and went home to get ready for his 1 PM classes.

The cave that Sauli guided us through we would eventually refer to in our database as La Cueva de Carlito #1, named for the owner of the property where we entered the cave. It had about 250 meters of passageway but had no art that we observed in it.

After Sauli left us Alain and I ate our lunch of spalami and crackers and we GPSed our way to La Cueva de Papasito which we had partially mapped on a previous trip guided by Rafael. We traipsed fast through the cave to get to where we had left off measuring and as we passed through the bottom of a deep sinkhole we were surprised to hear our names called out and when we looked up we saw Rafael up on the rim waving and smiling. When we finished measuring for the day the three of us drove back to Rafael’s house to wash up and change out of our muddy (and worse) clothes. Rafael had had to tend the smoldering pile of tree limbs that he was turning into charcoal to sell, but he promised to be ready to lead us to new caves the next day.

Here I am with my GPS device on a stick trying to raise it high enough to get a location.

2012-08-12T10:08:00.001-04:00

A Visit to the Ward Healers

After 6 days of off and on fever and diarrhea which had turned bloody even though I self medicated (correctly it turned out with Metronidazole) and with substantial tenesmus (a new word for me that is clinically defined as having the urge to defecate without the material but which I define as your colon trying to turn itself inside out to empty your own intestines into the bowl and boy does it hurt) I finally dragged myself to Padre Billini Hospital, the venerable public ward healing hospital in the Colonial Zone. It takes up nearly an entire city block and was built around 1880. I remember bringing Niningo here for what he thought was a hernia but turned out to be constipation some years ago and being pretty shocked. Feces in the waiting room, blood drips following gunshot victims into the emergency wards, broken tiles, flies, dirt etc. Just months ago the Hospital was reinaugurated after an extensive renovation—all new plaster outside, new stone entry steps, glass doors, all new tile floors and walls, air conditioning and huge atrium garden with a giant statue of Padre Billini himself.

Hospital Padre Billini in the 1940's

At 7:30 am it was not crowded and after giving the watchman a short list of my symptoms he led me, forgetting to pass his metal detector over me, to the emergency room and introduced me to a nurse or maybe a doctor, very few name tags here, and she led me to a bed. My history was taken down a couple of times, sometimes by students, and I was handed two specimen jars for urine and feces. The bathroom was sparkling with its new white tile job but had no running water, no soap, no toilet paper and nowhere to hang your IV bag while you worked—floor or back of toilet. When I returned the canisters to her she had to ask which was which—the urine sample was the color of Coca-cola and the feces flask contained only a thin pool of blood with a corn flake or two sunk in the bottom. At least now she believed I was sick. Blood was taken (from my arm) and I was given a bed and froze to death on it for four hours waiting for the first test results. There were about 14 beds on the ward with a central nursing station where they let me use some hand sanitizer. I was the only patient all day who did so. Positive for Amoeba, no surprise, but the blood came back with a high white count and almost no platelets (13,000 of a recommended 150,000). She took another sample to reaffirm the results and said they would be back fast. Someone graver than I came in and was given my bed and I was given a piano stool to sit on next to my IV tree, which dripped cold saline into my arm. It was so cold parts of my hands turned white. I asked to wait outside in the lovely sweltering waiting room but they were afraid I was a risk to flee, since I had talked about going to work. Four hours later the doctor apologized saying that the lab had damaged the second sample and they would need a third and I obliged. They found me another bed and by around 7:30 PM confirmed that I had too few platelets to leave and I would be interned.

An atrium within Padre Billini today

I was wheeled through the beautiful atrium garden and down some hallways to Room 109 in the Gautier wing. Three bed suite with a giant bathroom (sans H2O) and I was the sole occupant. Silence. Two sheets. Adjustable bed. Perla brought me juice and bread and the plaid flannel sheet from Egremont.

An X-ray upstairs in Padre Billini costs $200 pesos or about $5 usd. For fancier blood tests I had to cross the street to one of the many freelance medical labs within walking distance since most of the patients here are too poor to use taxis and the Hospital has meager capabilities. Leptospirosis was the only expensive one at about $50 usd (result negative which I understand is a good thing) blood and stool cultures run between $8 and $15 each.

Every day a sheaf of prescriptions come in signed by a different doctor ordering me to go get such and such a test and some of them repeat tests that I am already waiting for results on and some are for Billirubins (not yellow), LDH cholesterol (I fail to see. . .), they had demanded twice that I get a sonogram (which would mean a taxi ride) and one for transaminasas (the doctor thinks it’s for liver enzymes). I spoke with an epidemiologist, gruff but distinguished white haired man who filled out forms while he sat and asked me questions, who did not know if there were other cases of amoebiasis similar to mine and when I asked him why I needed a cholesterol check he said it was all tied together. Said he wanted me to get another check for dengue fever even though I had no dengue symptoms. When I mentioned that I slept under mosquito netting he mentioned that the dengue mosquito is only active in the daytime and when I pointed out a live one which was resting on the wall next to us and asked him, “like that one?”, he said, “yes.”

Finally I met Dr. Mendez, 35ish, rough looking, short beard, but soft spoken and polite and was very reasonable. Said not to bother with the new sheaves until we had results from the first battery of samples and he confirmed that I was within my rights, at any time, to sign myself out of here as long as I did not owe any money. Since the hospital room and board is free that won’t be a problem. Waiting for the platelet count for the day, if it gets to about 80,000 I might get to leave peacefully.

I spent a total of seven days in Padre Billini. When you are interned here you are NOT allowed to leave. Nurses rotated through every few hours to hang a new IV bag and to inject various drugs and medicines into the port on my arm. Stomach calmative, antibiotics, metronidazol (antiparasitic), vitamins and some that nobody seemed to know what they were. I was interviewed often about how I was doing. My sheets were changed every day. Every patient is allowed one family member to sit with them and they can spend the night sleeping in a chair in the room. Breakfast consisted of a cup of tea around 7:30 AM and around 8:30 a wholewheat roll and a bowl of boiled milk. Lunch was a scoop of mashed plantain with a half can of tuna fish or a hardboiled egg and dinner a scoop of mashed potatoes with a little grated cabbage or a slice of luncheon meat. Fifteen hours could pass between dinner and breakfast and any additional food, and all drinking water has to be smuggled in by visitors. Some visitors were able to smuggle in fried chicken and Pepsi-cola but others had their provisions confiscated by the guards. Once Perla came in almost crying because they had confiscated her apples leaving her with only a banana and a bottle of water for me.

Although she was able to bring me something every day, after 5 days I felt like I was starving to death and I sent Perla a text message in the morning pleading for hardboiled eggs. I reasoned that they were easy to cook and easy to smuggle, nourishing, caloric and cheap if they were confiscated. The text messages got a little confused. She came at 7:00 PM and handed me a bag with a towel and a new roll of toilet paper in it. When I realized there were no eggs I broke down. She said I didn’t know what it was like to try to get stuff past security. I ripped my IV bag off the tree and left the room angry. Out in the atrium a guard saw me pacing and came over. Before he had a chance to invite me back to my room I told him my problem with the guards in the entrance and food and eventually I introduced him to Perla and he said he would let her in with the stuff and she walked back to the apartment to boil eggs and potatoes.

I sat on a bench in the garden while I waited for eggs. After a little while a white man came out of one of the bedrooms sat down and introduced himself as Thurman. Thurman is from Johannesburg, South Africa, 33 years old and has lived here for four years teaching English at the Berlitz School but now has ulcerative colitis. A year ago he contracted amoebiasis but did not know what it was. He shat blood for 9 weeks alone in his apartment; eventually unable to work he went to the Plaza de Salud. A month later his insurance, which was the good kind, was depleted by the 30 pints of blood he’d had to buy and the medicine that costs more than $1000US/month. His Ford Bronco had been repossessed. He is in Padre Billini Hospital now trying to regain strength and hoping his family sends a plane ticket for Johannesberg soon. We talked a long time about the fragility of the human body and of the world in general. Thurman now dreams of edenic economies and of living on a commune someday. Eventually Perla entered the garden and walked up and handed me a loaded Tupperware container, spun on her heel and left. “She’s ticked off,” I said to Thurman. “She looked ticked off,” he replied.

The next day Dr. Mendez, Dr. Abreu, Dr. Sánchez and the epidemiologist all said that I would be dado por alta or released almost immediately. No infection, no fever, no virus, no untoward intestinal incidents (I continued to photograph my bowel movements for proof). But the day dragged on like the others, a lost receipt from a lab, then they wanted to wait for the sonogram, then it was my blood pressure (which had not moved more than 5 points the whole week). The next day Sánchez did not show up because it rained. The seventh day I got up early and sat on the bench, arms crossed, leg twitching, where I had met Thurman and I laid for Méndez. I plead my case with any nurse or docent or janitor who paused to chat while I waited. Most of them concluded that I would be able to leave when God decided it was time. A warm drizzle fell in the garden and at about 10 AM Méndez finally emerged from the staff cafeteria at the far end and I stood up and hailed him like I was in a lifeboat lost at sea. We shook hands and he said that he understood that I was ready to go home. An internist brought me a release to sign stating that if I died of high blood pressure she was not responsible. I packed my sheets and toothbrush, said goodbye to my roommates and walked alone to the lobby and out into the soft rain and slowly walked the 6 blocks to my apartment in Ciudad Nueva.

Characters on El Conde and a (voluntary) Blood Donation

2012-07-21T07:31:00.000-04:00

Mundo Artesanal is at the corner of Duarte and El Conde, which is a shopping street closed to vehicles and, 5 years ago was usually thronged with shoppers both tourists and Dominicans. My space is right in the door on the corner so I pass time leaning in the doorway watching the street. Since the elections in May tourist traffic has been way down, I would say foot traffic has decreased 50% compared to the same time last year. It is not only the elections that scared people away, a few weeks ago the US Embassy came out with a travelers warning (http://santodomingo.usembassy.gov/sec-noc-120613.html) regarding recent attacks on tourists arriving at the airport in Santo Domingo involving corrupt taxi drivers as well as taxis being followed to hotels and robbing people as they got out of the car. Cholera is still in the news. Many stores have closed and are boarded up and there are holes in the street and more beggars and thieves. The harbor still needs dredging to allow cruise ships to get in and the world economy, especially in Europe, is not encouraging the usual summer vacations to the colonial zone here. Business is dead. Some days, not only my little area, but the whole gift shop registers zero sales. There are large stores on the other three corners at Duarte/Conde: closest to where I lean in the doorway and across Duarte is Jumbo Supermarket, catercorner is Cuesta Ferretería a fancy hardware and department store, and across Conde is Siderias California a department/clothes store.

Yesterday a man lit out of Jumbo and sprinted down Duarte at top speed pursued instantly by two or three Jumbo employees and then by a half a dozen fleet-footed idlers. A crowd collected and a few minutes later the thief was lead back by two men who held him by locked elbows. Police showed up and it turned out that he had stolen a $3 piece of cheese. Something like this happens nearly weekly these days. A couple of weeks ago I saw the manager at Jumbo, with pistol in hand, usher a man out of the store where they were met by two Policia Nacional on a motorcycle who put the man between them on the bike and took him away.

