Yes, Once I hitchhiked all the way from Quito, Ecuador to New York. My companions on this journey were a shakey little kitty and a Blue haired guy named Dex. Sadly I don't have and photos from the journey, but here is a few pics of crazy Dex (post blue hair) so you know what I was up against. You can read more about Dex in the Amazon section. He drives me nuts sometimes, but I love him and he is certainly good for material! (Be warned, this story is long!)

Pan Americana

By Kat O'Sullivan

It took one hundred and one rides to reach New York from Ecuador, to go from the literal “center of the world” to the figurative one.

It was a journey which had been preceded by one hundred and one warnings of the dangers that awaited us.  We set off from Quito laden with tales of the thieves and rapists and murders who prowled the Pan-Americana in search of gringo victims. We were told ad nauseam about how setting foot in Colombia was a death wish, that the guerillas were chomping at the bit to kidnap us.  We were advised to say goodbye to our loved ones because we were sure to perish.  “Fools” was surely what all these well-intentioned spoilers thought as we politely ignored their advice and decided to proceed anyway.  I play the optimistic idiot quite well. 

Now I can’t help thinking that we would have been much bigger fools if we had listened to all the warnings. I  much prefer to be naïve than paranoid. 

Si Se Puede!

This unconventional journey was born in a moment of auspicious chaos.  Ecuador was playing their archrival Peru in a vicious soccer match.  If Ecuador won, it would be the first time they would ever qualify for the World Cup.  The whole country was on edge in nervous anticipation.

   Poor, endearingly unglorious Ecuador has had so few triumphs which garnish world attention.  Think about it: can you name a single famous Ecuadorian? The World Champion speed-walker, and Rico Suave not withstanding, the only Ecuadorian who triggers name recognition might be Lorena Bobbit.  Remember her? (If you are a guy, I am sure you are cringing). She chopped off her cheating husband’s penis a few years back in New Jersey.  It was a tabloid fiasco. Lorena Bobbit may not exactly be a Nobel Prize winner, but Ecuadorians are proud of their own. She was actually invited back to the country by the then president, and hailed as a champion of women’s rights. So you see, Ecuadorians are a little hard up for fame and glory, and the triumph of entering the World Cup could not befall a more deserving and humble nation.

   Some time in the late afternoon the city erupted. Ecuador won!  In an instant, every door flew open, the streets drowned in celebratory traffic. Conversation was impossible amongst a sea of drunken cheers.  Colorful, open sided trucks streamed by, laden with banners and marching bands.  The city was a sea of yellow jerseys and happy faces.  Loud choruses of “Si Se Puede!”(the soccer teams official anthem - “Yes You Can!”) echoed up from the buildings.  It was reminiscent of those old photos of the day the war ended, only so much louder

I ducked into the internet café to take a breather from the thunder of bliss outside.  And wouldn’t you know it, there was Dex, the odd blue haired fellow. I used to see him all over Quito, in the most improbable places. I would see him at the trolley station at the north of the city, or in the market of a neighboring village.  He would step in front of my taxi, or walk out of the hotel room next to mine.  He even sat right next to me at a movie theater once. It was like some freakish, third world Where’s Waldo. This went on for months, these random cameos.  Each time this happened I waited for Dex to laugh at the coincidences that led our paths to frequently cross.  But, without fail, Dex always blinked at me as if he had no idea who the hell I was.

  I could never accuse the boy of love at first sight, though nor would I deny that there seemed a certain sense of destiny in our meeting. I read somewhere that peculiar travel plans are dancing lessons from God. Dex was about to become my dancing partner in a transcontinental tango. 

           I sat at the table next to Dex, waiting for a computer.  My flight back to New York had departed the previous Thursday, but I had somehow failed to be on it.  Thus I was momentarily stranded in my beloved Ecuador, somewhat short of the funds required to purchase another flight.  It was an interesting predicament that I was hoping the Internet might provide some miraculous answers to. With no better options at hand, I happily eavesdropped on Dex.

          A very cute girl was gazing captively at him from across the table.  He told an animated story.  She giggled charmingly at each pause, enough to make me wonder if she even understood what he was saying.  As they chattered away he caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye, but registered not a flicker of recognition.  I actually preferred it that way.  If he stepped out of character and began to recognize me, the whole fabric of my social consciousness might threaten to unravel.

But suddenly my attention was piqued.  Was he saying what I think he was saying?  I snuck a glance, and sure enough, Dex was struggling for the right word in Spanish, filling in the gaps with an elaborate hand gesture. He held out his thumb, and looked at the girl hopefully.  She didn’t get it.  “Hitchhike!” he insisted, “HITCHHIKE. I am going to HITCHHIKE back to the US.”  She looked at him with come-hither blankness, mentally weighing whether this would be an appropriate time to giggle. 

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“Jalar Dedo?!” I jumped in uninvited.  “Vas a jalar dedo a los Estados Unidos? You’re hitchhiking back to the States?” My mind began to churn wildly. The pretty girl suddenly understood and emitted an embarrassingly cute gasp. Dex gave an ear-to-ear smile, pleased with the reaction.  He seemed unruffled by my blatant interruption.

“Really?  You are hitchhiking to the States?” I prodded.

“Yeah” he said, giving me a quick glance, the cogs of his mind momentarily whirring to place me, but boring of the task after only an instant.

“Can I go with you?” I heard myself ask before giving it any deliberation.

Dex cocked his head and consulted something inside himself, then he shrugged, “Sure, I guess.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“REALLY??”

“Sure.”

“When?”

“I don’t know”

“Soon?”

“OK”

“Tomorrow?”

“Fine.”

The next 24 hours were a whirlwind of preparation and goodbyes.  There was a lot of loving advice from friends, most of which was peppered with reassuring terms like “idiot”, “death wish”, “rape” and “ransom.” We also adopted a kitten.  It was a mangy pathetic thing that wobbled before us in a churchyard, and was entirely too pathetic to resist. Dex and I, so nonchalant about our own well-being, suddenly had a little life that depended on us. So we became a family of three. (See Fausto page for the kitten story)

 Together we set off in the early morning.  We had no map, basically no money, and only the vaguest ideas of what lay ahead.  My head echoed with all the warnings I had received, and I wondered if perhaps it was a tad foolhardy to hitchhike across war torn countries, virtually penniless with some blue haired kid who couldn’t remember my name. 

It took a full day to reach the Colombian border.  When we were just a kilometer or so away, the rampant paranoia that Ecuadorians feel towards their neighbor gnawed away at my psyche. Even though I had been to Colombia a dozen times before, I was feeling nervous.

 A covered pick-up truck with benches in the back slowed down so that we could jump on the fender and hang on.  “Oh my Gawd, Colombia!”I said to Dex, wondering if he felt my anxiety too.  Apparently not, I noticed. He was dangling himself upside down off the bumper, getting an untraditional parting view of Ecuador. Oh, Dex! I was becoming acutely aware of some of the boy’s eccentricities.

As I hung onto the back of the truck, with the wind menacing my hair, I calmed my nervous stomach and told myself not to invite fear into my life.  Then there was a tap on my leg, and what I saw nearly caused me to shit my pants.  There was a man in a black ski mask motioning me to enter the truck.  A quick glance inside revealed that there were several ominous looking men in ski masks.

Holy Shit!  I thought.  Kidnappers! Guerillas!  I’m gonna get raped! I’m such an idiot!! I should have listened!! I’m too to young to die!!!! Should we jump? Oh, Dex, why do you have to be doing acrobatics NOW, when our lives are at stake!!??!!

The man pulled off his ski mask and flashed a great smile.  He asked me where I was from, where I was going, all of which I scarcely heard over my pounding heart. Then it dawned on me that he was just being friendly.  In fact, he was hitting on me. The ski-masks were just an ill-timed fashion faux pas that had nothing to do with anything. I laughed at my jitteriness and let that be a lesson to myself:  There is much more fear in the world than danger. Alternately, another lesson might be: If you are going to pick up hitchhikers, don’t wear ski masks.

Mambo Colombiano

Crossing the Colombian border was a bit of a circus.  I was still learning and adapting myself to the quirky charms of Dex and his unconventional world-views.  His peculiarities neither began nor ended with his blue hair.  He was obviously above average intelligence, perhaps at times to his own detriment.  I have often criticized the hyper American tendency to diagnose children with fancy named disorders and pump them full of pharmaceuticals. Attention deficit disorder. Obsessive-compulsive-defiant-whatever disorder. I pity the children who get put on a regime of pharmaceuticals for being spunkier than harried adults feel like dealing with.  Yet, it occurred to me, Dex might be one of the rare cases of someone who genuinely DID have these weird disorders.  Its hard to tell…..Did he have a disorder?  Or did all the medicine and a childhood lived in opposition make him irretrievable quirky? He could be the poster boy of the Ritilin generation.

Immigration formalities with Dex had its dolorous moments.  He had “FUCK THE GOVERNMENT” scrawled in his passport. He also had socio-political objections to using the respectful “Usted” form of the verb, preferring to address everyone equally casually as “tu” and thus avoid linguistic class striation. I won’t even get into his objections to saying “thank you.”  Let’s just say that I had to do a bit of compensating for him in the social grace department, particularly where border guards were concerned. As if having blue hair and a kitten in your backpack wasn’t complicated enough.

After getting our passports reluctantly stamped, we marched towards the big “Welcome to Colombia” sign. On this particular day there happened to be thousands of protesters who had blocked the passage with fallen trees and burning tires.  I had a fleeting, pointless hope that their anger was not related to the United States, but I am hardly that naïve.  You would be hard pressed to find any discontent in Latin America that is not connected by a short, blatant path back to US interference.  This day the protesters were particularly angry at Plan Colombia, some heinous policy that I still don’t comprehend.  It allegedly has something to do with stopping terrorism and the drug trade, but most people see it as a thinly veiled scheme for the US to dominate and exploit.  The recent construction of a huge US military base in Ecuador, with its bloodthirsty eyes on Colombia, hardly quelled the masses.

I walked the sea of burning flags with a ingratiating grin, making a mental note to stitch a Canadian flag on my backpack. It occurred to me that Dex and I ought to iron out some sort of consensus of a fake nationality.  Americans are hardly popular on a global political level. This became more apparent as the taunts of “GRINGA!!” escalated, and fists were raised in my direction.  I made frantic, appeasing hand gestures to show that ideologically I was right there with them.  A few stones were lobbed in my direction, but for the most part people treated me with nothing more than humorous acknowledgment of our bad timing.

I was so preoccupied with my unanticipated ambassadorial duties that I scarcely noticed that Dex had strayed from my side. Though the crowd wasn’t specifically hostile, it was hardly a situation you wanted to stay around and poke at. Where was Dex?

Someone grabbed my sleeve and pointed.  Slowly the whole crowd, ready for a bit of distraction, turned to contemplate the most implausible spectacle. There was Dex, happily unconcerned with the turmoil below.  He was traversing the expanse of unrest on an elevated pipeline, arms outstretched to balance himself. It was like some demented Cirque du Soleil high-wire act.  The little kittle mewed plaintively from his nest of blue hair. Dex made it to the end and hopped off, seemingly unaware that he had just provided the halftime entertainment for thousands of angry flag burners.  He smiled with charming obliviousness, “Ready?” Yes!

