Roadtrip

Last Post

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 04:56:00 +0000

This is the last posting I'm making here.

We had a really good run with Blogger, but I've thrown in the towel and switch my blog over to Wordpress. Once I get all my DNS and domains straightened out, this address may end up pointing there too, but for now, if you want to keep reading dispatches from the Roadtrip Blog, please point your browser at http://davidpablocohn.com.

If you're following this blog on Blogger, I'd appreciate it if you could switch over to the Wordpress "follow" mechanism:

Go to http://davidpablocohn.com
On the right side, about one screen down, you'll see a text box and a blue "Follow" button
Enter your email address in the text box and hit the Follow button. Wordpress will send you email saying "Do you really want to subscribe?"
Actually, the email will say "Confirm follow?", which means the same thing. Confirm, unless you're getting cold feet.
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Please let me know if you have any problems - otherwise, see you over on the other side...

Westward From the Davis Strait

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:10:00 +0000

09 March, 2013. I can’t even tell where we are. I’ve slipped my windowshade up a crack, and the lone beam of sunlight cuts into the tunnel of this warm dark cocoon like a police spotlight. Inside, headphone-muffled passengers doze, type at their laptops, play Angry Birds, or watch the seatback movies. An elderly couple sleeps, her head on his chest, his arm over her shoulder.

Outside, in the impossibly bright blue, towering white mountains rise up from rivers of ice. Waves of fog crash on their windward faces in slow motion, breaking and rolling. Inside our pressurized aluminum crysalis, life goes on, oblivious. The world outside is nothing to those of us in here and, fittingly, we are nothing to it.

I’ll be home in six hours. A hot shower, a change of clothes, and that’ll be it, the end of another roadtrip. Oley and Tiago are still back in Nairobi; they’ve been asked to stay on and follow up with the lagging national tally, and the inevitable challenge and recounts that will follow it. Word from the internet suggested that the IEBC has declared Kenyatta the winner, exceeding the required 50% + 1 needed to avoid a runoff by a scant 4000 votes. This, out of a country of 40 million people. So the challenges will go on, as will the observation mission.

I could have stayed, I know - I’d finally gotten over the jet lag. But I’ve been away from my other life too long. Devon, Miranda, Jeremy. My team (which one? I’ve got so many, for the many different lives I seem to lead). I’ve got a family to tend, a job to do - an important one - and friends, old friends to see again. Plus, I was getting really tired of the crappy pillows at the Hillpark. Monday morning I’ll be back at my desk, and this life will be as far away as those mountains outside are to the sleeping couple in Row 11.

[Okay, folks - that's it: the end of the Kenya Roadtrip Chronicles. Blog will probably be relatively quiet until mid-April, when Devon and I are ditching the kids with grandparents and going off to Israel/West Bank. -p ]

The iHub

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:16:00 +0000

We’re sitting on a blue cloth couch, backs against a glass-fronted wall that bounds the heart of the 21st century here in Nairobi. For the past few weeks, the top floor of the iHub has served as the situation room for Uchaguzi - a home-grown crowdsourced election monitoring and reporting system. Daudi is showing us how the team’s information flow chart maps to the crowded tables arranged around the room, while wall-mounted three monitors display news and commentary on the tensely-anticipated announcement of results.

This morning, Naomi and I wandered the stalls of the city market. She’s got quite a story (doesn’t everyone here?), and her day job is with the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (“Yeah, it’s a mouthful - we’re working on a better name”). Tall, pretty and very not-from-here - you’d think she’d be an easy mark for the hawkers. But when they pounced, the poor fellows found themselves suckered into being subjects for her field work.

“Karibu! Please, look at the carvings - it is free to look.”

“Very pretty. You live here in Nairobi?”

“Yes, yes. You would maybe like a nice mask?”

“Lovely. Where in Nairobi?”

They tell her, and she drills down - what’s the sentiment in their neighborhood? What if things go to a runoff? Does it feel to them like the election was free and fair? What do they think will happen if Raila cries foul? By the time she’s done, she has a new friend. They shake her hand, wish her well, and have completely forgotten that they were supposed to be selling her anything.

I ask what she thinks, and it sounds like the consensus is that everything will be fine, regardless of how the election turns out. The merchants, the taxi drivers - no one with a job can afford to have a repeat of the 2007-2008 violence. They’d all rather have some crook steal the election (which crook is a matter of opinion) than go out of business. Of course, there’ll be some violence in Kibera - that was a given regardless - but it’ll be isolated, contained; the work of angry young men with no hope of anything else to do. But overall? She thinks we’re good.

Back at the iHub, the monitors have switched to a press conference. Conversation on the floor ceases suddenly as strains of music swell through the speakers. Then everyone is on their feet, singing. Slowly and tentatively at first, but then louder, as the national anthem continues. These kids - really, many of them barely out of their teens - face the monitors and sing. They are black, white, Indian - they are all Kenyan. Okay, almost all - Norbert is German, but I think he’s lived here long enough to count.

Uchaguzi sprang out of Erik Hersman’s efforts to use his tech skills to document and help stem the violence of the last election. Beginning with SMS and a hastily-cobbled together online map, Erik and friends invented crowdsourced monitoring on the spot. That effort grew into Ushahidi, now a global resource and household name in any form of crisis management. Erik’s a white African, tall and sturdy, with a clean-shaven head and close-trimmed red beard. He looks incongruously large beside Juliana, Ushahidi’s petite black executive director. Together, and with volunteers assembled in this room, they are a fearsome team.

The anthem ends, and the room erupts in applause. Someone turns up the volume, so we can hear the man at the microphone, but after a few minutes it’s clear that this is just another announcement that there is, as of yet, no announcement. He makes assurances that all votes are being examined, that no valid votes will be left uncounted, and that, when they have something to announce, they will announce it. The room turns back to their tables, to their screens, and work resumes.

And Then a Bunch of Other Stuff Happened

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:32:00 +0000

Feel free to skip over this post. Nothing beautiful or evocative here - I just feel like I have some obligation to have a bit of continuity as to “what happened after the count”.

Once the voting and counting is done at the polling stations, a bunch of stuff happens:

The ballots are rolled up in bundles of 25 and sealed back in the ballot box.
The presiding officer fills out a triplicate form indicating the results of the count, and any party agents who’s still awake signs it to indicate that they witnessed it and agree with the numbers on it. Every polling station we visited, both here and in the 2011 Liberian election, had (at least) one observer from each major party watching the vote from the moment it opened until the end of counting. So in theory, there was someone from each side with a vested interest in detecting any hanky panky throughout the process. By signing the ballot, they were saying that they’d not seen any.

One copy of the form is posted outside the polling station, and one gets attached to the ballot box. In Liberia, the Liberia Media Center used community radio encouraged folks to copy numbers from the posted form and SMS them to a call-in number, where they were filtered, aggregated and posted to a Google map. As such, in a country where there’s no electricity or running water, a handful of volunteers in Monrovia and at Google were making election results available live, worldwide (thanks Sando, Pete and Kathryn!).
The ballot boxes and summary forms (Forms 34 and 35, in the case of the Kenya election) are brought - under armed guard - to a tally center. Party agents and observers typically follow along. In Kenya, the tally center is run by the Constituency Election Coordinator; she receives the ballot boxes and the forms from the PO, consults with the PO and party agents to reconcile any irregularities she can spot in the form, and adds them to her spreadsheet. She also announces them and - if the dodgy technology is working - projects the totals on the back wall so everyone can see. It is at this point that the numbers are considered “official”; if you’ve got a beef with the vote, this is when you need to speak up.

At this point, the PO’s job is done - she and her staff can go home and get some sleep, as can - in theory - the party agents and observers for that polling station. We were lucky here: our PO finished counting by midnight, and our results were in the CEC’s hands by 2:00 a.m. Many polling stations gave up the count overnight and resumed in the morning, with PO and staff sleeping with the ballots. When we visited other CECs the next day, some POs, sitting in the dust among the backlog, had slept with their ballots the last two nights and were looking like they were going to be spending another night sleeping in a schoolyard waiting to discharge their responsibility.
Also at this point, observers tend to swap off. Oley and I headed back to the Hillpark to give our LTOs (Long Term Observers - our regional leads) initial debriefs and qualitative observations. We’d been relaying the quantitative data back via forms on an android tablet as we found it, but getting all the Smurfs, er, I mean STOs in the same place was a good way to pick up on things that might not rise to the surface as a pattern if taken individually: “Oh yeah, that’s right - we noticed that, too, but I didn’t think anything of it!” It’s based on these data that the Carter Center puts together its preliminary statement, in this case, that in spite of long lines and technology fiascos (which contributed to the long lines), the voting itself seemed to go pretty well.
Also at this point, your hotel gets broken into, and everyone gets all their valuables stolen. This isn’t part of the official process, but the Daisy Guest Home didn’t have safes, so we all lost some stuff. I was relatively lucky - they missed my stash of money, and I’d brought my computer and camera with me to the tally.
Anyhow - Oley and I visited a few more constituencies throughout the day. Some were posh (the Stima Club in Kasanari), some... not so much (Mathari). Circling the block in Mathari, our driver wasn’t happy. “These are bad people here. Somali.” Granted, the neighborhood was a bit lower rent - chickens and ragpiles in the rutted dirt path that passed for a street; painted tin-roof shack dwellings dominating the roadside. I could have leaned my elbow on the roof of the colorful but somewhat ambitiously-named “Paradise Hotel”. But the folks we asked for directions seemed helpful enough - maybe it’s the magic of the Smurf shirt?
But back to the election: once the tally center has received ballots and counts from all its polling centers, it declares the final numbers, pending complaints. At KTTI, Jamuhuri and the other centers we visited, the agents were pretty quiet, and it didn’t seem like there were going to be any issues. Mathari, on the other hand, was a rocking place. There were a couple of outbursts demanding recounts, and some beautiful real-time consensus building between the CEC and observers on how to proceed. Once the CEC has its numbers, it copies them on to (I think) Form 36 and - if the electronic result transmission system is working (it wasn’t) sends them to the national tally center in Bomas. In theory. In practice, I think they got carried there by hand.
Once at Bomas, the process repeats at a national level, and it was there that folks started raising some concerns. Word was that authorities in Bomas weren’t allowing party agents or observers to adequately observe the process. It was also then that some bugs in the written procedures came into play. In order to avoid a runoff election, the winner must have 50% plus 1 of the vote. The problem was that it was not apparently specified whether that was 50% of the total votes or 50% of the valid. Given the complicated six-ballot process, plenty of people put their (white) presidential ballots in the (faint beige) parliamentary box, the (pale pink) womens rep box or the (faded yellow) regional rep box. Given that in many polling stations, voting went on well into the night, lit by a single Coleman lantern, some places had a lot of misplaced ballots like this. The votes were considered invalid as far as the presidential race was concerned (yes, they could be contested) - but were they still counted into the total number of votes? For a good part of the race, it looked like this question would settle whether or not there would be a runoff.
Anyhow - this question, and the access of observers to Bomas was way above my pay grade. I gladly deferred to the direction of my superiors and retired back to my room for a long, quiet nap.
Next morning (this also wasn’t part of the official election process), a bunch of us piled into a pair of rented minivans for a dawn tour of the Nairobi National Park. It’s small - about 45 square miles, but sits right at the city’s southern border. Fifteen minutes from your hotel, you can be surrounded by galloping zebras, bouncing antelopes, giraffes, lions, rhinos - the works. Photos (along with all my other Kenya photos) over here. Sure do wish my telephoto lens hadn't gotten stolen the day before...