A month or so ago I was sitting inside the store around 4 in the afternoon trying to stay awake when I heard a series of gunshots and a moment later a taxista came in the store dripping blood and went to the bathroom. It turned out that three armed men had robbed the banca, where they sell lottery tickets, a block and a half up Duarte. The watchyman had just wandered off with his sawed-off shotgun for a cup of coffee. When the men exited the banca a motorcycle with the usual two Policia Nacional mounted happened to drive by and the thieves mistakenly thought that they had been called for the robbery and started shooting and scattered on foot. The cops and a small impromptu posse, some of whom pulled pistols out of their waistbands, gave chase on foot and the three were eventually rounded up. The taxista, who had been dozing on a box leaning against the side of Mundo Artesanal had caught a stray bullet that somehow had threaded its way between the parked cars a block away and lost the tip of the little finger on his left hand.

Richard, who is one of the sales people in Mundo, did not come into work yesterday because his hand had become infected. Two weeks ago he went downstairs from his apartment to complain about loud music played by a neighbor, one thing lead to another and when he tried to wrest the machete away from the neighbor his right hand got sliced up to the tune of 50 stitches. The two spent the night in jail in separate cells and were released when they agreed to shake hands—left hands in this case.

Guy comes up to the storefront, big sloppy guy, shiny suit coat, blue jeans, dress shoes, face kind of beat up, dark bags under eyes, twitchy right eyelid and asks me how it is living here. I start to give him my cost of living advice, look out for thieves, it’s tough in the barrios banter and he eventually tells me that 10 years ago he and a partner bought a piece of land here in Herrera near what is now an airport for $380,000 US and that, tomorrow, now that the Minister of Finance of the Country and the IMF have signed off, he is going to close a sale for 68 million dollars. His iPhone rang and while he paced around the sidewalk talking on it I managed to overhear a confirmation of an order for 40 pizzas to be delivered to the closing. He told me that he is going to start a bank in Santo Domingo, said you only need 3 million here to do that. Before he walked off he handed me two dollars and said to buy myself a beer when I got off work.

Two guys come in to the store and start looking at my pictures. One is a big fat guy with a dark hair buzz cut, tee shirt with scissored off sleeves and his friend is a skinny little guy with bad skin and a blond buzz cut, I figured them for Merchant Marines or deportees. They reminded me of the big mouse and the little mouse in the Warner Brothers cartoons who were modeled after Laurel and Hardy or maybe Abbot and Costello. The big guy, Paul, asked some questions about the Taínos and when I started to explain about their cohoba drug ceremony he asked me what the active agent in cohoba was and when I said DMT he started in about how it is in every living organism, including our brains, and is even responsible for the WHITE LIGHT that everyone is supposed to see just as they are dying. As the conversation wandered he asked me, by the way, did I know the best way to transfer like $200,000 cash from Canada to a high interest yielding account here. He bought a $75 dollar panorama, which, these days, is a higher end sale for me and I said I would recommend a good lawyer.

Last year a customer eating a hotdog and drinking a coke in Rudy’s little café in Mundo Artesanal keeled over in a diabetic coma. I got called over because he only spoke English and he eventually was able to mumble, “juice.” I shot over to Jumbo and bought two cartons of orange juice but when I got back the victim, whose name turned out to be Felipe, or Phil from the upper east side of NY, was still dazed but sitting up on the floor. He said he was fine and not to worry. We helped him back up on his stool at the counter but he passed out again a minute later and hit the floor like a wet sack of rice, cutting his head on the way down. There were four taxistas standing around waiting for fares and none agreed to take Phil to a hospital unless he paid up front. Finally Richard and I guaranteed payment and piled Phil into the nearest taxi. When we pulled up to Clinica Abréu Phil became alert and begged us to bring him home where he had his insulin, which was only a few more blocks so we did. The taxista charged him 500 pesos which was a real soaking for a 10 block ride. Rudy eventually closed up his hotdog stand but I still saw Phil from time to time walking the Conde. When he wore shorts you could see his lower legs were red and swollen. He was on some kind of disability and collected social security but ran monthly tabs at the restaurant, pharmacy and colmado. My friend Hal waited to meet him for breakfast yesterday but Phil never showed up. The American Embassy came around later in the morning to his apartment to collect the body. He had died in bed.

Hal stops by to chat almost every day. He used to be the famous Mafia boss Meyer Lansky’s driver and errand guy and spent years in Haiti and Cuba running casinos. Says Meyer Lansky never swore. Hal gave Baby Doc Duvallier his first bicycle for a birthday present and used to put shopping bags full of money on Papa Doc’s desk to help with the casino license. He says he offered to broker a deal for the new president of Haiti, Martelly, an ex-performer who used to sing in one of Hal’s casinos, with the Israelis to arm a police force but Martelly goofed and used the word army in a press release and the U.N stepped on the deal because nobody wants Haiti to have an army, remembering the body count from the last time. Hal knows the people who the Sopranos were modeled after (Tony Acceratti for one), knows Whitey Bolger the Boston gangster who was played by Jack Nicholson in the movie—“I don’t know where he is, but he calls to chat every so often” and then when they caught him—“ I doubt they are going make anything stick” and Henry Hill from the movie Goodfellas—“That guy was a born crook, I saw him swindle someone out of $10,000 once in about an hour with a phony real estate deal. He always wanted to be made but he wasn’t Italian.” When I asked him, half joking, if he knew where Jimmy Hoffa was he said no but that he knew they would NEVER find the body. Hal is 85 and says the FBI comes down to Santo Domingo from time to time to ask him questions and he says he can’t figure out why, “cause almost everyone I knew is dead.” He would like to go back to the States for cataract surgery and thinks he probably could since as far as he knows there is no warrant out for him but says at his age it’s not worth even taking a chance on getting arrested so he’s trying to figure out a way to get Medicare to pay for the operation here.

On Sunday morning four months ago Rudy, my German friend here who makes the tee shirts, who used to have the hot dog stand in Mundo and whose wedding I went to last year and who has a 7 month old baby named Lars, walked out the front door of his house in Los Frailes and bumped into two tigueres taking a motorcycle away from some dude on the street. Everyone panicked and while Rudy was either backing away or trying to scale the sliding driveway gate to get back inside someone shot him in the ankle shattering tibia and fibula. A neighbor brought him to the Plaza de Salud. The hospital had to mail order the steel pins required for the surgery so Rudy had to wait until Friday for the bone setting. But when Friday rolled around he was informed that the operation was postponed until he found at least two volunteers to donate blood to the blood bank in case he needed any extra. Some of his employees tried but forgot to bring their cedulas or IDs; all his wife’s sisters were having their periods and so were disallowed; Richard in Mundo Artesanal has no cedula; Modesta is underweight. I went with one of Miriam’s brother-in-laws to try to donate the final pint. An uncle was already there in line but he was disqualified because he is older than 65 and the brother-in-law turned out to be anemic but I qualified since my tattoos are more than ten years old. When my blood bag was about half full, Rudy’s wife poked her head in the door and said Rudy was on his way to surgery. He is walking with crutches now but his shin has a wicked curve to it and his foot is angled funny so he is going to Germany to try to have it reset.

Automotive Letter to NPR's Car Talk

2012-07-03T09:24:00.000-04:00

Dear Click and Clack,

I just bought a used, year 2000 Daihatsu Hijet minibus from a Japanese import lot here in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. It measures 5 feet wide by 11 feet long and is 6'3” tall and is a 5 speed with a 660cc, 3-cylinder motor and uses lots of regular gas, which costs $3.50 a gallon here. In 5th gear at 60mph it runs at a little over 4 grand but it is adorable.

It's been “tuned up” a couple of times now by street mechanics who each owned one wrench-the 10mm is ubiquitous- a pair of bent pliers, a screwdriver and a piece of cardboard or burlap to lie on in the street lieu of a creeper. The timing was set by ear. When I have asked whether that thing that they are tweaking is a fuel injector or a carburetor they tell me it is “somewhere in between” and keep on turning the four adjustment screws on and near it until it idles smoothly and restarts easily. After one bout of adjustment one mechanic shrugged and suggested that I should start it cold by not touching the gas pedal and when starting hot that I would need to keep it matted until it started and this system has worked fine except for on New Year's Eve when, thankfully--because drinking while driving is not discouraged here-- it would not start at all. One of the muchachos spent about 3 hours New Year's Day underneath it installing 3 new spark plugs and now it starts again using the methods described above.

In the city it runs great and is peppy when weaving in and out of traffic-which is essential here to avoid being run over by gigantic guaguas (busses) making left hand turns across your bow from the far right hand lane through busy intersections but on the highway, after about an hour of driving at a steady cruising speed, it sometimes shows the unnerving symptoms of running out of (or maybe of being flooded by?) gas and jerks, I mean IT jerks, and it almost dies but this symptom is not at all predictable. Occasionally I think I detect an increased smell of gasoline in the air when this happens but, since the motor is directly under the front seats, this may be expected from time to time due to proximity. I have, so far, always gotten to where I was going. One of the mechanics working out of a grease pit found the fuel filter under the chassis and blew it out from both sides with a compressor and proudly announced that it had been installed backwards and reinstalled it the right way, but this seems to have made little or no difference. I have also poured an assortment of carb-cleaners and dry gasses into the gas tank and just when I think that did the trick I find myself lurching toward the breakdown lane again. I do not want to spend much time standing around in the breakdown lane because when the street thugs here steal your sneakers they don't wait for you to take them off, they remove them at the ankles with a machete-- without damaging the sneakers.

My real question is why am I getting only 22MPG? I am certain that I am converting from kilometers accurately and I have confirmed that the gas stations here indeed sell the stuff by the normal gallon and I have checked the odometer by using a handheld GPS unit and it agrees. I was hoping for more like 50mpg. One “mechanic” tells me that 22 is normal because my model of Daihatsu has a turbo, and, indeed, the van does have the word Turbocooler written on the side in what appears to be factory lettering but I do not know what an actual turbo looks like or how much one might drink.

What do you think?

P.S.-

Well, I thought that the new plugs had cured the “dying on the highway” problem but three days ago it died dead in a backwater village far from home. A mechanic who materialized out of the bushes determined that I had a bad “pita de abajo” which was failing to control the flow of gasoline. He described this pita as a small vertical pin that works like a float and is next to the real float and is located in the lower half of the carburetor. He then adjusted the carburetor for highway driving, so that I could get to where I was going, which meant that the thing ONLY ran at 3500 rpm or above and stalled instantly at idle but could be restarted. This strategy worked (at the expense of much of the clutch while negotiating speed bumps, traffic lights and craters and goats in the road) for 200 miles when it died dead again in a smaller village, even farther from home, and so the next mechanic had to be fetched by a friendly stranger on a Honda 50cc Club Special motorbike and he determined that the fuel pump was working erratically. So, after finally locating a new-used fuel pump we changed it on the side of the road-and it is a submerged fuel pump so we had to drop the gas tank and he figured that maybe a wire was bad too so, after stripping the ends of a found length of insulated wire with his teeth he ran it from the tank to the fuse box where he jammed it in alongside one of the live fuses. The motor idled and ran at normal rpm for 5 miles, even though the screws on the carburetor had not been reset, but then reverted to its custom-highway tuning of before-- but I made it the 80 neck-jerking, backfiring miles back home, and boy was I glad to get there.

So now what do you think?

P.P.S.

I have taken the Daihatsu minibus to a real Daihatsu dealership to be worked on. They tell me that there has been a spate of bad gas in the country and that this could easily be causing all of my problems. The bad gas evidently came from the National Refinery which, fearing fuel shortages over the holidays, topped off their supplies of gas with an, as yet undetermined, although clearly detrimental to the fuel delivery system, substance- garages have been reporting ten-fold increases in fuel pump and pita de abajo replacements in the past weeks.