After crossing the border, a taxicab slowed to pick us up. The driver announced quite serenely that we didn’t need to pay. “Bienvenido a Colombia!” he said.  His free ride was just an inkling of the overwhelming generosity that his country would show us.

Colombia, of course, is about ten thousand times more wonderful than anyone imagines.  For all its bad reputation, I’ve always found it to be enchanting.  It is a country whose greens are greener, whose fruits are juicier, whose smiles are wider. Despite their continuous political turmoil, there is a light-hearted laughter about the people.  And they might be the best dancers in the world.   Though I relish the fact that Colombia isn’t going to get ruined by tourism anytime soon, I still feel compelled to declare to anyone who will listen that it is a stunning and worthwhile destination.

Angels  in our Pockets

My friend said to me today, “You carry angels in your pocket.” I smiled.  I think he’s right.  Not just in my pocket, I’ve got angels on my shoulders, tangled in my hair, angels underfoot making me trip.  It is impossible not to notice how the world always seems willing to provide exactly what is needed at a given moment, to shower gifts.

Each day at dawn we would wake up with that feeling of a five-year-old on Christmas morning, who knows that the impending day is going to be filled with toys and sweets.  As we ran out of money we became richer still.  Instead of suffering, we were blessed.  We never had to ask for anything, we were always fed, and our last ride of every night inevitably led us somewhere safe to sleep.  People went so out of their way for us.  They seemed so proud to give us a good impression of their country.  They seemed to enjoy watching us wolf down our rice and beans and lick the plate in bliss.  As humbled as I felt after receiving so much, I also know that for the most part we left people feeling good that they had picked us up.

One day, as we were slowly hitching our way through Colombia, we found ourselves in the scorching, dusty middle of nowhere.  It was one of those places where you could lay down with your backpack as a pillow and read a book while hitching, because so few cars ever passed by.  Our kitten broke out in guilt inducing pleas.  He was shaky and thirsty. But what could we do?  We were hours from anywhere and quite hungry and broke ourselves. Watching that little cat cry made us feel so powerless and guilty. “Wish we had some milk for the kitty!” Dex and I agreed, silently wanting to convince ourselves that bringing the kitty on this trip wasn’t just a cruel indulgence.

          From behind us on the long silent road there came a bouncing, , coughing little truck.  We could hear it bumble closer, but hardly bothered to turn and look because it was traveling in the wrong direction.  As it reached us and slowed down to a quiet roll, the driver lowered his window with a smile.  That’s when I first saw that it was a MILK truck, and the driver - without even stopping  - was offering us the most coveted of gifts - a bag of milk !  It was so cold and dripping with icy condensation that we lifted it in ecstasy to our faces and sang praises of joy.  The milk truck wheezed on down the sleepy road, driven by our smiling savior.  Incredible!  Ask and you shall receive.  Even our kitten has angels!

          It was quite prodigious, this ability to state a desire and watch it come true.  It happened so frequently that I can only liken it to a religious experience.  I   started feeling like I had the Midas touch, wherein anything I imagined would be thrust before me. It was both very humbling and empowering.  I think people who hitchhike a lot might know this feeling. It’s part of what makes hitching so addictive. Its like you are in constant communion with some benevolent higher power.  Completely at the mercy of fate, but fate is so kind. I can’t think of words to use that don’t make it sound cheap and cheesy. But I can give a hundred and one examples

Somewhere outside of Cali, we were picked up by an impossibly tiny car filled with three inebriated party-goers. The moment was so surreal and laugh inducing that Dex and I both failed to noticed that we strayed quite perplexingly far from the Pan-Americana, our simple, straight route home.

                We found ourselves in a dusty village with aloof little tin huts.  Most people simply retreated behind closed doors when we posted ourselves on the side of the road.  We could catch them peering through curtains, but no one ventured to talk to us.  Where the hell were we????

“Alright” I said to Dex. “We are lost.” 

“Yup,” he agreed, “We should probably get a map.”

Perfectly on cue, a door opened on a hut 100 meters away.  A barefooted boy stumbled shyly forward, on a direct path towards us. Upon arriving at our lazy pile of backpacks, he nervously thrust forward a bag, and then ran home as soon as he delivered his cargo.  How odd!  We looked inside the bag, and wouldn’t you know it, there was a gorgeous map of Colombia! Oh, how we needed it!

Things like that happened a million times a day.  I would make some bratty demand like “I WANNA RIDE A PONY!” and then a horse drawn cart would pull up.  We began to test our new power. “I want………a truck with three wheels!”  (And what do you think appeared on the horizon? I SWEAR!!)

         Outside Medellin,Dex declared that what he most wanted was a ride on the back of a flatbed. It sounded lovely, but I said that I just wanted someone who would take us right to Cartegena (which was still a 3 day hitch away).  We gnawed on a bit of fried bread, and before we had the chance to wash it down with a lukewarm Coke, up pulled a flatbed truck. Dex smiled triumphantly. He got his wish.

I ran to the cab to ask where he was headed, but the driver didn’t even unlock the door for me.  He just pointed to the flatbed.  We jumped on and praised our luck for scoring that cool ride.  Little did we know the full extent of it.  Our silent savior was going all the way to Cartegena! Ha Ha!!

 What ensued was thirty caustic and glorious hours on the back of a flatbed, completely exposed to the elements.  It was marvelous.  If this trip were a movie, this would be the musical montage scene. We passed through desert and mountains and coffee plantations.  We got our skin burnt into leather and stained black with the diesel fumes that belched out all over us.  We were hobos from a Woody Guthrie song.  I felt proud of that dirt.  It gave us this post apocalyptic-chic style that you might occasionally find on a Milan catwalk. Every time I moved one of my few possessions would blow irretrievably away.  Instead of feeling sad about losing my stuff, I felt grateful that my backpack would be that much lighter.  And, joy of joys, it was mango season.  Our chins got sticky and our teeth tangled with pulp.  If anyone ever tells me that they are thinking of doing a trip like this, my first word of advice would be: “Do it in mango season!”

The journey on the flatbed was another a showcase of the “ask and you shall receive” phenomenon.  I was feeling dusty, and remarked that a shower would be nice.  Not 20 seconds later we rounded a curve where a picturesque waterfall sent up a billowing mist that cleansed the dust from my weary skin.  Jarred from the bumpiness I said, “Wouldn’t a mattress be a Godsend? All of a sudden, for the next 20 miles, for reasons I cannot begin to understand, in the most improbable locations along the side of the road - were dozens of mattresses!!…….I mean, in THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE! (We never stopped to pick one up, but perhaps I simply hadn’t been clear enough in stating my whimsy.)

            We arrived to the stifling heat of Cartegena and our driver merely pointed down the road and waved.  He had given us such a tremendous gift, yet didn’t even seem to want to be thanked for it. Amazing.  We didn’t even know his name. We swayed down the road, taking the better part of a day to get our land-legs back.  That night we sat in the warm Caribbean Sea in all our clothes and let the waves tumble us clean and the sand slough away our blackened skin.

Cartegena

I love Cartegena.  It’s so frikkin pretty that you sometimes don’t even notice that your flesh is melting off your bones in the Caribbean heat.  There is this one stretch of road along the old city wall that is populated by a dozen quaint little cabanas, all offering unidentifiable juice concoctions.  There are all the regular fruits you would expect to find in Carmen Miranda’s hat, as well as a pleasing variety of obscure, sometimes uninviting tropical specialties.  It is fun to just point at a few things with childlike innocence, and watched the shirtless man expertly blend them with a little ice (parasites be damned!).  Absolutely soothing and filling. 

         I would go back to Cartegena for nothing more than just the juice, but in fact there are quite a few attractions.  When I arrived with Dex, it was my third or fourth time in Cartegena, and it felt pleasingly familiar to navigate the impeccably restored colonial streets. You couldn’t find a prettier city.  Nestled on the sparkling shores of the Caribbean, Cartegena was a favorite of pirates, who repeatedly plundered its gold.  The streets are narrow, the buildings are noble, faded to a shade that would make Martha Stewart jealous.  Some of the structures, in their gaudy pastels, invoke images of faded socialites donning too much makeup, their arched windows like expressive, over-plucked eyebrows.

         Cartegena is where I saw what can only be described as “THE CUTEST THING IN THE WHOLE WORLD!!!” I was waiting in a hotel lobby, and there was a parakeet cage, thought noticeably missing the parakeet.  Upon closer inspection, it was revealed to be the home of some sort of hamstery thing.  It peered up at me with shiny wet eyes, and reached out a little hand.  I did a stupefied double take.  Five little fingers! Oh my gosh, it was a MONKEY!  The size of a gerbil. I regressed to 8 years old and felt innocent adoration sweep over my face.  I wanted it SOOOO bad!!!!  Then, as if I could handle any more cuteness, it shifted its stance for a second and - POP! Another head popped out!!!!  Oh my god, it wasn’t a monkey, it was---- TWO MONKEYS HUGGING!!! Oohhhhhhh….it was unbearably cute. Pure saccharine.

   I was informed that they were Pygmy Marmosets. They could be bought easily on the black market for 6 dollars each, 10 dollars a pair. I briefly envisioned the pet revolution I would cause in the US when I began breeding these little packets of undiluted adorableness. (Hell, if US consumers fell for a Pet Rock, these would go like hotcakes!) I could just stick them in my pocket.  They would make me happy forever and ever.  Oh damn those international wildlife regulations!

Dex and I also saw a three-toed sloth.  Oddly, it was right in the middle of the city.  These arboreal creatures, usually slumbering far out in the Amazon, are renowned for their painfully slow movements, their dignified lack of haste.  At first it was really cool to watch this peculiar creature’s every tedious footstep.  It seemed quite prehistoric.  But after ten minutes, when his amblings had lead him a whopping five inches from his starting point, my attention wavered.  Curiously, Dex, usually a case study in ADD, was transfixed.  He told me to go ahead, he would catch up with me later. He spent the better part of the afternoon in attentive rapture.

That evening, as we sat on the sandy paradise beach, Dex was overcome with the need to reenact what he had learned from the three-toed sloth.  Starting from about ten meters from shore, he attempted to pantomime the sloth’s glacieral gait, even replicating its serene blinks with a creepy accuracy.  Oh God, I thought, eyeing the distance between him and the water, knowing that it would take him ages to eventually reach it.  Instead of waiting, I just went in on my own, knowing that my skin would be puckered and waterlogged before he ever arrived. 

> Some curious children ran down the beach to see what Dex was up to.  He was a silent spectacle.  The little kids clamored around, but Dex ignored their questions, preferring to attempt perfection in his sloth nirvana. Never daunted by this strange creature on their shores, the children fell to their knees beside him. They mimicked his impossibly slow game. So, as the sun set and the warm waves broke gently around me, I marveled at the slow freakish caravan of human sloths, inching ever so slowly closer.  I looked at my life and laughed.

The Darien Gap! Oh my!

