Roadtrip

Christmas Gifts

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 20:08:00 +0000

54 years ago, my parents married on Christmas day. Their friends weren't doing anything, and everyone had the day off, so it seemed like a reasonable choice. And no one ever forgets their anniversary. My sister and I have a tradition of calling on Christmas to thank my mother for her Christmas gift: us.

Twenty five years ago, I had just gotten my pilot's license. I was living in Seattle, but was spending a few days back home in Denver before shipping off to Japan for a year as an intern with Hitachi. I passed the checkride at the last possible moment - the day before I'd had to leave, and had only flown once since: a couple of laps around the pattern with my girlfriend Mary before she dropped me off at SeaTac. Mary had been my encouragement and support throughout the learning-to-fly thing, and it was only right that she got to be the first passenger (note: the weather was awful, and I really shouldn't have been flying that morning - there's a bit of a story there, too. Maybe later?)

Regardless, I had about 20 minutes of official "Pilot in Command" time under my belt when I arrived in Denver. My friend Brian had no idea I'd even been working on the license, and I was determined to take him on a "surprise" flight as a Christmas present. (another note for new pilots: it is generally inadvisable to take the unsuspecting on "surprise flights". But Brian and I had already been party to enough inadvisable adventures together to justify it.)

I called the local flight school to see if I could rent a plane. I don't remember the constraints, but there was only one time they had available: Christmas Day. Problem was, before they could let me rent the plane, they had to take me on a check-out flight - giving your airplane to a novice pilot to operate in unfamiliar airspace entails a little more due diligence than handing over the keys to a rental car.

The receptionist and I pored over the schedule - there really was no time and no one available anywhere to give me a checkout flight. I was nearly distraught - my work to get the license finished before I left for Japan, keeping it secret from Brian. To be foiled so close to having the perfect surprise for him - it seemed unfair (Okay, really, it was just bad planning. But the 23-year-old brain typically interprets "bad planning" as equivalent to "unfair").

One of the instructors nearby was listening in on the conversation - David DeBuire - I've got his name in my logbook. He asked me what I was doing early Christmas morning.

Nothing, really - we're Jewish. Sleeping in, maybe?

"I could give you a checkout then."

The receptionist protested, but David overruled her.

"Listen, my kids are going to be up at six, tearing open presents and screaming around the tree. Once that's done, I'm going to be ready to be out of the house for a while."

So Christmas morning, with frost still on the ground, David and I were circling the prairie south of Denver in Cessna N49858 - a gift of flight from one pilot, a seasoned instructor, to another, just minted.

I took Brian flying that afternoon. His surprise and enjoyment of the flight was gratifying. It felt like I now had my turn to give the gift of flight, to show someone the earth from above. Not from some small round porthole on the side of pressurized metal tube blasting through the stratosphere at 500 mph. But to look out at the expanse of the earth in its fullness. To say "I wonder what's over there?" and, giving a slight twist to the wheel, to go and find out.

It's now 25 years later. I'm a flight instructor with somewhere around 1500 hours in the air. And it's still magic. But as much as I enjoy the magic myself, the real joy still comes from taking someone else up, someone who's never seen the earth like that. Never seen the hills from above, never known the feeling of being able to casually find the answer to that question of "I wonder what's over there?" That for me is the gift of flight, handed to me by a stranger on a frosty Christmas morning, 25 years ago.

Time Out

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:15:00 +0000

Family is wonderful. There are times when I could spend, oh, entire hours with my family without going crazy. No, really. Contrary to our outward social appearances, Devon and I are kind of loners. Back when we were dating, we'd alternate driving the roughly 300 miles up/down to Eugene/Seattle once a month to see each other. We'd say our fond "hello"s, chat enthusiastically for a few minutes, then plonk down somewhere to read our respective books and mostly ignore each other. We both needed a lot of "alone time" and, since we understood each others' rules, it was a simple thing to spend it together. A blissful existence.

Now, loners don't normally reproduce in the wild, but somewhere along the way we got married (albeit while living 3000 miles apart) and had kids (living, finally, under the same roof). And a strange thing happened: there were these new people in the house. Very short people. Who tended to be loud at inconvenient hours and demanded to be fed, changed and paid attention to on a fairly regular basis. Needless to say, all that "alone time" went right out the door. Being the "non-primary caregiver", I still managed to get some from time to time, but we both learned to cope with a lot less than we needed. Along with sleep, come to think of it.

The kids are much older now and need their own bits of cave time, but once you have four people trying to be alone in the same place, the dynamics aren't quite so smooth. So Devon and I have become pretty unquestioning when either of us needs to bug out for a bit. It usually goes like this:

"Gah! I need to get out of the house for a bit."

"Home for dinner?"

"Don't know. Will call if the answer's 'yes'."

"K'. Bye."

We've been traveling together as family for about five days now, and my bug-out-o-meter went "ding!" this morning.

"I need to get out of the house. I think I'm going to go hike Tahoe Meadows."

"I have no desire to hike Tahoe Meadows this morning."

"That's okay."

"Bye!"

There was a little more to the conversation than that, but not much more.

Tahoe Meadows is a short little nature loop just off the Mount Rose Highway above Incline Village. When we're up here in the summer, we usually drag the kids around it once, complaining much of the way. We tend to be more successful on these drags if we've brought along friends with kids of their own, which minimizes the attention adults need to pay to their offspring.

It was different in the winter. Quiet and still, despite a December wind dropping from the ridge above and whistling through the frozen, dried grass. Crows harassed each other from the treetops, but the path was empty. The stream running down from Slide Mountain had frozen where it slowed in the flats, then overrun its banks and filled the meadow with an undulating sheet of ice, captured as if in a snapshot. Nothing moving but the windblown grass.

It was cold, and I relished the cold as much as the quiet. I should have brought gloves, of course, but holding my hands out for balance as I crossed the ice brought a nostalgic sting to my fingertips. I hadn't been cold in a while, not this way. Sure, we'd had a few morning frosts in Palo Alto, but then you always climbed into your car, set the defroster on "high" and trundled in to the office listening to NPR on your morning commute. This was different - it was an outdoors kind of cold. When I closed my eyes - yes, I really did a couple of times - I could feel myself back on The Ice. Not "the ice" - "The Ice". My fingers always stung like that when I was working Cargo. Rest of me nice and warm, but my fingers always got cold. Even after Bryce showed me the trick about putting the warmers on the back of my hands, where the arterial blood brought heat to my fingers. Even after OV scored me a pair of the coveted Carhartt gloves that folks out working the berms swore by. My fingers always stung like this back then. That was a special time.

I like pointing out to people that I missed winter last year: left Palo Alto in the fall and crossed over to the Southern hemisphere where spring was blooming. Didn't return home until March, when winter was hustling to not let the door hit its butt on the way out. Sure, the South Pole counts for something - even mid-summer. But it's not technically "winter". The short days, for example - it still throws how early it gets dark (yeah, yeah - my friends in Seattle and Minneapolis are having a good laugh at this. Go ahead, you deserve it. If anything, the Pole made me a wimp.)

And today - honestly, here? It wasn't that cold. Down by the lake it was positively balmy - something like 40F, and probably close to 30F up where I was. If I put my hands in my pockets, they were nice and warm, but I had them out for balance on the ice. Besides, I liked the feeling.

Anyhow, it was what I needed. A couple of hours wandering around in the solitude, communing with the crows, and I'm back in kilter. Was ready to face family again. And I even made it most of the way back by the time Devon called to tell me that she was stuck at home with the kids, because I'd forgotten to leave her the car keys.

Sutter Creek

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 06:37:00 +0000

Author's note: Below, I tried, and actually succeeded in writing what I was intending to write about. Unfortunately, it's turned out all inarticulate and rambly [yes, M, that *was* a Firefly reference]. Ah well. Maybe it's like the Hitchiker's Guide instructions for flying: "Throw yourself at the ground and miss." Maybe the magic only happens when you miss...

This blog really ought to be called "But what I really meant to write about is..." because, as far as I can tell, when I sit down to write about something, gyroscopic precession takes over and the post goes off in a direction 90 degrees away from the thing I was trying to put my finger on.

In this case, I think what I mean to write about is small towns. The towns you drive through on your way from one place to another, except that you don't, because these towns aren't really on the way to anywhere. They're just, well, where they happen to be. Sutter Creek, California is a good example. It's Gold Country, or was, and is trying to make the best of it. The old main street is nicely preserved, with an antique shop or two, a handful of quaint "Wine Bar and Café"-type establishments alternating with places like "J.D.'s Steakhouse" and "The Pioneer Saloon", the straight-out-of-the-last-century American Exchange Hotel and the Sutter Creek Theater.

It was actually the theater that brought us here - kind of a long story, or no it's not. Here's the scoop: It was back in Seattle, as a grad student, that I inadvertently discovered, that I was a folkie. Sure, I'd been raised on the stuff - Joan Baez, Dylan, Pete Seeger, but that was all campfire music, and I hadn't realized that there was any more to it than that. But one day my housemate Kathryn (hi K!) handed me a Christine Lavin cassette and said "Here - I don't know why, but I think you'll like this."

It was "Good Thing He Can't Read My Mind". It was... kind a weird. But compelling. I saw her at a "Four Bitchin' Babes" concert and immediately got hooked on the rest of the vein - Patty Larkin, Cheryl Wheeler. David Wilcox - it just grew. And then there was Uncle Bonsai. You can't describe Uncle Bonsai and hope to not both appall and mislead people. They (yes, "they", not "he" - Andy Ratshin on guitar, Arni Adler and Ashley O'Keeffe) were a trio with amazing harmonies, a twisted sense of humor and absolutely no shame. They played the clubs in Seattle with the occasional free concert on the lawn at the zoo.

Look, rather than me trying to explain, go to YouTube, and plan to spend a few minutes listening to them. And yes, listen to That Song. Oh wait, with Uncle Bonsai, there are a few different songs that could be considered "That Song".

Done? It's okay, we've all done it - you go online to listen to a folk song, and then suddenly it's two hours later and you've followed the acoustic garden path of "related videos" down unknown alleys and suddenly caught yourself on that tutorial of offensive Bulgarian drinking songs. But hopefully you listened to a couple of Uncle Bonsai tunes before things came off the rails. The "Woodland Park Zoo Concert" ones are nicely representative.

So, UB quickly became a staple at grad school - lots of us actually got hooked. Then they had that farewell concert at the zoo in 1989 - Arni was something like 8 months pregnant and she kept bumping into the mic stand with her belly. Was a fabulous, memorable evening.

Right. So, now fast forward now about... 22 years. Devon and I arm-wrestling over plans to spent the kids' vacation up at Tahoe, at her parents' house. We'd invited bunches of friends with appropriately-aged kids to come up and spend parts of the break with us, and avoiding tears in the space-time continuum required us to arrive up at Tahoe no later than Sunday afternoon. Fine.