P.P.P.S.

I just retrieved my minibus from the Daihatsu dealer because they refused to work on it because, evidently, none of the running system is Daihatsu-they did not know what it was, but it was nothing they had seen before and did not appear in their computer. So I bucked and burned the clutch back to Moto Plaza where I had purchased it in the first place and I will find out more on Monday how this is going to be resolved.

Jan 30, Monday--

Moto Plaza, in a last ditch effort to get the guaguita running smoothly, removed all of the vacuum tubing as well as disconnecting the air filter and the turbo-cooler. But the guaguita ran worse.

Motor of the guaguita denuded of vacuum tubing.

Moto Plaza replaced the motor with all its adjunct parts with a motor from a similar guaguita in their lot and the guaguita ran worse.

Moto Plaza has painted me up another minibus from their lot. This one is white, does not have a turbo, has a simpler motor and is supposed to be ready for me this Friday.

The post above was written in 2006. I still have (in 2012) the guaguita that Moto Paza gave me that Friday in a straight swap for the original one. Aside from the fact that the timing belt breaks and warps all the valves annually (repair about $150 usd see post entitled Culata http://santodomingodiaries.blogspot.com/2012/03/culata-mechanical-nightmare.html) it has been a fine vehicle.

2012-06-01T23:08:00.001-04:00

Aborto

Today in the store the girl who works for the restaurant in Mundo Artesanal handing out menus on the street came to work walking funny and around 11 AM eased up to the register and told Modesta that she was bleeding bad and thought she lost the baby. Modesta and Miriam conferred for a minute and hollered, “¿DUVALL, tu tienes la guaguita hoy?” They helped hold her up while I drove the guaguita to the door, she got in and she and I drove off to her doctor on the other side of the river. After I hit one bump going kind of fast I asked her if I should drive smooth or fast and she said smooth, so I eased over everything after that. I drove down Meriño to the Malecón and found that the riverbound lanes were backed up all the way to Quimbambas waiting for a cruise ship to offload its passengers so I U-turned at the base of Meriño and wrong-wayed it back to Isabel la Catolica at about 2 mph with my flashers on and we eventually got down to the Puente Flotante fine and crossed the river. I almost hit the same pothole I hit the other night bringing Miriam to Avenida España to make out and when I missed it the girl and I both said, “whew”. She pointed out the clinic after a couple more turns and I parked in front and went around and opened her door. There was a wide deep broken gutter between the guaguita and the sidewalk and when I asked her if I could carry her she nodded her head weakly. It’d been a long time since I picked a girl up out of a car and carried her into a hospital, maybe never. I carried her in and down the hall where a seated nurse said to go back to the first door and I did and I opened it with my foot and laid the girl as gently as I could on the bed there. She was crying softly and I held her hand and stroked her forehead while watery blood soaked its way across the mattress. The nurse came in and asked her some questions and called Dr. Castro, who was the girl’s physician, and left. I offered the girl my cell phone and she accepted since she had no minutes and when her boyfriend answered she wailed, “Oh, Poppy, ¿Donde tu estás? ¡Ven acá!” in an agonized tone that I have only heard from women’s throats at Dominican funerals. Then she called her priest and spoke with him for a minute or two in Haitian Creole. The doctor showed up just finishing off an empanada and went to wash up, I presume. The nurse came back in snapping on a pair of latex gloves and I asked if I should stay. The girl said no that her guy was on the way, I asked again and she said that he was really on the way and I left. The tiled hallway floor where we had entered was still blood spattered and the passenger side door to the guaguita on the street was still wide open. My pant legs were blood soaked to the knees and there was a puddle of blood on the seat.

The girl was 3 months along and had had a recent sonogram that suggested there were things wrong. She had been given two pills to help her, one to swallow and one to insert. She had started to bleed shortly thereafter. She was never told that the pills were meant to abort the baby. Later I learned that her name was Rosa. Two months later she was fired from the restaurant.

The Last Fight

2012-04-16T07:45:00.000-04:00

Life with Altagracia proceeded in an up and largely down fashion. She worked one day a week for Alexa cleaning her apartment and spent the rest of her time in Villa Mella cleaning our house incessantly. Sometimes she would cook and sometimes not—in past years there was always food on table but not now. In past years she had looked for better work, talked of taking remedial reading classes and of business ideas. Her angry outbursts and tirades became more frequent and when I came home from work or waked up in the morning I never knew if I would be embraced or cursed. Kiki is in prison for an undetermined period of time and, I think, that much of the money I left on the bureau to buy food went via Western Union to the jail in Elias Piña. She sent all the money she earned from working to Kiki and she secretly owed money to the lottery ticket booth where Chavela still works.

Alain, my French caving friend came to Santo Domingo and stayed with us. I had thought, when I invited him that he would be in the house one or two nights per week when he and I were not exploring caves but it turned into more like 4 or 5 and he was here for over a month. I told Alain that he had to wash his own caving duds and Altagracia that she had no obligation to wash them but she would ferret them out in his room, wash them and then complain about the mud and the smell. Even when I had him bag them and hide them in his room or stash them in the marquisina she would find them, wash them and then lay into me about how disgusting they were. He eats a lot and has specific food requirements. Altagracia did not like anything about him even though Alain paid for almost all the groceries and we had more fruit in the house than ever before. On the last day, just before I took him to the airport, he awkwardly handed Altagracia 500 pesos ($15) by way of saying thankyou for the extra work and she accepted it quietly. But when I got back from the airport run she blew up saying that we had treated her like a servant, that the wife of a foreigner should not have to work and then she took it to the street ranting at top holler, going from door to door screaming what an abuser I was and that I treated her like a slave, etc etc. We did not speak for three days and I began to look for an apartment to move into.

I am working these days on the Conde where I rent the inside of the corner doorway to the gift shop, Mundo Artesanal and, when I am not in caves I sell the photographs there. The commute is brutal, ranging anywhere from a half hour to an hour and half if there is a tapon, and I see a near accident every day. I leave the house around 8:45 in the morning and get home around 8:30 at night after closing the store. The guaguita does not have a radio but I put Radio France on a small transistor radio that rests on the passenger seat and it sounds fine. My original plan was to sell on only the busy days of the weekend but I went there on the slow days too, as much to get out of the house as anything. When I am not in the store the sales staff sells my stuff for me and I tip them about 10% of the sale. When I am in the store I can use my computer to write stuff like this and can go online using a wireless modem. While some days are long and slow, the worst are painless. Around lunch time I walk up to la Sirena and buy a piece of roast chicken and tuna pasta salad from the deli counter and whatever groceries we need in the house. There is also a grocery store across the street from Mundo Artesanal and a branch of Banco Popular across the Conde. Life on el Conde is convenient.

I began to walk the streets near the Zona Colonial looking for an apartment and after about my third foray I fould an unfurnished studio apartment through a middleman named Ivan in Ciudad Nueva, about a 15 minute walk from the store, 12 minutes hotfooting it. Altagracia and I had made up by then but the truce was shaky and I reasoned that I could use the studio for matting prints, writing or even a small gallery so I rented it for $216/month. When I told Altagracia she humphed and said it sounded like nothing more than a rapadera or a place to take prostitutes. I bought a portable radio in the flea market, moved the matting and framing stuff there and hung the 26x36 original print of my main logo. I showed it to her once which turned out to be a mistake.

I then came down with either Giardia or Amoebic dysentery, probably from a bad plato de día (lunch special) and was repulsively sick for 4 days, including experiencing nocturnal leakage while sleeping (and this from a man well known for the strength of his anal pucker). As I recovered, Altagracia began her menstruation so as a result we did not make love for almost two weeks. Saturday night I went to sleep around 10 and around 11 she woke me up roughly asking why I was sleeping with my back to her all the time and when I did not have a good enough answer, because I had been asleep and did not even know she was in the bed, she went and slept on the floor of the living room. The next night she slept on the sofa and the next in Chany’s room. Monday I went to Las Maravillas cave with Domingo to take paint residue samples. Tuesday morning I bought lumber to make a bookcase for the office—as we were then calling it—brought the boards home to the marquesina, marked them for cutting and the electricity went out for 7 hours so I had nothing else to do but wait. When I came up the stairs toward the galería the ruler pocket snagged on a piece of the railing and ripped; a harbinger of more torn clothes.

Jhoanglish had been working as a night watchman but last week he shot himself in the left hand while putting the pistol in his pocket and is now furloughed until the stitches come out which means that he hangs out on the street in front of the house, borrows money and smokes pot every day. Just after lunch he wandered by and complained to Altagracia about the reheated dinner she had given him the night before and mentioned that he would slap her up if she did it again. She lit off the galleria and grabbed a softball-sized chunk of broken concrete from the curb and chased him until Niningo and Chavela restrained her. He threatened to kill her and she responded in kind, brandishing the brickbat until Niningo wrested it away. Once back in the house she grabbed a 2 foot long piece of iron pipe that she keeps handy in case of thieves and started back after him, Niningo blocked her and she turned and beat the hell out of the concrete set tub we have in the patio breaking off pieces. Channy, 3½ now, had been sleeping on the floor of the galleria on a pillow with her bottle and woke up crying because ants had invaded her crotch and were biting her. Chavela picked her up by one arm and gave her a roundhouse slap to stop her from crying. Altagracia, unarmed finally, now went out to the street harangueing about the four good-for-nothing children she has and she has to support them all by herself because the father was murdered and nobody helps her not at all not one peso and even though she is with a gringo she has to clean floors for a living. She went up one side of the street and down the other for most of the rest of the afternoon shouting this litany to anyone with their door open. When the electricity came back on around 6PM I went down to the marquesina to cut my 1x10 pine to length and make the dado cuts with my SkilSaw asking myself what I was doing in Villa Mella where mothers threaten sons with brickbats, hit children waking up from naps and holler lies up and down the street. When I finished my cuts and dados I packed the unassembled parts into the guaguita along with the tools I would need to assemble the shelves in the office.

Although we had not spoken civilly since her interrogation about sleeping orientation, Altagracia and I watched the 10 oclock episode of the novela Fantasma de Elena on TV and I went to bed at 11. She rolled and smoked a cigar out in the patio and around 11 came inside, got ready for bed and went into the spare room. A minute later she flung the bedroom door open and when I sleepily looked up she hurled the new red cell phone I had bought her the week before, the one we called the chihuahua because it was so small, on the floor and it broke into pieces ricocheting across the room. She fled the room but turned and charged in again, I was sitting up on the edge of the bed by now, and she launched a volley of punches, I tried to stand up and she stooped and tore a gaping hole in one the legs of my pajamas. She resumed the punching. I was able to grab her wrists from time to time. All the time she was screaming that I had cheated on her, that I was nothing but a no-good cheater and liar and occasionally shooting a glance at the night table. When she retreated I looked over at the night table and saw the AlkaSeltzer.