I still had a folded cocktail napkin that some cute Colombian boy had given me my last night in Quito.  On it were instructions for a cheap place to stay.  Cheap being, as always, the operative word. Dex and I had started the journey with a collective worth of just over forty dollars, a sum that was rapidly dwindling.

Randomly, in the lobby of this cheap hotel, I ran in to Fabio, an old friend of mine from Argentina.  We blinked incredulously at each other, surveyed our surroundings, and hugged in celebration of the strange synchronicities that lead paths to cross. We sat down in sticky plastic chairs and sipped warmish lemonade under the slow moving ceiling fan.  It was so nice to have an old friend to trade gossip with, and remind me of my former life.  It was also so valuable to get advice from another traveler who knew that Colombia is infinitely more beautiful than it is scary.

 Fabio was trying to get to Panama as well, but finding it a bit challenging to cross the fabled Darien Gap.

The Pan-American Highway is a glorious thing, stretching from way up in Alaska (or somewhere thereabouts) all the way to Argentina.  It is the vein of the Americas, thousands of miles long.  But for one brief instant, right between Panama and Colombia, it ceases to exist.  This break of about 140 kilometers is a legend among adventurers, so difficult it is to cross.  It is called the Darien Gap, and its dense jungles are controlled by the not-tremendously-congenial Kuna Tribe. If you manage to cross it, you win bragging rights for the rest of your life.  Not too many try, and occasionally those who do never emerge.  Kidnappings and disappearances are hardly shocking in the Darien Gap.

 It would seem sort of silly to have this big, long, magnificent highway with a chunk missing from it, right? Fabio referred to the Gap as “The Southern border of the United States”, a sentiment I heard echoed several times.  Folks seem to agree that, despite the obvious benefits of having a functional highway, the powers that be (in other words, the US, who has always been a strong presence in Panama) were content to leave it blank as a way to deter Northward immigration. I don’t know if that’s the whole truth, but it seemed plausible. Indeed, Panama, for such an unflashy country, had strangely strict entry requirements: Visas, Onward tickets, proof of funds and Yellow Fever vaccinations (administered to us free of charge from a shabby clinic with suspiciously unclean looking needles!)

Fabio was getting sick of the obstacles between himself and Panama.  He was opting to squander his savings for a flight to Costa Rica, but he did give us some useful leads on boats.  In exchange I offered him work the following winter at my Christmas tree stand in Harlem. Anything to do my little part to subvert US immigration policy!  (Imagine my shock the following Thanksgiving, when a road-worn Fabio actually showed up in New York, making good on my offer!)

Since crossing the Darien Gap by land was financially out of the question, Dex and I had to explore our options for crossing by sea.  We went to the yacht club, to see if any eccentric millionaires would be charmed into giving us free transport.  The yachtsmen gave us the once over and made it clear that they would rather entertain scurvy and lice infestation.  We were greeted with sneering repulsion and told in no uncertain terms by our countrymen that we were idiots, that we would never make it to Panama. It was then politely, but firmly, requested that we conclude our search elsewhere.

 All and all a rather chilly reception from our fellow Americans! Amazing how the poor people of the world stumble over themselves wanting to offer you any hospitality they can, and the rich look at the needy like vermin. Sometimes I get the sense that Americans think being poor is a crime.  Then again, I can’t really blame these weary individuals for not throwing open the doors of their million dollar yachts for two sun-scorched ruffians who smelled like cat piss.

Not to be daunted, I remembered the banana boats that dock near the Pegasus Plaza.  Underneath the majestic statues of winged horses there is a fleet of somewhat less majestic contraband boats.  They are crewed by yellow-eyed men with darting glances and nervous ticks. It was the type of sketchy prospect that is really fun to talk about afterwards, but a bit unpleasant to anticipate.

We negotiated our passage on one of the rickety wooden ships.  It had no cabin or anything, just a tarp and a bunch of boxes to sit on.  There were no lights, no radio, no navigational equipment (not a single lux-u-reeee!).  And a hull full of contraband! I stoically accepted that there would in all likelihood be no “king of the world” Titanic reenactments, which I reasoned was okay if it meant no nasty icebergs.

After a few days delay we pushed off from the dock, with one last delicious juice to hold us over.  The journey was to take two days.  I nestled in between some mysterious boxes and fantasized about all the scary illegal things they must contain. Machine guns! Chemical weapons!  All padded with kilos of cocaine! I also contemplated the likelihood that these salty drunken sailors might toss us overboard just for sport. Its not as though there were any witnesses.

  It was a creepy ride, made more ominous by the rolling gray storm clouds.  Soon we were drenched. (Our poor kitten!) I regretted not informing my loved ones that I would be making this journey, so that they might send a search party when we failed to resurface. The sea tossed and tumbled us, washing waves over the low sides of the small boat. I noted with regret that the captain more closely resembled someone who asks for change in the subway than a strapping, swarthy navy admiral. I tried not to be unsettled by the absence of life preservers.

  In retrospect the only threat to safety was my overactive imagination.  We arrived nicely suntanned two days later.  Those “suspicious boxes” turned out to be full of some innocuous fruity soft drink, and the crewmembers all hugged me goodbye.

Panamania

The little jungle outposts that dot the coast of the Darien Gap have the most sing-songy names.  Acandi. Sapsuro. Puerto Obaldia. O bla dee- oh bla da! We traveled between them in wooden canoes.  It all seemed rather charming until we came to rest in the last town.  Puerto Obaldia.

This teensy border town makes no attempt to be hospitable.  In fact, they seem to go to every length to find some reason to reject you from entering Panama.  Upon landing on their shores we were escorted (by men with big guns!) to the immigration office.  Despite the relative inactivity and the suffocating heat, the immigration officials still wore complete military regalia.  They first embarked on a long campaign of ignoring us.  The lower ranked lackeys dropped several sniveling hints that we were going to be turned away.  The prospect of refusing someone entry to this town is not only cruel, its ridiculous.  Not a single road leads to the outside world.  It’s in the middle of the jungle. Where the hell are you supposed to go when they announce that you are not welcome?

  When the immigration officials decided to move onto the second phase of our hazing, we presented all of our documents in the most obsequious manner (I think Dex might have even said “Usted!”). We not only had our shiny American passports, and yellow vaccination certificates, we even had gone so far as to procure visas from the Panamanian consulate in Cartagena.  The immigration guy frowned at all of this and tossed it on his desk, unsatisfied.  I had a brief flash to a frustrating border crossing in Bolivia, where the immigration officer actually held a flame to my passport until I finally acquiesced and gifted him with all my money.  But Dex and I hadn’t the resources to grease the wheels here in sunny Puerto Obaldia.

         It was finally decided that we could not enter Panama if we did not show proof on onward passage. Luckily Dex still had an airline voucher, which seemed good enough for them.  I knelt and pretended to search my backpack for a plane ticket that I knew quite well didn’t exist. Oddly enough, my groping fingers encountered a tattered boarding pass from a New York - LAX flight several years before (Note to self - clean backpack more often!). I presented it sheepishly to the border guard, mentally trying to compose a convincing explanation for when he called my bluff.  Well, score one for illiteracy! He didn’t even notice! He examined it with practiced concentration, and resigned to stamping our passports with a defeated grunt.  Hooray!  We were in! It reminded me of that time I got into a Grateful Dead show with an Ice Capades ticket. 

We strolled the streets (er….muddy paths) of Puerto Obaldia. It wasn’t a terribly charming place.  After the overt hostility at the entrance way, one can promenade though a menagerie of suspicious glances and unfetching frowns.  There is only one room for rent in the village, and we couldn’t afford it.  There is only one restaurant….but we couldn’t afford that either.  We were told that the infrequent boat to Colon, the city on the Eastern end of the Panama Canal, had sunk.  By all appearances we were stranded in this horrid little boil on the Panamanian coast.

         Not wanting to let our spirits fall, we opted to explore the picturesque beach.  It would have been a small compensation, if it weren’t for the guns pulled on us just inches into our walk.  It was startling! There was a whole barricade of soldiers all aiming at us!  Through a megaphone it was announced that the beach was off limits.  With hands raised in panicked innocence we hightailed it off the sand.  I mean really, they could have just TOLD us!  Were all those guns REALLY necessary?? And, not for nothing, but if you are going to build a shit-hole town in the middle of a very sweltering nowhere, isn’t it perhaps just a tad cruel to deprive the residents of the redemption of the seashore?

         We stationed ourselves in the place that seemed to inspire the least contempt from the townsfolk.  It was a charmless, shadeless concrete slab at the edge of town.  Woo Hoo! Contemplating our fate was a little uninspiring, because our options were so limited.  Instead we propped ourselves against our backpacks and devoured our novels. I was reading a book by Wally Lamb, not because I loved it, but because it was in English, and I was feeling a little lazy to read in Spanish.  It was the most ridiculous thing.  The book was the size of the New York City Yellow Pages.   It was the most embarrassingly impractical mass of literature to accompany a road worn traveler like myself on a light-footed journey.  But it was all I had.  I cursed its hugeness, and sought revenge by tearing out each page as I read it, thus shrinking the confounded thing to more manageable proportions. It was one of the few small ways I could feel as though I had control in my life.

   The only friendly beings in that little town were a couple of bored schoolgirls who had nothing better to do that to sit and watch us read.  By this point Dex and I were hungry and thirsty and cranky, perhaps not the best playmates.  They were sweet though, and when night fell and a soldier informed us that we couldn’t stay on the concrete slab, it was these girls who saved us. They lead us in amongst the huts to a covered, gazebo-type building.  They said that we were allowed to sleep there.  I don’t know how much authority these eight-year-old girls had, but we were somewhat low on alternatives, so we settled in.  That night a storm rolled through, and I felt grateful for the flimsy thatched roof, however leaky it might be.  I was a bit sketched by the hostility of the town, and half expected the lynching mob to arrive at any moment, the little girl Judas’s accepting their shiny coins for entrapping us

.  Funny how in those moments of insecurity, the quivering little kitten could be so comforting.  I hugged him close and kissed him.  He would blink at me in the most innocent incomprehension, and then scamper off to swat at the flickering candle.  When morning came we were, of course, perfectly fine.  The only casualty of the long stormy night was the silly kitten’s whiskers, singed by the candle.

Lucky for us, life was never short on angels.  This next angel came in the form of a jovial, bearded Brazilian named Joao. He was attempting to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by riding his motorcycle from the Ushuaia, Argentina to North Pole, Alaska (“South Pole to North Pole”) and back again. He had this enormously shiny motorcycle covered with stickers of all sorts of fancy sponsors.  He had come up against the lack of highway, and was trying to get across the gap on rafts.  It seemed rather harrowing, and he was having similarly exasperating times with the Puerto Obaldia Hospitality Committee.  Joao took one look at us and accurately assessed our predicament.  The first icy cold lemonade he bought us was arrestingly delicious.  So much nicer than the rusty rainwater we were sipping out of barrels! He would come to buy us our next several meals (rice and beans!) from the one tiny restaurant.  As paying customers, we luxuriated in the plasticine comfort of the restaurant’s chairs.  Such a pleasing promotion from our slab of concrete!