Then came the email notice that after 20 years, Uncle Bonsai had launched a reunion tour and was going to be in Berkeley... you guessed it: Sunday evening. Cue marital strife.

But maybe there was still a way - after a few weeks of teeth gnashing and negotiations, I happened to click through to the UB tour page and noticed that on Friday, they were playing at the Sutter Creek Theater. Google-to-the-rescue and it turned out that Sutter Creek was a quaint little old touristified mining town about - would you believe it? - a half hour out of the way on the drive up to Tahoe.

Plan B kicked in pretty quickly: we'd drive up to Sutter Creek on Friday afternoon, see the show, spend the night in town, and continue up to Tahoe in the morning. Added bonus was getting to drag our progeny to the show and inflict Uncle Bonsai and Christine Lavin on a whole new generation. What's not to like?

We had a few more wrinkles, and settled on Plan L, or maybe M by the time Friday rolled around. Devon loaded up the car and headed out shortly after we'd pushed the kids out the door to school. I picked them up after their respective half-days-before-winter-break, and piled them into the plane. It's almost a four hour drive up to Sutter Creek, but only a 45 minute flight - hey, did I mention there's a quiet little airport just south of town? - so we landed probably 20 or so minutes after Devon arrived.

Somewhere around Plan G or H, I'd noticed that Sutter Creek was also about 30 minutes away from Calaveras County airport, where Andrew Turpen and Steve Cook of the Calaveras Airplane Company have been diligently restoring our beloved Skyranger. Devon hadn't seen the Skyranger in probably six or so years, since long before I'd hauled it away from the guys down in Hollister who were diligently not restoring the plane.

So we tacked a side-leg into the excursion to stop by and see Andrew and Steve.

Things went astoundingly according to plan. Andrew and Steve were charming as ever - some day I need to really write properly about them. Really incredible guys - a couple of true craftsmen dedicated to restoring antique aircraft, working their art at a small airport on a hill tucked away in the heart of gold country.

Got back to Sutter Creek, checked into the hotel and went wandering Main Street for something to eat. Not a long wander: up one side of the street for a block, and back down the other. Passing the Theater, a couple of folks were steering bits of equipment in the door. I looked at the man and said "Oh my - you're Andy Ratshin! [guitarist and songwriter for Uncle Bonsai] And... Christine Lavin!" Ratshin gave me a tell-me-something-I-don't-know look.

I asked if there was anything we could do to help.

"You wanna help us haul stuff into the theater?"

Get to play roadie for my grad school folk heroes? Absolutely. So Devon, Miranda, Jeremy and I made a trip or two hauling guitars, speakers and boxes of CDs into the tiny theater. It was a gorgeous little theater; the kind you'd imagine finding in a small one-horse town 100 years ago.

Anyhow - after gawking awkwardly a bit in my best fanboy style, it became clear that our work there was done, and the musicians were kind of wishing we would go away so they could start doing that preparation stuff that they do before a show. We excused ourselves and hunted down some dinner for the kids.

The show: the crowd was tiny - perhaps 50 people all told, and show was delightful. I'm not going to try to do a review here, it was just a heck of a lot of fun. Jeremy timed out about during the intermission (after Christine and one of her guests played a set), and Miranda made it all the way through.

Gotta say, though - hearing Arni's voice again, live and on stage, after all these years, gave me shivers. Really. Like having a photograph speak to you. Ashley wasn't touring this time around - newcomer Patrice O'Neill was filling in her shoes, quite ably. But Arni's voice. Wow.

I stuck around after the show a bit while Devon and Miranda headed back across the street to the hotel. Caught Arni in the hall and once again went all fanboy. We chatted a bit about the "farewell concert" 20-odd years ago - the big round blob that was in her belly is now in college. She was pleased to see that we'd brought our offspring - "I could tell she was sharp: she laughed at all the 'right' places." That was gratifying too.

But I was starting to feel in the way again. I thanked her, and Andy and Christine again and made my way back to the room, humming something or another from the evening.

Centennial

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:18:00 +0000

Happy Centennial, folks! Modulo the +20h time shift, today is the 100th anniversary of when Roald Amundsen, leading Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting became the first people to ever stand at the geographic South Pole of the planet. It was the proverbial "Last Place on Earth", a featureless geographical point - a concept, really - with nothing in particular to distinguish it from any other spot on that 2000-mile ice sheet of the polar plateau. The only way you could tell you were there was that, if you measured carefully enough, you'd discover that the apparent motion of the sun and stars formed a perfect circle above you, with no dip toward the horizon in any direction. And still, it was a place that captured the imagination of the world, a place where a flag needed to be planted.

Okay, honestly? It wasn't the "Last Place on Earth" - there were plenty of other, more remarkable spots that remained untouched. It would be 42 years before Hillary and Norgay planted a flag on the summit of Everest (what is it about humans and our flags?), but Antarctica was special for many people. It was a continent, an entire continent the size of western Europe, and except for some tiny bits around the edges, no one had any idea what was there. Only 50 years earlier, at the height of the age of steam, we weren't even sure there was a continent down there. Really. Modern era and all, and the bottom of the map was all "Here be dragons". Really, really cold dragons.

Anyhow. National pride and all, Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and the rest all took turns moving their respective flags around the continent, "discovering" new territory and reporting back for God and Country. Everyone has their favorite - Scott the grandiloquent poet, Shackleton the unflappable seaman, Amundsen the coolly efficient engineer. Popular sentiment has come down lately looking at Scott as a glory-seeking bumbler, mostly due to Huntford's book (as one of Kim Stanley Robinson's characters observes in "Antarctica": "It's a good book in some ways, but it really should have been called 'Scott was an idiot'; it's a five-hundred page list of stupidities. But a lot of them are crazy").

Anyhow. A hundred years ago, Amundsen made it. Stayed for three days, then headed home, leaving a flag, a tent with some supplies, and a note for Scott, asking him to relay a letter with their news in the event that the Norwegians didn't make it back. They did, of course, ahead of schedule and having put on weight during the trip, while Scott's party, in a twist of fate, ran out of food and will to live just 11 miles short of their resupply depot.

Today, tourists and politicians from all over the world have converged on the tactfully-named Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, a space-age wonder of a place at the bottom of the planet. My Polie friends down there - Bill, Elissa, Daniel, Kiell, all the rest - are putting up with the temporary international invasion of TV cameras and celebrities. Probably having some fun with it too; Polies always seem to know how to have fun with whatever man or nature throws their way. Then tomorrow, it'll all return to normal. Folks will get up for their 10-hour shifts shoveling snow, washing dishes, poking at scientific instruments and pushing papers. Just another day, in just another high-tech office building. On the bottom of the planet, in the last place on Earth.

[both photos here nabbed from Kiell and Daniel's blog]

(By the way - for local folks - I'm giving a talk tonight on my summer at the Pole last year. Really a reprise of the talk I gave at Google this spring. Congregation Etz Chayim in Palo Alto at 7:30. I've even got some leftover Polie swag I'll be giving out as random favors)

My Improbable Life - Continued

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 05:59:00 +0000

I think my life has been guided as much by Walter Mitty as by any other fictional character. The weird thing is that, against all odds (there, I've said it), crazy improbabilities seem to drop into my lap with alarming frequency.

Take today, for example. I've been trying to find the words to describe what my morning was like. I tried adjectives first: "inspiring", or "hellaciously fun", or even something prosaic like "informative". No go. I'm just going to stick with nouns a couple of simple Clue-like prepositions:

At NASA.

In the Space Shuttle Flight Simulator.

With Sully.

Pilots - please don't hate me. I'd hate me too, but I swear I didn't do it on purpose. It was just the dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time.

Yes, I just got to spend about 45 minutes riding jumpseat as Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger ("Miracle on the Hudson" and all that) got to try landing the Space Shuttle (America's other big white glider) under a half dozen or so different scenarios. The NASA guys were having fun: What if we give him low cloud cover? A short, unmarked emergency runway? Faulty nav? Okay, let's blow out a tire or two! Yes, he nailed it almost every time.

I swear, there's no good reason why I got to be the guy back there in the jumpseat - Cliff had set up the invitation to get Sully to come down to visit Google; Tiffany had arranged for a visit across the way with her friends at NASA - I was just tagging along. But when Sully and the NASA guy climbed into the sim and were getting started, that jumpseat was just sitting there unoccupied. I looked around, pointed, and the techs on the ground gave me a "be our guest" look. I assure you I did not hesitate - not one instant.

"Front office" in the shuttle sim for a
photo op. For the "flights" I was in the
jump seat just behind and to the right.

I've got to be honest, though - getting to ride the sim was good, but getting to spend some time talking airplanes with Sully was priceless. Some people work hard at radiating greatness. They act important and try to look the part. They want you to know. Sully (may I call you "Sully"?) is inspiring in an entirely different way. He smiles and moves easily in a way that says "Hey, I'm just a normal guy." He insists that - contrary to all the media hoopla - he's not a hero. He's a well-trained professional who just did what he was trained to do. And he reminds you that there were four other such professionals on Flight 1549 - first officer Jeff Skiles, flight attendants Donna Dent, Doreen Welsh and Sheila Dail - all of whom worked together as a seamless team to bring the flight to its remarkable conclusion. They all just did what they were trained to do.

He's very clear that he didn't ask for this fame - he was (again), just doing his job. But since long before that dip in the Hudson, he'd been a student of aviation safety. He became a fighter pilot after graduating from the Air Force Academy, and when not behind the stick, helped conduct accident investigations for NASA and the Air Force. Few pilots, even captains with 20,000 flight hours and 20 years of seniority, can support a family on an airline salary any more. So like many, he had a business on the side. His was a consulting company: Safety Reliability Methods Inc., providing "emergency management, safety strategies and performance monitoring to the aviation industry". So in one sense, yes he was just doing what he was trained to do. But it's hard to imagine anyone who'd been better prepared by their training.

His years of studying accidents gave Sully some pretty strong opinions about how aviation could be made safer. So while he didn't ask for this fame, he's not shy about using the bully pulpit make his concerns better known. There are the little things: to save printing costs, US Air stopped including tabbed dividers in their Quick Reference Handbook. When both engines blew out, Skilling couldn't just select the "Emergency Engine Restart" tab and start running through the checklist. He had to flip to the index in the back of the book and look up the right page numbers, then thumb through until he found it. There's a nice John Stewart interview where Stewart wraps up by saying that what he's taken from his conversation with Sully is that airline pilots should be respected and properly compensated, and that we should "put the damned tabs back in the book."

Anyhow. Inspiring. What can I say? Other than "Please don't hate me"?