Monday morning, the day before this drama, before meeting Domingo, I had had a headache and my stomache was still a little iffy so, before the drive to the cave, I had bought a two-pack of AlkaSeltzer Extreme. Since they were, at least nominally, extreme, I only took one and put the opened foil package, which incidently has trendier graphics than the classic AlkaSeltzer blue foil pack, in my shirt pocket and forgot about it. Tuesday, before the conflagration with Jhoanglish in the street, Altagracia evidently found the open packet in my shirt pocket while doing laundry and put it on the kitchen table. When, after the blitzkrieg that night I saw it on the night table I knew what had happened. I brought the packet to her and asked her what it was, she said with scorn, “condones,” I said, “AlkaSeltzer,” as I peeled apart the foils and dumped the broken tablet on the table. “Would you like a glass of water?” I asked. I watched her face. I had never seen an expression change like that with absolutely no facial movement. Something lit in her eyes and then fell. I got the glass of water, plopped the fragments in, offered it to her, she was still expressionless, and I drank.

I went back to bed. She went to the sofa but then came into the bedroom. I said I wanted to be alone. She said that she would not bother me and got into her side of the bed. I lay on my back all night with my eyes riveted on the concrete louvre that communicates with the kitchen and was backlighted. On the underside of each slat silhouetted cockroaches moved around from time to time. I waited until 6 AM and then got up and perked coffee as usual. I packed my camera stuff like I was going to a cave, but I also packed the cash hidden under the mattress and my passport. She slept. I packed my cell phone charger and the all the camera and flash cables. I packed a box of books that I would put on the finished shelves in the office that would be where I would live. When I was done I gave her a kiss on the cheek and said, “Mándame suerte“ like I did every morning when I knew I would need good luck. She murmmered but did not waken. I closed the door quietly behind me and left.

I called her later in the morning and said that I was going to San Cristóbal because I did not want her to look for me in the store. Early in the evening I called again and said I would not be coming home. She called back, “Never?” I said, “Never”, she asked, “Really?” There were many more calls like that. In the end she became hysterical and finally ran out of cell phone minutes.

The office has the 7-foot tall bookcase that I had cut and ripped in the marquisina in Villa Mella, the card table that was Mamie’s in the 1950s and not much else. It consists of one room with a separate kitchen and a bathroom. It is two blocks from the Malecón and the Caribbean and there is a colmado a half block away that does not play deafening music. There is a school across the street and an empanada and juice vendor set up on the corner to sell breakfast to the students in the morning. The Justice Building is nearby so there are always a lot of cops and lawyers around. I am on the 4^th floor, on the roof, with a small patio shared by two other apartments— one is empty at the moment and four young doctors live in the other. There is always a breeze and I can see the sea if I stand up and look out the back window across the adjacent rooftop. Last night I slept in my hammock.

Commute, Mundo Artesanal, Another Funeral

2012-04-02T07:36:00.000-04:00

Worst part of most of my days is the commute. I hope I get things organized eventually so I am not transporting boxes of stuff or bulky items every day and so can use the subway and guaguas. The traffic jams for no reason drive me nuts, just stupidity like cars filling up a clogged intersection so when the light changes nobody can go anywhere. Cars turning left from the right lane through busy intersections. Traffic cops directing traffic in intersections that have broken stoplights but then the cop wanders off and leaves chaos behind him. The other day a cop was directing traffic in a busy intersection in a shopping district, pedestrians crossing everywhere, motorcycles slinking and weaving their way to the front of the lines and squirting out across the road. I was in the middle lane stopped with a guagua to my right and a car to my left, we were in the very front waiting for the cop to signal us to go. He stops the other lanes, waves us on and just as I accelerate a Haitian runs out from in front of the guagua and I hit him. He goes flying to the pavement. I stop, the Haitian gets up, I look at the cop and he is just watching the Haitian shaking his head, the Haitian apologizes and limps off, I continue.

A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday morning on our way to the Plaza we saw a motorcyclist down in the northbound lane of Avenida Hermanas Mirabel. He had been hit by a SUV that had sped away. By the time we stopped passerbys had hoisted and dumped him into the back of a passing pick-up that had stopped and had dragged his bike to the side of the road. The pick-up took him to the hospital but he was dead in the road.

Mundo Artesanal (Craft World would be a likely translation) is top heavy in administration. David Morrillo is the owner along with his wife, Dany. His sister-in-law, Jocasta, is the manager, a son is the evening in charge person and there is an administrator who I think is a cousin, a cash register girl, an odd jobs guy, a housekeeper and two retail sales people. One of the retailers is Richard Bristol, an intense young Haitian who speaks Spanish, Creole, French and English and has a couple of his own paintings for sale in the store. When I am not around it is usually he who makes sales for me and when he does I give him 10% which is great for him since he only makes 2% commision in the other parts of the store and it is good for me because he is motivated.

Much of Mundo is stuff on consignment a few of us rent spaces. Ruddy the German (who makes my tee shirts as well as his own) rents two spaces. In one he has his tee shirt store right behind me and in the other he sells fancy knackworst and German beer-- Polaner at $5/bottle. On the other side of the store an Italian has a small diner type restaurant-- spaghetti with a tuna/tomato sauce, capuccino and mixed drinks and in the other doorway a jeweler who sets up on a card table and sells larimar earrings.

Aside from Richard, the other retail person in Mundo is Modesta and she really is the glue that holds the day-to-day business together. She is also the type that will grab a mop when the house cleaner moves too slowly and she will run the hose up to the tinaco to fill it with water when the odd jobs guy is goofing off; she is paid for 8 hours but opens every morning at 9 and stays to lock up at 9 at night while her youngest kid, about 10 sleeps on the floor behind the register. When it is slow and she is caught up during the day she will go into a back room and sleep in a chair with her head on a desk for a half hour or so. She is bone thin, blonde with white-grey eyes and ears that stick out. Last Wednesday when I went in to work Modesta was not there and Richard told me that her oldest son, 22 and a recent high school graduate had been killed the night before in a motorcycle accident. Evidently the stoplight was badly timed; while he was accelerating through a green an SUV went through on a stale yellow and killed him instantly in the middle of the intersection. There were lots of witnesses and the driver of the SUV was detained by the crowd and arrested. I went to the funeral home in Gualey with Jocasta and her husband Juan Paulo and then on to the cemetary in San Luis just outside the city past Hainamosa.

They bury them quick here. That day employees from Mundo went in shifts to go see Modesta in the funeral home in Gualey, a famously tough slum. I asked Jocasta if I could go with her since I did not know the way. She said that she was going to go on to the cemetary afterwards but it would be quick and I was welcome. Around 2 PM her husband, Juan Paulo, picked us up along with about 5 other people and we crammed into the crew cab of his listing pick-up truck. The funeral home was packed. Modesta was seated in the front of the room near the coffin that was closed but had a small window over the boy's face. There was blood caked in his hair and cotton balls stuffed in his nostrils and ears, no makeup. Modesta cried wailing nonstop and hugged hanging on to each person in the line who stepped up. She recognized me and cried “OH, DuVall” and cried on.

The cemetery was a lot farther away than I thought. Outside the city and farther than Hainamosa all the way to San Luis. There were two school busses full of mourners and at least 20 other vehicles not counting motorcycles. We wove our way in through the above- ground tombs and monuments overgrown with grass and weeds, past one that said Morillo, when I asked Juan Paulo if that was his family he nodded yes. The coffin was on the ground. The boy's sister was sprawled on top of it screaming. His father, who had barely been evident in the funeral home-- he is divorced from Modesta and has his own family-- was front and center tears streaming non stop down his face and Modesta was standing quietly a few meters away. A number of tough looking teens had scaled a nearby building and watched from the roof. A preacher spoke for 10 or 15 minutes and then 6 people hoisted the coffin up on their shoulders to a crescendo of screaming and crying. Modest broke down again and they slid the box into an opening in the tomb like the middle drawer of a giant concrete file cabinet. The preacher said a few more words and we walked slowly back through the weeds to the pick-up truck.

Short takes

2012-03-25T08:22:00.000-04:00

While I was in Massachusetts for a few months Jeannete rented out the landing above my stairwell to a nephew who installed two barber chairs and opened a barber shop. He painted stripes and arrows on the walls of what had been my area and clumps of hair wafted through on downdrafts. After getting my own hair cut I walked two blocks down el Conde to Mundo Artesanal, where I have sold fotos on consignment for years, and eventually persuaded them to rent me the space just inside the doorway on the corner of El Conde and Duarte for much less than Jeannette had been charging.

Today I drove Altagracia to Las Mameyes where she had heard there was a cheap clothes wholesaler. En route she got a phone call from Kiki saying that he had not been able to make any money trafficking across the Haitian border because the border had been closed due to the cholera epidemic and that he was hungry. So we asked some directions to Western Union from 3 different people, got 3 different answers—some of the wrong directions were very specific but none of them lead to a Western Union. We eventually wound up at Mega Centro and sent him $27 but since he has lost his cedula again we sent it under a friend’s name. This all took an hour and about 10 cell phone calls most of which were only to find out how to spell the friend’s middle name Meran. We returned to Las Mameyes and start asking people where the big clothes wholesaler is and after a half dozen vague responses Altagracia decided to bag the idea and go to Villa Consuelo where she had bought cheap jewelry before. She walked into 6 Importers and, after looking at blouses and jeans and asking prices, asked where the stuff was made and when they told her China, walked out. Walking out of an importer in Villa Consuelo because they sell clothes made in China is like walking out of a gift shop on El Conde because it sells cheap souvenirs.

Kiki never called to say that he got the money and eventually we found out that it was because he was arrested just before he went into the Western Union in Elias Piña. Police had evidently planted some marijuana seeds in his house. On our way home I bought two sheets of plywood for a display case to use in my new retail space in Mundo Artesanal.

While I am cutting up plywood in the marquesina later that afternoon, Altagracia got a cell phone message that she won $25,000 pesos—about $800 US. I explained to her and the crowd of neighbors who quickly gathered that it was probably a scam. But Niningo took over, called the number, borrowed $25 pesos and proceeded to buy the required phone cards and remit them to the company that had promised the 25,000. At one point when I came back up out of the marquesina to cry SCAM I turn the corner to the kitchen and see Felo, with my $50 Macy’s chef’s knife inverted over a can of guandules and his fist poised to drive the tip of the knife into the can to open it. To this moment—5 hours later—no one can understand why I yelled at him. The knife is worthless anyway now after it has been used as a screwdriver and to prune the guanabana tree in the garden next to the house. But I couldn’t take it anymore. Niningo meantime borrows more money to buy more phone cards so that he can redeem the grand prize. So about this time Belita wanders into the house sniffing around for lunch and asks if anybody has heard about the phone card scam and Niningo freaks and starts calling the police because none of the phone cards that he has bought and entered in the last half hour have taken.

The Culata, Mechanical nightmare

2012-03-07T06:54:00.000-04:00

The Culata

Last week Niningo asked to borrow the guaguita so he could attend the graduation party of his girlfriend. He brought five friends with him and returned the guaguita in one piece. I set off for the Zona Colonial the next morning and when I was in the middle of the long bridge over the Isabela River the motor made an ominous clicking noise and died. I managed to coast it over to the right hand curb and called Cojo the mechanic. He showed up in about ten minutes, parked behind me, turned my ignition key once, got out some wrenches and had the broken timing belt out in no time. Cars trucks and motorcycles skimming past his legs as he worked bent into the driver’s side door. He said to wait for him. He got in his Hijet, which is identical to my guaguita except that it is a flatbed pick-up and not a minibus and backed up against traffic a quarter mile before he got to the end of the bridge and could U turn to go back to Villa Mella and look for a new belt. A half hour later he returned, installed the belt, turned over the ignition and pronounced the culata, or cylinder head with all its incumbent valves, dead.