         The centerpiece of Puerto Obaldia was an incomprehensibly tiny airstrip that received occasional visits from equally tiny planes. When a flight did happen to arrive, half the town, in absence of television, would run out to watch the spectacle.  Dex was also entranced by the arrival of the small aircraft. Rather than mingle with the masses on the sidelines, he trotted right out onto the tarmac.

As the dot in the distant sky morphed into an approaching airplane, Dex struck a pose on the runway, arms outstretched, head thrust back.  Let me reiterate that this is not a friendly town.  Let me also remind you that they drew guns on us for simply walking on the beach.  So, what a surprise, Dex’s little runway spectacle was not an immediate hit. To say that the townsfolk in my earshot were scandalized would be a slight understatement.  Out came the guns and the megaphone. A murmur of curses rippled through the perplexed crowd.  More that one child gasped that they were going to shoot Dex.  And I can only imagine what the descending pilot must have thought upon seeing a blue haired man with arms outstretched in the middle of his very snug runway. “They are going to kill him!” shouted a child, and I got the sense that the crowd was bored and bloodthirsty enough to be okay with this.  For all the commotion, Dex scarcely batted an eyelash.  He seemed to get bored on his own accord and strolled off the runway a short moment before the plane landed. Oh, Dex!

It became clear that we were wearing out our welcome in Puerto Obaldia. With the only northbound ship resting soundly at the bottom of the sea, we had to make some decisions.  An inventory of assorted coins held very little promise.  I unrolled my emergency 20 dollar bill from the cuff of my pants (it had turned a pleasing sky blue!) All told we had…..twenty dollars and a couple of coins!  We asked around about the price of a quick plane ride to the nearest highway.  We didn’t really have enough, but with some furtive bargaining, and a subsidy from Brazilian Joao, we were able to secure passage on that little plane.

It really was an insignificant little thing.  I’ve seen bumble bees with considerably more heft.  But it was our chariot to salvation, and we would ride it with grateful glee. Several hours after the small plane arrived, we were smooshing our backpacks into its little storage compartments. Dex, kitty and I squoze onto the seat behind the pilot (who, I realized with consternation, was the loud man I had seen drinking beer on the corner for the last several hours!) In a moment we were air born, and I was quite content to watch Puerto Obaldia disappear from my horizon.  Joao stood vigil over our departure, and waved dutifully as we made our exodus. The poor fellow was looking to be stuck in Puerto Obaldia for a few more days as Immigration furtively searched for some reason to refuse him entry.

Once the joy of escaping simmered down, I realized how utterly terrifying small planes are.  They wobble like old grannies.  They dip and sputter and choke.  The pilot’s nonchalance and beer breath were not altogether comforting.  When Dex inquired about the various instruments in the cockpit (most of which, on closer inspection were cracked or lifeless) the pilot scoffed and swatted at the idea that one needs those frills and fancies.

Down below, the canopies of lush vegetation reminded me of the surface of a wart. I anticipated that we would survive a crash, but then meet slow death as a host to leeches and other blood sucking jungle cooties.  I ran through my mental catalog of certain death options, and none of them seeming terribly enticing. For the umpteenth time in so many days, I accepted my impending doom.  I repeated a phrase some new age hippy woman had once taught me (its supposedly Cherokee or some such) “Today is a good day to die.”…And then….like four second later…we were landing in Panama City.

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How the hell is that possible?  One instant were were surrounded by Children-of-the-Corn freaks in the jungle, centuries away from civilization, and then - poof! - we were circling in on a 7-Eleven. It’s disconcerting! We hopped down from the plane and found ourselves in some strange suburbia.  Recognizable brand names abounded. Nice shiny cars and well dressed civilians. Creepy!

The chilly reception we received in Puerto Obaldia was in no way indicative of what we would encounter in the rest of Panama.  In fact, I can accurately say that pretty much every single other person we met during out brief stay was nothing short of wonderful. Every single one was a star!

Dex and I, bewildered to suddenly be in suburbia, managed to get lost in some residential neighborhood right outside the airport. It was a blond Chilean woman who saved us.  She laughed at us and asked a million questions, seeming genuinely thrilled to be a tiny part of our journey.  Even though she was just out doing errands, she went entirely out of her way to drive us over the Panama Canal.  We all swooned and looked down at the boats passing through the locks.  She shook her head and said that her husband was going to be mad that she was so late, but she didn’t care.  It was all so serenely beautiful.  Simple and comfortable.  I can’t really explain why it was so touching.  Maybe it was the poignance of passing the Panama Canal.  Maybe it was the fact that her car had air conditioning.  I think it was something more ineffable though. Like the fact that in that exact moment we could already tell that that ride was a gift from heaven.  That laughing lady was an angel. It was my favorite ride of the whole trip.

It appeared as if the tide was flowing in our favor.  For the rest of that day we hitched with a startling ease.  Strangely, every time we were let out, it was the exact next car that stopped to pick us up.  That is like the hitchhiking equivalent of batting a thousand.

I have a theory, which is always proving itself true. My thesis states that when you hitchhike long distances you get 6 rides a day.  I know it seems too precise to be accurate.  Some mornings, after getting 5 rides in the first 30 minutes, I begin to doubt its validity.  But then, unfailingly, we will get a twelve-hour ride or something.  Conversely, we might be approaching our destination in what promises to be one bold swoop.  Then the driver will pull off one exit too soon….and it will take five rides to travel the next 2 miles.  I have tested it again and again.  The Six Ride Rule.  I know I probably won’t win any Nobel Prize for it (I’ll win that for something else, most likely literature - a thought that has undoubtably occurred to you since you started reading my story), but I would like to offer it as my contribution to the greater body of human knowledge, all the same.

After crossing the Panama Canal, we were picked up by a kid about our age.  He thought we were cool.  We thought he was cool.  He was so proud to show us little bits of his country.  He took a detour to a particular little village which was famous for its corn drink.  Then he took us to another place whose empanadas were renowned.  I’m certain he would have happily taken us on a culinary tour of the entire nation had we given him the chance.  He asked us to stay at his house, promising to take us on a road trip the next day.  But we were so giddy with our return to motion that Dex and I thanked him and declined his sweet invitation.

Our sixth ride that day was a lovely truck full of workmen.  It bounced so much that all my body-fat jiggled unflatteringly like jell-o and I had the wind knocked out of me.  But just before reaching the Costa Rican border we stopped for bread.  The workers unveiled a steaming bag of fresh, hot rolls, which were painfully delicious! We huddled in the back of the truck, covered in blankets, nibbling like grateful refugees.

Pero que Rica!……Costa Rica!

I always talk trash about Costa Rica, but I confess, I hardly know the place.  The idea of it just rubs me the wrong way.  It just seems that every time I meet some American “traveler” who is rhapsodizing about communing with the natives in Latin America, it turns out that they only went to Costa Rica.  .  I know I am a bit of a snob, but I just could not imagine going to a foreign country and paying three times more than I should, to sit around drinking beer with folks I could just meet in New Jersey…and then go home and brag about my authentic third world experience. Ug! I always avoid Costa Rica, and have a disparaging word for my meek traveling brethren who make that their final frontier.

But of course, I’m just an idiot.  It is actually a rather astonishing country. Its eco-systems are lush and fascinating.  Perhaps because of the lucrative tourism which I just insulted, their conservation is top rate. And they have no army! I like a place that doesn’t live in fear of attack. You can feel it, as soon as you cross the border, a gentleness in the air.  I felt so safe there!  And everyone was so damn nice and healthy. And it was really frikkin pretty. 

By the first night we made it to the capital city of San Jose. We rolled into town with a friendly truck driver who lead us to a convenience store and bought us microwave pastry treats.  Ah, the little joys of home were slowly creeping back into our periphery. I hadn’t seen a microwave in ages.  It was ever so slightly disconcerting to feel the gradual cultural shift as we neared our homeland.  There were suddenly McDonalds and Texaco stations, and a million corporate reminders of the economic dominance of the United States. Costa Rica even accepts dollars (though we had none left)!

Our tummies appeased with microwave dough, we opted to spend the night in San Jose.  This entailed little more than laying down on the sidewalk and closing our eyes. Normally I would opt for a good ditch, but we were in the middle of the city.  When I have to sleep on the sidewalk, I look for a hidden area, hug my backpack tight, and try to be invisible.  This is all completely pointless though, because Dex has no fear.  He sprawls flat across the pavement, his muddy possessions strewn all about, snoring loud enough that any thief in a six mile radius could come scampering in glee. We couldn’t call more attention to ourselves if we set off a flare gun. More often than not, I had trouble resting.  In the mornings I could be found red-eyed and jittery as Dex stretched like a purring housecat, greeting the day with sunshine in his heart.

I awoke on the chilly pavement of San Jose with a grand total of approximately 14 minutes of sleep. I watched the sun rise as Dex yawned his way into wakefulness. We then gathered our few belongings and trekked off towards the highway.  Getting dropped off in the middle of a city is such a bitch.  It is nearly impossible to hitch on the crowded streets, and the highways out are inevitably furious and inhospitable.  We ended up walking a long time along a shoulderless road, uninspired to even put our thumbs out.  When we finally reached consensus about a good place to hitch, we were picked up with merciful speed. 

Dex worked on the epilogue of his luxurious nights sleep while I made small talk with the driver.  He was a slick, strong-jawed man with movie star confidence.  His car was shiny black with tinted windows.  He told me he was a bounty hunter, on his way to capture someone.  He motioned to a case at my feet and described the guns it had inside.  Techno music hammered on the radio.  It was this brief, Miami Vice interlude, and quickly it was over.  But, we were back in the countryside, a straight shot to the Nicaraguan border.

Nicaragua

I was excited to be in Nicaragua.  I remember as a child hearing news reports I never understood, filled with names like Managua, Sandanistas, Contras... I still barely comprehend the whole Iran-Contra Arms thing.  It hurts my brain, which is already saturated with more than enough scandalous details about shady US involvement in Latin America. All the same, I enjoyed the thought of passing through the mystique of this little, tumultuous country, seeing for myself a place whose name evokes so much sentiment.

The queue of trucks waiting to cross the border was tediously long, so we jumped out of our ride and ventured forth on foot.  We walked a few kilometers, but no one slowed down for us. Every car that passed was full to capacity, so the drivers just flashed us apologetic grins and continued on their way.

 It was slow and uneventful until a figure appeared just ahead of us.  Closer inspection revealed that he was donning shaggy camouflage and carrying an impressively menacing gun.  He peered beyond us for witnesses, and then beckoned us closer.  I don’t know about you, but when I am in a politically unstable third world country and a shifty fellow with a big gun coaxes me towards him, many thoughts flash through my mind, few of them pleasant.

The gunman stood on one side of a tree, so that if a vehicle happened to pass, he would be hidden from view.  He hissed at us to come hither, which was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do. He shouted that we had to come with him. “Where?” I asked. He motioned to a cluster of trees two hundred meters across the field.  All the better to shoot you in, Dearie!  He said that his commander wanted to speak to us.  It is hard to know what to do!  On one hand, you are an idiot if you walk into an isolated patch of trees with a gun-wielding madman.  On the other hand, you are stupid to disobey said gun wielding madman. My heart was in my throat.  Dex and I glanced nervously at each other, and rapidly contemplated our options. It is here where we exercised one of the most handy little tricks available to travelers in foreign lands  - feigned incomprehension!