So that was basically it for the election, at least as far as I was concerned. I had another day of business meetings, but that’s another story.

Note: If you’re wanting to follow all this linearly, remember that I’m posting all this stuff one week delayed. Except for the next (chronological) post, which I put up realtime, because everyone was emailing me, asking if things were alright.

E-Day Part 2: Night

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:52:00 +0000

North Highridge Primary School, Westlands, Nairobi. The look in her eyes is far away, and the recognition rises in me like a wave: this is it - this is the moment I’ve come for. The ten thousand miles of travel, the days of dusty discomfort, were all so I could be right here, right now.
The day itself has fallen away into a blur - the faces, the smiles, the looks of concern and eager anticipation. Where was it that we got bullied by that PO? Westlands? He wanted to keep our credentials, and said we couldn’t leave until we’d signed a form that, well, he didn’t have time to look for now. We’d have to sit there in the corner and wait. Pardon my French (Oley’s French is very good, obviously), but bullshit.

And at the entrance to Hospital Hill - the line stretched out over a mile by the time we got there - the people at the gate asked if I would take their picture, yes please, because they were there to vote. There was a special ring to the way they said it - a touch of fervor and faith that would not be out of place in a Southern Gospel revival. We are here to vote. Honest - I felt a shiver go down my spine.

At the Oshval Jain Center - Nairobi has a large Indian population, many of whom have been living here for over a century - the line of voters was a kaleidoscope of faces and fabrics. Black, white, brown faces. Starched white kurta and turbans in line with redbluegreen Masai shawls. May I take your picture? Yes, yes, of course!

And and and... it was all a blur, from before dawn, through the heat of the day, until night settled in again. But here, now, with the look in this young woman’s eyes, it has all snapped into sharp focus. This is why I’m here.

She couldn’t have been much more than a teenager, sitting at the left hand of her presiding officer. Her expression reminds me of the beatific faces in those paintings of Catholic saints, meeting their fates with peaceful, unresisting determination. Yes, she’s tired - we all are. Oley and I have fortified ourselves with cocoa nibs and chocolate, and we’re still fading. This young woman? She will do whatever he PO tells her needs to be done - you can see that in her eyes.

The PO is a powerful, graceful woman, wearing a silver business suit. She radiates a combination of patience, strength and humor that makes me suspect she earned her stripes as a primary school teacher. When, at 5:00 p.m. the last voter had deposited their ballot (many polling stations took hours more to clear their backlog), she stood and faced us.

“It is now five o’clock, and I declare voting finished at this polling station. Ladies and gentlemen, party agents and observers: the men and women on my staff have been here since last night. They have been working non-stop since five this morning. May I ask you to permit us a ten minute break before we begin counting?”

I felt like I should be applauding.

After the break, the PO marshaled us all - again, the third-grade teacher coming through - to rearrange our wooden benches around the counting table.

“Ladies and gentlemen, agents and observers - we are about to begin counting ballots. Now, before we start, let us agree not to fight about it. The standard of validity is voter intent - if, when we look at the ballot, we can determine who the voter intended to vote for, the ballot is good. Tonight, when it is late and your candidate is not winning, please don’t cry and complain that is a circle instead of a check mark. Are we agreed? Good. Let us begin.”

The seals were cut, and the paper ballots poured out on the table. By the light of the Coleman lantern, she held the ballots up one by one, displaying them to the party agents as she called out the candidate, then handing them to her staff to stack.

Our saint received ballots for Uhuru, the woman to her left got the ballots for Raila; six other staffers around the table gathered ballots for the remaining seven candidates. “Raila. Uhuru. Uhuru. Uhuru. Raila. Peter Cannon.” It occurred to me that she, like most Kenyans, was calling the candidates by their first names. Yes, this election is personal.

“Raila. Raila. Raila. Uhuru.” She noticed that the party agents were starting to lose focus, and interrupted the proceedings: “Listen: my staff and I have been up since yesterday morning to make sure this election is run properly. And you have been here all day too. But now is when it is most important. Please, pay attention.”

“Raila. Raila. Uhuru. Uhuru. Uhuru.”

She paused and glared at the party agents. “You just let me put a ballot for Raila to Uhuru. Come on, now!”

Chastened, they leaned forward with renewed attention. Five minutes later, when she called an Uhuru ballot for Raila with a gleam in her eye, the Jubilee party agent jumped to his feet in protest. “Very good, now!” It was the voice of Ms. Newby, my 3rd grade teacher, when someone had correctly identified the capital of Norway.

A dozen more ballots, then “And look - this person loved Raila so much that he circled the picture and checked the box. No quarrel, okay?”

The agents nodded agreeably, and the count went on. Another lone ballot for Peter Cannon - the PO pursed her lips in mock sympathy as she handed it over, and there was laughter around the room.

That was hours ago, and we’re only on the third of six ballot boxes. It’s been a long day, and it’s going to be a long night. I realize I’m dozing, and stand up from our bench to get my circulation running. Our saint looks up at the motion and smiles briefly as our eyes meet. Then she turns her attention back to the table, back to the ballots, as our PO calls out another name by the light of a Coleman lantern.

E-Day, Part 1: Dawn

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 02:34:00 +0000

[I'm putting these posts up in sequence, with a one week delay from realtime.]

The line stretches through the iron gate of the Kenya Technical Teachers College and half a mile out, to the main road. We thread our way in slowly, headlights disappearing into the pre-dawn mist. The car’s more of a hindrance than help here, so Oley and I continue on foot, excusing ourselves as we negotiate the quiet, patient mass of Kenyans who have come here, wrapped warm against the cold, to cast their vote.

We find our way to the block of classrooms that will be KTTC’s polling stations and are met at the entrance by Doreen, her round young face beaming beneath a red beanie cap. She introduced herself as the presiding officer for Polling Station #4 and welcomes us inside, then excuses herself to finish recording seals on the ballot box.

It’s 5:59 by my watch when she decides that all is in order and calls the rest of the polling officers, also young men and women, together. They hold hands in a circle and lower their heads in prayer. Doreen asks for a peaceful election, one that one is free and fair. One that reflects the will of the people, and the will of God, amen. Then she turns back to the doorway and raises her voice: “It is now six o’clock. I now officially open this polling station number four.” And the queuing officer lets the first voter in through the door.

...

Outside again, in the mist, I speak with another young woman - a soldier waiting on the small rise that separates the classrooms from the road. She is square-shouldered, almost as tall as me, and the rifle at her side looks like a toy by comparison. Beneath her cap, her face is framed by a checkered scarf.

Habari gani? I ask - how’s it going?

Mizuri sana, asante. Mizuri sana. Very well, thanks. She smiles broadly, and we both stand there, looking out over classrooms, the line, and the mist-covered hillside disappearing into Karura Forest behind it.

I ask: “Long night?”

“Yes, and it will be a long day, too.” She leaves it unspoken that this long day will be followed by another long night, and we stand in silence together another minute. Then she adds: “But it does not seem hard. When you are doing what you are here for.”

I steal a sideways look at her. She is confident, happy - proud of the scene playing out below us, and pleased that I am here to witness it. I roll her words over in my mind and realize that she’s not just talking about this morning. No, it is not hard at all. Not when you are doing what you are here for.

[Alas, no pics of our soldier friend. I asked if I could take a picture of her - it’s always a good idea to ask first before you take pictures of someone holding a gun - and she shook her head nervously. No, no please.]

Day 4: Okay, that's more like it

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:26:00 +0000

[I'm putting these posts up in sequence, with a one week delay from realtime. Feel free to skip this one if there's too much to read - please tune in tomorrow, though, for the "E-Day" post"]

It’s hard to feel like you’re in Africa at The Village Market. The nominal “market” is a sprawling steel-gated reproduction of some generic California outdoor shopping mall, with food court, bowling alley and steak-and-ribs roadhouse. Little blonde girls in sundresses and sandals, skip down the fake mission-style steps in tow of pale round corn-fed parents in shorts and matching “Gotta Have God” t-shirts. Teen slackers, obviously dragged to Nairobi by their Embassy-staff parents, try to look cool hanging at the mall on a Saturday afternoon.

