Relax... It's Costa Rica

Punta Cateral, or the tobolo, in Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

     The day before I left for Costa Rica I realized I didn't know where I was going the first night.  I was victim of my oblivion again, my inability to forecast anything whatsoever in my life that required choice.  I had gotten my vaccinations and read the State Department warnings, (Nicaragua has been land-mine free for 3 years now!) but forgot to plan a damn thing.  I had 44 days to get to Mexico City.  That is all I knew.

     I messaged my friend, John, who lived in San Jose, three times to ask for his address.  I was worried.  Americans worry.  But Costa Ricans don't.  John replied he would "send somebody for me."  And if that person didn't come, I should take a taxi to San Pedro Mall and wait in the food court.  For who?  I felt like he was batman, and I could never find him, but somehow, maybe, he would find me.

          Worry was something that was new to me at 27.  And I don't deal with it well.  And this makes me worry more.  I worry about choices: should I move to New Orleans; should I change jobs; and which tomato sauce should I buy at the store, should I buy organic, or save a buck, or does it really matter?  Every decision represents an alternative choice, and I can never know which one is better because I can't experience both simultaneously, time won't let me go backward and choose again, and again, and again.  Time is the dirtiest of bastards.  But three years ago I didn't worry.  I was traveling in Ecuador.  I was jumping off things even though my mother told me I'd break my neck. I jumped off bridges, boats, into waterfalls.  I hopped onto buses unsure where I wanted to go or where I'd spend the night. I ate guinea pig and chicken feet and cow heart from dirty street grills.  I never thought twice about it.  What happened?  What is this feeling....is this what my parents always encouraged...is this...dear god...is this maturity?!  

         I hated the idea and so I before I left the airport I bought a bottle of rum at the duty-store free.  When I left security a man stood with a sign, "Sam Nelson."  His name was James Brown, and he was an older, black man who grew up on the Carribean coast.  He spoke Spanish nice and slowly, and everything he did was relaxed except his driving.  He threaded his taxi between trucks and cars at fast speeds on the highway.   He treated several red stoplights as if they were suggestions.  And he taught me pedestrians have no right of way.  He almost hit three of them.  I loved James Brown, and was tempted to hug him instead of pay him, but I knew he would not have wanted it that way.  

           I also learned there were no postal addresses in Costa Rica. There were street numbers nobody knew of because only recently did the capital city start to post signs.   

          "When I get mail, which is almost never, it says I'm two blocks from here and 1 block from over there," John told me. 

       I relaxed.   I had arrived safely.  I was in Costa Rica, the beginning of a two month dream vacation.  But I quickly found other things to worry about. Why hadn't I planned  anything?  Did I pack too many sets of pants? Why wasn't I traveling with my girlfriend in Iceland or Spain or, hell, why not Fiji?! Had I robbed myself of novelty by returning to Latin America?  Why had I quit a good job?  Did I have enough money? What about socks...god, I hate wet socks, did I have enough socks? And why were there so many prostitutes here? Everywhere, a prostitute.  Every question represented a choice, every choice a right and eight wrong answers. Was I on the right track here?  I thought I was...but there were just too many hourly hotels to confirm it.  

         I thought about these things and many more, all the way to the Pacific coast.  Even in my first walk in Manuel Antonio National Park I worried. I was distracted briefly by a green vine snake eating a poisonous milk frog ten times its diameter.  It suffocated the frog by swallowing its face.  I wondered if it would be able to swallow it whole, and decided it would.  Snakes don't second-guess.  Then the frog stopped moving and I resumed my walk and started worrying again.  And why was I so worried?  This, especially, worried me.  I worried I would be full of worry all the way back home and have nothing to say for it.  