We faked innocent smiles and waved goodbye, as though he was just a friendly chap with golden intentions. We abruptly turned and walked (with ever so much haste!) back toward the border where there were sure to be protection in numbers.  When he shouted at us, we just pretended not to understand.  He was angry to watch us slip away from him, and pursued us nervously.  Each time a car approached he would dart behind a tree (as Dex and I attempted to hitch a ride for dear life, to no avail).  We just walked, straight backed and purposeful, feeling his gaze burn holes in our heads, and wondering if at any second we might get shot.

To our relief there was a truck pulled up along the shoulder, several hundred meters ahead. It was like speed-walking towards the finish-line to claim our Olympic gold metals.  Nothing was going to stand between us and getting a ride on that truck……except, of course, the driver.

I stepped on the tire and rapped on his window.  He glanced at me and shook his head. “Por Favor?????” I said with the utmost urgency.  He flatly refused, unmoved by my gushing charm and stunning good looks. I looked down the road at our armed friend, waiting with his cute little gun. I turned again to the truck driver, our most direct route to safety. I pleaded with teary eyes.  He said No way.  He was only going 1 kilometer. He couldn’t give us a ride.

“One kilometer?” I said as I opened the passenger door and tossed in my rucksack. “That’s fantastic! We really appreciate it!” It was the second time in five minutes I played the foreign-idiot card.  Dex hopped in, all too relieved to be out of firing range.  We smiled eagerly at the truck driver who shook his head No. But there was no way in hell we were going to budge. 

Apparently having two stinky gringos and a kitten suddenly materialize in his cab was a little more hassle than the truck driver felt like dealing with. Ultimately he just shrugged and continued on with us as his stowaways.  The “one kilometer” he was going was actually a luxurious 200 kilometers! When the adrenaline finally settled in our veins we explained about the guy with the gun, and apologized for our most undignified intrusion on his truck.  He forgave us, and before the ride was up he even bought us a super juicy bag of grapes.

As the afternoon sky faded to a whispering pink, we found ourselves just outside of Managua. From the side of the road we watched truckloads of muddy campesinos returning from their exhausting days work.  I was a little startled when one of these giant pay-loader trucks pulled over a hundred yards ahead of us, and all the men in back started whistling for us to join them.  We grabbed the kitty and ran, but as we got closer I was a little intimidated by the size of the vehicle.  It took a mammoth effort just to summit its mud crusted bumper.  I had no idea how I was going to get inside.  But I had little time to contemplate, as three pairs of arms reached down and dragged me up.  I landed in a most ungrateful flop on the murky floor.  As I straightened my clothes and picked about six wedgies, I marveled at the dense leathery faces around me.  All these sun-scorched workers were examining us, revealing precious little emotion. These were the real salt of the earth.  The people in whose name revolutions are won.  The lines on their faces speak of universal hardship and dignity.

  Dex and I said a few watery hellos to the masses, but no one seemed particularly enamored by our presence. Then our kitten poked his little head out from Dex’s windbreaker, and a collective gasp was emitted.  The kitty, in that unselfconscious way of children, hopped to the ground and sought out our luggage.  He then gave an adorable farewell curtsy to the captive crowd, and crawled into Dex’s backpack for a nap. (Ha ha. Napsack!….I hate puns.) The cute little display served to melt the distance between us and our fellow passengers.  A few curious folks ventured to converse, and within moments, we felt like welcome guests.  We were laughing and staring at the sun, the wind knotting the ends of our hair together. It was all so picturesque, a moment to guard in my memory for eternity.  The only detail that was imperfect was my scratching thirst.

         Dex and I glanced at each other in silent acknowledgement of how cool this ride was. I ventured to defile the wonderfulness by saying, “I am SO FUCKING THIRSTY!” He nodded.  He felt it too. Instantly, we felt little specks of water dampen our cheeks. At the front of the truck, a worker was randomly dumping an orange thermos full of water over the side.

“WAIT!!” we both exclaimed in unison.  When the campesinos saw we were thirsty, they passed down the orange thermos and offered it with an eager smile. We gulped it down and washed our faces, and then gulped it down some more.  It was suspiciously gritty and I’m rather certain it wasn’t Evian, but damn if it wasn’t the best drink of water ever!

Six months later when I shit a worm, I wondered if it perhaps came from that lovely water.  It could have been from anywhere, but I just imagined it was that moment, because that beauty of that ride is still worth the almost indescribable skeeviness of discovering you have six-inch worms in your intestines.  No worries, I went to a fancy doctor on Fifth Avenue, (who also treats the Pope!) and he fixed me right up.  Actually, the medicine he gave me was downright glorious, it almost makes me want to recommend getting worms. (If you shudder at over-disclosure, I suggest skipping the rest of this paragraph).  This medicine gives you the most religious-oh-my-god-peace-on-earth-and-goodwill-to-men-record-breaking shits ever. It makes you look into the toilet with astonishment and pride at what you’ve accomplished.  You leave the bathroom feeling like a blissful wood nymph, tossing garlands on your coworkers, phoning your enemies to tell them all is forgiven.  It’s powerful. Really.

Managua might be a lovely city, but to us it was simply a challenge.  We were dropped off in the middle of a knot of roads, completely at a loss for which direction to go. I tapped a young man on the shoulder to find out where the Pan-Americana was, and he shyly swelled with a sense of responsibility. He wouldn’t tell us.  He insisted on showing us.  He hailed a bus. We said, “No, no, no, we can’t!  We don’t have money for a bus!” and he dismissed our pleas and beckoned us aboard.

        Our new companion’s coolness was revealed in the shy, halting conversation the ensued.  It turns out that he hadn’t even intended on traveling in this direction, he was just accompanying us to be nice.  Really nice, as it turns out - the bus ride took over an hour! But when we finally hopped off we were, as promised, back on the Pan-Americana. I was so embarrassed with gratitude that I just wanted to hug him.  I felt guilty that he had been so nice.  He brushed it off with a hint of blush, and shook our hands.  I wasn’t expecting it when he pressed a few warm, sweaty coins into my palms, and darted across the street before I could protest.

         The poorest people are always the most generous.  It is so humbling.  Here we were, two irresponsible white kids from the richest country on earth, bumbling through this ragged little country which lives in our shadow…..and they give us money. Or food. Or rides. Or whatever….but they GIVE. And it is a generosity that seems almost effortless and expects no compensations.  I am utterly floored by it.  I feel guilty being the recipient of so many gifts, which I have done nothing to deserve.  I vowed about six hundred times that when I was working again in New York, I would give my spare change to anyone and everyone.  I would buy pizza for the beggars.  I would treat everyone to everything.  I felt saddled with a Karmic debt it might take years to repay.

  When it turned dark we retired to the side of the road and used the shy boy’s coins to buy ourselves two big banana leaves filled with rice.  We hungrily devoured the food, and then pecked like chickens at any grain of rice that had escaped the initial annihilation. It was delicious.  So fulfilling that we both decided that, despite the darkness, we felt charged enough to keep hitching.

   After just an instant on the side of the road, an enormous truck slowed down.  It was filled with the most baffling assortment of rusty metal debris. Mattress springs. School desks. Bikes. A dressmaker dummy.  It looked like avant-gard art.  I was relieved that we weren’t expected to ride in the back, as I can’t recall whether I was up to date on my tetanus shots.

The driver was so friendly! He was going all the way to the El Salvadoran border, and invited us to spend the night. Hours later he turned of the highway with that magnificent pile of junk, and we traveled down an isolated dirt road. Rushing down the international thruway, it’s easy to forget that anything exists beyond the roadside.  It was a fascinating reminder to pass thru silent hamlets that slumbered in the darkness. Whole worlds thrive in our periphery that we scarcely venture to notice.  The volume of alternate lives which we speed by is exhausting to contemplate. Even in a tiny country like Nicaragua, you would have to spend years before you began understanding their world.

         We pulled into some sort of roadhouse where apparently transients are welcome to spend the night.  I surveyed the structure and noticed a motley assortment of men, strewn at improbable intervals among empty liquor bottles on the cement floor. Looking back on the moment I laugh at how genuinely thrilled I was to have this place to sleep. I don’t know at what point my standards got so low that a trash strewn hovel populated by bleary drunks at the end of a dark isolated path in Nicaragua seemed like the lap of luxury.  I stretched my sheet out on the cement and snuggled with the kitty.  It was the best night sleep I had in weeks.

Guatemala

The next day was a blur of border crossings. By the time we went to sleep, we had been in four countries in one day. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, finally coming to rest in Guatemala.

I felt a giddy comfort in returning to Guatemala.  I had lived there for some months when I was a teenager, and it felt familiar and easy to navigate.  The lyrical names were like old friends to me. Quetzaltenango. Huehuetenango. Chichicastenango. I knew my way around. I have to admit though, that I wasn’t overly delighted that we were arriving in a sketchy sector of Guatemala City a little after midnight. Not that I want to give much credence to paranoia….but why press our luck?  The empty spaces of my head (of which there are many!) were filled with a rather disconcerting Mano Negra song:

Cuidado en la calle.

Cuidado en la acera.

Cuidado  donde sea.

Que te andan buscando…….

Peligroso esta el barrio de Guatemala.

There was no way we would ever find a ride out of there that late at night, so we decided to look for the safest place to sleep.  We were in a huge produce market, filled with paneled trucks and many shadows where evil-doers might well have been lurking.  Not wanting to put ourselves on full display before bedtime, we opted to climb into the back of one of the trucks for shelter.  It was hardly the luxury of the previous nights cement floor, but it was the best we could do.  It was a page ripped from the “I Can’t See You So You Can’t See Me” book of self-defense. We climbed the high walls of a truck, and dropped into its mysterious black interior.  A few flicks of a lighter revealed that it was mostly full of tires and chains.  I sculpted a little nest in the rusty chains and settled in.  As I drifted off to dreams I reminded myself, for the second time in as many days, to get that silly tetanus shot.

Dex was strangely flustered the next morning.  I figured it was just the anxiety from spending the night hidden amongst scraps of metal.  At any rate, he didn’t seem much for conversation, and he pushed for a swift start of our day.  We meandered out to the unwelcoming divided highway.  Dex walked in purposeful, silent strides ten yards ahead of me.  I figured he was mad at me for something.  Its bound to happen, traveling so close like this.  Dex and I never actually fought, but at times the tension would blossom up like a storm cloud.  We would both know that whoever dared to utter the next word would be met with a torrential downpour of bitchiness.  These moments require no explanation.  You just have to let their bitter, griping, self pitying, harassed, hungry raindrops fall within your own head, until the air clears. It is well advised to keep a wide berth in such moments.  With increasing frequency, Dex and I could be spotted walking 40 feet away from each other, as though on other planets.

I assumed this was one of those moments, so I just let it be.  I saw Dex jog towards a gas station, leaving me alone on the highway.  When he emerged from its restroom moments later with a noticeably more pleasant disposition, I realized that I had misread the situation.  He had just needed to shit.