Sorry - I really shouldn’t denigrate this little enclave - I remember being an expat in Japan. There were times when, the hell with cultural immersion, you just wanted a beer and a bacon cheeseburger somewhere that was even vaguely trying to feel like home. I was in Japan by choice, so after I’d had my swig of American cultural imperialism, I was ready to venture back into the crazy, inexplicable world of Tokyo in the 80’s. But I imagine that if you were the dependent of a government staffer, you might just be content to drown yourself in this little smack of Disney-America until your husband/wife/father/mother got reassigned somewhere more emotionally tractable.

Anyhow. We’d stumbled into The Market yesterday in search of a mutually-agreeable lunch. Found ourselves sipping smoothies at a faux French brasserie that could have been tucked away in the Stanford Shopping Center - the cognitive dissonance with what was outside those steel gates was dizzying.

…

Today, though? Today was different. It’s a hell of a lot easier to feel like you’re in Africa when you’re lost on a dirt road in a crowded slum on the outskirts of Nairobi. Not scary or anything - when you’re this far out of your element, folks are surprised and curious to see what the white guy’s doing here. Oh, and glad to help. David, Oley and I probably spent 45 minutes asking directions and going in circles around Kangemi. There are supposed to be four polling places in the slum, but since there are no official roads or addresses, the current location of Old Kihubuimi Primary School was more a matter of philosophical conjecture than fact. Tomorrow, on election day, it’ll materialize somewhere, and the folks who are supposed to vote there will find it.

Today, the red dirt roads were a river of people - barefoot merchants hawking goods from wheelbarrows, elegant young couples dressed in exquisite Sunday best on their way to church. Kids, kids, kids everywhere, most just playing the way kids do, some poking in close to get a look at the tall white guy with the ponytail.

We never did find Kihubuimi or the three other polling stations in Kangemi, but by the time we made it back to the main road, we were all covered with fine red dust from the maze of its dirt roads. And yeah, my face was covered with a big smile. Yeah, this was more like it: definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Getting a taste of life outside the gates was only part of what made today feel good. The other part was that finally - after all the cramped hours in a plane, the jet lag, days of briefing and planning - finally, we’re getting to do what we came to do.

From the perspective of an STO (short term observer - what I am), the tally centers are where it all begins and ends. Today, the CECs (Constituency Election Coordinators) are there, marshalling all of their staff to prepare all the materials the hundreds of polling centers in their constituency will need for e-day, tomorrow. Cardboard voting booths, ballot boxes, propane lamps, numbered seals and tamper-proof envelopes and - most importantly - the blank ballots themselves are being, stacked, grouped, labeled and tallied under the watchful eye of Kenya’s police and armed forces. At Jamhuri High School, the beautiful colonial courtyard has been transformed into an outdoor warehouse. The atmosphere is one of opening night - a million errands, checklists and a giddy nervousness. Everything needs to be ready and at the polling centers by 5:00 a.m. tomorrow and most of these people will not sleep tonight. Or tomorrow night, for that matter. We, back in the US, have come to think of democracy, like hamburger, as something that comes shrink-wrapped in styrofoam from the local Safeway. Here, on the ground, we’re getting to see how it is really made, and it’s both humbling and inspiring.

Tomorrow’s the election, or “e-day”, and it’s going to be gruelling. We need to be on the road by 5:00 a.m., and may not get a break until some time the following day, when local tally centers complete their manual counts. No one will. The polling staff will be setting up all night - some will sleep in the the school rooms to guard their ballot boxes until the polls open in the morning. We’re lucky - we get to go “home” for the night tonight.

Tomorrow, we’re going to be on the go, trying to visit and observe as many polling stations in our area of responsibility as possible, so today’s task was finding those polling centers. We’ve got names (“Old Kihubuimi Primary School”) and we’ve got a rough map, and we get to work out the rest for ourselves. Google’s a great help here, but we need to run the route manually to work out the inevitable bugs. There are always bugs. Many of the landmarks aren’t where Google thinks they are. Some of the roads shown as “primary” are dirt ruts disappearing into a hillside, and at least twice, the driving directions recommended that we turn left off a downtown overpass and plummet to the ground to make our next turn. Again, not that Oley and I have anything to complain about. Unlike folks up in the Rift Valley, or northeast, at least we’ve got maps. Oh, and roads.

So we spent the day threading the crazy streets of Nairobi, making wrong turns, getting stuck, relying on the ample kindness of strangers and generally treating the adventure as a learning opportunity. Oley and I picked up all sorts of useful Swahili: Iko karibu? (Is it near here?) Highridge shule hakupatika (Highridge Primary School is nowhere to be found) and the ever-popular Kwenda kuzunguka moja zaidi wakati (Let’s go around the block one more time!).

No, actually, David didn’t teach us the last one, but we did orbit Jamhuri three times trying to get away, apparently caught in topological black hole of Nairobi traffic signs.

In the end, we did find most of our polling stations. We got shown around a few, strolled around the others ourselves. We were just a little grateful that “Posh Duty” wasn’t as rarified as we’d been led to believe - just a little. Still tomorrow’s going to be rough for everyone. Which means I’d better get off the damned computer and get some sleep - 4:30 a.m. is gonna come way too soon.

Deployment, Part 2: Oh, the Humanity

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 15:05:00 +0000

[note: I'm back in the US now, but in keeping with the need to respect radio silence until The Carter Center STO mission is over, I'm putting these posts up in sequence, with a one week delay from realtime.]

Trying to write, but my brain is too fuzzy from trying to coordinate the incompatible planning and communication styles of five different nationalities. There were nine of us, including drivers, with the simple task of getting in cars in one place (the Hillpark Hotel) and getting out of them, at approximately the same time, at our cozy new base (the Daisy Guest Home) about a 30 minute drive away. We almost passed that test, but the added complication of feeding ourselves once we’d arrived was more than we could handle.

It’s hard to say whether it was language or culture, but - for example - I interpreted our driver David’s increasingly insistent question “Where should I eat?” as “Can you direct me to a nearby restaurant?” I was apparently not being clear that I had no idea - hey, you’re the local, I’m from the other side of the planet. Ten minutes later, David would ask again, and we’d both crank up our frustration a notch.

It took three times around this particular merry-go-round before I realized that what he was really asking was “I hate to be pushy, but will you please give me that per diem payment I’m owed so I can go buy myself some food?” There were smiles and apologies on both sides once we figured that out, but in the meantime, we’d started two more that’s-not-what-I-mean snowballs.

Fortunately, I think we’ve now managed to establish an atmosphere of presumed mutual goodwill. But I’m sure we’re each going to keep feeling like we’ve stumbled into a Kenyan version of the Swamp Castle skit.

And that was just the American-Kenyan connection. In our little convoy, there were also Gambian, Portuguese, French and Ivorian cultures to reconcile, making the question “How ‘bout if we stop and eat here?” an almost comically unresolvable question. We almost starved in the time it took to settle on an answer. As Carol Burnett observed, comedy is tragedy plus time. It’s funny now, but trust me - we weren’t laughing then.

Once fed and situated, we spent the rest of the afternoon at our new Westland digs. We sat out back, at a table on the lawn sheltered by yellow-flowering trees and a tattered cloth umbrella. We pored over maps, tied to get in touch with local officials and planned our routes for the next two days. We watched the sun go down and listened to the rising tide of bird calls bringing the night on.

Finally, we’d run out of things to say, and Tiago broached the question we’d all been dreading: “So - where should we all go for dinner tonight?” Me? I’m sitting this one out.

Day 3 - Deployment

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 14:57:00 +0000

It’s remarkably easy to keep your mouth shut when you’re surrounded by people like these. All too often in “normal” company, I can’t resist blurting in, saying “Oh, I know what you mean - something just like that happened to me in [name-dropped exotic location]!”.

That doesn’t happen to me with this crowd. I honestly have no idea what if feels like to camp out for a month in a Congolese village, wondering whether the UN helicopter was going to come this week to extract you, or maybe next week, or the week after. I can’t say I have anything to help me relate to the challenges of keeping a refugee camp running in Liberia as guerilla fighters from both sides take turns overrunning the town. Or to have people try to stone you in Tunisia. Or, or, or... Not that I have any desire to have tales that can match those of Hans, Emma, Moshood, Nancy or the rest of the seasoned observers on this mission. Honestly, as we see each other off this morning, I’m feeling okay about my “safe” little assignment.

And I’ll admit that I’m a little nervous about even these baby steps out. Sure, I’ve been “in Africa” for three days now, but except for two little excursions on my own that first day, I’ve been cloistered here at the Hillpark, surrounded by our little international enclave of observers. Now, finally, we’re going “out there” to do what we’ve come to do, even if “out there” - in my case - is just across town.

This deployment is so different from my last one, two years ago in Liberia. It was raining then, and the pre-dawn mood was somber and nervous, piling ourselves and days worth of emergency supplies into a glistening black convoy of Land Rovers poised for a long overland journey. Some of us would be in those cars for two days just trying to reach our Areas of Responsibility.

This morning, the air is fresh and clear. The teams headed for Mombasa and the northeast left hours ago, but the rest of us are taking our time, sipping coffee on the patio, chatting, reviewing maps and checking email.

But it’s time to load up. Next stop, the Westlands.

Day 2: What Could Possibly Go Wrong

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 21:46:00 +0000

[note: in keeping with the need to respect radio silence until The Carter Center STO mission is over, I'm putting these posts up in sequence, with a one week delay from realtime.]

Morning - the air’s cool and fresh on the patio. Cloth umbrellas and jacaranda trees provide shade from the flat sunlight. A few minutes of quiet respite before we stuff ourselves back inside the briefing room for a second day of How Not To Screw Up. And oh, there are so many ways. Yesterday focused on How Not to Be Culturally Inappropriate and How Not To Interfere With The Election Process And Get Kicked Out of the The Country. Turns out both of those are more subtle that you might expect: the shirt I was wearing, an understated orange/peach cotton weave, was the party color of the CORD coalition. Good to know these things before I go out, put on my badge and get the Carter Center kicked out for choosing sides.

