We arrive in rural Nicaragua, and what we discover

Initially when I was organizing our trip to Nicaragua, I assumed that after Ometepe we would all three drive our compact rental car to Colby’s PC site: past Chinandega, past El Viejo and over dusty rutted roads to Monte Rosa, the sugar cane refinery and farm that surrounds his tiny village.
Wrong.
Colby made it very clear that we would not be driving to his village, we would be arriving by bus, because that is how everyone in the village travels, and that is how he travels throughout Nicaragua. Given the reputation of Nicaraguan buses for comfort and safety, you can imagine my trepidation. (See previous post on this subject.)
It is a measure of my limited perspective and privileged travels in the country, that I have never before ridden a Nicaraguan bus. This would change. Colby was absolutely right. Simply arriving by bus, the same bus the locals ride, gave us a certain cred, if not exactly respectability, in the village. Plus we did not embarrass Colby. And one should never miss an opportunity to NOT embarrass one’s offspring. (Or do I mean the opposite? Ask me tomorrow.)
So we parked our rented vehicle in Chinandega, and took the bus to El Viejo. In El Viejo (home to the silver Virgin statue brought over by a brother of Teresa of Avila, a long time ago, about which I wrote thousands of words in my novel Absent a Miracle, and then deleted most of them.) Colby bought a 100-pound bag of pig feed for his pig, Rojita. She is named for his favorite, red-flavored, Nicaraguan soft drink. We tried to visit the inside of the church but it was closed. There were, however, a gaggle of very young nuns in pale blue habits looking for money, and I have never learned the art of saying no to a nun.
Then we took the bus from El Viejo to Monte Rosa. The 100-pound bag of pig feed rode atop the bus. A young man carried it up there. I have no idea how such feats of strength are possible, but they are, Because there it was, a 100-pound bag of pig feed on top of the bus, and no crane, pulley or winch in sight.
Inside the bus, I glanced across the aisle and noted that the leg of CSB’s seat – yes, we were lucky to have seats– had pierced the floor of the bus and dangled in midair. It hovered over the dirt road like a nectar-gathering hummingbird. I watched and waited for the inevitable crash. I wanted to photograph the incongruity of CSB’s un-Nicaraguan tall frame perched upon the suspended seat in the ancient school bus, but I was dissuaded.
Then we arrived at Colby’s village.
In years past, I have driven past villages like this in Nicaragua and other Latin Countries, and I have had friendly chats with the people who live in these villages, small farmers, cane-cutters, and teachers. But I had no idea.
Here we are staying with Colby’s host family: Doña Pastor, Pipé, her autistic 23-year old son, and Bryan, a grandson. Their house is built of cinder block and plywood, and loosely roofed with sheets of corrugated tin. There is a well in the garden, so it is quite easy to pump water into a bucket, or send in through PCB pipes into a cement ‘sink’ inside. The latrine we won’t speak of. Personal ablutions take place inside a cement enclosure, with a bucket and a bowl. The heat is such that I do not miss hot water. Which is saying quite a lot, since my devotion to hot water is legendary. While here, Colby has graciously given us his bed, which we learn is a typical Chinandega style bed Chinandega bed: a wooden bedframe supporting a platform of woven cane. And Colby will sleep outside in the hammock.
After making a few visits to various families, we are back for an early dinner. It gets dark early, and so dinner is early. Even though the village got electricity about a year ago, there are still very few lights and the current is unreliable and weak. Still, any electricity at all means that those who have them can charge their cellphones. They can talk on cellphones will sitting on latrines in the middle of sugar cane country. Doña Pastora prepares dinner, the usual rice and beans, with the special treat of plantains cooked in coconut oil; Colby (along with his backpack and his 100 pounds of pig feed) brought home a plastic jug filled with coconut oil for his host mother. Colby relishes the coconut-fried plantains. CSB not quite so much so. Then, as the darkness quickly descends, Doña Pastora and Pipé and Bryan head off for cult. That is what they call it: cult. Me voy para cult. I had to hear this to several times to believe it. I know that in my prejudiced & narrow mind I may think of their evangelical meetings as cult-like, but I certainly didn’t expect to hear Doña Pastora refer to it as such. Yet she did, repeatedly. I did not hear wrong. Almost every night she goes to cult.
When she doesn’t go to cult, she and the family watch the news. Because they have a television, bought from a traveling salesman who drives around the countryside selling shoddy goods at inflated prices. They will be paying for this television long after it has died. The reception is terrible; the television is more like a radio with suggestions of black and whites shapes moving across its screen. Still, they gather around the television to watch the news. Colby suggests that we do the same, and this seems like an excellent plan. But first I take a bucket shower with the aid of my headlamp. Then I hear some oddly familiar strains of music: Que barbaridad! Those are the opening credits for Downton Abbey.
For some reason there is no news on tonight at the usual time. Instead, in a sweaty dusty village in Nicaragua, the people are watching and listening to the dramas of the upper classes of the early 20th century in the English countryside. It must be the first season: Lady Mary is the early phases of her romance with the self-made newspaper mogul who will turn out to be such a cad. I am trying to consider how I can sleep and yet simultaneously be vigilant against the Chagas vector, and also thinking ahead to Lady Mary’s later romance and marriage with Matthew Crawley and then the craven, distressing, and yet utterly predictable, ending to last season: crash.
Then we retire in darkness. Lady Mary’s fate is still an open question. I read Giaconda Belli’s memoir of love affairs and revolutions by headlamp, and fall asleep.
It may be the countryside, but it’s not quiet. Crickets bellow. Roosters crow at surprising hours. Dogs wander and bark. But suddenly this noise is more than ordinary wandering & barking dogs. The dogs are barking a lot, and loudly, and in unison, and without stopping. In the interstices we make out angry voices, the clang of metal upon metal, and more angry voices coming from other directions. We are resting upon the caned surface of the Chinandega bedframe, wondering if this goes on every night. Along with Downtown Abbey. Or not.
CSB converses with Colby, still in his hammock. Much later things quiet down, and we do not get bitten by the Chagas vector that night.