Yosemite

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:02:00 +0000

The first thing Steve said when he saw me with the camera was "Okay, here's the challenge: take a picture here - anywhere - of something that hasn't been photographed before." Steve is my father-in-law, a friend and role model, and sees this as the same sort of education that the old master imposed on Kwai Chung Caine in Kung Fu - "When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, grasshopper…"

He had a point - aiming my camera at the peaks towering above us was pointless; that's what postcards were for. I should concentrate on shooting the kids. Er, shooting pictures of the kids.

Still, it's hard not to try to capture this place. You walk a few hundred feet down any path between the redwoods and look up, you're going to catch your breath.

Thanksgiving morning now. The sun is making its way down the canyon, and frost is starting to melt away from the leaves outside. At about the same pace, folks are starting to amble into the Great Room of the Ahwanee Hotel to start their day. The Ahwanee is way posh, and way iconic in a California way - Disney even built their own version of it in Disneyland. Enormous cut stone columns, massive wood beams, vaulting windows - and yet, looking out at the sequoias and towering granite walls of the valley, it feels somehow…small in perspective.

Devon and I are here with the kids, her parents, and her brother's family. The plan is to spend a few days letting the kids burn off some energy chasing each other around while grownups explore some of the easier paths around the valley.

Wandering Greenwich Village

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:15:00 +0000

Kind of surprised; I would have thought that this brief roadtrip - out to NY for a day of meetings and back the next morning - would have done it. Would have coaxed the muse out of her hiding place and given me something to write about. There's certainly kindling enough for it; I can't think of any city - any place - with which I have such a deeply-ingrained, longstanding love-hate relationship.

You step out into the street, and the energy, the excitement, the promise of untapped adventure are palpable, seductive. You think "Yes, this is where people come to make their dreams happen, like moths to the light. Like moths to the bug-zapper. In the glowing storefront lights, photoshop-sculpted billboard models, rail thin and dripping in diamond junk stare out in vapid, vampiric sexuality. On the street below, a pack of young men, toughed out in their muscle shirts and gang colors stare back - "manning up" to the taunt, but unable to look away. There's something terrifying in both of their faces, fear, and longing, both sheltered by an impenetrable wall of anger.

And then? Then there are the people who simply live here. You see them more near the edges of the island - The young mother on the E-train, coaxing station names out of her daughter: "Penn shashun!" "Staaaay-shun, darling, staaaaay-shun." "Shashun!" "Yes, darling." The young couple walking quiet cobblestones below the Highline, lost in conversation and imaginations of something far away. The late-night clatter of a boy, alone with his skateboard on a darkened Chelsea side street, trying again and again to land that elusive flatland Ollie.

My parents used to walk these streets. Washington Square, The Village. Back before I was born, before my sister was born. Back when they were much younger than I am now. Maybe they were that couple I saw below the High Line? I look up at the storefronts here - they're more humane: the deli, the diner, the laundromat. I imagine back, over fifty years ago. Did they stop here? What about here? It was 1960 - the Village was young and hip. She was the exotic dark-eyed beauty hanging on the arm of the handsome young doctor from Brooklyn.

I think about Hemingway, about Hotel Montoya, and Burguete - about places he went, and whose spirit he captured and distilled into words on a page, such that others visiting Pamplona, or Paris, or Navarre could see them for the first time, and - in a way - already know them (Quick check of the web reveals that Hostel Burguete is still owned by the same family - they're happy to book you into room 23 - his favorite - and arrange for a fishing trip like the ones he described in The Sun Also Rises).

For someone like me, who loves (craves?) the sensation of finding human connections - that's where the magic of writing comes in. It's like a magic trick, a secret connection, a conversation, not only across space, but across time. It has, when I let myself go, the same impossibility that television, or the telephone must have had to some folks a century ago. He's talking to you - telling you about the cold water in his boots, the angle of the sun on the wildflowers, and how good it is just to be here, now. Except "here" is half a world away, and "now" is almost a century past.

Being able to see, to stand in the place where someone wrote - that's doubly magic. In Turkey, looking across the Hellespont with Herodotus in hand, nestled in my Jamesway at the South Pole reading Siple (the first structure erected at the Pole was in fact a Jamesway - wouldn't be at all surprised if it still survived somewhere around Summer Camp). That sort of thing? It's as good as a time machine.

Anyhow. So here I am, exploring the streets of Greenwich Village at night. I'm here because tomorrow, November 15th, is my father's birthday. He would have been 79 tomorrow - it feels impossibly old for a man who I only know from a handful of 40-odd year-old photographs. In this time travel meander I'm trying to conjure - and yes, "conjure" is the right word, he would have been 28. Strange - I can't imagine him being 28 either.

Tom Wolfe has a great quotation in Bonfire of the Vanities (no, sorry, I never read the book - just came across it out of context):

"Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life."

It's one of those quotations that hits home - in spite of what I said about fiction, when done well, it's so often the lie that tells the truth. And so here I was, fifty years later, wandering these streets, trying to get to know this man, this 28 year-old with a Brooklyn accent and mysteriously-familiar smile. Ten years later, before I was really old enough to know him, to know anything, really, he was gone.

I'd gone out to the cemetery my last trip to NY, to visit the plot where he and his parents were buried. The gravestone needed some, uh, correction (long story - due to a family feud, the stone listed him "Beloved son and father" - no mention of his role as "husband"). We took care of getting a new stone cut ("Beloved father, brother, husband and son" - didn't want to piss off anyone this time around) and put in place over the phone. The stone carver sent us pictures, but none of us have been back to see it in person.

I thought about going out to see the new stone, as a way of commemorating his birthday, celebrating a too-short life that I never knew well enough. But I didn't want Plot 57, Section 15 of the New Mt Carmel Cemetery to be how I remembered him. I don't think it's a place he would have spent much time by choice. I thought that he'd rather be here, now, in the cool dark of a Greenwich Village evening, noise spilling out onto the street from the cafes while young couples walked by, oblivious to everything else.

Adult Conversation

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 02:44:00 +0000

There are magic moments in the lives of one's children when - every so often - they linger after dinner is over. Instead of clearing their plate and bolting unexcused for the Nintendo - again, every rare once in a while - they sit, and engage with the grownups in adult conversation. These moments, like the one Saturday night at Jill and Mikes, are to be cherished.

There we were, pondering the remains of a vanquished pizza before turning our attentions to the supercritical cake-shaped mass of chocolate menacing us from the center of the table. Okay, maybe it wasn't the conversation that kept the kids there, but they were making a good show of it.

It's also times like these when you get the nerve to ask things, things you feel like you ought to know about your friends, but somehow, never had the nerve to ask. Devon decided it was time:

"So," she began, "I'm kind of embarrassed, but I have to ask…"

Emmy smiled reassuringly. "Yes?"

Devon hesitated, but regained her composure and blurted it out: "Ninjas or Pirates?"

Emmy didn't bat an eye: "Ninjas. In a second."

"Ninjas or Samurai?"

"Ninjas. Duh."

Another pause.

"Ninjas or unicorns?" We'd skipped right over the whole zombies-vs-unicorns thing. Clearly that was too 2010.

"Ninjas." Emmy was starting to look bored.

"Care Bears?"

"What? Versus Ninjas?" This time she had to think, but came down on the side of Ninjas again.

Mike and I decided to weigh in - we weren't so sure. I mean, ninjas have throwing stars and all, but Care Bears have a range weapon. They could just set up a perimeter and hold it. There wasn't a lot of literature on the respective ranges of throwing stars vs rainbows, though, which would make all the difference.

Jill called time-out for some clarification on the whole Care Bear rainbow thing. You see, according to Wikipedia,

"The Care Bears' ultimate weapon is the "Care Bear Stare," in which the collected Bears stand together and radiate light from their respective tummy symbols. These combine to form a ray of love and good cheer which could bring care and joy into the target's heart."

Caution: contemplating the semantic implications of a "stare" emanating from one's "tummy" may be hazardous to your health. Don't do it.

So then, Teletubbies - where did they fit in? What did they radiate from the TVs in their bellies, and how would they do against zombies?

At some point, I'm sad to say, the conversation turned silly. There was mention of a Barbie vs My Little Pony cage match, and somehow tribbles came into the conversation. Fortunately, the chocolate kicked in shortly after, and I don't remember much else.

(Yes, it's been a slow week down here at the Roadtrip Blog. But if you have to ask: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_versus_Ninjas)

Quake Fairy!

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:13:00 +0000

I was going to write again about settling in to my new routine, except that the past 48 hours haven't been very routine. Yesterday morning, I had no idea I'd be going to Ghana next week. Yesterday afternoon, I had my seat assignments for the flight and was scrambling to get my visa paperwork in order. This morning, well, I'm not going.

Bit of a relief, actually, regardless of how fun it would have been. But the Google team that's going doesn't need me there as much as they'd initially thought, and after some consultation around the room, we decided that life would just be simpler all around if I stayed home.

Where there are some interesting things afoot. The Quake Fairy has visited us from halfway around the world, and left us a gift. Lots of gifts, actually. Four big FedEx boxes of plaster dusted belongings that were left in the Grand Chancellor Hotel when it partially collapsed in the Christchurch earthquake. Demolition workers dismantling the building gathered up all the belongings they found in our room and turned them over the US Antarctic Program. USAP staff sorted and packed them, then sent everything that looked like ours via air freight, where, after a couple of days at the hands of FedEx, it landed on our doorstep this afternoon.

No point in trying to get any work done once I'd heard it had arrived.

As far as we can tell, it's all there. Yes, my old seven-continents passport. My computer. My backup disk with all the photos. My notebook. Packages of crushed Ritz crackers and Mentos dusted with hotel plaster. Dirty laundry that has been moldering for almost nine months in an airtight nylon bag. Devon's favorite pair of pants. The missing car keys. My razor. Crap - my razor; does that mean I need to shave? I'd told everyone I'd only grown the beard because the quake took my razor. Umm… Anyhow.

Lots of stuff we've already replaced. Lots of stuff we could never have replaced. Our living room looks like a yard sale, with stuff strewn all over, wherever we left it as we dug through the bags looking for - ooh ooh ooh, look, here it is!

Anyhow. Pics up at https://picasaweb.google.com/109923111311395991183/20111108ChchStuff

Speaking of which, my Liberia pictures - oh, I really meant to write about Liberia today - it's the runoff election! But the Liberia pictures are at https://picasaweb.google.com/109923111311395991183/LiberiaElection2011 - I think some of them are pretty awesome.

And now for something completely different...

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:29:00 +0000

Peace and quiet.

Really. Our endless summer reluctantly petering out as the rains finally came. Amazing how late it's stayed warm - played havoc with the garden, I can tell you. The first pumpkin of the summer went bad and rotted in place; couple of months ago I turned its dried, leathery remains under the soil with a trowel just to have it out of the way. Now we've got new pumpkins coming up from the seeds. It's November, folks - November. The green beans, too - the original vines paid their last respects some time in September. Jeremy and I pulled what we could of the dried husks and shelled them; got a quart or two that we'll use once winter sets in. If we remember, of course. But of the beans that fell - you can't pick and shell beans without at least a few going astray - a dozen seem to have mistaken our tardy autumn for an early spring, and gotten a head start. They're about five feet tall by now, and I pulled a handful of fresh beans off the new vines this morning. November, I tell you.