I wasn’t wrong about there being tension in the air though.  It turned out that the tension wasn’t between Dex and me …the whole city seemed schitzed. There were police checks everywhere.  We kept having to exit our rides and line up on the side of the highway to show our documents.  When this happened four times in the first hour, it occurred to me that maybe Guatemalan authorities weren’t just overly curious….maybe something was going on.

Apparently so! My jaw dropped to learn that the night before, as Dex and I lay sleeping like vulnerable little chickadees, there had been a tremendous jailbreak just around the corner. Over 200 of the nations most dangerous felons had escaped! The details were still fuzzy, but all evidence suggested that this was the stuff Hollywood movies are made out of.  Allegedly these twin sisters had somehow smuggled guns into the prison.  Their boyfriends, notorious gang leaders who were serving time there, used these guns to kill a bunch of guards and make a dash for it. 

For lack of accurate information, my mind began to color in the details as they ought to be.  When I reflect upon the incident I can see crystal clearly two voluptuous twins in fetching Playboy bunny outfits.  They are bursting forth from a gigantic birthday cake with oversized, Al Capone-era machine guns.  The pasty, obese guards are so shocked that they scarcely feel the bullets. In no time the girls have stolen their shiny key ring and are dashing through the cellblock.  On their way to their handsome boyfriends, they generously liberate all the other grateful prisoners, as well as a few lions and giraffes from a local circus.  The twins, ample bosoms heaving from the exertion, are reunited with their wrongly convicted true loves just as the sirens begin to wail.  There is only time for brief, yet expressive, kisses before a ring of light illuminates our protagonists.  Looking above we see that the Humorous Sidekick has arrived by helicopter, just in the nick of time! The men each tightly embrace a twin with one hand while gripping a shiny golden rope with the other.  They are swiftly swept up into the bowels of the helicopter, and fly off in the direction of a perfect crescent moon.  Below them, the streets are in chaos as hapless criminals loot and graffiti the nearby businesses.  In the distance we see the silhouette of an elegant giraffe cantering towards its freedom. Fin!

I suspect that the reality may have been a touch less colorful.  I heard that by the end of the day, 40 people were killed. The brothers were shot downs.  The twins were convicted and received life sentences.

Viva Mexico Cabrones!!

As we walked the final stretch toward Mexican immigration, Dex and I concurred that it was in our best interest to procure a map. As usual, the walk-on actors in our marvelous movie were perfectly cued up.  From around a corner appeared a blond haired kid that made me instantly nostalgic for California.  He spoke with all the afflictions of a surfer dude.  He told us that he was on his way to “Costa” to hit the waves, and by any chance did we want a map of Mexico, because he didn’t need it anymore. We laughingly accepted!  I considered telling him that he was an angel with perfect timing, that he had partaken in some religious phenomenon that was permeating the fabric of our existence….but I couldn’t imagine how to explain.  I can only hope that once in a while life lets me play his role, rather that having me be perpetually on the receiving end.

We chatted for the briefest of moments, and I actually felt a twang of envy.  He seemed so carefree. He was bringing his kid and his woman to his patch of land in Costa Rica.  She was going to grow flowers.  He was going to surf.  They were all packed into a blue station wagon with thoughtful bumper stickers.  It seemed so sunny and free, that I was jealous of him!  And then I remembered that my entire life is just one glorified summer vacation, and if I weren’t me I would be jealous of myself. And I felt better.

A few hours later we had made it to Chiapas. Viva Zapata!  I marveled at my ignorance.  How is it that I can go to a liberal arts college and then live in Latin America, all the while hearing references to Chiapas, but still have no idea what the hell is going on there? God, I am such a typical bleeding heart liberal, all full of valiant ideas, with no real research to back them up.  Shame on me!  I made another entry on my growing list of “Notes to Self”…..learn about Chiapas! Who the hell are the Zapatistas?

Chiapas is a sensuous and lush.  The leaves are broad and speckled with dew.  The flowers are abundant.  We were dropped off at random on a narrow bit of road, flushed with dense vegetation.  “Look where we are!!” Dex and I exclaimed, feeling the glory of our journey manifested in our surroundings. It really was a marvelous sensation, to be in the middle of the tropics with the highway sprawling mysteriously before us. I felt so happy to be me, to be there. I reflected on the akward moments of my childhood. I had often been teased for being sort of a freak. But looking around, I felt really fucking cool.  In that moment I wouldn’t have traded my life for anyone’s. If the morons from junior high school could see me now they would cower in the might of my reckless tropical abandon!

  The hours began to line up, one after another, and the rain began to fall.  These were no anemic rain drops, they were the size of golf balls.  Within second we were saturated.  The steam from the pavement, and the peculiar, yellow-gray, bright sky were so pretty though.  We hardly minded the wet.

All the same, I think we were both relieved when an ambulance slowed down for us.  I jumped in front and Dex took the back. There were two well-scrubbed men who welcomed me to Chiapas, and gave me all sorts of information about the area.  They were relief workers, providing supplies for the poor farmers in the area.  They mentioned that the back of the ambulance was stocked with cases of infant formula.  I would be lying if I denied that for a moment I had a gnawing vision.  Dex will eat anything, and I noticed that he had just snacked up the last of the cat’s food that morning.  I had a troublesome fear that these kind men would open the back hatch to find Dex chugging back their precious supply of infant formula.  I said a little prayer that he would show restraint…..and he did.

         The men were well connected in the area, and offered to arrange for us to stay the night in a mission house.  The sun was getting low and we were tired, so the offer was eagerly accepted.  They drove us to a little cement building off the highway where a one armed woman received us with an diffident glance. She showed us to our room, where we were nearly blinded by the whiteness of the sheets.  Wow!  A bed!!  What elegance!

We showered under a spicket of cold water and put our damp, dirty clothes back on (we each had only one outfit).  For dinner we were served a plate of rice and beans, which we wolfed down with such voracious delight that the cook seemed genuinely flattered.  We both held up the plates and licked them clean.

 It was great to be in Mexico.  What a country!  It’s so pretty, and the people are so kind and proud.  The music. The food.  It was a pleasure, all of it.  I especially liked passing signs for all these marvelous destinations: Tabasco. Chihuahua. Tampico. I just gazed from the car windows with the sedated pleasure of a little kid watching Saturday morning cartoons.

The highlight came when I was picked up by Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna (the former who I have a huge crush on, the latter who I would also not banish from my bedroom).  We traveled in their old station wagon to a secluded paradise beach called “Boca del Cielo”.  There we drank a lot of tequila as poignant music played on the jukebox.  The night was concluded with a sensational ménage-a-trios which, although thoroughly enjoyable for me, ultimately lead to the demise of innocence in the boys’ friendship. Oh wait, that didn’t happen. That’s just a movie I saw. Sigh…

(If you haven’t seen Y Tu Mama Tambien…you should!  And then we can discuss how dreeeeaaaammmy Gael Garcia Bernal is. And maybe I will even invite you to our wedding.)

No. There was no ménage-a-trois. I did not find love along the Pan-Americana.  The closest I came to action was a pervy driver of a Coca-Cola truck. I noticed, as I straddled the stick shift, that he was changing gears an awful lot.  He seemed to linger a bit too long in the vicinity of my upper thigh.  I casually mentioned that Dex and I were missionaries on our honeymoon.  He pulled over and bid us adieu soon thereafter.

         The next guy who picked us up more than compensated for Mr. Touchy Feely.  He was an old truck driver with a playful smile that lingered constantly at the corner of his lips, needing only the slightest provocation to burst into bloom. I was telling him a story and I forgot the word for “goat”. My Spanish is really good.  I even know the word for “Platypus”….but for  some stupid reason I always forget the word for goat….chivo? chavo?chivato?  Something like that.  To illustrate my point, I began to bleat like a goat. (I can do a really good goat impression, and not just because it is a recurring necessity in my life.  I learned from this girl on Grateful Dead Tour who had taken waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy too much LSD and lost her verbal skills, preferring only to communicate in bleats.) So I was bleating to the truck driver, and he just started mooing.  Dex jumped in with a few owl hoots, and for the next several minutes we were a regular Old McDonald’s Farm.  In Spanish, animal make different noises.  Birds don’t chirp, they go “Pio-Pio-Pio!  Roosters don’t cock-a-doodle-do, they go “kickory-keee, kickory-keee!” You learn so much when you travel!

As we drew closer to the American border, nostalgia began to set it.  We were eager for the triumph of arriving, but a bit sad to have to start speaking English and thinking about real life again.  We were picked up by this turquoise sedan weighted down with way too many people.  There was hardly room for us, but they had pulled over to offer us a ride after seeing our cardboard sign that read “Matamoros”.  We said sure and crowded in, unable at first to fully take in just how many people were in that thing.  Fathers, mothers, naked children, hitchhikers...a kitten.  It was marvelous and chaotic.  They were going to drive us to the border the next morning, and offered us a place to stay at their house, food, showers, and a chance to talk to Jesus Christ, their personal savior.

  Dex and I looked at each other and decided that we still had some daylight, and so much energy, so we were going to say no thank you and try our luck on the side of the road.  We were feeling all mighty about our hitchhiking prowess and thought for sure our dream chariot was going to stop by any second. So we sat and waited.  And waited and waited and waited.  We began to wish we hadn’t said goodbye to the turquoise car, with its promise of a bed and food.  We watched the sun set and sat on our backpacks, half heartedly sticking our tired thumbs out.  It was one of those times when my hand couldn’t even manage to hold itself in proper hitchhiking position.  Pathetic!   We were sitting at a speed bump, hoping that when people slowed down for it, we would have time to give them pleading looks which would elicit enough guilt to make them pick us up.  It didn’t work as well as planned, and soon it was past midnight. 

I think we had both grown a bit delirious when the bus appeared.  It was this glowing, purring chariot, with a sign blazing its destination - Matamoros.  Ahhhhhh........  We wanted it so badly that we both flailed our arms in delusional hope.  The bus driver opened the door, no doubt thinking we were going to pay.  I mustered up every bit of charm I had left and sweetly, urgently suggested that he take us for free.  He joked with us as he shook his head in refusal, but we weren’t about to let our dream chariot leave without us, its predestined passengers.  Fate would have it that Dex misunderstood what the driver said and thought we had permission to ride for free.  So he picked up kitty and bounded on the bus.  Not wanting to lose the opportunity, I climbed the stairs and promised the driver he could kick us off whenever he felt like it.  We must have looked too happy to disappoint, so he smiled and sighed and let us collapse in the seats.  It was air-conditioned splendor.  Reclining seats!  Ah!  We were in heaven

There was a lady in the front seat.  There are often lades like her on busses.  Ladies that flirt with the driver in an off hand, bored way.  Maybe they both just needed to stay awake.  For whatever reason, they struggled to keep their conversation alive all night, which lead them to repeatedly revisit the topic of how bad gringos smelled.  I cringed in my seat, aware that the scent of several weeks of road grunge and kitten piss was radiating from our raggedy selves.  Yes, we really were quite gross, I must admit.  I blame it on the cat.  We wouldn’t have been so offensive if it weren’t for the cat.  The cat who, incidentally, seemed to know exactly the wrong time to break out into fits of heart wrenching meows.  Every time the bus would stop the kitten would start shrieking, and Dex and I would try to stifle her while simultaneously pretending to be asleep so that the diver wouldn’t have the heart to kick us off.  We stifled giggles and listened with guilty pleasure as time and time again the driver and his lady friend saw fit to pontificate on the poor hygiene of gringos.