He nodded toward the back of my guaguita, where I positioned myself and pushed. He steered it across the four lanes waving his free hand to slow down traffic. He then U turned through the same traffic and after backing up in front of the guaguita fished out a snarled handfull of green, nylon clothesline and braided a four foot long tow rope, tied the two vehicles together and we started off. The nylon cord had enough stretch in it and, without the motor running, my brakes were soft enough so that we never broke the rope although there was some bungy motion when I did have to brake and after about 5 kilometers we turned into the alley where his mechanic’s shade tree is. I left Cojo to work on the motor and took the Metro to work—I had luckily left my whole display with all the photos in the stairwell the night before. That evening he finished the work and I picked up the vehicle after paying him $218 for everything.

The following morning was Sunday and Altagracia and I drove to the Zona together so she could work for Bettye while I sold in the Flea Market. The guaguita had about one half the power as normal, barely even climbing the overpass at the Ovando intersection in second gear. It rained hard in the afternoon but I sold ok. Altagracia got out of work a little early so I packed up, loaded the guaguita and we set off for La Sirena to buy some birthday party stuff for Chanel. We went the back way via Avenida Central and, just as we were coming up on the broken stoplight at the entrance to the Cancino barrio, the guaguita made a brief, light grinding noise and died. I got out and pushed it through a couple of potholes to get it over to the curb and called Cojo. I waited for him out under the stoplight in the rain under my blue umbrella while Altagracia wandered off to buy pica pollo or fried chicken. He eventually showed up, popped off the valve cover, pronounced the new cualta dead and got out his green clothesline again. This time as we lurched over the potholes into the five-way intersection under the broken stoplight not all of the traffic stopped and Cojo had to hit his brakes suddenly, I hit my brake pedal, it went ro the floor and I crashed into Cojo’s rear bumper, well it was more of a jagged piece of metal than a bumper, Cojo moved forward again, flagging cars to stop by waving his arm out the window and we made it across. This time we had about 12 kilometers to go. Up hills down hills I had to brake with the emergency brake and unbrake in time so the rope did not snap. Cojo's pick-up overheated and we had to stop so he could borrow a fuse out of my guaguita so his radiator fan would run. We made it through a tapon at the interesction to Sabana Larga and went through the tunnel under Hermanas Mirabel near La Sirena and down the freeway Jacobo Macluta turning left and wending through Guaricano barrio where Cojo lives. The only damage done by our fender bender, as far as I could tell, was a loosened headlight.

The next evening Cojo drove my guaguita with its second newly installed culata in two days to my house, picked me up, I gave him a ride back to Guaricano to his house and bid farewell. I pulled out of his alley in the dark, turned left and within a kilometer felt the guaguita slowing down. I could keep going but needed more and more gas and lower and lower gears. After about two kilometers I realized I would never make it home, U turned over a median strip to return to Cojo’s and made it only a 100 meteres or so before the brakes completely locked. I called Cojo but his cell phone was turned off or the battery had died and I grabbed my umbrella and hotfooted it back to his house leaving the guaguita parked in the dark and questionable neighborhood where it had balked.

I got there in about fifteen minutes but he had already left for points unknown. His mother lives next door and after inviting me to have a seat in the galeria she sent a kid to look for Cojo’s brother Eddy. After about a half hour Eddy showed up, listened to what had happened, gathered an armload of tools and drove me back to the guaguita in his pick-up with no headlights and a maximium speed of about two kilometers per hour faster than I can walk.

Using his cell phone for a flashlight he peered up under the dashboard at the brake pedal linkages and started working the pedal up and down. He fished a fingertip full of grease out from somewhere, smeared it on a joint somewhere up under, we pushed the guaguita back and forth, braking , unbraking until he pronounced it cured. I got his cell phone number before I pulled away, but I did not have to call him and I made it home.

The next afternoon the same thing happened but this time I noticed in time to get back home. Cojo eventually came and we discovered that in our fender bender under the dark stoplight a piece of metal had been pushed up against a part of the brake pedal linkage that caused it to gradually seize in the braked position. Cojo excised the offending piece of sheetmetal with a hammer and cold chisel. I think this chapter is done.

A Day at Work on El Conde

2012-02-18T10:37:00.000-04:00

Day at work in the Gallery.

Up between 5:30 and 6:30 depending on which day. Coffee and listen to WAMC on the computer at the kitchen table. Fill iced tea jar and a Tupperware if there are leftovers for lunch.

Drive south on Hermanas Mirabel—I finally have what I think is the best route. Straight through Ovando, over the new overpass, left on Pedro Livio Cedeño, straight to Avenida Duarte, turn right at the Texaco station go straight through the Duarte shopping district. Even at 7AM street venders are setting up their stalls with new and used clothes, baseball hats, belts, text books, fruit, cell phones; heating up cauldrons of oil to deep fry platanos, empanadas, spam, pigs ears and chicken feet to sell for breakfast. Vendors unpacking their merchandise from soggy cardboard boxes, cheap suitcases, unloading from the trunks of taxis or from horse drawn carts or tricycle carts and hand trucks.

After crossing Avenida Mexico and the two blocks of Chinatown what traffic there is drops off to almost nothing. The Colonial Zone sleeps late. I cross Avenida Mella and pass La Sirena, downhill past the Monastery of San Francisco, cross Mercedes a few blocks from where Alexa the archaeologist lives, cross El Conde, turn left on Arzobispo Noel, left on Hostos and park as near as I can to El Conde. If I am more than 4 spots from El Conde I reconnoiter during the day and often am able to get the first spot on the corner, which is important if it is Saturday when I haul everything home at night so I can sell in the Plaza in the pulguita on Sunday.

If I am early I stroll off to buy an empanada, if I am really early I nap in the guaguita.

My stairwell is closed to the street with a galvanized steel roll up door. Flor, the housekeeper or Londres or one of the nieces who live upstairs either opens the door for me or tosses me the keys from the balcony. If it is Thursday I carry my tables, cases of matted and framed photographs and tee shirts in about 5 round trips. If it is Friday or Saturday my stuff is stashed under the stairs. It takes me about an hour to set up. I bring my GE Superradio and listen to Radio Francia 93.1 FM; the news alternates between French and Castilian Spanish and the music is a mix of Euro pop, American Jazz and eclectic rock but the general mood is NPR.

I am usually the first shop owner to arrive on my block. Suqui, directly across from me also opens early as does the pleasant woman who manages Coco Zen three doors up. Domi-Habana opens next and then my immediate neighbor to the left La Morena. Suqui is a diminutive Dominicana of apparent Asian extraction and has had her gift shop for more than 25 years. She pays just $400/month and is petrified the rent will go up. She and her husband Carlos have two daughters one in Long Island and one in Paris. Suqui spends her days watching television in her shop and leafing through a French phrase book in hopefull preparation for a visit to the Paris daughter. To my right is another stairwell where Vilma sells beach clothes, mass-produced Haitian paintings, baseball hats and canvas shopping bags. Vilma lives in an apartment upstairs and mentioned once that she does not pay anything for the use of the stairwell—in fact I heard once that her building has no owner and that no one in any of the 10 apartments pays any rent to anybody. Most of the ground floor was a gift shop at one time but is now sealed up by steel doors.

Across the street from me-- and by the way, El Conde is pedestrian only, no cars allowed, street lights and benches line the center-- next to Suqui is Jeanette’s Salon. I pay Jeanette $20/day for my stairwell; Jeanette rents the building I am in. Upstairs are a series of rooms where 10 or so of Jeanette’s nieces and nephews, all brought in from Haiti, live. Most of them work in one of her two salons. The two leaders of this pack of kids are Alexandra 21 and Myrtha 25 who work in the salon across from me. They are helped by Marybell 10, when she is not in school. Gina, 17, Polita and Chantel work with Jeanette herself in her other salon near the other end of El Conde. Londres is the alpha male who once in a while washes a window or fixes something in the salon but mostly hangs out. He goes to the gym every day and plays basketball every evening in the parking lot on Luperon. Judging by his acne and rope like veins in his arms he is injecting vitamins (i.e. steroids). But he is pleasant. On days when there are many customers Myrtha and Alexandra work hard all day from 8AM to 8PM with only a short break for lunch.

Myrtha and Alexandra are either cousins or half sisters; they have each told me different stories and it could be they don’t know for sure. They are both short and very cute with large round faces and gigantic eyes. When the salon window is dark and Myrtha, who has darker skin, looks out, sometimes all you can see are the white crescents of her eyes. When I asked them how much money they made working in the salon they said nothing but that whenever they wanted to buy something there was money. When it is quiet in the evening Myrtha sometimes brings out her laptop and connects to Facebook where she is Myrtha Zamy but she recently told me her legal last name is Kelly. What could she say, she said, her mother had lived in La Romana. Alexandra likes working in the salon because, as she put it, she gets to be the little boss.

I initially inquired about renting the stairwell because I had noticed it only sadly displaying clothes for sale with never any interest. I was directed to the distant salon where I met Jeanette. She is 55, not large but imposing, high cheekboned, large eyed, dark skinned and wears flowing white tessellated dresses. She greeted me in Spanish with a thick Haitian accent and after asking where I was originally from she announced that she was not Dominican but Swiss. It eventually came out that she was once married to a Swiss and lived in Zurich for a while. I had had in my mind a daily rate of $20-25 so when she asked for $20 I agreed without bartering. During my first two weeks in the stairwell I sold very poorly and at one point I asked if she would consider lowering the rent until I got going. I had the money I owed for that week in my hand and as it dawned on her that I was asking to pay less, she kept glancing at Gina, who was sitting in a salon chair not really paying attention, and asking her to translate, and as what I was asking finally registered, as she finally allowed it to register, her eyes got even bigger and she seemed to suddenly grow taller and I handed her the money and thanked her and fled. Since then we greet each other warmly and I don’t ask for any discounts. Yesterday she came into the stairwell and sat down and we chatted. I was able to explain that I needed to go to Massachusetts for a couple of months and she assured me that the stairwell would still be mine when I returned, especially if I paid in advance but even if I didn’t. Her eyes stayed the same size the whole time, to my relief.

Much of the day is spent hanging out. I read the New Yorker and listen to the radio. Sometimes I have computer work and I bring my laptop. For example—a couple of weeks ago Alexa was able to borrow a complete set of USGS maps of the entire Dominican Republic for two days only. The first night I photographed all 150 maps at home. I had to set up a stepladder in the living room and lash a tripod horizontally to the top rung with strips of bicycle inner tubing so I could get the camera far enough away to take each map. The next day on the computer I was able to process/crop/tweak each map so I was sure we had usable files. To buy the full issue would have cost about $2000.

When it is busy I have long conversations with customers, some of whom keep in touch later through email. I get inside local gossip from Vilma and was getting it from Santos who worked in the big gift shop La Morena to my left before he was transferred. La Morena is a family operation run by the matriarch known as La Morena and her husband Eusebio. Their son Francis and Eusebio’s brother Santos work for them along with an unrelated rotund employee named Maylenny. They also use the services of guides known as Buscones who are the annoying guys on the street who tug on tourists sleeves saying things like come to my gift shop, everything 40% discount, no cost to look, cheapy cheapy, and then lead them toward holes in the pavement so they can say, Look out!, Watch you step! When a tourist who has been successfully dragged into La Morena by a buscon buys something, the buscon gets a cut as does the person who makes the sale and a cut goes to store. How they divide it up at the end of day I do not know. Sometimes there are fights. Francis almost never sells anything since he drinks all day. Motorcycles from various local colmados deliver jumbo Presidente (1L.) after jumbo Presidente, curbside estimates reckon he spends about 500 pesos a day on beer. Sometimes when I am in La Despensa, the small supermarket one block away I see him in line buying a12oz. single beer. Santos sells the most souvenirs for La Morena. He is 54, short and wiry with a shaved head and horn rimmed glasses and wears heavy-metal tee shirts that hang down past his jeans pockets, baggy jeans and oversized sneakers, but when he peers up at you over the frames of his glasses and lowers his voice to a confidential near-whisper he is very convincing.