Today’s first briefing focuses on How Not to Get Hurt or Killed which - in my book - is a key part of the How Not To Screw Up curriculum. As I understand, the threats fall into a few basic categories:

Ethnic violence - a perennial favorite, as folks from one enthnic group set fire to the houses of another group, in order to drive them out of town and prevent them from voting. Not quite so much of an issue in Nairobi.
Opportunistic crime - it’s a short hop from Kibera, one of the largest and poorest urban slums in the world, to almost anywhere in central Nairobi, and the police are going to be stretched thin guarding polling stations. They’re not out to hurt you, they just want your stuff. You can avoid most of the danger here by going out in groups, not wearing anything flashy and carrying minimal valuables; that way, if you do get held up, you can cheerfully hand over everything you’ve got. Really, this one is just the same as in any big city.
The Al Shabaab wildcard. As remote a possibility as this is, this is the one that has me most worried, considering our assignment. Those whacky guys with bombs have been quiet lately. One explanation is that Kenyan army is right about having destroyed a lot of their operational capability; another is that they’ve just been sitting tight for an opportunity to get the biggest bang for their buck. If that’s the case, the rich, expat part of Nairobi on election day would not be an implausible target.
But the number one thing to rationally worry about is....Traffic accidents. We heard this in Liberia, too: by far, the greatest actual cause of harm to election observers and other assorted foreigners in Africa is traffic accidents. Don’t speed. Don’t drive at night. And for Bob’s sake, wear the damned seatbelt.

As I said before, the Carter Center has a hecka lot of experience in keeping their observers out of harm’s way. We get to talk about some of them, others are better if we just keep to ourselves. I’ll just say that I’m feeling as well taken care of as I can imagine. And since this is all getting posted after the fact, you can rest assured that if you’re reading in my blog, rather than the “tragic complacency” section of the news, it all turned out okay.

Speaking of tragic complacency, afternoon is reserved for our operational training exercise: can 58 well-educated and experienced world travelers follow a checklist of instructions and fill in the blanks to get the right numbers in the right places? Heh. How hard could that be? (Hey - I said it with a distinct smirk and implied sense of irony, so it’s okay. Right? Right?)

Jet Lag

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 04:42:00 +0000

[note: in keeping with the need to respect radio silence until The Carter Center STO mission is over, I'm putting these posts up in sequence, with a one week delay from realtime. In realtime, I'm now waiting in the Schiphol airport lounge for my AMS->SFO connection home.]

It’s like a hangover you get for free, without going to the trouble of getting drunk first. I’m 11 hours out of sync with where and when my body thinks I should be, and it’s not missing a chance to complain of the fact. I’m doing all the right things: avoiding heavy foods, drinking lots of water and getting as much morning sunlight as my feeble complexion can handle. But I really just need to lie down and close my eyes for a couple of minutes. If I do, of course, I’ll be dead to the world until I pop wide awake at 10 p.m., staring down the prospect of another sleepless night followed by another zombified day. Awkward to be slumped over in my chair, drooling all over briefing notes of Utmost Importance. Oh please... just a minute or two... I promise. Yeah, right. I’ll set an alarm. A lot of good that did you last time. But the pillows.... No.

Nairobi - Day One

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:39:00 +0000

[note: in keeping with the need to respect radio silence until The Carter Center STO mission is over, I'm putting these posts up in sequence, with a one week delay from realtime.]

First day of briefings, reviewing the situation, as Fagin would say. The Carter Center team gives us the rundown on getting to and around our Area of Responsibility (Pedro - operations), fulfilling our legal function (Mariusz - code of conduct) while not getting injured, kidnapped or killed (Steven - security). As with any election in most parts of the world, there are things to be concerned with in each of these aspects, but it’s nothing these folks haven’t seen before. Last night over dinner, we got to swap stories about the observation missions to Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire, and the DRC. You know how I sometimes say that I’m surprised when people have better travel stories than I do? Welcome to the bigtime, kid.

Compared with a lot of places, Kenya’s pretty straightforward: the government and populace responded remarkably well to the aftermath of the 2007 election, creating a new constitution that strengthened the judiciary and devolved more executive power to the districts. There’s also more transparency: the electoral commission is now an independent body rather than a branch of the president’s office. On a continent where there’s an unnerving habit of seated presidents deciding that they’re still not quite ready to leave office, this one step goes a long way.

But there’s still plenty of opportunity for things to come off the rails - the recent New York Times article does a good job of summarizing a few of them. There are genuine land conflicts, and political leaders at all levels seem to be exploiting them for personal political gain. Each telling their followers to remember (and implicitly, avenge) the exaggerated and often mis-represented wrongs done by their rival’s ethnic group. It’s working remarkably well, especially in rural areas. Villages burned, once-friendly neighbors terrorized and driven away, if not killed.

What’s especially disheartening about it is the fluidity of the charges and alliances. Former rival candidates have allied in this election, so ethnic groups incited against each other in 2007 have been convinced that - surprise, surprise - their grievances are not with each other, but with a third ethnic group, only coincidentally that of the political alliance’s new rival candidate.

Today we also met our new partners. In spite of the teasing that having survived Nimba County during the Liberian election makes me a veteran, I’m relieved that my partner really is a seasoned observer. Oley is a dynamic young woman from the Gambia, living these days in Cote D’Ivoire. This is something like her fifth mission in four years, and from her stories (yes, they’re better than mine) I don’t feel an enormous degree of disappointment that our assignment isn’t somewhere like Tana River, or the Somali border. No, we’re going to be observing election procedures in the Westlands, Nairobi’s answer to Beverly Hills. Mind you, if political unrest turns into class warfare, or if Al Shabab decides to come to the party, Westlands is a plausible target of opportunity, but analysis suggests that we’ve been handed a velvet rope assignment. While Ahna, Tiago, Shebora and the others are enduring long drives over rutted dirt roads to villages in the middle of nowhere, Oley and I are going to be patrolling restaurant row.

Yes, mom - we’re still going to be vigilant, but at the moment, the biggest challenge will be not mortifying Oley with my hiking-boots-and-cargo-pants lack of fashion planning.

“You didn’t bring a canvas hat, did you?” Pause. “Oh god - you did, didn’t you?”

Habesha

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:43:00 +0000

[Okay - out-of-sequence post here. As I mentioned previously, I'm publishing last week's posts serially on a one-week delay. But I've been getting enough queries about the situation right here right now, that I wanted to give y'all an update.]

We’re sitting under an umbrella in an Ethiopian restaurant in Kenya, discussing Nigerian soap operas, and I'm thinking that the world is both bigger and smaller than I can possibly comprehend. The smoke of incense and scent of thick, sweet coffee swirl past us from the next table and hang in the air. Breathing it in, the weather is almost a metaphor for the mood on the street: thick with anticipation.

Rumors are that most of the county votes have been tallied, but only a few - perhaps a strategic few - have actually been announced. Uhuru’s early lead, initially over a million, has shrunk dramatically, possibly enough to force a two-candidate runoff. But there’s enormous uncertainty: the electronic tabulation system has failed spectacularly - some say by design - and questions are flying about who gets to decide who gets access to Bomas, where the paper ballots are being manually tallied. Then of course, there are the shenanigans with the interpretation of the election code: the winner must have a majority of the popular vote. But is that a majority of the ballots cast, or only of the votes that have been deemed “valid”? The surprisingly large number of “rejected” ballots could easily make the difference between the two.

Regardless, there are rumors that the IEBC will announce results tomorrow, and the press is falling over itself with rampant speculation of the consequences. Naomi gestures to the tables around us and says it’s a good sign that the restaurant is full. If Kenyans thought all hell would be breaking loose, they’d be at home, stocking up on food and water. She and Tiago both speak from experience. Hell - everyone here speaks from experience; they’ve seen a remarkable range of what can go wrong (or right) in an election. They’ve seen Cote D’Ivoire, the Congo and a dozen others, and they’ve learned to read the street.

Without warning, the clouds open up, and rain pours from the sky. It splatters in thick drops on the stone tiles at our feet, but the umbrella protects us. Tiago looks out across the courtyard - it was also like this in Sierra Leone, he says. Everyone was afraid of violence when the results were announced, and then the rains came, and it was alright. He reminds us that he doesn’t consider himself a spiritual man, but who knows, maybe - just maybe - there could be something to it.

[It’s important to emphasize that the international media are really hyping up the "election violence" story. They've completely missed the widespread national "Never Again" movement that dominated this election. Likely there will be localized hooligan violence - there is everywhere in the world during elections. But 2007 is so fresh in these peoples' minds that there's an enormous drive to make the outcome and inevitable transition peaceful. Everyone knows that they have more to lose than to gain if things go sour.]

Nairobi - dawn

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:09:00 +0000

[note: in keeping with the need to respect radio silence until The Carter Center STO mission is over, I'm putting these posts up in sequence, with a one week delay from realtime.]

28 Feb, 2013. Nairobi Hillpark Hotel. It’s pushing 5 a.m. and in the dark of my room I can detect the faintest whiff of that scent. Honestly, I don’t know what it is - a woodsmoke of some kind, but it’s not like the sizzling, crackling pitch of a pine bonfire, or the deep, full-bodied smell of oak or maple from an old stone fireplace. It feels like hickory and dust - my mind may be playing tricks on me, but I remember it from half a continent away, from Liberia.

Could be coming from anywhere; it feels like the evening wind has carried a ways. My guess is Kibera, to the west. It’s the largest urban slum in Africa; and by all reports, a fascinating microcosm of human tragedy and triumph. I doubt I’ll ever see it up close - as adventuresome as I am by some standards, my comfort zone doesn’t extend quite that far.

The hotel we’re staying in is halfway up a wooded hill that was the heart of British colonial Nairobi. It’s low key - away from the central business district, away from the flashy Intercontinental Hotel. That’s the way the Carter Center likes it: an election observation mission wants to be low key.