The jalapenos and cukes have been more reasonable, at least. We'd never had any luck growing peppers before, so I was a bit surprised when this one thrived. Still thriving, for that matter. Has given us a couple dozen pods at least. Thing is, it's given me pause to realize that I don't actually have any recipes for jalapenos, so they've ripened, red, crinkly and hot as all get-out on the bush. Really crazy hot. I'm used to those little slices of canned jalapenos that you find in Mexican restaurants, and believe me - this is a whole different world.

The cucumbers. One of the few vegetables that our kids will reliably eat, so they've been wonderful companions in our garden, if a little overenthusiastic. Couple of months ago, one of the vines snaked its way over to the adjacent cage of Romas and snuck out the back. I'd gone up on the wall to get at some hard-to-reach tomatoes and found myself confronted with a posse of four or five enormous feral cukes hiding on the far side. Managed to rehabilitate one of them, if I recall, but the others had to be put down (resisting the temptation here to claim that we split one of the others to construct a dugout canoe).

Yes, it's been a good summer for the garden. But judging from the forecast, summer's just looked at her watch and done a very hurried look-at-the-time-I-must-be-going. Temperatures are supposed to head south over the next few days, and our little eager beaver beans and pumpkins are going to get the surprise of their brief and tragic lives. Ah well.

Speaking of beavers, we've also had the company of a raccoon from time to time over the past couple of weeks. No, we haven't seen him, but he's taken to stopping by our yard and rolling up the lawn to look for grubs underneath. Really efficient about it - couple of times a week, I need to go out back and roll everything back into place.. Wouldn't be so bad except that he's haphazard about it, and I find myself playing jigsaw puzzlemaster, rotating and arranging these irregular square-yard-sized chunks of turf, trying to figure out where all the pieces go. It could be worse - it could be much worse.

So that's the news from the west coast equivalent of Lake Wobegon. But it's late, and tomorrow's going to be a long day. Outside, it sounds like the rain's moving in again. It's a nice, peaceful, quiet sound.

Unexpected

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:48:00 +0000

The framing of our lives can change so quickly. Sometimes you know it's coming, like when you're flying into West Africa. One moment you're at the door of your comfy, climate-controlled pampering euro-styled Delta Airlines 767, the next you're confronting the teeming mass of Liberia's harsh poverty, cracked concrete, rust-colored and searing hot.

Sometimes you know it's coming, and sometimes you don't.

One minute, you're joking with your kids about when the pizza will arrive. Katie and her mom are there too. The next moment you're on your knees at the center of a crowd. Chairs are overturned at the table behind you. The mother's calling 911, and the father's thrusting his limp, unconscious little girl into your arms, asking, begging if you know the Heimlich maneuver.

Some part of your mind tries to reconstruct how you got from Point A to Point B so quickly. There was noise at the table behind you. Not surprising - it's Friday night at Applewood Pizza, and place is teeming with loud unruly offspring scantly under the control of their parents. There's plenty of yelling, but this sounds different. Someone stands up quickly, in a way that suggests they don't care that they've just knocked over a few chairs. If you were in a bar, you'd be moving out of the way of a fight.

But he's not yelling at anyone - he's yelling for help. Is there a doctor? Do you know the Heimlich maneuver? My little girl. Anyone?

He's yelling for help, and the circle around him widens, staring down at the spectacle, trying to make it real. A man on his knees, holding a ragdoll sleeping child. Yelling, trying to hold down his rising panic. Somehow, you're the only person who's stepped forward. You Are Terrified.

He fixates on you: You know the Heimlich maneuver? You nod. And you think you know the Heimlich maneuver for toddlers. But no one else has moved from the circle. You decide to drop the "think" part. You did this in First Aid class. On a plastic dummy. Crap Crap Crap Crap This is For Real.

Suddenly, the child is in your hands. She feels just like a small child, like a sleeping baby gone down for a nap, limp and warm and pink with bows and crinoline. Amid the overturned chairs and yelling, she looks lovely and peaceful as you kneel with her in your arms. Except that, unless you do the Right Thing Right Now, she may die. Right Here. Right Now.

Your mind separates from the action as you watch yourself turn her on your arm. This is why we practice, this is why we practice. Oh-God-I-wish-I'd-practiced-this. Chest against your forearm, head cradled in the same hand. Raise her vertically to check for breathing while trying to remember where on the back you're supposed to whack. Shoulder blades, right? How hard? You think "I'm going to be whacking this man's kid." How do you both feel about that?

But first things first: raise her head to check for breathing. A very young man in a flannel shirt and jeans is now on his knees facing you. He asks if he can help.

"Are you a physician?"

"Yes."

You realize that it's been a while since you've drawn a breath.

"All yours."

You take one and hold the girl up while he puts his ear to her mouth. "She's pulling air - that's a very good thing." He says this calmly, with a hand on the father's shouldler. Together, you lay her on her back, on the carpet, while he listens and repeats, in a louder, but still Jedi-like voice of serenity: "She's breathing. It's a good thing."

You step back to make room for the mother and stand - you're not needed here anymore. The young doctor turns back to the girl and gently kneads her tiny hand between his thumb and forefinger, speaking to her in sweet, quiet voice: "Can you hear us, sweetie? Are you feeling okay?" She gags for a second, then takes a deep breath and starts crying, quietly at first, then loudly. Her mother scoops her up and the crowd erupts into soft murmuring.

The doctor's asking the parents questions: "Was she visibly choking?" "Has she ever had seizures?" as the police car pulls up 30 seconds later. You catch the eye of the first responder as he comes through the door and point him to the nativity-like gathering at your feet. The doctor looks up and says "Breathing and conscious." The policeman repeats the phrase into his microphone, and somehow, everything's back to normal. You're done here.

Father cradles the child, talking with the doctor and paramedics while the Applewood staff help the mother assemble their older child - also in a high chair - and the miscellaneous boxes of pizza for an impromptu visit to Stanford hospital. Everything's good, but it's going to be a long night for this family.

At the back of the restaurant, doctor makes his apologies to the friends he was sitting with, kisses his own wife and baby, and heads for the front door; he's going to the hospital with the family. You watch his wife shrug her shoulders and smile at the evening's unexpected turn. She's talking to the friends, saying something like "Well, what do you expect when you marry a doctor? These things happen."

These things do happen. And sometimes, when you're lucky, there's a doctor around. You make a note to look up local first aid refresher classes as soon as you get home - in case there isn't a doctor around next time things take an unexpected turn.

[Honestly, I'd already started a post about how hard it is to keep writing when you transition from the intensity of a place like Liberia to the humdrum existence of family life in Silicon Valley. Gonna leave that one untouched for a while, I think.]

The Count

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:08:00 +0000

[Transcribed from my notebook, scribbled out in the dark as it happened]

The scene is surreal. Two electric Coleman lanterns dimly illuminate the pair of plankwood benches pushed together in the center of the whitewashed concrete school room set up as a makeshift counting table. Shining black faces peer at the lng, thin paper ballots, held up one at a time in the beams of flashlights brought to bear by the dozen weary partisan observers crouched on identical benches lining the walls. They, and the poll workers have been here for 14 hours now, and it's clear to everyone that we're going to be here a lot longer. It's sweltering, and some of them haven't eaten since they reported for duty at 7:00 this morning.

Every few ballots, a dispute breaks out - one candidate's representative objects to a ballot being declared invalid. She says the voter's intent is clear; the counting officer says he's just following the rules, and the room descends into cacophony. Outside, in the dark, the rain keeps falling.

...

One a.m. and there are still 10 more votes tallied for the House contest than were cast in our polling place. All but two of the partisan observers have gone home; one is lying prone, fast asleep on the now-vacated bench while the other struggles to keep her head upright. The three surviving poll workers soldier on reconciling the numbers, straining to keep focused, recounting again.

From the sound of it, we're still better off than the adjoining polling place, which shares an open tin roof that reflects every bout of angry shouting. I keep expecting the verbal brawl to turn physical, and wonder how our precinct security officer will handle it. Shes's a young woman with a sweet smile, an aggressive stance and a gun. She certainly looks like she'd be up to the task.

In a way, she's representative of the new generation of Liberian women. Ten years ago, when the women of Liberia took things into their own hands and ended the country's devastating civil war, something clicked with empowerment here.

But that's not what I meant to write about. Honestly, I've got no idea what I meant to write about. The heat, the chronic lack of sleep have given me and Susan a bad case of what we've been calling "the stupids" - the inability to talk, reason or act intelligently on matters any more intricate than loading another scratch card onto the smartphones we've been been using to keep track of this crazy election. We stink of sweat, mosquito juice and lack of hot running water. We're cranky and punchy at the same time - well past the "laughing inappropriately" stage and looming into "thousand yard stare" territory.

Susan says' she's had worse - during the Albanian election, officials insisted that poll officers and observers remain locked in until the ballots were tallied and reconciled. Which took 36 hours. For making an election agonizing, Liberia's got nothing on the Albanians. But know this: the Liberians want to show the world that they can do this right, and they're going to take as much time as it takes to do it.

[Okay folks - that's it, the last of the "embargoed" Liberia posts. We're all caught up. On posts, at least. I'm back in the States, and trying to catch up on what happens when you leave your project unattended for a couple of weeks. I do promise to put up photos soon, though, and will post again when they're up. Thanks for following along!]

Election Day

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 03:23:00 +0000

Didn't get to sleep stupidly late last night, but didn't get that early bedtime I was hoping for, either. The urgent "Don't go to sleep until you've retrieved the important email" message was, at the end of it all, kind of vacuous. Hours later, when Lonestar had come back up and we'd succeeded in retrieving the damned thing, the contents mostly repeating our previous instructions with one added admonition: "Make sure you get to bed early and get a good night's sleep." Alex, back at Ops, was going to pay dearly for that one - I was sure of it.

But morning was here. Steve was at the veranda tables by 5:50 a.m., waiting for us.

"We talk so much about Liberian time," he said. "I know that today, with you depending on me, I've got to be on American time." Rock on, Steve.

We were out of town, northbound, by six, headed for Mongbain, where we'd decided we were going to watch poll opening. It was our most remote polling station and, by dint of that remoteness, our coolest. Maybe it was the principal's benediction asking that we be sent back there when we were needed - don't want to do anything to rattle a man's faith.