There is a local cast of minor characters, beggars, prostitutes and homeless who come and go. Jasmin is a crack addict who also hangs around the plaza on Sundays. She is scrawny, toothless 4 feet 10 inches tall and probably no older than 25. She wears rags, sleeps in the middle of sidewalks until the tourist cops shag her off and collects empty beer bottles for a peso each and begs. She spends time in Najayo women’s prison every year and, reportedly when she sleeps on the rocks on the seaside of the Malecón the bums there fuck her for $1. I had not seen her during the past month and when I asked Vilma if she knew if anything had happened she told me that some tigueres had beaten Jasmin nearly to death, that she had spent a month in the hospital Dario Contreras, that her mother had even come to help and that she had lost an eye due to the beating.

An old woman with a bundle of rags comes every afternoon and sits on a stoop in front of the sealed up gift shop and waits for people to give her money. She is graceful about it and never begs but readily accepts. La Morena fills her water bottle for her when she is thirsty. One day a geezerly part-time peddler reeking of rum set his two or three broken souvenirs on her stoop in an unlikely attempt to sell them and when the old woman arrived she demanded her spot. When the peddler refused and the argument escalated Santos launched out of La Morena brandishing a large machete and ran past my stairwell toward the arguement—when he sped past my doorwar he glanced in at me with a wink and a smile—the peddler, who looked to be an arthritic 60 took off like a gazelle and turned the corner at Meriño without breaking stride and without looking back. Santos collapsed in laughter but passerbys gaped in horror. Eventually Asoconde, which is the equivalent of a chamber of commerce for El Conde, heard some version of this story and now Santos has been deported to another gift shop owned by his sister-in-law in the Mercado Modelo up on Avenida Mella. Along with Vilma he had been the most fun to hang out with.

Aside from the buscones there are a host of other guides who all expect a cut from somebody for any sale made on El Conde. Many gift shops have agreements with individual guides and one can see small flocks of tourists being bum-rushed past store after store until arriving at their guide’s chosen locale. Because I have unique merchandise I have no agreement with any guide—most of the gift shops here have nearly identical inventories displayed slightly differently i.e. one store puts the Indian made saris in front, another places the Panama hats more prominently and another their Haitian paintings—I sometimes have trouble with them. One day two French women stopped at my gallery, looked at some photos, asked about pricing and moved on. About an hour later they reappeared and started selecting photos and negotiating a discounted price when suddenly a guide’s head insinuated itself between the women and looked at me smiling and told me to start bagging. The women bought about $60 US worth of stuff and the three left. An hour or so later the guide reappeared looking for his due. When I looked surprised that he was asking he said, “aw just enough for a soda?” but when I offered him 30 pesos (about 75¢ almost enough for a soda) he took umbrage. We were in the street and he started yelling about how he was not like the others that he was a good and honest guide and I yelled back that he had not brought anybody to my shop, that I had met the women on their own before and that I was not going to pay anything and he could feel free to get lost. He yelled the whole way down the street and to this day (2 months later) gives me a dirty look every time he passes.

As I type this in my stairwell at 11:15 AM a hard rain has completely cleared the streets of all foot traffic. A few guides huddle, here and there, under awnings and overhangs but not under mine.

At lunchtime, if I have not brought leftovers or stuff to make sardine sandwiches (with a 45¢ avocado purchased from a fruit vendor around the corner), I put a be right back sign on the front of my display and walk fast to one of two or three comedors that are within two blocks. Lunch price ranges from 70 pesos ($2) for rice, beans and a veggie, to 100 pesos for rice, beans, potato salad and a stewed meat choice of beef, pork or chicken to 140 pesos from a different comedor for the same thing presumably tastier or from a cleaner kitchen. I bring the meal back in a Styrofoam compartment plate complete with plastic spoon and eat it when it cools off.

So, I sit in the stairwell and read or write for most of the day and when the shade reaches the bench out front I sit on it with Vilma and the girls from the salon and we shoot the shit. Sometimes Ruddy stops by after closing his concession in Mundo Artesanal and we drink beer. Ruddy is a 55 year-old (same as me, in fact Jeanette is 55 also, Santos is 54) athletic German ex-pat who had a silk-screening business in the Zona Colonial for a couple of years. He eventually got tired of the low quality of the Chinese tee shirts available so he studied and thought and bought some used sewing machines and now he designs and makes the shirts that bear his designs and he makes mine too and we have become friends. He is getting married next Saturday and I will go to his wedding.

Around 7:30 or 8 I pack up the photos and either store them under the stairs or haul them to the guaguita if it is Saturday since I still sell in the Plaza Maria de Toledo on Sundays and drive home. At 8 there rarely are traffic jams although one night, and Altagracia happened to be with me, there was a bad one before crossing the bridge after Ovando. It was so bad and so unexpected that I bet Altagracia that it could only be one of two things—an accident or a dead horse in the road. As we finally reached the other side of the bridge and passed the Metro subway station we saw the horse, dead and splayed out across a lane and a half.

Gilbert Murdered

2012-01-27T08:06:00.000-04:00

Gilbert Murdered

Chavela now has spent the past 5 years working at the banca selling lottery tickets. The banca is a kiosk sized building just on the other side of the colmado next to our house. She opens lazily around 4 or 5 in the afternoon and then hangs out on the front step with Chany and chats with neighbors or plays dominos. Across the street in front of the banca is Gilbert’s colmado. It is a grungy little colmado in a perpetual state of failure. Gilbert is, or was, a kind of goofy harmless tiguere who, when smoking drugs, would stay up all night cranking the jukebox in the colmado. He had long arms, short legs, a drooping lower lip and had two sons one 6 and one 11 years old. Altagracia and I were out of town when she got the call that Gilbert had been killed.

The banca was open and Chavela, Chany, Gilbert and 4 or 5 others were hanging out on the front step. The phone rang inside Gilbert’s colmado; one of the kids answered it and yelled out that it was for Gilbert. Gilbert got up, went into his colmado and when he did two men no one had paid much attention to who had been loitering nearby followed him in and pumped four 9mm bullets into his chest. They ran out, sprinted up an alley and disappeared. Gilbert slumped against the counter and died almost instantly. Both his sons were there. Chany heard the shots but has since been told that Gilbert went to Nueva York.

The prevalent theory is that the two assassins were hired to kill Gilbert by the father of Omar. Omar was murdered a month ago and his father had heard a rumor that Gilbert knew who the killers were but would not tell the police. The phone call that was placed to the colmado was so that the killers could identify Gilbert by seeing who got up to go the phone. The rumor that Omar’s father heard was wrong. We are now waiting for one of Omar’s brothers to be killed in retaliation by one of Gilbert’s brothers.

Kiki mostly stays in Elias Piña but pops up from time to time. When he is in the area he stays with Chavela who has moved into an apartment down a narrow side street behind the banca (she and Calderon are back together). A couple of weeks ago before leaving to work in the Zona Colonial on Sunday, Altagracia and I swung down her side street so we could deliver Chanel’s clean laundry. I knocked on the door and after a few minutes it opened a crack and Kiki’s face appeared. We were equally surprised. He said, “Good morning“, I said, “Good morning“, I handed him the bundle of laundry and turned and left.

Joanglish continues as before. He is now working as a Municipal Policeman two days a week. Altagracia sends a plate of rice and beans daily to his apartment a block or so away. He is still not allowed in the house.

Niningo is still working 7 days/week at the casino. Altagracia has taken his banking passbook and deposits the money he gives her on paydays.

I have rented a street level stairwell on El Conde three days a week and set up a little gallery of the cave photos. In general it has gone very well although as the elections approach tourists have been warned to stay away. Yesterday I sold $0. Campaign activities paralyze the city daily creating huge traffic jams. The activities involve setting up bandstands with loudspeakers the size of tractor trailers to play reggaeton at volumes at which you cannot hear a car horn honk, itinerant clowns on 5-foot stilts and free rum. I have heard of individuals being paid as much as 1000 pesos ($27 at today’s exchange rate) for their vote. When the election results start coming out the celebration can include pistol shots either into the air in happiness or horizontally in revenge.

Short misc posts. Cave exploration, solenodon.

2012-01-02T08:00:00.000-04:00

Kiki is out of jail. He was found innocent of killing Carlos and the six months were enough for the other charges. He is staying in Elias Piña.

Chavela’s baby, Chanel, is almost 2½ and is a happy baby although Chavela is a careless mother. Chavela has left Calderon, again, and is living in the pink wood house across the street where La Rubia, who butchered chickens in the front yard, used to live. Chanel has been sent to the colmado across the street barefoot, with 10 pesos to buy a pat of butter by herself. She is tiny but spunky and chatty. She loves to drink coffee with Altagracia after lunch on the galería. Sugar and Nesquick in her milk, daily icecream and frequent candies have resulted in her having all her front teeth pulled. Nickname is Vampira.

We had lunch at Peperoni with George and Mitzi Stein on Wednesday. The dinner at Vesuvio last year was more fun since it was her first fancy restaurant and had never seen so many glasses and silverware on one table. She picked at her salmon and did not like the risotto. She loved her margarita but not the chardonnay. No time for desert, George and Mitzi had to catch a plane for Chile.

Things in the house have been mostly ok although there was a explosion last week that sent me looking for an apartment downtown. I actually looked at one on the edge of the Zona Colonial—decent location behind the Shell station on Independencia but on the third floor, through the landlady’s living room and out onto a rooftop hallway to a room in which the bed fit but nothing more. The private bathroom measured about 3 square feet and the toilet was directly underneath the showerhead. $5000 pesos or $140 a month. I declined.

A few weeks ago Altagracia and I stopped at EPS, the mail service I use, so I could pick up a package and the New Yorker. She waited outside while I went in. While she was standing on the sidewalk a bunch of motorcycle cops drove by followed by a series of limousines in one of which was Leonel Fernandez, the president of the country. She waved and he waved back.

I now rent a street level stairwell on El Conde Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays where I sell the cave photos. I rent it from Jeanette who has two hair salons on el Conde. About 10 nieces and nephews live upstairs all of whom, except the very littlest, work in the salons. Sundays I still sell in the Plaza Maria de Toledo in the antiques flea market.

In February and March Alain Gilbert was here and we searched for and mapped caves Mons, Tues, and Wednesdays. We worked in Cumayasa, Hato Mayor and el Seibo mostly.

One of our searches concerned the alleged Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands) reported in Pedernales, a desert region in the south near the Haitian border. Alain and I rode with Domingo Abreu, who is the government official in charge of all the caves in the country. The two of them know more caves than anybody in the Dominican Republic—Alain has measured and mapped 400 caves and Domingo has been exploring them for 40 years. The cave we were looking for had been reported in about 1990 by Morban Laucer, then director of the Museo del Hombre, now deceased, in his book Arte Rupestre in the Sierra Bahoruco. There is a photograph of Laucer in the book standing next to a guide named Donovan, or Nóvan, Pérez a montero who lives by hunting feral goats and cattle in the mountains around Pedernales. There were also black and white photographs of handprints on the cave walls We eventually found Nován’s house in Enriquillo by asking random people on the street. His wife was home but Novan was out hunting. She said she had just spoken with him by cell phone, that he had just shot a goat, but when we tried calling there was no signal meaning he had moved into a valley. Armed with his cell phone number we continued driving on towards the town of Pedernales trying to call him every hour or so.