        Then the beach confronted me.  Natural beauty has a way of challenging you, but each natural beauty is unique in its confrontation, its arrest of your vision and perspective requiring immediate attention to the details that make it so magnificent and different than all other places on Earth.  Manuel Antonio is special because of its wildlife, but also because it contains a geographical rarity, a tobolo--where the ocean waves deposit enough sand from two directions to thinly connect the mainland with a nearby island, creating a formation that, from above, looks a like a spoon with beaches on both sides of the handle. 

       I stared at the Pacific Ocean.  It went on forever.  If there was an end to it, I saw no evidence.   It is so vast and blank and permanent, it feels as if it has never changed and never will, only the land that meets it will change, and because of this, it feels as if it has no past.  Staring into it, I felt the same quality reflected in myself; I forgot my own past, the mirage of myriad missed choices, all the other places I could have been right now.  

      I swam.  The undercurrent was strong but the water was shallow, and I felt all my worry wash away in it.  I sat down in the waves and looked at the tropical beach bowl surrounding me, small cliffs delineated with palm and manzanillo trees, a bright sun, warm moving water.  I got out of the waves and hiked to the tip of the spoon.  I saw howler monkeys, dozens of chicken of the tree lizards scattering under my bare feet, and a two-foot black iguana sun-bathing at low tide, and then I swam again, on the other side of the tobolo.  

      I found shade on the shore under the toxic manzanillo tree, reading Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano but really just listening to the cicadas and a pair of Laughing Falcons squawking at each other, and the waves washing up, not even caring to think about how far the water traveled to get here, as I often like to do.  I was on a tropical beach in Costa Rica. I hadn't forgotten all my worries, but they had lost their weight.  It was beautiful and bright and full of life, and I felt like the vine snake, its fangs in the milk frog; there could be no second-guessing here.

Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

Green Vine Snake eating a Milk Frog in Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

Black Iguana, Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

Part of the hiking trail in Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

Chicken of the Tree Lizards (I think) in Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

If you think this is a trip for young people, please note that Steve is not young, but traveled
from Belize to Costa Rica on his own in 5 months time.  We found ourselves in the same place, going in
opposite directions. 

         

2nd Lining after Mother's Day Shooting; Celebrating Life and Culture in New Orleans

The rescheduled Original Big 7's Mother Day Second-line at Frenchmen and Villere, sight of the shooting.
Photo courtesy of Alex Turvy.  

The streets leading to Villere and Frenchmen are like many in the 7^th ward of New Orleans.  Well-kept creole cottages mix with vacant lots and houses, boarded up since Katrina and swallowed by swaths of cat’s claw vine that overtake the roofs and kill native plant life.  On the 1200 block of Frenchmen, though, a resident, Julius, who lives in a cream-yellow double-shotgun home had put 7 flags up on telephone poles, each adorned with a white and red star and the word, “Welcome.”

            A block away, on May 12^th, 2013, 19 men and women were shot at Villere and Frenchmen by a teenager during The Original Big 7’s Mother Day second-line  that started only a half hour earlier on Elysian Fields Avenue.

            Two days later The New York Times ran the article, “Celebrating, In Spite of Risk,” and politely asked if second-lines invited violence, a question that’s been asked before.

            A few hundred people gathered at the place of the shooting to hold vigil for the victims and to answer the question together—No.   Mayor Landrieu led the vigil and told the Times, “The layers of this thing are really important, and that’s to understand what the origin of the violence is, what it’s connected to and what it’s not connected to.” 

            Second-lines are like parades and have not been affected by gun violence for a few years now, but they have long expressed a traditionally thin line between life and death in New Orleans, a line that every resident and native walks in their lives and understands, more so because of guns and hurricanes.   A second-line is mobile, a people’s parade, a party.  The first line is the band and the people that follow—drinking, smoking, dancing—are the second-line.  The band, in essence, “rings the (cow)bells” through the narrow streets of poor neighborhoods and people come out of their homes and off their porches to join until the party swells the sidewalks, gaining momentum block by block. 