Folks were lined up way out by the time we arrive, an hour before poll start. Some of them had been there since six. The rules didn't have a cut off for how late you could vote - as long as you were in line by the time polling closed, you could stay there until you'd gotten the chance to cast your ballot. But the whole village, and by the look of it, some of the surrounding villages, weren't going to take a chance on missing out. (This, by the way, was a pattern we consistently saw at all the polling stations: everyone showed up at opening, and by the time they reached the front of the line, they'd been waiting in the heat for six or seven hours. The polling stations we visited in late afternoon were practically deserted - in our half hour at Messiah, our last station, not a single voter showed up.)

Anyhow. Back in Mongbain, they were clearly improvising. The cardboard security screens that were supposed to be delivered with the voting materials never arrived, so the Presiding Officer improvised out of available materials. Kudos there - at some of the other stations we saw, they simply set a desk down in the corner and counted on nobody watching.

Improvised voting booth

The start of the vote was a beautiful thing to watch. It was a dance of sorts, with the polling workers stepping through their rehearsed paces: hold up the empty ballot box for all to see, place the lid and read off the numbers of the seals. Arrange the blank ballot books, and set the jar of blue ink for marking voters' fingers. Places, everyone, then call for the queue controller to let through the first person. There was sort of a hush - they'd rehearsed it, but this time, we all knew, it was for real.

Outside the deathly serious flow of the polling place itself, the atmosphere was vaguely festive. Kids playing peekaboo around the corner with the white people, neighbors setting themselves down on the ground, or on stumps, to gossip and play with kids. Folks were settling in for the long haul. And it was going to be a long haul. I figured they'd probably speed up a bit from the roughly four minutes it took them to get the first voter through, but I didn't envy the guys at the back of the line this morning.

After doing our "opening to 30 minutes of observation" at Mongbain, we said our goodbyes and headed back towards Ganta to observe the more urban polling stations on our itinerary. Protocol was that we were to fill out a checklist of our observations: how many party observers were present, whether the numbers of the seals were recorded in the appropriate place, whether the site was free of campaign material etc. We had a clipboard for this, and a stack of sheets for poll openings, closings and observations through the day. Once we had made these observations, we were supposed to copy them to an electronic version of the form on our Carter Center-issued smartphones, and relay them back to Ops at the earliest convenience. Imagine trying to enter responses to about 40 questions on a tiny touch screen while bouncing down an almost impassable road in rural Nimba. We pretty quickly decided that I, the guy who had never in my life gotten carsick, would get to do that enviable task.

The rest of the day was a blur of places, people, and checklists. Some times the polling stations were calm and orderly, sometimes less so. Usually, the Presiding Officer looked like he knew what he was doing. Very frequently he actually did. Sometimes… uh, not so much. The crowds: at Yini School, they waited good-naturedly, lamenting the fact that the line was moving so slowly; at Gbayee, they swarmed angrily, pushing at each other and shouting down the Queue Controller who'd been charged with keeping order in line.

Our job, we reminded ourselves (and others) was to observe; we were prohibited from helping or intervening in any way - all we could do is watch, listen and encourage voters to "use official channels to exercise their rights."

At the YMCA - yes, Ganta has a YMCA, of sorts - a man came at us angrily. He wasn't angry at us, but he was furious. He complained that one of the poll workers had told his mother that she was supposed to "vote for Old Ma" (Sirleaf) - or at least, that what she thought he told her. She was illiterate, but knew enough about voting to tell her son what had happened, and he wanted blood. We explained that we were eager to hear what he had to say, but that we were just observers, and repeated the "use official channels" line (though we did take the liberty of pointing out that, if he wasn't comfortable filing the complaint with the Presiding Officer here, he could do it at any of the other polling stations).

Steve casts his vote

It was frustrating, seeing things done wrong, or inefficiently, and not being able to step in and say "You know, this would go a lot more smoothly if you…." But that was the nature of our role, central to the agreement that let us be there in the first place. We could ask the Presiding Officer questions - how many people had voted and the like. But we couldn't approach him with problems or complaints. That was the job of the Liberians.

Mostly, the stuff we saw wasn't intentional - really, I don't think any of it was. It was just symptomatic of folks stepping through a complicated dance of a process that they'd never experienced before, and things were bound to go wrong. Still - maddening.

Anyhow, the day was a blur until suddenly, somehow, it was 6:00. We'd covered 14 polling stations and who knows how many miles in 10 hours of traversing Nimba County. We counted down the final seconds at Messiah Christian Academy. Liberia had voted. But our day wasn't done yet. No, not nearly. Now the votes had to be counted.

As ready as we can be

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 02:58:00 +0000

[Again, a reminder: these posts are all one week old, and I'm putting them up in sequence, roughly corresponding to when they were written, to give a feel for my time in Liberia as it happened.]

9:30 p.m. the evening before "E Day", and we're about as ready as we can be. We'll be up at five, on the road at six, and if all goes according to plan, we'll reach Mongbain, our first stop of the day by seven, in plenty of time to observe the polling place opening procedures. The Liberian Election Procedures Manual specifies in painstaking detail who will do what and how tomorrow in every polling place in this country, in what order the seals on the ballot boxes are to be verified, applied and documented. What latitude the Ballot Controller has in folding the stamped ballots before giving them to verified voters. On which finger of which hand voters will have the I-have-voted ink applied, and when. And - since this is a post-conflict country - what to do if they don't have that finger, or any fingers, or any hands. How the Ballot Box Controller should shake the box to get more room if it begins to clog (the BBC is not supposed to touch the actual ballots, even to give a push to one that didn't go all the way in).

No one's counting on all these rules to be followed to the exact letter. But the Liberians are rightfully proud of having gotten this election together themselves, and we're willing to bet that this pride will keep them close to official protocol. Really, though, we're not looking for little slips of whether the ink is applied before the ballot goes in the box or after (the manual says "after they have voted" - leaving it ambiguous on whether "voting" refers to the marking of the ballot or the placing of it in the box). We're looking for patterns of behavior that are inconsistent with fair and transparent elections.

We'll spend roughly 30 minutes at each of the dozen stations on our priority list, crisscrossing two districts in a semi-random order designed to make our arrival at any precinct as unpredictable as possible. We start an hour before the polls open, and stay until the tally of polling place ballots have been signed and posted, and the re-sealed boxes have been delivered to the county magistrate. Our laptops and phones are fully charged. Checklists, spare food and water are packed. Emergency numbers programmed onto our phones - we're ready for anything we can think to be ready for.

My half of the gear

Just before we turn in for the night, a last-minute text message comes in: "Check email for important last minute instructions. Do not go to sleep this evening until you have received them." And then? Then Lonestar cell service goes down throughout the city. Zero bars. I check all three of my phones and the GPRS modem. Nothing. Embassy folks on the patio confirm it - the signal's gone. Crap. This may be a long night.

[Turns out to have been just a local Lonestar outage lasting about half an hour; the other cell carriers were unaffected. But Susan and I had a nervous few minutes, speculating that - if you wanted to disrupt an election and instigate some cross-border mayhem - the first thing you'd do is take down the country's communication network, wouldn't you?]

About last night...

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 02:51:00 +0000

I guess I kind of left everyone hanging about our accommodations. The morning after the earlier-described Night From Hell, Susan and I stumbled down to the breakfast area. We'd met LtCdrs Ketchum and Ketchum from the US Embassy in Monrovia the afternoon before (yes, they're both Lieutenant Commanders - she's with the Coast Guard, he's with the Army). They were on their way to Harper, in the Southeast, estimating that they had another day and a half's drive ahead of them, so they'd brought "hotel camping" gear along with them, and were making coffee and oatmeal on the camp stove they'd set up in their front room.

"You have a front room?!"
"Yeah - don't you?" He showed me.

"You have air conditioning!?!?!"
He looked puzzled - "What, you don't have air conditioning here? You're braver than I thought."

Try "less informed". Our sullen innkeeper had given me and Susan the boiler room accommodations above the kitchen. Turns out that in the other rooms out back, for an extra $25 (twice the price of our rooms), you could get a lovely two-room suite with a separate sitting room, a real shower, a memory foam(ish) mattress and, valued beyond all price, electric air conditioning.

We bolted for the the office. Put on our best "good morning" smiles, gave our sweetest "How do you do"s, and asked if, just maybe, they might have a couple of empty rooms out back. Innkeeper was in a much more cheerful mood this morning and gave out that yes, they'd be happy to upgrade us to the executive accommodations. In fact, she thought they had a couple of rooms available right now, if we'd like to move our stuff over.

Last night was blissfully survivable. Enjoyable, even.

...

The town was alive as evening fell, practically generating electricity from the noise and motion. Campaigns trucks, stuffed to overflowing with singing, chanting teenagers clad in their party colors patrolled the streets blaring music and slogans from oversize roof-mounted speakers. Every candidate had their own theme song; the sidewalk sensation was one of slowly spinning the tuning dial of an enormous car radio cranked up to eleven.

A block short of the end of our early evening walk, we were hailed by a voice from the veranda of a roadside bar. Ken and Lourdes, another couple from the Embassy, were having a couple of drinks with their drivers Michael and Valentine, and insisted we join them. (The Embassy had insisted that every group have fully-redundant transportation, which meant two cars and two drivers for two passengers). We'd met them earlier that afternoon; like the Ketchums, they were headed for the Southeast and were overnighting at Alvino. Apparently, Alvino is the "Ricks" of Nimba County - everybody goes to Alvino.

Richard was tall and thin and quiet. Valentine was not, and exuded boyish mischief in a way few grown men can. You got the idea he and Ken would happily drink each other under the table if they didn't have a job to do in the morning.

A block down the street there was some sort of ruckus: people were shouting and dense black smoke billowed into the air. We craned our necks from the safety of the veranda, but Valentine turned to Susan and said, urgently, "Quick - give me your camera!" A moment later, he was across the street, waving down a random passing motorcycle and hopping on its back toward the conflagration.

Ken nodded his head, unsurprised, and smiled. Ahyup - that's Val for you.

Valentine returned ten minutes later, disappointed - it was just a trash fire that had gotten out of control. But he had gotten photos from up close.

Speaking of "Rick's" and Casablanca, Hotel Alvino also has a nightclub, a long squat brown-tiled building across the small parking lot from the back rooms. Once the generator kicked in for the night, it was lit with red light from behind its mirrored windows. Susan, Steve and I had our precinct map spread at our usual table in the open-air restaurant area when we were approached by three young women who had been camped out at another table, back in the corner. After a brief conversation with Steve they returned to their perch, occasionally looking over to glare at us. Steve explained that they were part of the local prostitute contingent, and wanted some info on the potential client he had at his table. He told them that Susan was my wife, and that, you know, she just wouldn't approve.

The Lay of the Land

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 02:39:00 +0000

Ganta, 10 Oct 2011 - E-Day minus 1

Monday: visited more polling places, talked to Liberians on the street, er, dirt paths, and tried to get a feel for the mood. It was good, really - people were excited about the election. They wanted their candidate to win, but really, it was the election itself that was the important thing. Makes me feel good.