On our way we stopped at two caves near the highway that Alain and Domingo knew and photographed the rock art in them. We ate lunch in Pedernales (waitress named Misou) and continued to ask people if they knew someone who might know where the Cueva de Las Manos was. We eventually located a lawyer who had reconnoitered many of the caves of the area—he showed us a human skull he found in one—who said that Nicolas Corona might know. We called Nicolas but he was working in Bayahibe on the other side of the country. We drove around a barrio of Pedernales and found a brother of Nicolas but he did not know where the Cueva de las Manos was. We slept at a $10 hotel in town.

The next morning on our way back toward Enriquillo we toured a limestone quarry as part of Domingo’s job with the Dept of the Environment and then stopped back at Novan’s house. There were twenty or so people outside the house sitting on plastic chairs under an improvised blue poly tarp awning. Novan’s mother-in-law had died that night. He was hiking out of the mountains to attend the wake. We offered our condolences to his wife and started the 4-hour drive back to the capital.

Eventually Domingo called Nóvan and made a date and the next week we drove back to Enriquillo. We arrived at night, Novan found us an $8 hotel and the next morning we picked him and drove as far as we could to the cave. We parked off the road in a gravelbed. Following Novan through the cactus and spurge desert we arrived at an enormous sinkhole in red limestone after about a 20-minute hike. If you trip it is better to fall than to grab a branch to steady yourself—the spines can take weeks to get out of your skin and become infected easily. Our friend Eric Labarre who I hiked with through mountains for 11 hours to reach the Cueva de la Cidra a few years ago refuses to explore Pedernales anymore because of the cactus and rough walking. Four years ago he and Alain spent three days traipsing through this same desert looking for this same cave unsuccessfully. The jagged rocks tear up shoes, there is permanent drought and the sun is ferocious.

The sinkhole contained many petroglyphs and a few paintings, and was very interesting, but did not turn out to be the Cueva de las Manos but to be a cave called Póciman Jé. I photographed everything including an iguana turd the size of a German Shepherd’s. Novan admitted that he could not remember where the Cueva de Las manos might be.

We went on into Pedernales, lunched in Misou’s restaurant and I remembered that I still had Nicolas’s phone number. We called him. He was in town but about to leave but could meet us for a few minutes. We met him at a nearby gas station and he drew us quick directions on how to find the cave, two caves in fact.

We found the first cave; in fact, we drove right up to it at the end of a 4wd only track. The entrance was about 15meters up a sheer cliff face. We could see red paintings on the cave ceiling from the ground. To get to it we had to climb up around the back of the promontory and then descend down to a skinny ledge, step over a gap in the ledge in which was a colony of honeybees. (Novan stuck a smoldering branch in the hole to keep the bees calm) and belly crawl into the small cave. The ceiling and walls were covered with mostly geometric designs in red pigment. Since it was already middle afternoon I only had time to photograph rapidly and we climbed back down to go to the Cueva de las Manos. Following the map Nicolas had given us we searched up one dry ravine called the Cañada de los Huesos or Bones Creek and then down the other until dark. There were clouds of small mosquitoes—but slow and slappable unlike the lightning quick mosquitoes in Villa Mella—there were interesting natural red patterns in some of the cliff walls that I think might have inspired the indigenous artists’s abstract designs—but we found no Cueva de las Manos.

Now, weeks later, Alain has gone back to France to his job as architect of historic buildings for the Dept of Culture, and Domingo is still trying to track down Nicolas for a better map, and Novan, who has forgotten where the cave is, is trying to relocate it when he is not hunting wild goats.

Last week I came across a web page that reported that some kids had captured a live solenodon in Hato Mayor. There was a link to another page called Save the Survivors Solenodon and Hutia, which was run by Joe Nuñez. Nuñez had recorded the first ever video of a wild solenodon in Pedernales—as cute as a venomous insectivore that looks like a small opossum can be. There was a photograph of Nuñez wearing a heavy leather falconry glove with a solenodon perched on his hand. I joined his Facebook page.

Two days later I am sitting on the bench in front of my tiny gallery on El Conde when two men stopped in their tracks in front of the gallery. I had put my photograph of a cave painting of a solenodon in the front of the display that day and one of the men was Joe Nuñez. He bought the picture. He had actually been up the Cañada de los Huesos and had visited the same cave full of red paintings that we had, but knew nothing of the Cueva de Manos.

Death of Carlos

2011-12-15T08:18:00.000-04:00

Death of Carlos

During the early part of the summer Kiki lived in the newly roofed house in Elias Piña and had reportedly settled into a rhythm of moving items back and forth across the border. Sometime in August he and his uncle Carlos, Altagracia’s brother, went on a clerén and crack smoking bender. Carlos was about 36 and had been one of the friendlier relations when we visited Elias Piña. On the 4th day of the bender they had a slap and push scuffle and shortly after Carlos slipped into a coma. Pipina and some others threw him in the back of a pick-up and brought him to the local hospital where he vomited something green and died. Altagracia and Niningo took a guagua to Elias Piña the next day and found that all the other brothers and sisters were accusing Kiki of murder, claiming that he had heart-punched Carlos knowing that he had a bad heart. The autopsy concluded that drug and alcohol overdose was the cause of death but nevertheless. There were some shouting screaming and pushing fights. Altagracia was accused of being armed. Pipina claimed rights to Altagracia’s house in Elias Piña. Kiki was jailed in shackles. Pipina later is said to have paid some police 5000 pesos to kill him in prison but they only beat him up. I suspect that Pipina and the others—Papito, Violeta, Felix, and even Anna and Momona, his grandmother are just sick of having him around shooting off guns and stealing and eating their goats and pigs.

Altagracia continues to work for Bettye on Sundays and for Adrian and her Haitian retired husband on Tues and Fridays. She would like to quit Adrian but needs to send money to Kiki in jail from time to time and knows better than to ask me to donate. But I have never heard her (or anyone) complain so much about working 3 days a week. Other than analysing the gossip on Loma de Chivo that is our only topic of conversation

Niningo searched for work daily after graduating from high school including trying to get into the air force academy. He evidently almost got in but his school was not able to produce his graduation papers by the deadline. A month ago, with a recommendation from Adrian, he got a job at a Casino on the Malecón watching the video monitors in a locked room with one or two other monitors. He watches for dropped dice and cards and checks that the tellers examine bills for forgeries. He already has spotted 300 counterfeit Euros. His shifts are 10PM-6AM or 2PM-8PM and he has not had a day off since I have been back due to understaffing. 8,000 pesos a month plus the overtime. On his last payday he gave Altagracia 1000 pesos and me 500, and was proud to do it.

Jhoanglish continues to drift unmoored. He does not give the mother of his son any money, does not live with them and sometimes hits her arguing about money. At the moment he is living in a rented room up around the corner and eats at Chavela’s.

Kiki reels on, Altagracia works

2011-11-30T20:15:00.000-04:00

Kiki

From Baní Kiki went to his Uncle Tito´s house in Dajabon, then returned to Baní then went to Elias Piña. After about a week in Elias Piña he started running into some folks he had fought with last year so he fled back to Baní, but not before attacking a moneychanger and stealing 5000 pesos from him. His second night back in Baní (where Mariela is still pregnant) a friend of his asked to borrow 100 pesos and when Kiki took out his wallet two other “friends”, one with a pistol and one with a machete, helped the 1st friend rob him of the 5000 pesos. They scattered. Kiki went for a machete and waited outside the 1st friend’s house for hours until he came home Kiki attacked him and cut him up bad enough that he had to be sent to Dario Contreras Hospital here in the capitol with head and body wounds. So if the guy dies Kiki will have to flee Baní. He still won’t be able to come back here because the guy’s face whose ear he shot last week is swelling up because the bullet passed under the skin near the cheekbone on its way to his ear and the guy, whose name is Hansel, had been known as a handsome fellow and is pissed off about his face.

Altagracia

Altagracia has gone back to work. She has been working Sundays cleaning a gallery/pension for Bettye a Tennessee expat for 500 pesos or about $15 for the past few years. She has filled the rest of her time aggressively cleaning our house. Through my recommendations she now works three additional days per week. One day cleaning the apartment of Stan’s wife, Elizabeth, and two days cleaning and doing laundry for a couple who are friends of Stan. It seemed that her getting out of the house and earning some money that is really her own would all amount to a good thing but. . .

On the Saturday I drove her to her first day of work with Adrian en route she unleashed a string of invectives against me out of the blue. This is not unprecedented, Altagracia speaks nearly every thought that enters her head and filters nothing but usually I have done something to spark a frontal attack like this one. That night in the house she ignored me completely. Sunday she, Niningo and I drove to the Plaza, which abuts Bettye’s—I sell photos under my canopy in the flea market and Niningo sells bead, and shell jewelry that we buy wholesale in Villa Consuelo. We get to the plaza around 8:30 AM and since Altagracia doesn't start work with Bettye until 10 she usually drinks tea which a walking vendor sells out of thermoses and chats with the other vendors setting up their stalls but that day she sat down and shouted insults at me whenever I walked by. Ramon heard some of them and was really shocked. To tell you the truth, for all I knew, this treatment was a common Dominican cultural phenomenon. When I offered her a cup of tea her response was Go to the Devil, coñazo. After a week or so things calmed down but I don’t know why. We would sleep more or less normally, make love more or less normally but in the morning either silence or insults.

One of the problems is that, even when she is working outside the house she is determined to maintain the house the same as when she is home full time. This includes sweeping water off the roof of the marquisina after it rains, ironing everything in the laundry— including my paint stained tee shirts, perma-press polyester button down shirts, underwear, the baby’s clothes, the pillowcases, my handkerchiefs and the dishtowels. Sometimes I hang clean stuff that does not need ironing in the closet to keep her from doing it but she ferrets them out and irons them anyway. Even though, at $250/month she is making more than a secretary, more than a full time policeman and more than any military personnel up to about the rank of lieutenant this may not be worth it.

So the timbre of the relationship has changed. It seems to me that when she calls me a stupid campesino (which had been a term of affection between us and perhaps best translated in this context as sodbuster) that there is a more cutting tone; that when she says that she does not know how I can be so stupid while being a professor and all it sounds, these days, like she really means it not like before. We have been together almost 6 years now but separate for about half of every year, which makes it 3 years together physically. It has always seemed to me that the 3-year mark is the big hurdle in relationships. I don’t know if 3 years is the period of best behavior, if our habits of consideration and kindness slip a little, or if we do not really change much but our perceptions of the other shift. Even though I had made it clearto her that I was not rich—which is the perception about all gringos here—and that we would both have to work to get ahead somehow a latent impression of rich gringos lingers and she may be a little bitter that she wound up with a poor one. It also happens that she is working in houses that are luxuriously appointed. As long as there are pictures on the walls and the chairs are strong enough to hold us up I don’t really care. I lived in tipis, barns and foundations when I was younger and somehow never lost the taste for living in unimproved conditions.