  Miraculously, when the driver finally told us it was time to go, we were at our final destination.  He had let us ride to the US border.  He smiled in mock opposition to us and shooed us off the bus with a wink.  Maybe he was a reluctant angel, but still an angel.  We stretched out on the dirty bus station floor and resumed our slumber as if we were lounging in the luxury of the Ritz Carlton. 

America the Beautiful!

Looking at the long bridge across the border, Dex and I got really nervous. What would happen if they didn’t let the kitten in? We were both too in love with the little guy to even fathom leaving him in Mexico.  We discussed the possible scenarios.  Dex said that if worse came to worse, he would sneak the cat over.  A quick survey of his tattered clothes, his hair which had faded to a soothing turquoise hue, and his passport with its anti-American slogans made me doubt the likelihood of a discreet entrance.  We opted to attempt our crossing in waves.  I would go alone first with the cat, concealing nothing and playing the innocent fool.  If they turned me back, Dex would try later with the cat hidden.  We synchronized our watches like real-live adventure heroes, ready to break international laws.  I set off across the bridge, pausing to bid a final adieu to Latin America.

While waiting on line at immigration, cat resting in the crook of my arm, the room suddenly burst into commotion.  Just ahead of me in line a Mexican man had bolted from the queue in a mad dash for the door.  He ran like the wind, but he may as well have been trying to reach the planet Neptune..  Within five seconds a dozen guards plastered him to the floor and twisted his arms back like pretzels.  He was lead off to some interrogation room, leaving the spectators to mumble and speculate. I can’t imagine how desperate someone has to be, how short of options, to make that suicidal dash seem like a viable alternative.  It was heartbreakingly unjust.  I had just waltzed all over Latin America, being met with nothing but open arms and kindness, and this is how my country returns the hospitality.  Borders strike me as such cruel and arbitrary things. I know that, after I am elected president, one of the numerous factors which will contribute to my swift assassination will be my passionate and radically naïve immigration reform. 

Finally I made it to the front of the line, my stomach churning with kitten-related nervousness.  The cat, who had been snuggled so tenderly in my sleeve only moments before, must have sensed that he was missing a chance to cause a commotion. He burst forward and demanded his rightful acclaim as an operatic tenor, singing of all the exotic pests and parasites to which he was surely host.  He clawed his way up over my shoulder, and completely subverted my attempt at composure.  I offered my most ingratiating smile to the border guard, and began contemplating the back-up plan.

The immigration man batted nary an eyelash.  He was more perplexed by the state of my tie-dyed passport. See, I had run out of pages. Rather than trouble myself with a trip to the embassy, I had pursued the slightly misguided option of washing the old stamps off.  What resulted was pages filled with groovy swirls of color, and the occasional bit of scrawl in indelible ink.  The officer pinched it between his fingers as though it was infectious (and I can’t promise it wasn’t).  When he met my eyes with an inquiring gaze, he finally noticed the cat, who had by this point left some charming decorative scratches all over my neck.

This is it, I thought.  Moment of truth.  He is going to turn me back to Mexico. I braced myself for the bad news.  All the immigration officer had to say was, “Aw! He is soooooo CUTE! What’s his name?” He stamped my disintegrating passport and I hurried away before he had a moment to reconsider.  Not for nothing, but isn’t it a little fucked up that this germ ridden cat can freely enter and exit 10 countries, while the average Latino human isn’t allowed to?  My cat enjoys privileges that aren’t even extended to other human beings.  How do they know that the damn cat, who doesn’t even speak English good, isn’t gonna steal our jobs and make the streets unsafe for our precious children?!

I think in the end the cat even got better treatment at the border than Dex, who followed a half-hour later.  The guard was suspicious as to why exactly he was traveling with a box of cat food.  He was granted entry after some tense interrogation in which Dex simply admitted the truth: He eats cat chow.

As I waited for Dex to make it over the border, I sat on the curb outside a grocery store and soaked up the familiar touches of home, both welcoming and frightening.  Across the street there was a Greyhound station that advertised 99 dollar fares to New York.  It seemed like the height of opulence.  Wow! I could pay 99 dollars and go straight home?!  I contemplated the luxury with desparate envy.  It’s not often in life that a 3-day Greyhound ride seems enticing.

Beside me there were some old-school bubblegum machines, the kind with little plastic globes that encase prizes which are consistently disappointing.  Plastic rings, stupid stickers, rubber monster finger-puppets, though never the one you had hoped for. I would get one for nostalgia’s sake, only I didn’t have a quarter.

I looked around at all the familiar brand names.  “We Accept Food Stamps!” declared an airbrushed poster.  How weird to see English! This is my country! I surveyed the gaggle of women who congregated in the shade beside me.  They had unforgivably sprayed out hair and atrocious fringed suede ensembles.  These are my people?! They were yacking away about something inane. Atrocious grammar abounded.  Instead of feeling like the objective anthropologist I had been all through Latin America, I was suddenly embarrassed. I am one of them!? I declared it my national obligation to make fun of them, if only in my own mind.  It helped sooth my identity issues.

I was relieved to see Dex finally emerge from the border crossing, snacking on a handful of cat chow.  I suddenly identified with him so much, like we were both visitors to a strange land. It was funny, after traveling so long and being constantly referred to as “American,” to get home and feel so inexplicably foreign

We trudged down the blisteringly hot highway, each silently savoring the bitter-sweetness of returning to our homeland.  It is triumphant, but hard. The nostalgia for Latin America mounted as we spent more than an hour on the side of the road, watching spacious, air-conditioned cars whiz by with no apparent thought of stopping.  The contrast was striking.  Down south everyone stops.  On a busy road you barely have to wait.  But Americans have years of scary movies that form the mortar of their psyche, and passed us by with the relieved excitement of a near death experience. I was hoping that the rotting armadillo carcasses we were stepping over were not indicative of the fate that awaited us on these unforgiving roads.  How fitting that, when someone did finally pick us up, it was a Mexican.

Later that day, we were picked up by a very nice, if somewhat forgettable man.  What sticks in my memory about this ride is that, as we were getting broiled in the midday heat in the back of his truck, he gifted us with some rather astonishing and refreshing bottles of Gatorade. I felt like a bumpkin, examining the bottle in my hand.  What the hell is this?? The liquid was a frightening neon blue and was reputed to have all sorts of anti oxidant microbeads or some-such.  Maybe it was deoxyribo-free-radical-ceremide-three.  I don’t; remember.  And the bottle was this multi-tiered space age contraption with informative graphs and double helix diagrams.  I felt safer knowing that  if this truck in the middle of the desert should perchance to crash in the ocean, my Gatorade bottle would become a flotation device. Why on earth is does a beverage require so much technology? Why are consumers so fickle, and so easily fooled by these gimmicks? Why is life so increasingly complicated? How are we supposed to choose between so many technologically sophisticated beverage options?  Choice is beautiful.  Superabundance of choice is a nightmare.  All it does is breed discontent.  You walk away from the 7-Eleven wondering if maybe you haven’t selected the optimum beverage.  I get so overwhelmed!!

The rest of the day provided similar anthropological lessons.  We had such dismal success scoring rides on the highway that we ended up trying to solicit rides in a mall parking lot.  It was one of those super-giant-mega-wonder-discount-outlet places.  Obese families with RV-sized shopping carts unloaded economy boxes of processed snack-food into their jumbo SUVs. It was like an exaggeration of anti-capitalist propaganda.  I was mesmerized and appalled.

Dex and I wandered from vehicle to vehicle, politely asking for rides.  No one seemed compelled to offer us any undue hospitality. We felt the sting of no longer being exotic foreigners.  We were suddenly just white trash, tumbling in the breeze. Fathers protectively ushered their children into the cars as we approached.  More than once I heard the click of automatic locks being depressed.   Finally one nice family took mercy on us. They dropped us off at a Weinerschnitzle.  You could smell the sizzling meat from out in the parking lot.  I felt like I was on some Americana ride at Disney land.

We went into the Weinerschitzle to see if anyone wanted to give us a ride.  A cursory glance revealed that we would probably have to resign to a long, slow death on the Texas highway.  Then I saw a man come out of the bathroom.  He looked Latino.  My heart jumped.  I knew he would help us!

I approached him with so much enthusiasm that he thought he must know me from somewhere.  I chatted him up.  He was from El Salvador.  It was such a wonderful privilege to say, “El Salvador!  I was just there a few days ago!” I gushed about how lovely the people were, which wasn’t just shameless flattery. They really are pretty great.

The man was shy, but visibly touched to see people excited about his country.  He explained that he was driving an oil truck, and that he would get fired if anyone found saw him give us a ride. He apologized or not being able to help us out, but then as he left the red roofed bratwurst heaven, he had a change of mind.  He said he would take us as far as the next truck stop, but we had to ride with our heads down so no one would see us. How sweet is that? He risked his job just to be kind to two dirty strangers.

That evening we washed up in the truck-stop restrooms, the water leaving visible streaks down our dusty necks.  I went outside to survey the prospects.  Dex perused the convenience store aisles, happily  munching on the bulk bin foods, and filling up his flashy Gatorade bottle from the soda fountain.  A lovely way to get arrested, I thought.  Now that we are back in our own country we can’t act like innocent tourist anymore. “What???Ohhhhhhh!  You mean you have to PAY for this? Ah!”

From my seat on the curb I watched happy families pull in and out of the parking lot in their shiny sedans.  I envied the girls with blond ponytails that swished back and forth.  My hair was such a disaster after so many truck rides and so few washings that it would probably never swish again! I watched family dogs excitedly bound out of air-conditioned cars, pink tongues flailing.  I actually felt jealous of those dogs.  Their lives were more comfortable than mine right now.  I wished one of these families would adopt me and drive me to a beautiful house with soft beds and porridge that isn’t too hot or too cold, although frankly, I was so hungry I’d eat anything.

Since my poorly organized “Adopt a Hitchhiker” campaign failed to attract any investors, Dex and I walked over to the back parking lot, where all the truckers were. We rapped on a few windows but were met with indifference.  I knew it would be like this.  I am an old pro at hitching rides from truck stops.  There is really only one good way to go about it, and that means getting on the radio. If I can convince someone to let me use their CB, a world of possibilities opens up. The sound of a female voice coming over the airwaves excites a lot of the truckers from their monotonous stupor.  If I make a little plea for a ride, I am more often than not met with a plethora of offers.

“My friend and I are looking for a ride to New York, can anyone help us out?”

“Hey little lady! Well I am headed to Sacramento, but you can come with me!”

“Are you old enough to go for a ride?”

“Sure honey.  What size knockers do you have?”

“Is your friend a guy or a girl?”

I managed to secure a ride by being purposefully vague about my traveling companion’s gender.  A horny trucker pushed his rig into gear and pulled forward, thinking no doubt that it was his lucky day.  His head filled with visions of buxom sorority girls is daisy-dukes, he registered a marked disappointment at the sight of us. Without even slowing down to talk he gave us a repulsed flip of the hand and continued on his way.  This happened several times, until the soothing seduction of my voice on the radio failed to elicit any more takers.