Liberian border officials

We headed down the twisted dirt road out to the Guinean border, five minutes from Alvino, to talk with the guards at the border station and get their feeling for the situation. One of the "worst case" scenarios we'd been briefed on back in Monrovia was cross-border violence, guns and men coming across the bridge from Guinea if things got bad after the election. Yeah, sunshine and ponies, I know. Guards here weren't worried though - said that they were sealing the border this evening as a precaution, but the vibe they'd been getting was fine. Oh, and while we were there, would we like to walk across the bridge ourselves? Yeah, it was fine.

Still, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous. Nimba is constantly pointed to as the powder keg of the region. If violence breaks out, this is where it'll start. Consensus is that there's little chance of any craziness until tabulated results are announced a couple of days from now, and by then we're scheduled to be long gone. But one of our "local sources" enumerated the ways things could go wrong in a hurry. Some of them seemed trivial: media-announced tallies being even a few votes off from the official numbers, for example. Nimba County is full of ex-combatants and ex-generals - men with guns and men with organizations that can mobilize them quickly if they felt disgruntled.

Susan asked if there were any hot spots particularly close to Ganta. He looked like he was trying to find a nice way to say it: Ganta is a hot spot.

In parting, he offered us a word of wisdom: "You've got the UNMIL hotline, right? Just remember that, when you're reporting violence to UNMIL, make sure you're not visible. Otherwise the violence will reach you before UNMIL does." Criminy.

County election supervisor shows us the ballot boxes,
being guarded at the local police station

Mongbain Village

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 05:11:00 +0000

[Again, a reminder: these posts are all one week old, and I'm putting them up in sequence, roughly corresponding to when they were written, to give a feel for my time in Liberia as it happened.]

Nimba County, 09 Oct 2011

In one of my dreams last night, Africa was trying to kill me. It wasn't like the continent had some anthropomorphized intent, it was more like I was a foreign object that its enormous and well-developed immune system was autonomously trying to eliminate from its body. The heat, the insects were just part of that. Food, water. Bad roads and random acts of violence if you got past the first line of defense. People from "the ice" are fond of saying Antarctica is a harsh continent. It's true - Antarctica doesn't care whether you live or die. But Africa? Sometimes you could swear it's trying to kill you.

Thoughts like that can be terrifying, paralyzing. And then? Then you have a day like today.

There's a polling place in the village of Mongbain, deep in the forest east of Ganta. To get there, you head north to Zuluyee and stop to ask directions to the side road. You have to ask directions, and Susan and I are deeply grateful for Steve's natural inclination to pull over and ask at regular intervals.

"Heymifren - pleeshome wedeygot dawayta Mongbain?" I swear - it's not pigdin, Liberian is a full-blown dialect, branched off from American English 170 years ago. It's beautiful once you get the rhythm of it, and once you know what you're listening for, it makes perfect sense. What Steve was asking the young man at roadside was, literally "Hey, my friend - please show me where they've got the way to Mongbain?"

And the young man - like all others we met, is glad to oblige. In this case, the road is an almost invisible path between two market stalls at the side of the highway.

We weave our way through in the car, windows rolled down and leaning out to smile and make eye contact. The children are naturally curious, pointing at Susan, chanting "White girl! White girl!" like American kids might chant "Justin!" or "Taylor!" at the passing of the appropriate celebrity. It's weird and unnerving - but it's also addictive. I think some part of us is wired to respond to this thing. It's some sort of Jesus syndrome, where people want to see you, touch you, talk to you just for who - or better, what - you are. Of course, like most addictions we're wired for, it'll turn you into a basket case when you get too much.

The track gets wider once we clear the town, but not much better. We're shimmying through gullies, precariously inching across bridges made of no more than a car's-width of logs lined up lengthwise across small rivers. At one point, we pile out to clear fallen branches from the path - Steve hacks away at them with his machete while Susan and I pull the pieces clear of the track.

As we roll along, we pass children, eager to wave, deliberately indifferent women and young men with unflinching steel-eyed gazes. But the smiles seem to work with just about everyone. I remind myself that when these men grew up, an approaching stranger was just as likely to try and kill or abduct them as anything else; you survived by being prepared to fight or flee. When something like that is bred into you, I don't see it ever going away.

The morning sun hurts my eyes, but I've decided it's important to take off my precious, protective glacier goggles and make eye contact. I want them to see my smile, a real smile. I'm on their turf, and it's inexplicably important to me that they realize that I'm not a threat.

I try to smile in a way that makes it clear I'm asking for a sign of welcome, it seems to be working. I realize that I can actually count the beats: eye contact into a steely gaze, smile, two... three... four, and bang: eyebrows go up in recognition, and I get a smile back. Usually. There's sometimes a wave back, and often a few words of English thrown in. I do my best to respond in kind.

It's 9:30 when we break out into the clearing of Mongbain. Steve pulls up short and explains to someone on foot why we're here; he tells us to follow him and runs ahead. We're here today to visit the polling place. Susan wants to see how it's set up, to talk with the villagers and gauge their awareness of the election. By the time we pull up to the round, open-walled thatch hut that will serve as their polling station, we've got a good fraction of the village in tow.

The chief greets us, and Susan shifts into gear. As I said, she's done this a bunch, and it's a polished process. She explains why we're here: we've been invited by the government to watch how the election goes. One of the older men declares "Free and Fair!" and the kids take it up in a chant. They, like everyone in Liberia, seem to be caught up in the enthusiasm.

Principal shows us the new school

Susan asks if the candidates have visited - no, but their representatives have. And what did they do while they were there? They had rallies, they talked. Anything else? She's looking for something. Oh, they gave money to the village. She latches on - to the people who attended the rallies? She asks it innocently, as though that would be the natural way to do it (though that, of course, would be vote buying - a big no-no.) The chief shakes his head - no, no, they gave it to the village, to him, the chief. He says this without hesitation - it's clear that he's not hidden that from the others. And what did you use it for? The new school - they're buiding a new schoolhouse for the younger kids.

This all sounds good, fine, and Susan switches to a new tack: so, do you know who you're going to vote for?The chief looks worried and shakes his head vigorously: "No, no - vote is secret. No one can know!" The Greek chorus of kids gleefully chants "Secret vote! Secret vote!" She backs off and explains that she wasn't asking who they were voting for, she just wanted to know if they'd made up their mind. He's relieved, and smiles at the clarification: "Oh yes, yes. But no one can tell anyone else." Good, good. But what if the person you voted for doesn't win? His gesture is a universal one, recognizable from Brooklyn to Monrovia: palms out, shoulders hunched, head tilted to the side. The meaning is clear: "Eh, what can you do?"

(Much later, Susan explains to me that, in some places, the village chief tells everyone who to vote for. The fact that even the kids knew that each person's vote was their own secret meant that these guys had their civics nailed.)

We ask directions to the next village, and the chief offers to ride along and show us the way; we'll be coming back by the same route, so we can drop him off on our way out. He and Steve talk while Susan and I gawk at the dense jungle encroaching on our narrow track. We're as far out into the bush as you can get in a car, and even then it's dodgy when the rain comes. The County election supervisor has told us that on election day, they're using porters on foot to deliver the ballots, rather than trusting mechanized transportation.

Our car pops out into the next clearing after a few minutes and we pull up in front of a line of mud and thatch houses. A line of young women - girls really - with babies on their backs approach from the left, while a line of steel-gazed young men eye us from the shade of the houses.

I take a deep breath and climb out, giving my best "permission to come aboard?" smile to the tall, well-muscled man who seems to be riding point for the group. He's wearing a low-cut tank top revealing the extensive tribal scar tattoo on his chest. I find myself counting beats as I keep the smile, trying to hold eye contact. I get to "four" and almost run out of nerve before I think to extend my arm for a handshake. He throws his head back a notch, breaks into a broad grin of recognition and takes my hand. I get the full Liberian shake: low grip, high grip, back to low, then finger snap as you pull back. We're cool in his book, and in a heartbeat I've literally got my hands full greeting everyone else.

Over on the other side of the car, Susan's been talking with the young women and teaching the kids how to high five. She asks one kid "Are you going to vote?" No, but they know about the election. An older man, probably the chief of this village, has introduced himself and is now fielding questions - I was too busy with the young Turks by the houses and missed the beginning. I kick myself - why didn't I ask them about the election?

He explains that of course the entire village knows about the election. That on Tuesday morning, they're going to walk to Mongbain to vote. The whole village. Together. And they're excited as all hell about it. An elderly, almost toothless man in beautiful white cotton kurta makes his way through the crowd and greets us in impeccable American English. He introduces himself and his wife, who follows in a greenblueyellowred swirl of gorgeous African Sunday best, and thanks us, thanks the Carter Center, for coming out to their village. For coming to Liberia. They must be very old, perhaps even by American standards, but the energy and sincerity they radiate - yes, radiate - is palpable.

Hours later, on the road back to Ganta, I was still playing the moment over, again and again. I'd been focusing on the enthusiasm of kids, but there was something much deeper going on with the grown ups. When we dropped the chief back in Mongbain, the school principal insisted on making a benediction over our visit. Everyone dropped their heads and he thanked the lord for sending us. He asked that we be blessed in our travels and in our mission, and that God would send us whenever Liberia needed help from above. It was beautiful, heavy stuff to have on our shoulders, and it stuck with me.

I realized that, for the kids, the excitement was just that there were white people in their village. But for the principal, for the elderly couple, for all the adults who had lived through the horrors of the war, our presence there had a deeper meaning. We were international election observers, our significance to peace in Liberia every bit as important them as the dove was to Noah. I thought about their faces, thought about their smiles, and let the thoughts wash over me. And I realized that my smile had turned to a goofy grin - it really did feel good to be here.

Morning

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 15:19:00 +0000

Ganta - 09 Oct 2011

Morning - it's hard to muster words for last night. The stifling, airless heat, radiating up from the floor, in from the walls. The plastic free-standing fan sparking and balking, in a pathetic and ineffectual attempt to provide any breeze. A forgotten TV crackling talk show nonsense somewhere down the hall while an argument erupts from the street below. The sound of diesel generators masks everything else.

I've pulled the curtain away from the window to give the fan what little assistance I can. I'm not worried about mosquitoes coming in through the gaping holes in the screen, but the mice worry me; I keep startling at the imagined sound of something scraping on the grate.

The mosquito net is a mess; I've jury rigged it in a way that generally seals the bed, but it lays low across my waist; I've got to keep my legs under the blanket or they'll be easy prey. Every movement snags the net and pulls it down closer to my face; it catches as I roll over, bringing the not-quite-large enough bedsheet up with it. I wake - realizing that I've been asleep for at least a little - curled in a ball with my face against the bare mattress. I was dreaming of a vortex pulling me down into darkness, with spiders and mice nipping at my fingers. I roll, carefully onto my back; I don't want to think about what's on that mattress. There's a stinging sensation on the back of my hands; no dream there - I've been bitten by some sort of insect. My feet too. My head is pounding in the darkness, I'm sweating and short of breath. Hypochondria sets in: heart attack? I'm toast if it is. Malaria? Plausible. Anxiety attack? More likely. Dehydration? Let's try that one first.