            The second-line evolved from the jazz funeral, where the band leads the funeral party and deceased to the graveyard.  They play dirges, but also upbeat spirituals, and the family dances, shaking white cloths in the air, some say to keep the spirit of the dead from attaching itself to the living.  More simply, New Orleanians respect the dead by celebrating life.  2^nd lines are celebrations of life without funereal ceremony.  They happen every Sunday from September to June, put on by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs operating in primarily African-American neighborhoods.  They are funky and fast and open to everyone, an expression of community in the Crescent City, but even they too respect the dead and slow the parade to play a dirge somewhere along the 4-hour route.  

             

             Many people wondered if there would be a second-line the week after the shooting.  There were four. The morning began with a less traditional bicycle second-line that I followed, with another near-thousand bikers, to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Treme then abandoned to find the start of the Divine Ladies in Uptown. 

            A mass of people gathered on St. Charles and Washington and barbecue smoke pilfered the corridor of live oak branches shading us.  A truck played bounce music and the streetcar rang its bell to let people off.  A sousaphone player tuned his instrument on the corner.

            A local reporter, Meg Gatto, interviewed me, asking me in a few different ways if I felt safe, and digging at the same question that went national after the shooting, trying to figure out what defines New Orleans culture, and is the violence inextricable from the way we celebrate life.  

            “The culture here we’re celebrating is one of peace and community and life,” I told her, “and the culture of violence is one we’re trying to discourage.  They’re two separate things.  I second-line a lot, and I always feel safe doing it.”

The Divine Ladies Social Aid and Pleasure Club

            A double-decker City Sight-Seeing bus pulled up.  On top the Stooges Brass Band hung their horns over the rails and showered notes at the shifting crowd, as if their trumpets were magnets gathering the people in, and the Divine Ladies, behind them, waved their fans and danced.  They all filed off the bus.  The tuba player left the corner and the barbecue trucks got ready to move.  The first line marched on, and the second-line, us, followed, everyone dancing.  We might never predict the next storm or gunshot, but the second-line, like a sunrise, we could count on.  It was Sunday and it was going to happen, and like another lady interviewed said, "We ain't never going to stop!" 

            The next week Money Wasters began their annual 2^nd line in the parking lot of Charbonnet-Labat-Glapion Funeral Home, where the jazz funeral for famous musician Uncle Lionel Baptiste began almost a year ago, his brown oak coffin being led out slowly to “Take a Close Walk with Thee.”  This time, the honored party emerged from the home wearing salmon-orange suits and waving ostrich-feather fans, unaccompanied by the dead, and To Be Continued Brass Band (TBC) lead the rest of us.  We rounded the corner where three black men on horseback waited in Tuba Fats Square, a gun-free peace-zone on a vacant lot and house weathered by neglect, but celebrating the home of another famous and passed musician.  We went by the Candlelight and a mural of Uncle Lionel with his bass drum looked out at us.  The horses followed.  Under the Claiborne Overpass, TBC, slowed down and played the first few notes of “Take a Closer Walk with Thee,” but it was a fake start, and they immediately switched tempos in music and pace, bringing the funk back and marching quickly under the highway and up Orleans. An older man in a white tee and army hat followed holding a beer bottle and a white sign, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," -God.

The Money Wasters Social Aid and Pleasure Club

            The next Saturday I was scheduled to fly out of New Orleans for the summer to travel, but the Original Big 7 had rescheduled their Mother’s Day second-line to run the same route before the shooting disbanded it three weeks earlier.  They changed nothing about the route sheet, except the date, and even excluding the common request, "Keep your guns at home." 

           But nobody worried.  A swarm of people gathered on Elysian Fields Avenue, and food and drink vendors set up on the neutral ground between pink crate myrtles and an Oleander Bush, a beautiful but toxic shrub. Q93.3 gave out hand-fans with a printed message, “stop the violence.”   The Big 7 came out of a green cottage home with orange and gold-trimmed shutters.  An old, weathered live oak tree shaded the yard, its branches extending across three lanes and into the neutral round, where Bittles Wit’ the Vittles BBQ truck sent meaty plumes of smoke skyward. 