There’s no air conditioning, and it’s not really needed. Even though we’re practically smack dab on the equator, the city’s up at 5400’, and the temperatures don’t get much above the mid-80’s even during the dry season. Compared to Accra, to Tamale and Monrovia, this is a piece of cake. Besides, we’ve got internet - real broadband internet, fast and free (you hear that, you pretentious American hotel chains? Free. And fast. Take a memo, willya?).

From my window, I can see the city lights below, framed by - what are they - acacia trees? The sun will be coming up soon, and already the birds are starting to come alive. The chattering, cackling and cooing would be heaven for the right ornithologist, but it’s wasted on me. To me it just sounds the way the smoke smells: a half-remembered recollection of something from far away. Maybe not even from this lifetime - maybe it’s imprinted somewhere in my DNA from a thousand thousand generations ago. I imagine smells could be like that.

Anyhow, the sun’s up and the day’s getting started. And 11 hours of jet lag aside, I think I’m as ready for it as I can be.

Last post for a while...

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:35:00 +0000

Great Circle

Northwest, to Nairobi - sounds unintuitive, but maps, as magical as they are, can’t help but lie when it comes to distances like these. My first change of planes in Seattle is not so far from the great circle route to Kenya, lying just south of the equator, half a world away. Total distance of the flight will be something like 9709 miles, only a few hundred longer than the shortest path of 9608. And for context, the farthest you can get from any spot on earth is 12,416 miles. only a few hours further. Here, climbing out over the coastal range in California, it’s Monday morning - when I get off KLM 565 in Nairobi tomorrow night, it will have already been a long trip, and that’ll just be the beginning of it.

Lat 71 3 29N, Long 35 54 24W

The world outside my portal at 12A on Delta Flight 232 has crawled about as far north as we’re going to, moving eastward now before arcing south, to Iceland and Amsterdam. From 39,000 feet, the night sky outside has the appearance of freezer burn. It is impossibly cold, dark and inhuman - beyond the plastic, steel and glass of our cocoon is a world where even the idea of light and warmth is heresy.

And somewhere invisibly far below is Summit Camp, a miniscule research outpost on the crest of the Greenland ice sheet. It’s at Summit where climatologists are getting some of the most damning evidence about the change happening to our planet. I’ve had friends there from time to time. But not now, not now.

Sand

The miracle of flight. Only a few hours later - a change of plane in Amsterdam, the Alps, the Mediterranian. And now, we’ve crossed from the pebbled moonscape of the Libyan desert to Sudan’s flowing dunes. I feel I know the Libyan desert from Saint Exupery, but the geography of Sudan is a blank spot on my mental map.

I feel like I am flying over an ocean, caught on film and tinted sepia. The waves, the sand, the wind - you can see even from here how it lifts the dust and carries it forever far away. There are no signs of life, nothing below to indicate that this world has ever been anything but sand and dust, baked by an unsleeping sun.

What am I doing here? Here, in a pressurized metal tube, eight miles up over the Sudanese desert? I’m finding the question a little alarming - sort of like when you were sixteen, right after your parents asked “What were you thinking?!?” And, as you looked around you at the wreckage of glitter and glue gun debris that used to be the living room, you get the idea that you should have asked yourself that question just a little earlier in the project.

Below, there’s a snake of dark sand - from above, I can see clusters of dots - vegetation of some sort - along its banks. It’s dry now, but when the rains come, I suppose they give these wisps of life enough water to hold on for another year. Somehow.

But back to me, and why I’m headed for Nairobi. Yeah, I can give myself permission by saying I’m helping the Carter Center out here. But I know I’m kidding myself: they’ve got plenty of volunteers - they don’t need me. I’m doing it for myself. So I’ll have an adventure, a story to tell. So I’ll have something to write about, to talk about the next time cocktail party conversation ebbs into uncomfortable silence.

I had a conversation with myself a while back.

“Self,” I said, “Here’s a question: let’s say you had the chance to have the greatest adventure ever. Go to Mars, or the bottom of the ocean. Maybe discover a new hidden civilization there - something like that.”

“Yeah? Sounds great - I’m in.”

“But here’s the catch, Self. You wouldn’t ever get to tell anybody about it.”

“Why not?”

“Let’s just say. For the sake of the question.”

“Okay... So what’s the question?”

“Would you still do it?”

“Yeah, sure! Of course!”

“Even if you could never ever ever tell anyone about it? Anyone?”

“Ah, I see where you’re going. Could I write about it? For people to read after I’m dead?”

“Nope.”

“Argh - you’re a cruel bastard, Self.”

“Hey, it’s just a hypothetical question.”

”You want to know why I do it. The adventure, thing. If there’s something more to it than having a story.”

“Something more than having a story to tell, is what I was wondering. How much of your life is simply an elaborate stockpiling of anecdotes to rescue you from conversational obligations at your next social engagement?”

“You have a better idea?”

“About the parties? You could stop going...”

“But I like those people. And they’re doing such important stuff. I just don’t know what to say to them.”

“Fair enough. But you know, you could start watching sports. Or Downton Abbey. People talk about that all the time. ‘Hey, how about them 49’ers?’ And you could do that from a comfortable couch. Much easier - and cheaper, while we’re at it.”

“Yeah, but there are places like Sudan. And the South Pole, and crazy foreboding blackness in the Arctic sky. And mist-covered volcanoes and sunrises and...”

“Whoa, whoa - I get the idea. Really, it was just a question.”

“Do I have to answer now?”

“No - take your time. But hang on: there’s one more question.”

“Yeah?”

“If you had to - could you do it?”

“Not tell anyone?”

“Not tell anyone. Ever.”

“Yeah.”

“Ever?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I could.”

Dusk

From the in-flight map, Juba is a hundred or so miles west. There are clouds now - not the parched wisps that don’t even cast a shadow, but real clouds, billowing like white mountains in the day’s last light. Below them, lost in the gray, must be lakes, or a place where lakes once were, illuminated only by thousands of tiny yellow lights tracing their outlines. I try to imagine what they are - and come up empty.

And then, on the horizon, the moon rises, swollen, overripe and tinged with red. Forty five minutes to Nairobi - here we go.

Dusk clouds over South Sudan

This and That

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:40:00 +0000

I think I mentioned that, in my new job, I had negotiated to work 60% time initially - three days per week - so that I’d have enough time to do the writing I really want to do.

“And how’s that working out for you?”

Not so well, I’m afraid. I love my new job - it’s an opportunity to have enormous positive impact on the world, more than I’ve ever had. And slowly but surely, I’m coming up to speed and being able to meet that opportunity. But, I’ve learned it’s not something I can do on 60% time. To keep up, to actually provide forward thrust, I’ve been putting in 80%, and often 100% of a normal work week, trying to squeeze the writing back into the interstitial times before the kids are awake in the morning, and after everyone’s gone to bed.

The work is important enough that I’m going to give into it - with my manager’s permission, I’ve gone up to 80%, now officially having one day per week to myself. I’m going to put the novel back on hold, and will probably fall back to just updating the Roadtrip blog when I have actual roadtrips. Which brings me to another item....

I’ve got a roadtrip coming up. Election observing in Kenya, with The Carter Center again. Much like with the Liberian election back in 2011, we’re asked to hold the details of our deployment until after the election, after TCC announces its findings. So I’m going to be writing as frequently as I can, but not actually posting until I’m on the way back on March 9th. There’ll probably be a ping or two (“Hey, I’m alive!”) and maybe a pretty picture in the meantime, but I promise I’ll be writing as much as I can.

For now, it’s a bunch of prep. I’ve been flying to Africa a lot lately, but but it was mostly Ghana (“Africa for beginners”), and mostly in Accra, which had become a friendly, familiar city for me. I’ve been to Kenya once, something like 25 years ago, and as an exquisitely pampered tourist. This time? It’ll be a little different. So I’m packing, unpacking, re-packing. Making another trip to REI, unpacking and re-packing a third time. Getting some more vaccinations, making another trip to REI... you get the idea. And I’ll keep spinning up and re-packing until some time later this morning, when Devon tells me it’s time to stop fretting and get in the damned car.

Am I worried about the trip? Eh, a little. There’s some ethnic unrest in places, and tension leading up to the election. But honestly, the thing that has me most worried is this: except for me, in the past week and a half every single member of my team at work and most of my family have come down with some flavor of cold or flu. I’m going to be on airplanes for the next 24 hours (yeah - Nairobi is far away) - heh. I’m going to try not to think about it.

[And yes - I’ve had my flu shot. And every other shot I could get. For the past four or five years, I’ve been pretty much inoculated against everything known to man.]

Labadi Redux

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:46:00 +0000

[Hi all - yeah, sorry I've not been posting. My new job has, in spite of best attempts, been consuming pretty much all of my brain power. But I do have some travel coming up next week, which should provide plenty of interesting fodder for Roadtrip stories. They're going to be a bit delayed, though, much like the Liberia postings from a year and a half. In the meantime, let me go ahead and hit 'publish' on this old one, written in mid-November but never published.]

"The present is not always an unwelcome guest, so long as it doesn't stay too long and cut into our time for remembering." - Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre"

Accra, Ghana - November 2012. And when does "now" decide to become a memory? This time, it was only a few days back - Wednesday - sitting out on the roof with the team. Pete, Everett, Jenny, Maria-Ines and Nithya. Someone had picked up a bottle of rum, and Maria-Ines was positively wiping the rest of us out at a game of Set. We'd bailed on the sterile European fortress of the Movenpick for this trip in favor of a local hotel, the Deon, tucked around a broken asphalt sidestreet in a gritty neighborhood. It was refreshingly different. Evening noises of an urban African city washed in through the windows, and cats, dogs and an occasional herd of goats roamed the road when we set out at night (MI: "Oooooooh - baby goats!" Pete: "No, you can't have one." MI: "Just one?" Pete: "No.").