I've tucked my water bottle under the net, so it's easy to test the dehydration hypothesis. But there's no room to sit up, so I choke and cough as the water comes down the back of my throught. Still, the remedy is obvious. I drain the bottle and ponder fighting my way out of the netting to refill it for more. The liter I've just downed has given me a glimmer of hope that I'll make it through the night. I illuminate my watch: 11:30 p.m. - seven more hours, then three more days. I wonder if, just maybe, a heart attack would have been more merciful.

[Again, a reminder: these posts are all one week old, and I'm putting them up in sequence, roughly corresponding to when they were written, to give a feel for my time in Liberia as it happened.]

Hotel Alvino

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 05:20:00 +0000

photo by Susan Hyde

Ganta, 8 Oct 2011

6:30 p.m, and the storm is coming in. It's been impossibly - no, insufferably hot since we stepped out into another world. Here, deep in Upper Nimba County, we're just a couple of miles from the Guinea border. The heat and the dust, the noise and chaos spilling from the awning-covered raised "sidewalks" - it really is the wild west saloon town, transported to highlands of West Africa. As an outsider, unfamiliar with the conventions, unable to read the social cues and hopeless at the dialect, the sense of lawlessness is almost paralyzing.

...

Our rooms. Building probably from the mid-60s. Linoleum, painted concrete walls, thin mattress, with strings from the ceiling for your mosquito net. Bathroom: fixtures are there - sink, toilet, tiled corner with a shower hose, but of course nothing's hooked up. Two big buckets of water in the corner are provided for our needs. Electricity comes on at night, officially at 6:00, but in practice whenever the caretaker gets around to firing up the generator. Ceiling fan over the bed is probably original equipment - swings wildly and makes an ominous noise reminiscent of a Bond villian's secret lab when switched on. Better to stick with the plug-in fan at the window.

...

I'm tired, I'm sticky, my eyes hurt. I'm dirty as all hell, covered in bug spray, and looking forward showering out of a bucket in the morning. The sign above the toilet says "Please place all human waste, condom and cortex in trash bin." I think I know what that means, but don't know how to ask the folks downstairs delicately. Yes, I'm feeling damned uncomfortable. And while I don't think I'm actually miserable, I expect I could let myself go there in a hurry. We're here for four days, so I'm sure the time for "miserable" will come. Likely more than once.

Generator flickers again. Crap - gotta go. One of the mice (I'm telling myself they're mice ) we saw prowling the hallway has slipped under my door and darted into the narrow space under my bed. Then again, no, I don't have to go anywhere - don't see that there's much I can do about it; might as well keep writing. Just need to make sure my stash of Cliff Bars are suitably secure. Ah, adventure.

...

Plan for tomorrow is to scout out an election-day trajectory through our assigned polling places. Figure out which one we're going to watch for the opening of polls, where we're going to watch the closing and counting of ballots, and which others we're going to visit in-between. Awkward bit is that TCC rules require us to be off the roads by dark. Which is about 6:00 - the same time polls close. So, technically, we have to be back before we've completed our duties. But Susan's done this before, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Venezuela, Indonesia, Albania - I think a couple more, too. She'll figure out how to get the job done.

[Again, a reminder: these posts are all one week old, and I'm putting them up in sequence, roughly corresponding to when they were written, to give a feel for my time in Liberia as it happened.]

Retrospective: North to Nimba

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:36:00 +0000

[Back in the states now, but I'm posting notes from last week, while we were in "news embargo" in Liberia]

Monrovia - Ganta, Oct 08, 2011

Nominal dawn departure has a few hiccups. We're up at five, stumbling down the the lobby in search of caffeine and a place to drop our bags. The Krystal staff has gotten up early for us, with fresh fruit and omelettes on demand. Doesn't get any better than this. Well, maybe it does: there's torrential downpour that's been going since last night, and most of us have hours of dirt road to traverse to get to our posts.

It's been pointed out to me that I haven't been really clear what I'm doing here, so let me straighten that out quickly. I'm here with the Carter Center, as an election monitor. They've got a joint observation mission with EISA (the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa - don't worry that the letters don't match), fielding about 40 observers. I'm one of the Short Term Observers - an "STO" going into the field about three days before the election (now) to report on conditions leading up to the day of the vote and the election itself. My fellow observers are amazing folks.

So, about that dawn departure: some of the drivers never got their per-diems, and take their STO teams to rental car office to wait for opening hours so they can get paid before they're willing to the road. Someone's muffler apparently fell off. A couple of the cars were parked in somewhere. A couple of the drivers just didn't show up. Davor is handling it with aplomb, augmented by a constant stream of coffee and cigarettes. "You expect things like this. Honestly, you don't need to get on the road until 10, which is why I told everyone six. If I'd said 10, you'd be here until two in the afternoon."

He works out an arrangement which shuttles us back over to TCC headquarters and manages in a little more vehicle juggling; by the time we're rolling down the driveway at 9:40, I've caught up on email, recharged all my devices and slipped in a 30 minute nap on the couch at the back of the business center.

Our driver is Steve. Steve Zeon, from the outskirts of Monrovia. He has friends up in Nimba, and spends more time there than most Monrovians, which is why he's been assigned to be our local minder on the road.

Steve's mother named him after the brother of the Liberian president at the time, who died in a plane crash the day he was born. He's twenty-something, and does some electrician jobs on the side; he likes working with electricity, likes working with his hands. Would love to study journalism, too. We spend some time talking about how important journalism is in this country, but no one needs convincing.

Susan asks Steve about the war as we wind our way up the backbone highway to Ganta. He was 10 years old when the men with guns came to his neighborhood, to take children away for the militia. His mother hid him and his 15-year-old sister for days, telling the soldiers all her children had already left home. Susan asks - already knowing the answer - how his life would have been different. Steve shakes his head sadly and does a sort of a whistle. So different, so different. The boys drugged up and send to kill, the girls pressed into sexual slavery; we know there's no point in asking for details here.

Further up the road, we pass Gbanga - Steve points to the place on the hill where Charles Taylor's "training camp" was. Taylor was the last of the warlords to seize power, and the most brutal. His new recruits - the boys he took from the villages he raided - were brought to the camp to be dehumanized, and turned into killing machines. There, they either "graduated" or died; nobody seemed to care which - there were always more boys in the next village.

We pass UN water tankers, up to their wheel wells in the river. Smooth highway leaving Monrovia slowly decays to red dirt potholes. We're driving with one wheel on either side of the ditch at road's edge, pushing the edge of the pavement at 40 mph. Tall grass at roadside whips at my shoulder as we pass; the air conditioner hasn't much been working, so we've rolled the windows down and have been leaning into the breeze.

We pass rubber plantations - Steve tells us how, now that the Chinese are here, Firestone's been forced to pay better for raw sap. The Liberians would rather work for the Americans than the Chinese, but they'll sell their rubber to the highest bidder.

As we get to Bong County, we start to see goats. This is one of the contrasts I remember from Ghana: there, in even the poorest villages, there were farm animals. But in all my time in Liberia back in 2010, the only warm-blooded creatures I saw other than the people were stray dogs. Further up country, we pass ducks and pigs. Passing through one village, the car ahead of us hits a piglet - just a few steps too slow behind its mother and siblings running across the road. Susan gasps in dismay as it hits the ground, then picks itself up and limps after its family. Steve starts laughing, and Susan admonishes him: "That's not funny - the poor little pig!" But Steve keeps laughing, laughing for an uncomfortably long time - it's almost as if he can't stop himself. I feel like I have to file this away somewhere in my mind, a ripple noticed on the surface hinting at something deep beneath. I think about the civil war, what he's lived through, and what he's seen. I realize: he's not laughing at the pig; he's laughing at us: is this what we think qualifies as a calamity?

Six hours in, we make it to the edge of town. I have the name of the place we're supposed to stay, the somewhat wishfully-named "Hotel Alvino", and three phone numbers. At our LTO's suggestion, I tried calling the night before, to ensure they knew we were coming, but none of the numbers worked, so we figured we'd play it by ear.

View from "Hotel" Alvino

We roll slowly through the dusty wild west town main street, looking for our digs. There's a faded sign nailed to an ancient tree that punctuates the road branching north and west to the Guinean border just across the river. It announces Alvino's existence in Ganta, but doesn't give an address or any directions. Steve rolls down the window to ask someone for directions (we're oh-so-grateful for his willingnes, eagerness even, to ask for directions). We get steered wrong a couple of times and almost make it out to the river before homing in on the correct building behind a tall wall of whitewashed concrete with an ornamented steel gate.

The bored-looking woman in the darkened, dusty front office has no idea who we are, and seems uninterested in the question of whether there's any room. Eventually, once Steve weighs in on the conversation, it emerges that there are a couple of rooms above the office, but we'll have to come back later, when they're ready. She's clearly annoyed with us: "Liberians, we can sleep anywhere. But you, you need somewhere special." I don't know whether that's an observation, a complaint, or an insult. It doesn't matter - I smile appreciatively and thank her for her attention.

Lunch - or whatever. It's late afternoon and we've all been subsisting on the goodie bag of crackers and cookies that Ops issued us back in Monrovia, supplemented by a massive ziplock bag of homebrew trail mix Susan's husband sent her off with. There's a "Beer Garden" back on the main drag, a block from our hotel, and We slide between a space in the row of tables out front, grateful for the shade and a chance to sit somewhere that isn't bouncing down a potholed dirt highway. Two couples at the next table are gesturing in animated conversation; one of the men tries to lift himself up in his seat, but the plastic chair folds beneath him and he crashes to the floor with the sound of breaking beer bottles. There's brief laughter from the table and then he's up, dusting himself off and walking away as though nothing happened. The angry-looking girl at the table on our left doesn't even glance up.

Steve identifies Angry Girl as our waitress. There's a brief conversation - we haven't picked up the rhythm of the language yet - and Steve asks us if rice and soup is okay. "It's African food." Yeah, rice and soup are okay - sounds great. She sulks off to fetch our plates, glaring after us like she's been sent to clean up after the cat. But the food is great. Hot spicy soup with large cubes of beef, and a plate of brown rice steamed with - I don't know what. The three of us eat quickly.

Rooms are ready by the time we've paid and grabbed a few groceries from the shop across the street. We lug our bags in and Susan gets to work on logistics. She's in charge of assigning observation teams to polling places, and wants to have another look now that we know (approximately) where in the hell we actually are.