People think of her as the wife of a gringo who does not have to work but works just to keep busy. Perhaps she feels like she is getting the worst of both worlds.

She woke up late this morning and when I suggested that she take the Metro—the new commuter train—to avoid the traffic jam and difficulty in finding a taxi she said that the Metro was for the rich people and she would be ashamed to take it wearing her work flip-flops.

Bombardment of the Galería and Shooting

2011-11-16T06:49:00.000-04:00

Kiki Explodes

After months of tranquilitude La Loma de Chivo heated up. Popitín and Fabriccio are the two tigueres the police are after the most. Popitín’s leg healed well and within three weeks he was back on the street and his limp disappeared after a few more days. Rivals shot Gavilán in the leg and he was not seen for more than a month.

After sleeping for months on Chavela’s floor in her new apartment, which is where Ambar used to live, Kiki moved in with his girlfriend, Mariela, in Chavela's old apartment. Mariela was Kiki’s childhood sweetheart when they were growing up in Baní but she dumped him when his fights escalated along with his drug use years ago. Mariela moved to our neighborhood to be near Altagracia who was a mother figure for her when they were neighbors and she found work shampooing hair and sweeping the floor in a hair salon somewhere in the Zona Colonial. Before renting Chavela’s old apartment across the alley (from which you can see into our bathroom if you peer through the percianas at the right angle) she lived with a different boyfriend a couple of blocks away who worked and had a large flat screen TV. But as the weeks passed she began taking up with Kiki again and since the boyfriend spent quite a bit of time away working she was able to entertain Kiki in the other boyfriend’s apartment.

One afternoon during this period Kiki found himself short of money and thirsty so he pawned the boyfriend’s giant TV for $30 and when that money ran out he sold the pawn ticket. Drunk he argued and pushed Jhoanglish around so Jhoanglish went and borrowed Mariela’s cell phone, which of course had the boyfriend’s number listed, called him and told him what happened so the boyfriend dumped Mariela. So without a place to sleep she joined Kiki on Chavela’s floor. Mariela then missed her next period, quit her job and the two of them rented the space over the old colmado. The Venezuelans paid their first and last month deposit.

I met the Venezuelans New Year’s eve the night my wallet was stolen. (I had never taken such precautions before sallying out to the Malecón outdoor concert thronged with people event. I had removed my ID cards and had put my spending cash in other pockets, the wallet was in my front pocket while I waited to use one of the portable outdoor toilets. While I was in the line a large man with a hat pulled low cut in the front of the line two or three people ahead of me—a number of us told him to move, that it was a line etc. but he only moved laterally cutting in front of the line for the adjacent port-o-san. I now believe that while this intentional distraction was going on, he had a friend who was lifting wallets from behind.) At any rate, Altagracia and I and Niningo and Chavela, along with Kiki and Mariela had driven to the Malecón together. I gave Kiki and Mariela $15 and the same to Niningo and Chavela for refreshments and we all milled around in the crowd. At one point Kiki brought us over to cluster of people he was drinking with and proudly introduced us to four Venezuelans as his business associates. I was impressed at first, the V’s were dressed in black sport jackets and spoke enough English to want to practice their conversation. Later I learned that they had all met in prison. Kiki goes out with them occasionally and returns with money and none of us knows what they actually do.

Mariela’s pregnancy began with very bad malestar or morning sickness, which is not a phenomenon I am expert on, but I do know that she vomited at any time and with no warning and was weak and dizzy. Stress could be partially to blame since Kiki told her that if she lost the baby he would kill her. She told him to go make some money, and she didn’t care how. She got her severance pay and secretly gave me 2000 pesos of it to me to hide for her for the next month’s rent so Kiki couldn’t spend it. Her malestar got worse and whenever Kiki stole or earned some money (he actually worked construction for two days but decided that his hands were not suited to rough labor) he bought rum and drugs. When Mariela started a tab at one of the local colmados Kiki slapped her, hard on the street and did it when Belita (an ex of Kiki) was passing by. A sonogram showed the fetus somehow badly placed. Mariela had had enough and I gave her back the 2000 pesos. She gave Kiki 250 for food money for a few days and she left for Baní to be with her family. Within 15 minutes Kiki bought a bottle of rum and an hour later he bought another one. While I was eating dinner in the kitchen his voice came croaking in from the street that he wanted to talk to me about borrowing 500 pesos ($15) so he could take a guagua to Baní where he suspected Mariela’s family was advising her to get an abortion. I said no. Later he was seen up by Manso’s colmado with another bottle. Altagracia and I went to bed around 10:30, Niningo turned out his light a half hour later. A cement block crashing against the front door woke us all up around midnight. Then another boulder hit the steel burglar bars, then another. We were under bombardment. Kiki was hurling the chunks of block and stone from the street and screaming at us to come out so he could send us all to Hell. We did not know if he was otherwise armed. Some of the blocks hit the tin roof of the galeria mangling it in places. Niningo called the police, then 5 minutes later called again. We waited inside in the dark clutching baseball bats. We could hear Chavela out in the street screaming at him to stop, we later learned she had a knife but never got close enough to use it. Finally 4 police on motorcycles, a police SUV and a paddy wagon showed up. Kiki was dragged out of Chavela’s apartment where he had run when he saw the cops coming and Altagracia hysterically identified him and challenged the cops to shoot him in the feet and lock him up in Najayo (a tough prison here) for a real long time. They stuffed him in the SUV and took him to the station house in Villa Mella. We followed in the guaguita because Altagracia would have to sign to keep him locked up since it was a family matter. At the station house, when we were in the front room signing the complaint Kiki lunged out of the back room howling, ”Mommy, mommy,“ and was hauled back in and slammed up against the wall a few times. We went home and wended our way through the rubble and broken glass on the galería floor and went to bed.

In the morning Altagracia had to go back to the station house to re-sign to keep Kiki in for 24 hours, which is the maximum when no one in a family dispute is injured. I went to sell photos in the Plaza. Altagracia called me at noon to tell me that Kiki had escaped the jail. I figured he would have run far, foolishly thinking that it was a crime to escape from jail in the Dominican Republic. When I got home from work we heard that he was with a bunch of neighborhood tigueres drinking and snorting drugs in a local disco. Later in the evening he turned back up at Manso’s colmado. Around 11 PM when we were getting ready for bed we heard a shot but didn’t think anything of it. Around midnight we awoke to Chavela frantically pounding on the front door saying that Kiki had just killed somebody. We talked to some near-eyewitnesses in front of the house and pieced together that Kiki had been with a guardia and had either borrowed or taken his pistol in order to rob someone—he had pistol whipped the guy then pushed the gun into his chest and pulled the trigger repeatedly but the gun did not go off, got about $5 from him and while yelling “You’re useless, tu no sierves!!” and while pulling away on the motorcycle had reached back and shot at his head, the gun went off this time but only took off a piece of his ear. But until we knew how bad the injuries were and who the guy was we had to prepare for immediate repercussions. He might have armed brothers, he might be part of a gang. Niningo, Altagracia and I turned off every light source in the house, double checked the door bolts and sat behind a concrete wall and waited silently. Well, Altagracia kept hissing for us to be silent while she monologued in a high whisper about all the things that could go wrong. We waited like that for about an hour and eventually concluded that neither the police nor the avengers would come that night and went to bed tensely listening and twitching at every cat scratch, dog bark and distant pistol shot. At 3:30 in the morning we heard somebody hitting a padlock with a hammer two houses away. It was Valentine’s Day.

As I write this on Monday Kiki is on the run based around Baní, where he knows the woods and where he figures Mariela will protect him. He still has the pistol but only one bullet. The guardia has been thrown in jail for losing his pistol and his father is trying to negotiate its return. At the moment the proposal is that the father give 4000 pesos ($120) to Chavela and Jose, a local trusted tiguere, and they go to Baní to buy the pistol from Kiki for 2000 pesos with Jose getting paid the other 2000. So far Kiki has not agreed. Mariela is bleeding and has severe abdominal pain, is not eating and has not seen a doctor.

Altagracia and Alicia cleaned the rubble off the galeria using shovels and 5-gallon pails while I was at work and dumped it in the vacant lot across the street. The pile of brickbats would have filled more than two wheelbarrows.

Neighborhood News and a Violent Incident

2011-11-01T08:11:00.002-04:00

Fewer people live on Loma de Chivo so it is quieter these days. Some of the old people have died, some have moved away and many of the tigueres have been killed. Just this week police entered Popitín’s house and shot him in the hip as he backed away against a wall. His parents were in the room. The goal was to give him a dosis, or a permanent crippling but it seems he will walk again. His parents paid $700 to the police and they released him today. We sent a bowl of rice pudding over to his house since he is a tiguere who does not rob from his own barrio.

Rubia, who used to butcher chickens across the street sold the little pink house and moved away with her son and Anita, her 16-year-old daughter with her new baby.

The colmado next to the house closed, to everyone’s relief. The speakers Rubio had hooked up to the jukebox got bigger and bigger until we couldn’t hear our own phone ring, much less talk on it when the music was playing. He evidently had borrowed a lot of money to make improvements on the colmado, squirreled the money away and stopped making payments so the bank closed the place down after confiscating the jukebox. Rubio tried renting the space out as another colmado but the guys who rented it gave up after one week for lack of business. At the moment it is a hair salon but I never see any customers in it.

Christmas day, during the short time the new colmado was open there was one customer who, when drunk, refused to pay for his beer. The second time it happened Kiki happened to be in the colmado and when the drunk reached across the counter and cuffed the colmado employee up side of the head Kiki suggested he lay off. Kiki walked out and was right in front of my marquisina when the drunk emerged from the colmado and yelled at Kiki—who had also been drinking all day—that he should mind his own business and keep going. Kiki turned around and, when the drunk walked up fast and threw a right at Kiki’s head, Kiki launched an overhand right that I could hear connect from the galería and a left that floored the drunk. When he got half up Kiki kicked him in the stomach and connected to the head twice more. The drunk was sprawled in the center of the street but managed to sit up and say something I couldn’t hear. Kiki took a step and a half like he going to kick a field goal and kicked the guy in the head so hard that the sound of the shoe hitting the skull was almost indistinguishable from the sound the back of the guy’s head made when it slammed against the asphalt. As Kiki moved in to stomp the guy’s head into the pavement Niningo, Domingo, and Altagracia herself who had been trying to pull him off all this time finally succeeded. It had been like watching an efficient predator on the Discovery Channel dismantle a confused wildebeest. A couple of us dragged the unconscious wildebeest over to the curb and it took a long time before his chest moved with his breathing. He was out cold for 5 minutes and we donated two buckets of water from the cisterna to bring him to. Kiki was ushered up to Chavela’s apartment in case police were called, and when Jhoanglish started to lecture him about something from the Bible Kiki grabbed a knife and lunged across the table at him but only managed to nick him although the baby fell and started crying. So Kiki’s girlfriend took him down the street to her apartment and on the way Kiki threw another punch at a passerby who had made a smart remark. This was on Christmas Day, which is also Kiki’s birthday.

The next day the drunk came around and apologized to the colmado and to Altagracia and she said his whole head was swollen. A few days after that he came around again when he realized he would probably have permanent cosmetic damage (at least), with a pistol this time, but Kiki was not around and we have not heard anything more. He is nonviolent when not drinking and has five children, all younger than 7, with a tall slender woman who often walks past the house with two or three babies in tow and a bucket of water or laundry balenced on her head. They live in a two-bedroom shack with a dirt floor.