   The manager of the truck stop had been eyeing us nervously, and rather than politely requesting that we leave, he called the police.  I don’t understand that.  He could have just said something, and we would have gone.  We scurried across the highway to a neighboring truck stop and established ourselves on its exit ramp, our thumbs optimistically erect. We were both feeling kind of worn down from our first day in Texas.  I daydreamed with Dex about how wonderful it would be if the next truck that passed by was going all the way to New York.  Then I thought for a moment and added that Atlanta would be cool too, so I could go visit my friend Sue, the woman who had bought my psychedelic school-bus on ebay.  

   Wouldn’t you know it, the very next truck whined to a halt a hundred meters down the ramp.  When we arrived, breathless and grateful, the driver informed us that he was going all the way to Newark.  NEWARK!! That is practically all the way home!!! Then he said that he hoped we wouldn’t mind, but he also had to stop in Atlanta for one night to visit his mama. Ayyy! Ask and you shall receive!  Life is so marvelous!

   He had the most tragic name. Klatorris. Ouch! I asked him like three times, just to be sure I wasn’t miss-hearing.  Now I mention him every time I am in one of those conversations where people talk about other people they know with really bad names.  Klatorris.  Oooh. I usually also mention a kid from my high school names Sal Monella. And the girl my brother went to the junior prom with: Kana Koke. (E gads, people!  Have a little foresight when naming your children!)

   Klattoris was awesome though.  At least I think he was.  To be quite honest his accent was so thick I scarcely understood what the hell he was saying to me. It was funny to be back in my English speaking land and be at an utter loss to follow the conversation.  I fell back on a lot of nodding and agreeing about things that I have no idea about.  When you don’t understand a person, “Yes!” is a beautiful word. Dex had no problem with it though.  He is an endearing accent whore, and about ten minutes down the highway he was testing out his new ebonics and tossing about truck-driver slang like it was nobody’s business. The only thing I caught in their conversation was the alarmingly frequent use of the word “pussy.” Since I understood essentially nothing else this strange New Dex was talking about, I succumbed to the gravitational pull of the bunk-bed.  It was amaaaaaazing. I slept like the princess minus the pea.

   After a bit of rest I started to warm to the charms of my native land.  I really am proud of this country.  I know I spout a lot of disparaging liberal diatribes about our consumerism, foreign policy, and appalling fashion sense…..but I really do like America.  Given the chance, I wouldn’t want to be from anywhere else. I realized this in a million tiny ways as we sped across the southern states.  We pulled over several times so Klattoris could fake his logbooks in order to continue driving hours past the legal limit. Dex and I would bound forth to the service station like eager schoolchildren.  We happily munched the left over french-fries on people’s plates. The availability of free condiments was a numinous gift from heaven.  We inhaled packets of ketchup and envelopes of Sweet n Low like Halloween candy.  And restroom tap water was the nectar of the gods.  The world was our banquet!

   A few days later we pulled into an Atlanta truck stop, well rested, stomachs full of processed substances that, under the Reagan administration, might very well qualify as vegetables. I called up Sue and said, “Guess where I am!!!”

   Sue and I became friends from an ebay transaction.  I had a gigantic psychedelic schoolbus that I could no longer maintain, she had a wild spirit and a lot of money.  It was a peculiar friendship.  I never know where to begin describing Sue.  And once I begin, I can never quite end.  We are from different planets.  I am from the sloppy place where people have pores and get spinach stuck in their teeth.  Sue is a template for socio-genetic perfection.  I believe she may actually be 15 years my senior, but she looks like my younger sister. Well, prettier than my younger sister would be….That she is the wealthiest person I know is beyond doubt, though the quantity by which her wealth exponentially exceeds the combined worth of everyone I know is still untold. She is a thoroughbred. The crowning glory of generations of rich fabulous people cross-breeding with other rich fabulous people, weeding out any imperfection. You should see her children.  You will go blind.  They are that gorgeous. I feel like a greasy, snaggle-toothed troglodyte in their illuminated presence.

   Sue paid for us to take a taxi from the truck stop, and we once again were transported between worlds.  She lives in a lovely wooded area of Atlanta, surrounded by stately homes and fancy people.  Among all these highbrow temples to gourmet living, Sue’s house jumps out.  It is as proud and impeccably manicured as the rest of them, with one obnoxious exception: my school bus is parked in her driveway! I cheered as we rounded the corner and saw the old bus.  She was dozing in the dark like a docile rhinoceros, all dolled up for the circus.  It was like seeing an old friend.  I ran up to the bus and kissed the lips of the purple octopus on the hood.

   Sue’s house was a cathedral of luxury and colors.  Dex and I wandered in, eyes drawn every which way to take in all the art and impressive decorations.   A hundred years from now art historians are going to crap their panties when they comb through her collection.  Her house is a museum of rainbows and sparkles, portraits and sculptures.  I think she must be known as “the crazy one” among her fellow debutantes. It makes me proud that my humble bus is a part of her world.  It makes me laugh at fate’s sense of humor - the fact that I find myself welcome amongst such opulent splendor, so soon after sleeping in muddy ditches.

   In the back of my head of course the bleeding heart liberal cannot help but be flabbergasted by the inequality in the world.  I had just recently seen so many yellow eyed children, whose liver’s are rotting away towards uselessness because they can’t even afford a couple of dollars for hepatitis medicine. So much abundance, and so much poverty. How can that be reconciled?

   I feel like a covert liaison between the rich and the poor.  I move so frequently between worlds.  In the poor world I am rich, in the rich world I am poor. I witness it all, the utmost of extremes, and have no idea what my part is in all of it.  It makes me feel sort of phony sometimes.  For wealth of experiences, I know I’m in the top tax bracket.  But sometimes, as far as coins in my pocket, I’m not quite keeping up with the Jones’. But I am not ignorant of the fact that any educated, middle class white American who voluntarily joins the “Have-nots” is exercising a privilege known only to the “Haves.”  I can go without food for a few days, and sleep in ditches with leeches all over me, but I could never really be poor.  Yet I know, even if I had millions, I could never really be rich either.

   The injustices of the world proved a little too complicated for me to solve that night at Sue’s, so I let my conscience be cheaply bought with a well stocked refrigerator and a nice hot bath.  I should mention that Sue’s bathroom is as impressive as her tree house.  It outsized most New York apartments. The tub is nestled between tall windows and lush hanging plants.  There are more sweet-smelling, froofy, girly delicious soaps and frills than one could consume in an entire lifetime.  I sat and let the whirlpool jets churn up more fragrant bubbles as they massaged my weeping back. Aaaaahhhhh. What could be better?  As I patted myself dry with uber-plush-mega towels, I cringed at the ring of dirt lingering in her porcelain tub.

   I wanted to sleep in my bus for old times sake, but I never made it that far. I didn't even get to take up Sue's invitation to use her hyperbaric chamber. I was lured and seduced by a king-sized bed. Its mattress must have been designed by a panel of the worlds leading physicists to be ergonomically unsurpassed. The thread count of the sheets exceeded the GNP of most developing nations. I was asleep before my head hit the overstuffed pillows, of which there were many.

   The next morning, rested, clean, and full, we headed back to the truck stop to find Klattoris.  As I was leaving, Sue slipped me a hundred dollars.  This woman is more generous with 50 dollars bills than I am with tic-tacs! I felt like a schmuck taking it. She gives me so much, and I have so little to offer in return besides my quirky presence. But the truth was, a hundred dollars felt like wining the lottery.  A hundred dollars made the sky open up and rainbows fall down.  A hundred dollars gave us wings. I reluctantly accepted, and renewed my promise to be a seriously generous mother fucker next time I had a stable income.

   With that little bit of money, Dex and I were on top of the world.  We made phone calls.  We ate vanilla ice cream cones with rainbow sprinkles.  We verified the claim that there is indeed no wrong way to eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. We treated Klattoris to the all-you-can-eat buffet. We were like little kids playing grown up. Gold miners who struck the mother load.

New York! New York!

I will forever remember that first glimpse of the New York City skyline.  The Empire State Building. The Chrystler Building.  The Twin Towers.  I was breathless. We had come so far to be here, and there it was, in all its majesty, New York City glistening like a bejeweled crown.  I felt like an immigrant who had crossed oceans in search of a new life.

I remembered a story my mom had told me about when she was a little girl in World War Two.  Her family had to flee Burma after the Japanese started bombing.  They ended up on a harrowing tangle of boat rides around many continents, before arriving on US shores.  Though just a child at the time, my mother recalls vividly that when their boat crossed under a bridge which signified their safe arrival on US shore, the elated passengers all threw their most treasured belongings overboard, like an offering to the gods who had protected them.  My mom threw the shoes of her favorite doll into the harbor.

When I think about stuff like that, I get a bit misty about my country, and all the noble ideas it represents.  I looked at New York City and imagined it as my grandparents had seen it, arriving by boat from Ireland nearly a hundred years ago.  I feel proud to be from this place.  I looked at the Twin Towers with a newfound reverence.  I had always thought they were ugly, but suddenly I loved them. Little did I know that I was saying goodbye to them.  A few weeks later they disappeared.

It felt amazing to stroll briefly down Manhattan’s avenues, to get to the Long Island Rail Road.  The mammoth skyscrapers loomed above us like an enchanted forest.  There was so much motion and noise.  So many new smells and accents. I was overwhelmed by all the implications of being home.  I knew that every time I would mention this journey from Quito, the response would be, “Really, how was it?” and I would have about ten seconds to answer before their attention spanned expired. How can you fit an entire adventure into one all encapsulating sound-bite?  I knew that if I were to open my mouth in attempts to give any genuine response, out would flow a parade of continents, languages, dust, sequins, petticoats, trucks-stops, llamas and palm trees.   I wasn’t ready to contemplate it all, I just wanted to go home. See my mom.

Miguel’s White Horse

On the train ride home, knowing that our epic journey was drawing to its reluctant yet triumphant conclusion, Dex and I got nostalgic.  We talked about our favorite rides. I had three: the Chilean lady who drove us over the Panama Canal, the flatbed truck that took us to Cartegena, and the free bus ride to the US border.

Dex smiled along with me.  I could see the film of our journey glistening in his eyes.  He agreed that those rides were all wonderful, but none of them were his favorite.  (Well, aren’t we so lucky that we have so many favorites to choose from!)  Dex’s moment was nice and simple.  It was our first night.  We still hadn’t reached the Colombian border, and were both silently enjoying our last moments in Ecuador.  We were laying down in the back of a pickup truck, watching the stars as we were tossed to and fro by the bumpy potholes.  I turned to Dex and said something that I guess really struck him.  Something about how to some people, luxury is a big juicy steak.  Maybe to some it is a fancy car.  But I can’t imagine a bigger privilege than hitching a ride in the back of a pickup and watching shooting stars.  “To me, this is living” I said.  And I guess that touched him in some way.

What I recall most about that ride that Dex referred to as his favorite was the full moon tangled in the t