I think it was Everett who knew about the roof. There was a hidden staircase in the Deon, and if you carried chairs up there, you could look out over the Accra at night, playing cards in the light of the rooftop fluorescents. We had to pause conversation whenever one of the big jets coming out of Kotoka rumbled by overhead. We'd watch as it disappeared to the south, climbing out for elsewhere over the ocean's endless darkness, then the conversation would start up again, more often than not in some entirely new direction. By now, Maria-Ines wasn't even bothering to call "Set" when she spotted one - she'd just tap the three cards and pull them to her deck while the rest of us nodded in humbled appreciation.

At some point, Pete declared that it was reggae time. Wednesday nights apparently were always reggae time at Labadi (how does he know these things?), so we followed him downstairs and out onto the main road to find a couple of cabs.

Everett managed to get the first driver down to four cedis for the trip to the beach. Better than I could have done - comfort level be damned, I'm a pushover - but Ev wanted to hang back to the second cab to see how Nithya would do. We'd learned early on that Nithya's Mumbai-style negotiation was brutally effective in Ghana, and we'd become eager students of her technique.

She leaned her head into the window of the next cab that pulled up and asked "How much to Labadi Beach?" - then, without waiting for an answer, threw down her offer: "Two cedis." I think the driver had started replying that it would cost us something like 15 for the trip, but quickly regrouped and proposed ten.

"Two cedis."

"Eight."

"Two cedis." She said it like it was fact.

"Five?" His voice was plaintive now, as if asking for mercy, but he'd barely gotten the word out of his mouth before she hammered back her unyielding response. A few more iterations and it was over; Nithya and Ev hopped in back as cheerfully as if the poor man had offered a free ride, and I strapped into the front seat. I seemed to always ride shotgun, and as we rode along, wordlessly bouncing and creaking down the stretch of road to the beach, I quietly slid two wrinkled one cedi notes out of my pocket for the fare.

I've been to Labadi before, but that was "before", and it was without the team. Hawkers, hookers and random rastamen thought they saw easy prey as we found chairs out in the sand and settled in for the evening's entertainment. "Hey mifriend - akwaaba! Lemme give you a little gift to welcome you to Ghana...." Really?

The first ten minutes felt vaguely like one of those superhero movies, where the good guys are circled back to back, each holding off all comers with their own superpower. Pete's was his disarming charm and feigned incomprehension; Ev's defense was a stonewalling stare and a single authoritative "No." Me, I slid the fedora down low over my eyes and tried to channel a slow Clint Eastwood I-don't-think-you-want-to-start-this-conversation bravado, and after a bit of tuning, it worked surprisingly well. And the hawkers mostly just left Nithya alone - I think somehow they already knew they should be scared of her. Paintings, carved bowls, bracelets and joints were offered and shoved in our faces and rebuffed. In the end we sat alone, cheerfully undefeated.

The music made up in energy what it lacked in quality - the band's sound system hopelessly distorted by overdrive as they segued from Bob Marley to Lionel Ritchie, the Commodores and on to Jimmy Cliff. Fires burned from stacks of driftwood, illuminating the sand, and low, straight lines of breakers coming in from the sea. We sat and talked, we drank guava juice and Star beer. We fended off the occasional late-to-the-party intrusion. "Wait - is that a hat, or is it supposed to be her hair?"(only half whispered), as a medusa-coiffed young lady attempted to plant herself on the arm of Everett's beach chair. And we philosophized, as those who find themselves on a fire-lit African beach late at night are wont to do.

Later, there was a little dancing, barefoot in the sand. There were handstands and cartwheels in the shadows of the stage by - ahem - the younger members of the team and then, finally, somewhere past midnight, it was time to go. We caught a fresh set of cabs and got them hopelessly lost. As we walked the last couple of blocks back to the Deon, I paused to relish the moment, even as it settled through the sand into memory. The "now" was over, and I had already begun savoring the memory that I had been here for it. Really here.

The Future

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 16:25:00 +0000

Days like this, it’s hard not to agree with William Gibson’s assertion that “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” Living in Silicon Valley and working at Google, you’d think I’d be kind of jaded by now. And I am, I really am.

But I just had a conversation with Sarah, a bionic woman. Right after I shot rubber bands at a bystander using an articulated telesurgery robot and tried on an off-the-shelf brain-computer-interface device. I’ll admit, though, that I decided to pass on a demo of the implantable “doctor on a chip” - my commitment to seeing the future of medical technology only goes so far.

I grew up reading science fiction, and watching it on TV. I knew, deep in my heart, that we’d have all those things some day. Bionic people, doctors who were really just artificial intelligences, waldos, moon bases. Okay, I’ll be honest: the moon bases were the only things I was really sure of. Scratch me as a prognosticator.

[Hang on a moment - I’m not kidding: a robot has just wheeled itself up behind me and may be reading over my shoulder]

Anyhow. Except for the moon bases, it’s all here. I’ve spent the afternoon wandering around FutureMed, a one-day conference and show-and-tell on - you guessed it - the future of medicine. Workshops on redefining pain management, oncology. Pitch sessions - five minutes each from a dozen candidates for the Next Big Thing - each flaunting bulletproof IP and promising 30x return; all they need is an angel round to get them past their prototype. And the demo floor, an acre or two of booths and tables offering the opportunity to try out artifacts from The Future. That’s where the fun was.

As I mentioned, I tried out the waldos. The folks at da Vinci Surgical don’t call them “waldos”, but that’s what they are. You put your hands in the micromanipulator grips, look into binocular camera visor, and remotely control these itty-bitty grippers on a machine halfway across the room. It takes about 30 seconds for it to feel natural, but with the instantaneous response and force feedback, it just clicks: the sensation is that your hands are inside those little metal duckbill grippers you’re watching, and it feels freakishly natural to pick things up, manipulate them and pass them from hand, er, gripper to gripper.

The official task for the demo was to put little miniature rubber bands over blobby silicone protrusions, presumably simulating laparoscopic suturing of something icky inside the human body, but (quelle suprise), I got kind of carried away and started stretching one of the bands, trying to see if I could get it to “twang”. Then realized I could hook it around the end of one duckbill, pull back and... I thought it sailed pretty far, and it did, relatively speaking. But given the scale of the operating table, the whole trajectory was about a foot.

Great fun. And convinced me that I should never, ever, ever consider being a doctor.

I’d mentioned the bionic woman. Yeah. Sarah was paralysed from the waist down in a car accident. The folks at Ekso have been working on exoskeletal walking assistance devices, and she was - well, not strolling - but having very little difficulty walking around and demonstrating the system to bystanders. There’s no neural control/feedback in the system - not yet, alas - but the design is fiendishly clever. Think of it as a Segway for your feet: when you lean forward, it steps your feet forward to keep them under you. Tilt to drive. Except that Sarah can once again look people in the eye, rather than up from a chair.

What else was there? Oh, tons. But you get the idea. It was a reminder that the future is here. Just like it's always been.

This Makes Me Happy, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 04:04:00 +0000

In preparation for the birthday edition of our Greenwood Musicmaking last week, I asked some folks for a gift. It was an odd request, but I had my reasons. You see, a few years back, on the occasion of my mother’s 50th birthday, she got friends and family together for a symposium on what constituted a good life.

Like any good Greek symposium, there was food, drink, music and celebration. But there was also a serious side to it. As we sat around the outdoor courtyard of a friend’s house on a beautiful autumn afternoon, my mother's family, friends and colleagues - many of them professors of philosophy and theology - exchanged thoughts on what “the good life” meant to them. What opinions they had found in their texts, in their faiths and in their varied life experiences. The thoughts of Plato, Saint Francis, Jesus and the Buddha were all quoted, pondered, considered, exploring what different cultures thought at different times, and what we, today might take from those thoughts.

We kids weren’t excused from the exercise; everyone, from the youngest to the oldest had a say as we wandered through this beautiful marketplace of ideas. Honestly, I don’t remember any of the specifics of what we talked about. But I do remember thinking “You know, when I’m fifty - some time inconceivably far in the future - I want to do this for my birthday, too.”

...

Who would have guessed that 50 would sneak up on me like that? But there it was, and damned if we weren’t already inviting friends and family to join us for food, drink, music and celebration. So I asked some folks - those to whom I didn’t feel it would be an imposition (or just weird) if they could prepare some thoughts to share. But instead of “the good life”, I had a different nut I wanted to crack: happiness. My favorite authors (John Fowles, Herodotus, Hemingway, Hafiz) all seem to spend a lot of time pondering the nature of happiness. What makes them happy, whether happiness is something to pursue, to embrace, or simply to be. Whether it even exists. One of the most famous stories from Herodotus quotes Solon the Lawgiver telling King Croesus that you should call no man happy before he is dead (yeah, I understand there’s ambiguity on the happy/fortunate translation, but I have no problem with throwing both into the same bucket for the purposes of this exploration). Does this mean it’s a just a final score? Or (as Ecclesiastes seems to think) is it an integral, the path of one's experiences, always to be built upon? Does it require self-awareness? Can you be happy without knowing it?

So, of those I was brave enough to ask, I asked this: what, to you, is the nature of happiness?

It was a wonderful evening. Between the food, drink, music and celebration (And pie. Did I mention there was pie? There was.) we didn’t get started on the philosophical bits until a little later, and some folks in charge of smaller folks had to leave. But they sent me their thoughts in cards, and by email, and now I have, in addition to all the swirling discussion in my head, these beautiful artifacts of what my friends and family think. Oh, and this. There are not too many things in life I’m absolutely sure of, but one of them is that this makes me happy:

(Chords and lyrics at http://blog.emilythink.org/2013/02/happiness-video.html)

“Me” Time

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 01:28:00 +0000

This past week, using my 50th birthday as an excuse to reward myself, I’ve been taking a lot of “me” time. Not doing anything fabulous or grand - okay, I did play hooky yesterday to catch the Ski Bus up to Tahoe yesterday, and spent the afternoon skiing Heavenly in my t-shirt. Snow wasn’t great, but the weather was in the 40’s - when did April start so early?