            We marched around the block to “I Got That Fire,” and soon turned on Villere Street towards the intersection of the shooting. 

            The setting was again familiar, colorful cottages offset by vacant lots, abandoned since Katrina or another storm.  In a lot next to the intersection, a set of wet clothes dried in the weeds.  A backyard lined with sunflowers fenced in a trampoline and a plastic kiddie-pool, next to a rotting yellow shotgun-home being strangled from the top-down by vines.

            At Frenchmen and Villere, One Mind Brass Band stopped and began to play the popular spiritual, “I’ll Fly Away,” then moved quickly to make room for TBC Brass Band.  I expected a dirge, something slow to remember the victims, but no one had died in the shooting—they remained with the living—and this is a city that celebrates its living and dead the same, by celebrating life itself, by dancing to keep bad juju from attaching to us, to feel alive and show off just alive we really are, no matter how many hurricanes and bullets strike out.

            TBC did not play a dirge; they did not even fake its start, but instead stopped at the intersection to play “We’re Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone adapted for brass funk.  They played for a hard minute, singing the chorus between blasts of trumpets and cowbells, then as quickly as they came, they marched on. 

            Behind us was a third line—a chorus of red and blue police lights from six patrol cars.  More cops walked with us, and at the next corner an officer lifted his orange vest to show the pools of sweat collecting in his uniform.

            At Henriette Delille Street the 2^nd line turned.  I let it go.  I had to fly out soon.  After the red-and-blue tails of the parade passed me, I walked back along Frenchmen Street.  Again, I noted the “Welcome” flags, the beautiful yellow house of Julius, and the vacant lots and homes of his neighbors who never came back, the unturned property sitting like visible ghosts of Katrina, and I knew the violence of man would never stop the 2^nd-lines, but the only thing that would return this city to nature would be nature itself, but even then…. even then, it is easy to imagine that if only a 100 people in a 100 homes remained, somewhere on a Sunday afternoon would be men and children with horns, and behind them an audience, a 2^nd line, dancing, celebrating every living moment, all the way down the line.   

            

The Bayou Boogaloo Bicycle 2nd-Line

TBC Brass Band at Charbonnet-Laban-Glapion Funeral Home for the Money Wasters
Social Aid and Pleasure Club 2nd-line

Money Wasters

New York Times Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/us/new-orleans-parades-celebrating-in-spite-of-the-risk.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 

Local News Report and interview: http://www.fox8live.com/story/22293935/group-holds-second-line-to-honor-mothers-day-shooting-victims

Jazzfest in Hell

          For seculars, hell is a fantasy, and everyone has a different idea, a different gallery of images that collects across the mind when asked to imagine it.  Some of them are brutal.  The Dutch painter Heironymus Bosch depicted hell as being full of frog-headed demons eating and excreting sinners into its fiery bowels.  In one painting a musician and his lady audience ride a haywagon being pulled by these demons toward the underworld.  The lute-player is having such a good time serenading his woman that he doesn't realize where he's headed, that his love for music is about to score him an eternity of pain and fire.  But the imaginative process is made easier when you’re released from the notion that you’ll burn forever.  Still, I sometimes like to imagine if I do go to hell, what would I want it to be like without cheating its integral features of being hot and uncomfortable.  I would want it be fun, full of people who are there because they enjoyed living too much, people who drink and play music and dance and had a healthy appetite of earthly delights, even if they knew it would cost them in the afterlife.

            I would want my hell to look and be like Jazzfest.
 

            I live in the quiet neighborhood of Bayou Saint John, which began as a worker's camp that predates New Orleans.  It is residential and quiet.  In the spring the air is fragrant from the confederate jasmine that lines fences of blue and yellow French Colonial homes. Down the street is a park where you can play chess or read under the shade of palm trees.  Live oaks encircle our streets and avenues and turn them into shaded corridors all the way to City Park and its 1,600 acres of Louisiana natural beauty.  It all screams of peace and quiet resplendence.  People come here to see the quieter, greener part of the city.