We stare back and forth between the numbers and the map. We can't quite make them match up. The heat makes you stupid - it's worse than alcohol, or oxygen deprivation. It dawns on us that we're supposed to check in with the operations center at some point, but can't remember how. And there's the update we're supposed to look for, using the GPRS modem. We stare blankly at the table between two Ph.D.s, three laptops, six different mobile phones and close to our weight in documentation, we're reduced to near blithering.

But we work it out. Susan exchanges SMS messages with Alex at Ops, and we get the modem working. Dark clouds move in, and the air plummets to survivable temperatures. The sun drops behind the horizon like a rock, and on cue, lightning fills the sky.

Retrospective: Security Briefing

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 06:20:00 +0000

[Air France lounge, waiting for AF084 nonstop to San Francisco. A crazy morning, beginning with a call from Devon at 2 a.m. Palo Alto time saying Delta had woken her to say my flight out of Monrovia was cancelled. The flight most of our contingent was on. There are only a dozen flights out the entire week, so you can see how this might cause a bit of logistical scrambling. An hour on the phone to Delta, two hours standing in the same place in line at RIA trying to fix our itinerary. We gave up and just accepted that they'd get us to Paris and let us work out the rest. Crushed in the back of an overstuffed A320, overnight with a layover in Conakry (that's the capital of Guinea, for you geo buffs). There, a wonderful wonderful AF desk agent (thank you Marie Annick Polydor!), juggled our itineraries to put us on a non-stop to SFO leaving in just a couple of hours. In business class.

So, about the backed up blog posts, here's what I'm going to try: we're almost exactly a week from when we, as election observers, went on media blackout. So I'm going to take all the stuff I wrote during that week and, rather than blasting it out all at once, I'm going to try cleaning it up a little and posting it in sequence, roughly timed as I wrote it, but a week late.]

Monrovia - Friday, 07 Oct 2011

More briefings with Davor, we learn the difference between preserving the "safety" and the "security" of the teams. Safety (remaining free of unintentional harm) turns out to cause the statistical lion's share of the problems. Road accidents are the number one cause of injury and death for NGOs in the country. But security issues should not be underestimated for their potential to ruin your day.

We run though the check in procedures: three times a day, at 6-9 a.m., 12-3 p.m. and after 8 p.m. We're prohibited from traveling alone, or at night, and are to check in upon departure from a site and arrival at the destination. If we'll be in transit more than four hours, we're also to check in every three hours.

I find myself becoming increasingly unnerved, as almost all of Davor's examples involve my assignment area ("So, say you're up in Nimba, and..."). I ask, explaining that he's making me nervous.

"Why Nimba? Nothing's happened in Nimba. Ummm, yet. Let me not be too detailed."

I give him my best you're-not-helping look.

"Okay, there's a certain... 'dynamic' in the power struggle in Nimba that suggests it could be an, um... hot spot."

"Look, my last three elections were Afghanistan, Afghanistan and Iraq - I have to justify my existence somehow."

He's definitely not helping.

Late at night

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:50:00 +0000

It's late, and we should all get back to our rooms for some sleep. But somehow, we know that, when this night ends, that magic thread of this crazy adventure will slip out our grip from the "now" into "remember when". Where at that liminal point, like a waking sleeper whose dream is still close enough to hold, before the day intrudes and washes it away to faded memory.

A dozen of us are squeezed in around one of the long folding tables on the covered balcony of the Krystal Ocean Hotel, drinking beer, swapping photos and stories of our time in the field, while the rain comes down in torrents. It's like the last night at camp, and we're huddled around the campfire, not wanting it to end.

Susan's been asked to stay on as an STO until the 18th. Cindy's already agreed, and will be heading back out in the morning: Up country into Lofa and Bong Counties, further north than her last assignment. Another day out on the road, on those crazy roads. The rest of us have another day here to putter, catch up on hot showers, and contemplate our next move. For some, it's back to the desk job; others are trying to squeeze a Skype call through the hotel's trickling connection to interview for a short term spot doing logistics in Kabul, or further afield.

Ah, the roads. I'd thought our high speed blow-out on the way home would be noteworthy. Getting our hands greasy under the car, helping Steve change the tire roadside somewhere in rural Bong with the help of some passing kids and a man from the Bangladesh UN post up the hill. Jack wasn't large enough, so a lot of improvisation and manual lifting: "Okay, on the side, up please. Yes, small more, small more. At good."

A blowout? Heh - Eldrid and Viwemi had three different cars die on them on the way out. Took 36 hours before they reached Sinoe. The problem that plagued Nick and Cindy's car ("Yeah, we had a few flats") was failing windshield wipers. Seems like a small problem, but when you're negotiating through ruts that put your car halfway up the door in mud precariously close to rolling the rest of the way over, it's really nice to be able to see where you're going. "We'd roll down the window and sort of slosh the wiper blade back and forth."

We compared accommodations: Kim and Tereza "won", with millipedes on the floor and rats getting territorial on their bed. No way to hang the mosquito net, and electricity to keep the fan going after 11 pm in the sweltering humid night up in Lofa County. They had good food, though: the Pakistani UN camp was legendary for its meals, and as international observers, they could get in.

Mary was down in Harper, the informal capital of the rural Southeast coast bordering on Cote D'Ivoire: "I'm on a constant dose of two Immodium per day. I also figure I'm bringing home at least three parasites." Her partner was Jeff, who lived in Harper for three years. "I mean, he was drinking the local well water straight. And we had this leftover fish that we kept eating. No, I shouldn't have done that, but Jeff ate it, and there's no way I was going to let him be more badass than me!" At one point, she found "a worm" in the fish; the way she described it, she wasn't talking about something you'd put on a hook. "I made some joke about it and kinda just pulled it out adn pushed it to the corner of the plate. What? Yes, of course I kept eating. I mean, remember: Jeff?"

Conversation turned to medical remedies. Not Cipro - what's the stuff they give cattle in Europe for deworming? Someone explains that they've used Cipro so wantonly in Cambodia that it no longer works for normal intestinal bacterial infections. "They prescribed something that's used to treat gonorrhea here. I was standing at the pharmacy, talking loud enough so that the other folks in line could hear me: Yes, Ha Ha Isn't It Funny to be Taking This Medication For My Intestinal Problem When It's Normally Used To Treat Gonorrhea, Which, Of Course, Isn't What I Have, Ha Ha."

We keep pinballing from topic to topic: Mary jumps in on this one too: "Cambodia? Yeah, tell me about Cambodia. I got flashed by a monk in saffron robes at Angkor Wat. I mean, what's up with that?"

It was 1:00 a.m. and we all knew we really should turn in for the night. We kept saying so. And then Scott, or Kim, or Pete would say "Oh god, and when we stopped at the roadside stand for fried plantains, they were wrapped in Danish newspaper, and...". And, and, and. And inexplicably, another hour washed away like red dirt in the rain on the street below.

Inbound

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:43:00 +0000

Five days deep in Nimba County can take a toll on a guy. Back on the outskirts of Monrovia, inbound. Gonna hold off posting much until after TCC press conference 24 hours from now, but at this point, I'm out of the woods for all practical purposes.

- sent from my phone -

Checking in

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:45:00 +0000

In brief, things are well. Lots of ups and down, literally and figuratively. Writing lots; will post on 12th, once we're out of the woods, figuratively and literally.

- sent from my phone -

Outbound

noreply@blogger.com (David Pablo Cohn) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 07:36:00 +0000

Friday night, and we're ready. As ready as we're going to be. Davor, Mariusz, Susan, Tom and the rest have given us all the preparation they can cram into two days. We file through TCC local headquarters and pick up the last of our gear. Badges, sat phone and netbook. papers, papers papers documenting our status as international observers. First aid kits and mosquito netting. Spare gear - flashlights, ponchos, soap and shampoo. Then there's nothing left to do but step out into the night, pack up, and get as much sleep as we can before tomorrow's dawn departure.

Impressions: indifferent rain spattering dark wet cobblestones leading down the hill. The street is lit by anonymous headlights from yet another convoy of white SUVs snaking through the barricades in front of the American Embassy. Static on the radio, a badly-tuned station broadcasting the rally downtown - if you focus on it, you can make out the sounds of the speaker calling out to the crowd; rhetorical questions, a thundering response, like the ocean heard through a tube-radio sea shell. Footsteps on hard marble, the sound of duffles dragged up the stairs to our respective rooms for the night. Hugs and awkward envoies, signing off until we see each other again on Wednesday, when this is all over.

Tonight is Kol Nidre, the evening of Judaism's most solemn holy day. I had misgivings about coming here, now. About skipping The Day. There's a rabbinic saying about how the study of Torah (the Hebrew Bible) is the highest virtue, because it leads the student to all other virtues. But what, a Jew might ask, is the point of all these virtues? We're taught to ask; asking questions, wrestling with the questions, and probing, always probing the answers is so deeply woven into our culture that it's the given name of our people: Yisra-El, the "God wrestler".

So then, why? There's another Jewish concept in our tradition - Tikkun Olam: "healing" or "repairing" the earth. I could be wrong, but as best as I can tell, it doesn't rely on a theological loop - it's grounded, literally grounded in the idea of fixing the ills that plague our planet as an end to itself.

There's an old joke about Jeb, the old West Texan who hears on the radio that a flood's coming (you've heard this, right?). His neighbors come by and say "We're heading for higher ground, Jeb, come along with us!" Jeb says "No, no, God will take care of me." Storm clouds begin pouring rain, and a State Trooper braves his way to Jeb's door. "Come with me, sir, we've got to get you out of here!" Jeb refuses - he's been a devout man all his life, and is sure God will take care of him. The waters rise, and as Jeb sits on his roof, a National Guard helicopter swoops out of the torrential storm. "Grab the rope, sir! Grab the rope!" Jeb waves them off. Well, as you might guess, it's not long before Jeb is standing there in front of God, mad as hell: "I prayed to you every day of my life! Went to schul, kept kosher, the whole nine yards! I thought I could count on you to save me - why did you let me down?!?" God rolls his eyes. "Listen Jeb: I sent your neighbors. I sent the State Trooper. I even sent a helicopter. What do you want, I should use Western Union?"

Yes, groan. But this, I think, is where my life intersects with Tikkun Olam. The rabbis tell us that study is good. But, they clarify, it's good because it *leads* to all other virtues. If it doesn't lead anywhere, then what's the point? Liberia's seen an awful, awful, unspeakable war. They've pulled themselves together, for peace and for democracy, in ways few believed possible. Helping ensure that this election goes smoothly and peacefully is crucial. For this country, and for West Africa. I'm here as a one of a few dozen election monitors with the Carter Center, part of a joint international observation team. A year ago, I never would have imagined myself here, at a time like this. But looking at the situation out there, it's pretty clear: somebody's got to skip schul this week and go help talk Jeb down from that damned roof. If not now, when?

[I'll try to check in, albeit briefly, from the road over the next few days. Hatimah tovah, everybody]