But for the most part, I’ve just been indulging myself on little things that make me happy. And things that, when I look back, think I'm likely to remember as time well spent. Like last Friday. Drove up to the city, just me and my laptop. Found a cafe on Union Street and sat out front at a small table with my decaf cappucino and brioche, in the shade of a bluebird morning. And wrote. Imagined I was in Paris in the Spring. Finished one short story that had been bugging me, and started another. Felt vaguely like Hemingway, but without the hangover. I wrote, and - I think - wrote well.

Once I felt I’d given the muse enough of a run (and vice versa), I migrated to Columbus Ave and played with my new camera (gratuitous photos below). Wandered into City Lights and lost myself in their intimidating wall of “Best Short Fiction of [Year/Place/Topic]". Watched people - the young casanovas amiably jousting their false modesty for the pretty young women walking by. The street artists. The elegant, quiet old man at his customary Italian cafe, as at home to himself as he was incongruous to the passing tourists - splendid and out of another time in his neatly pressed white suit, hat and leather spats.

Then across the bridge to Berkeley to finally finally finally visit Sharla over at the Rose Street House of Music. Emily from Bainbridge Island, Emily-of-the-beautiful-voice-and-morbid-songs was there, and we whiled away the afternoon swapping songs over ginger tea and cake. Princess Cake, at that (no, not that kind of Princess Cake). There were even candles, what with Sharla’s birthday coming a day after mine.

Then? Then it was time to head home. Time to stop - for just a little while - thinking about me me me, and time to help with dinner.

Some more pictures:

Pie, Cake, Crumble and a Root Canal

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:15:00 +0000

There’s something vaguely appropriate about getting a root canal on your 50th birthday. I knew it was coming (both the root canal and the birthday) and couldn’t figure out why it was bothering me so. The root canal, not the birthday. I’d been kind of looking forward to being 50, to stepping across that symbolic threshold to a second half century. Couldn’t imagine being 35 when I was a teenager, now, I still can’t really imagine being 50. Somewhere in my head, I’m still 24. Always have been.

But the root canal - that was bothering me. More than the dull, throbbing pain in my tooth, I mean. Dentist said it was a good thing, that a root canal leaves the tooth better and stronger than it was before. A bit of anaesthetic, drill out that pesky nerve and put in a nice solid core with no more risk of infection or inflammation - what’s not to like? I mean, other than the Novocaine, whine of the drill, and the smell of smoke coming out from inside your mouth during the process.

That part didn’t bother me, though - I’ve always been fine in the dentist chair. Took me a while to put my finger on it, but when I did, there it was: an itty bit sense of loss. As I’ve aged - quite gracefully, thankyouverymuch - I find myself watching my body the way a pilot monitors his aircraft: fuel flow looks normal, cylinder #3 is running a little hot - better keep an eye on that - maybe open the cowl flaps a little. Headwinds seem to be increasing - check the charts, check the forecast - no, we’re still good for intended destination.

As I’ve watched myself get older, there have been plenty of little setbacks. My right knee is a bit more dodgy, and I’ve been through a few bouts of physical therapy to get me back into running shape. It gets worse, it gets better - I can’t run as far or fast as I used to, but I can still run.

The tooth thing, though - it feels like letting go of something. An itty bitty part of me that will never feel again. It’s gone for good. And somehow that feels important, and a little sad. Perhaps a reminder to take better care of the fully-functioning parts that I have left as I turn the corner into my second half century.

Anyhow. Speaking of birthdays, it was a lovely one, filled with little, unexpected joys. Like pie. Have I told you how much I like pie? A lot. And there I was, completely overloaded from a of back to back meetings at the office, when I got a message that Jenny ominously “wanted to chat”. You remember Jenny, right? From my old team - the folks I’ve had so many little adventures with? Well, sweet innocent Jenny lured me right into their apple pie and raspberry-rhubarb crumble ambush. With candles. And ice cream. And - frankly - the worst rendition of “Happy Birthday To You” that I’ve heard from adults unhampered by alcohol. But someone who didn’t know me well might have mistaken the quavering in my voice as a touch of sentimentality.

I had already been surprised by candles and an improvised Reeses Peanut Butter Cup “cake” from Lacy, Chris and Paul in the morning, and I knew - strongly suspected - that there was a carrot cake with my number on it waiting at home. There are resolutions to give up sweets and sugary desserts. Then there are people saying “We love you” with pie, cake and chocolate. I surrendered to the hypo/hyperglycemic rollercoaster and hung on for the ride. Thank you. All of you.

The Best Bad Breakfast in the World

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 06:54:00 +0000

I think the problem is that I’ve got a lousy imagination. I love telling stories, but I’m absolutely no good at making them up. So the only way I get new stories is by putting myself into situations where new stories happen to me - then all I have to do is write them down.

Today seemed like a good day for a new story: a breathless deep blue morning, pierced by the red glow of a sun gaining its first toehold on the horizon. No plans for the day - a gloriously empty Saturday - except to go for a birthday flight.

No, not my birthday - I’ve got a couple of weeks before that. But on January 11th 1946, not even halfway into the previous century, the FAA saw fit to slap an airworthiness certificate on NC33395, the 15th production Skyranger built since Commonwealth began postwar production. She didn’t take her first flight until January 16th, noted in the logbooks as just a “test hop”, but I figure today was as good a day as any to commemorate her flight.

Target for the morning was the monthly “second Saturday” pancake breakfast at Modesto airport. Just 48 miles east of Livermore, where the Skyranger is living until I can find a local hangar, it’s a regular excuse for people who are plane nuts (and, some would say, plain nuts) to talk shop over pancakes and bad coffee.

Fitting a clear night, the morning was cold by California standards, with ice fog and a thin sheet of ice in the shadow of the hangar as I skittered around during my preflight. Tasha and the gang had just pulled ‘395 out of the hangar before I arrived, so she wasn’t completely cold-soaked. A few extra shots of prime as I cranked the starter, and she started right up with a chipper poketapoketa of the C-85 under her cowl.

Sun was still low as I climbed away from the field, and the hills radiated an almost unearthly green from the recent rains. The morning’s cold dry air put a spring in the little plane’s step - Skyrangers are not legendary for rocketship performance - and we swung east for the 30-minute trip through California’s central valley breadbasket. Little farms lit up in the slanting sunlight, swirling flocks of starlings settling in an open field - all these were spread out at my feet. However tempting the lure of higher-faster-bigger planes, those pressurized, turbocharged stallions that can launch into the flight levels at 300 mph, this morning’s excursion tapped into something inseparably close to my heart.

Puttering along there, two thousand feet up at somewhere around 100 mph, I could feel the texture of the countryside. I watched smoke rise slowly from the chimney of a farmhouse, circled an old truck navigating the dirt road over irrigation ditches. Waggled my wings at a pair of egrets going the other way, not far enough below me to escape notice.

The pattern at Modesto was predictably chaotic. Tower controller was doing his gentle best with folks who perhaps didn’t get out much, and when they did, apparently weren’t much accustomed to using the radio. Controller asked me three times to repeat my initial call in, asked other folks to kindly stop stepping on the damned transmission and wait their turn. He wasn’t sure what a Commonwealth, or Commodore was - I think he called my a Constellation at one point - gave me a left-45-cleared-to-land and asked if I could make a short approach.

Did, and squeaked the landing gratifyingly. Ground didn’t bother asking where I was headed; everyone was going to the same place. Tied down, ambled into the hangar, and laid down my $6 for a plate of pilot chow.

There’s something I love about these fly-in meals. The quality of the food swings both ways (somewhat farther in one), but they all seem to run about the same way. You’ve got your long table of steam trays, staffed by cheerful airport volunteers and their long-suffering (but still cheerful) spouses. They’ll chat you up about where you’re from, thank you for coming, and conspiratorially offer you an extra strip of bacon if you’d like. The fact that they do that for everyone doesn’t make it any less endearing.

Then there are the tables. The long folding-leg jobs, sheathed in taped-down rolled paper tablecloths, stretched end to end down the center of the roped-off hangar. Inviting - no, insisting that you drop yourself in elbow-to-elbow with total strangers who, five minutes from now will be your newest flying buddies. You look at the logo on their cap - “Oh? You fly a Beech 18? Lovely plane - I managed to hitch some right seat time in one a few years back...” and the conversation rolls on until one of you excuses yourself to get more coffee. There are a lot of old friends slapping each other on the back and sharing photos of grandkids. And a lot of grandkids in tow.

Once you’ve tired of poking around the cholesterol nuggets on your plate, you wander back out to the flight line, admiring everyone else’s planes and standing by for them to admire yours. Chat them up about the gorgeous paint on their Cub, no, no, I fly a Commonwealth Skyranger. No, don’t worry - nobody else knows what it is either; it’s that red and creme taildragger over there. Yes, thanks, thanks - we just finished the restoration last fall - very pleased with how it turned out.

And so on.

Until eventually everyone starts making their excuses to climb on in, fire up their engines and putter off into a flawless blue morning sky until it’s time to do it all over again next month.

Denver, September 1979

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:00:00 +0000

There are better and worse ways to say goodbye and, given the circumstances, I guess Colleen did the best she could. Still, I do wonder how she tells the story.

I never should have asked her out, of course - I was punching way above my weight. I was the nerdy high school junior with a summer job mopping floors at McDonalds; she was the popular senior. Willowy, elegant and blonde, she managed to be cool, somehow without being mean. We had shared debate class together, 6th and 7th period, which was why I ever got to talk with her in the first place.

So somehow, that summer, I managed the courage to call and ask her out - the Kinks were playing Red Rocks this weekend, did she want to go? Sure, sounds great, did I have a ride?

Oh, did I have a ride. I had the Battlestar.

The Battlestar was not technically mine, but no one else in my family seemed to have any desire to drive it. It was a 1971 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, a tan and wood-grain trim, moonroof-adorned station wagon weighing in at over two tons. Even then, in 1979, it looked like a relic from another era.

The plan had been to trade it in when we bought a new car a couple of years earlier, but with five kids in the house close to driving age, my parents consented to let it sit at the front curb, keys available to anyone who would keep the tank filled.