            And then for two weeks in the year people come here to see Jazzfest.  A lot of people.  A healthy Saturday will bring more than 100,000 people into the fair grounds and community.  Half a million visitors will make the pilgrimage during the festival. And for good reason.  There are more than 70 bands daily, including both rock stars and local favorites.  My first year I went three days and when I could not find a ticket the last day I hung outside the fence on Gentilly Boulevard and watched The Preservation Hall Jazz Band from inside a set of hedges.

            This year I decided to leave the first weekend.  I found a ride with friends to the town of Lafayette, another proud city of Louisiana that works hard to preserve its Cajun and Creole culture and French tongue. On the way we stopped at a gas station in Gross Tete, which is French for “big head.”  The station was called “Truck Tiger Stop,” and next to the lot was a large cage with a tiger sleeping inside of it.  His name was Tony and he was 12 years old, a Bengal Tiger, bred, born and raised next to interstate 10.  

            I ate homemade jerky from the truck stop and watched him wag his tail in the heat.  Inside his spacious cage was a tin pool, some balls, a rubber tire strung up by rope, and a pair of concrete structures he could hide inside.

            A man stood next to me wearing a Bluetooth with a microphone extension.  He was bald and his head was sun-burned.  He kept hissing, and I thought he was talking into his bluetooth until I realized he was hissing at the tiger.  He wanted Tony to move; to play the part of the powerful jungle cat.

            “Let’s throw something at him,” he said to me.  Inside the fence in front of us was a sign that read, “This animal is federally protected.  Do not throw objects into its cage.”

            I took another bite of the jerky.  It was smoky and delicious. 

            “Throw that jerky in there.  That’ll get him up.”

            “No,” I said.  The man shrugged then walked away.    Parts of Tony's home were painted purple and gold to support the LSU Tigers, only a few miles away in Baton Rouge.  Tony rested on top of his home and continued to swat his tail at the air.  I went back inside to buy more jerky.  By the salad and fried chicken there was a stuffed white tiger named Salene that used to live there, too.

            International Festival was not Jazzfest.   It was free.  It was easy to get up to the front of the stage.  It was downtown and we danced on concrete instead of dirt.  The beer and food was affordable.  I ate a fried chicken caprese sandwich tucked between waffles.  We watched an all-female 12-piece Mariachi band, Acadian rockers in kilts and dreads play Celtic music, and a Jamaican reggae musician pluck a guitar with only one string, the bottom E.  But the music was not as good and there was some sense of excess missing.  Nobody except the black creole cowboys danced and most people appeared sober and rested.  It lacked the struggle and hearty endurance of Jazzfest.

            I slept in a tent in a friend’s backyard and when the first ride available got ready to leave I packed up and left too.

            The next weekend I was back at Jazz Festival.  It was hot, crowded, expensive, and the rain had turned everything into mud.  Because it was on a horse track the mud contained manure and everything stunk.  Run-off created deep, wet trenches that separated crowds and caused festival-goers to cross it as if fording a river.  At the Fleetwood Mac show a man in a straw hat got stuck in the mud.  Three people helped pull him out.  I looked around and saw thousands of festival-goers stretching back to the end of the track, all exposed to the sun and without shade.   The ritual of it began to dawn on me.  Everyone gathered, as if religiously, around the large stage and faced the musicians.  A group prayer. There were flags hoisted in the air.  Drunk people jumped and waved their hands back and forth and screamed.  Others sat and knelt in the mud.  A man danced with a fly swatter.  Stevie Nix changed her outfit three times and came out wearing a top hat for “Go Your Own Way."  Lindsay Buckingham played a 5 minute guitar solo and never closed his mouth.  A shirtless man in front me shed a layer of dry skin; the second layer was already red and peeling too, and it felt like we were all burning; we were all sinking into the mud and didn't know it.  This was Jazzfest.  This was hell.  The place we all go because we like to have a good time just a little too much, because we like to drink and dance and play and do things to excess.  This is our pilgrimage to pay tribute to those things that make us a little less wholesome, and a lot more fun.  We worship a good time. We worship the music.  And if you stop and look around you, you'll wonder when it was that you arrived, when did you start riding the haywagon and stopped reading books under the shade of palm trees, stopped being quiet and restrained on earth; when did you arrive in this hell, and why is it so crowded?
               But when I found dry ground and fell into the music of the Little Willies at the Fais Do-Do Stage I forgot all this.  I was drunk and hot and I had stumbled into that ecstatic tired state of worship where the ritual of live music seems to enter you intravenously and flood your nerves, and you forget about your discomforts.  Norah Jones sang and her band played soft country music and my girlfriend and I held each other and swayed back in forth in the mud and we didn’t care if we were burned or dehydrated; if this was hell, it was a good hell, even in spite of the smell of horseshit. 

            The next day I conducted surveys to earn free admission.  I went to the back of the track where groups of friends, young and old, sunk their lawn chairs into the mud, several hundred feet away from the main stage.  Everyone complained about the mud.  I asked them how long they have been going.  They said 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 42 years.   They all said they would be back next year, ritually, and every year after that, immersed in lakes of hut mud.  But they also asked me to record a complaint: that next year if it rains and makes the same mess, that someone puts some hay down to cover it.

All For a Mardi Gras Day: PVC Magic Pipe

 

              Pipes have been around for almost 6,000 years, but the Babylonians were old-school and used clay.  If only they had plastic.  If only they had PVC.   Like Mardi Gras, polyvinyl chloride was invented in France, but took some time to catch on in America.  Invented in the 19^th century, it was brittle and unready for commercial use, but the addition of new plastics popularized it and by the mid-20^th century several nations were refitting and constructing sewage and water pipes with PVC.  

            But more importantly than sewage and water, PVC has artistic applications as well.  It is a thermoplastic resin with a low heat stability which means you can use heat to reform its shape.  As Mardi Gras fast approaches, krewes shift their attention to detail.  Big picture stuff slides away and is replaced by the tedium required to do a job all-the-way-right, to produce a product that doesn't just look cool from a distance. While the Krewe of Ragnarock’s Horse inspires awe because of its color and size, its details cast an additional layer of wonder upon any proximal reveler.  Some of the most fun details involve PVC pipe.   For the pale horse, with guidance, I used PVC to make chain links and ribs for the horseman.  A similar process can be done for many projects.  Here's how I made the ribs (the chain links were made in a similar set of steps):

Most steps are featured in pictures below.

1) Determine desired shape of pipe.  Cut it to length (table saw)

2) Create a mold of desired shape by drilling holes in a board to wrap the pipe around. 

3) Heat the PVC pipe all around but especially near the middle or where you want it to bend.  You will see it to start to lose its rigidity and droop. 

4) Shape it to the mold on the board. 

5) Let it cool.  After  a couple minutes, it will harden again.
6) When you have created all your pieces, prime the connector pieces with PVC cement primer.  Wear gloves because it is purple and difficult to remove from skin or fabric if spilled.
7) Coat the inside of the connectors and ends of pipes with PVC cement.
8) Connect the pieces into connectors.  If you are making chain links make sure you weave your links with each other. 
9) Paint!
*There are lots of variations of these steps possible you can perform to fit your desired project.  The most important feature of PVC for crafting is you can reshape and connect it!

Use a propane flame to soften the pipe.

Form the pipe to a desired mold using screws on a board.

 

PVC chain links.  About 30+ feet of it.

The skeletal legs and arms of the rider of our Pale Horse

Working the PVC arms and legs like puppets.