For gas money, I worked at McDonalds. Wasn’t as demeaning as a summer job could be, but it did have some of the crucial elements - low pay, bad hours, and Gene, a manipulative manager who exploited the social pecking order to enforce discipline. The pretty girls worked the best positions: cash register, drink station. The older guys, like Kurt, were in back, running the grill. Me? I got to mop floors and clean the bathrooms.

I was promised that, after a few months on janitor duty I could “try out” for a counter job, so I paid my dues and slopped the mop as best I could, working a four hour evening shift three days a week and closing up shop on weekends. To be fair, Gene did give me my tryout - he threw me in behind the register at peak dinner rush one day. I thought I held up okay, considering, but he said my till came up short, and I was back between the tables slopping a mop and scraping dried gum, pickles and worse off the seats.

Anyhow, the job at McDonalds kept gas in the Battlestar, and the Battlestar was freedom. Freedom to ask girls like Colleen Liljegren out to the Kinks concert that Saturday.

It’s hard to capture the promise of a concert at Red Rocks if you’ve never been there. Set up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, just west of town, it’s a natural amphitheater looking out over Denver, and the great plains, to the east. In the evening, when the stars come out, it’s magic, and the thought of sitting there with Colleen, snuggled on the stone benches against the night chill was almost more than I could bear.

I picked her up early - you had to get to Red Rocks early for a good seat - and she swayed out to the car, hiphugger jeans and a beat-up leather jacket, the epitome of cool. Smiled sweetly as I held the door - really, she carried no pretense or guile, if there were a Real Thing, Colleen was it.

“You brought anything for the show?” she asked as I drove the winding road up out of town.

I didn’t understand, so she produced a flask of something - I don’t remember what, from the pocket of the jacket. Probably Jack Daniels, that’s what the cool kids drank when they drank. I shook my head and apologized for my lack of preparation, but she waved it off.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got us covered.”

She laughed when I asked how she was going to get it in through security, as if to say “You poor, sweet, naive boy - you have so much to learn.” And in my mind’s eye, I can still see the well-practiced legerdemain as we went through the checkpoint. Holding her arms out, then sliding the jacket off with a clever twist - nothing in her pockets, nothing in her hands - she could have smuggled in a basket of chimpanzees and they would never have had a clue.

The show - the show was everything I’d hoped. We sang and danced on the seats as Ray Davies and Co. rocked the night under a star filled sky. She knew all the songs, knew all the words. I was in heaven, or as close to it as a boy can get.

On the drive home, I didn’t want the night to end. Of course I didn’t have the nerve to suggest that we go park up on the dam. I knew that’s what people did, but that was other people, people who knew what they were doing. Not nerdy boys out on a date with the most fabulous girl west of the Mississippi.

“Let’s get something to eat.”

“Sure - what do you have in mind?”

If you’ve been paying attention, you should be cringing here.

“How ‘bout we stop at McDonalds? I know the guys there.”

There are so many ways it could have been worse. I pulled the Battlestar up front and sauntered in, cool as I could be, Colleen at my side. I guess I wanted to show off. And you know, it sort of worked. Of course, Gene wasn’t there - he had better things to do than lean on the night shift. Linda was working up front, Kurt running the grill. It was late, and I guess they were just closing up.

Kurt and Linda were older than I was - probably a year or two out of high school, and I liked them. I got the idea that they’d been cool kids, and were now cool adults. They were the kind of people I wanted to see me, there, with Colleen.

We got our burgers and fries, talked about - oh, I don’t know what, and then, pushing midnight, it was time to go. I was tired, she was tired, and reason was whispering in my ear that we’d both had a lovely time, and I should not ruin things by trying to stretch it out any longer. Waved goodbye to Linda and Kurt and climbed back into the Battlestar. Turned the key and... nothing.

I turned the key back and re-engaged: nothing. Checked the lights; the battery was good, but when I turned the key to start, the car was as cold and silent as the suspicious stare Colleen was now aiming at me across the Battlestar’s wide bench seat.

Panic.

“Uh.”

She was polite as can be: “Is something wrong?”

“I... I can’t get it started.”

Her look was a million words at once. No, of course I wouldn’t be trying something smooth. I wouldn’t “strand” us somewhere on a Saturday night, least of all in the front parking lot of McDonalds, next door to Walgreens and the Discount Tire Warehouse. I think my look of abject horror assured her of that much. But it did little else to comfort her.

I scrambled out and lifted the hood, peering into the plumbing of the Oldsmobile’s voluminous engine compartment. I tried to conjure those manly gifts my gender is supposed to be born with, an intuitive understanding of how these things work, but nothing came. I knew that the car’s 425 V8 was a fine engine, one of the best and most powerful to come out of Detroit during its glory years. But now, at midnight in a McDonalds parking lot, with the most fabulous girl in the world waiting nervously inside, it was an abomination, a lump of cold steel designed from the very start to bring me to this point to the verge of true happiness - and humiliate me.

I returned to the driver’s seat, defeated.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, we can’t stay here all night. At least I can’t.”

Calling my parents was not an option. I took another pass under the hood, then we retreated back to the warmth of McDonalds. Linda unlocked the doors to let us back in, and Kurt was just finishing cleaning up in back. They sympathized.

Kurt asked “Where do you live?”

My house was just a mile to the south, walking distance, but Colleen lived a good 15 minute drive west.

“I can give you a ride.” He lived out in the same direction as her.

Our faces brightened; gratitude welled up in my heart, but I saw a conflicted look in Kurt’s eyes: he was trying to be a gentleman, trying to figure out how to break the news.

“My motorcycle only holds two.”

There was a second of silence while I pondered the implications, but there was no other way.

So that’s my memory of Colleen: leather jacket and jeans. Looking over her shoulder and waving goodbye from the back of Kurt’s bike as they rolled out of the darkened McDonalds parking lot and away into the chill of a Denver midnight. I never did see her again.

Black and White

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 02:58:00 +0000

Skiing yesterday at Heavenly Valley with Devon and the kids, I veered off for a couple of runs in Mott Canyon. Storm had just blown in nine new inches of powder, and still hadn't let hold of the sky. I was struck how everything looked black and white - the pictures below are un-retouched, taken with my phone, of all devices.

The Day Sleeper (South Pole retrospective)

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:45:00 +0000

[I came across this from my stash of "unpublished South Pole Journal notes" and figured enough time has passed that I can post it safely. Those of you who haven't spent time on the ice or weren't following the blog while I was there would probably do best to review some earlier posts from that era, specifically those involving life at Summer Camp. Names changed to protect the guilty, if anyone cares...]

-----------------
11/21/10 - The Day Sleeper

This morning was Sunday morning. Our one day a week to sleep in. Except, perhaps for that incessant beeping at 5:00 a.m. And 5:05 a.m. And 5:10, 5:15, and every five minutes after until I finally gave up and abandoned hopes of sleep at 7:30.

Either someone was a very sound sleeper, or they'd spent the night elsewhere on a station tryst and left their unattended alarm to madden the leeward side of J-7 in their absence. Those were the only two rational explanations I could come up with.

Problem was, rational hadn't come into the equation that morning.

Now, Beth had warned me that I would find myself sharing close quarters with folks who I wouldn't ordinarily choose to spend time with. I thought she meant folks with differing political or religious views. Folks from working-class backgrounds. I didn't think she meant people like Alice - people who, while not technically "bat-shit crazy", lived far enough along on the sociopath scale to warrant a wide berth.

I didn't realize it, but this particular bit of trouble started two days ago, when she cornered me I the lunch line.

"Hey Pablo - I need to let you know that I'm your neighbor, and I'm on swing shift now. I only got one and a half hours of sleep last night. You and your neighbors are way too noisy in the morning, and you've got to realize that you're surrounded by people who are day sleepers."

"Yow! Sorry about that - I've been trying to be pretty quiet." In fact, I thought I'd been *very* quiet, and wondered whatsounds I personally could be making to disturb her. Is there something I bang? The scrape of my coat on the wall?

"Um - is there a particular noise I'm making that's the problem?

She looks shocked, as though I've asked an explicitly sexual question. "Oh - I can't tell you that!"

I'm baffled. "No, really - what noises? I stand up, straighten out my comforter, put on my shirt, pants, coat and backpack and leave. I didn't think I was making any noises, but if you let me know…"

She's flustered now. "Well, don't worry - you're not the worst offender, and I'm making sure to tell all of our neighbors. But remember, we've got a lot of day sleepers in this end of the Jamesway."

I'm still baffled. I'd asked Beth, ages ago, how noise complaints were handled in Summer Camp, and it sounded like a serious business. If I were getting a noise complaint lodged against me, I wanted to know what it was for.

Yesterday, Daniel flagged me as I got back in from a service call. "Oh yeah - a woman came by and wanted to apologize for yelling at you yesterday." Huh? Conceivably, it might be Alice, but "yelling at me?" That didn't fit. It was her, however - she cornered me again at dinner and apologized profusely. I wasn't the problem, not at all, she said. But she'd been tired and cranky, and I was the first person she's seen, so I got the unrehearsed brunt of her frustration.

No worries - I assured her I hadn't felt hurt, just puzzled, and thanked her for clarifying the situation. We had a good "it's all better now" hug and parted ways.

Okay - fast forward to this morning. Aside from the untimely wake-up torture, the day had been going well. I'd made use of the early start to go running on the station treadmill, take a luxurious two-minute shower, and read a few more chapters of Siple. Was heading out toward DZ to go XC skiing with Zondra, when I ran into Alice in the coat room.

"Hi Pablo - sorry, I should have warned you. This morning, I set my alarm to show all those noisy people in J7 what it's like to get woken up early. It's this really annoying thing: it beeps ten times, then does double beeps ten times, then does this loud triple beep. Then it waits five minutes and repeats it all over again. I wanted them to know how obnoxious it is to have a noisy neighbor who wakes them up."

Me: speechless.

"In any case - sorry, I should have warned you that's what I was doing."

Me: "Uhh…."