In case you are wondering why it takes 40 minutes to walk the block and a half to the camel park in Brooklyn, with young Ignacio, most extremely cute grandson, I can now tell you:

• Litter is very interesting. Even the nicest street has some litter, and litter is full of possibility. Litter raises endless questions and answers almost none. A wafting plastic bag can be chased, kicked and chased some more.
• The cement mixer. A large machine that makes interesting noises and rotates. Enough said.
• Cast iron fences that need to be touched. Every post and railing needs to be touched, and tested for strength.
• Cast iron gates that need to be pushed open, pulled shut, then pushed open again.
• A plastic fork lying on the sidewalk. A discussion ensues: since I would rather he does not put this particular fork in his mouth, I must assert to Ignacio that this particular fork is dirty, and possibly too hot to handle.
• Curbs to be straddled and balanced upon.
• Free books on a stoop, quite a nice selection: Melville’s Typee, Conversations with a Dead Friend, a novel by William Least Heat Moon, and Postcards of Kentucky 1900-1950. We decide on Kentucky because there is a lovely picture of a horse wearing a garland of roses on the cover. Ignacio identifies this horse as a cow, which is normal for him.
• Old dead leaves that dance along the sidewalk and drift down from trees. These leaves can be caught, waved about, pounded upon and stepped upon. They are so versatile and interesting.
• Men with hoses and brooms.
It is a good thing to walk a block or two or more with young Ignacio and realize just how interesting – how possible – everything is. While he is opening and shutting gates and balancing upon curbstones, I find myself going slow enough to consider the sidewalk, the material it is made of, its cracks and lumps, and the tree roots that obtrude. I take note of the species of dead leaves that have fallen from the street trees, and think about the elegance of the gingko and why is that particular shape so extra-pleasing, and then I lapse into a moment of sheer longing for the huge sycamore leaves that fell in the front lawn of our first house in Hastings, and how we raked them in the fall and jumped into the piles and raked them again. There is time to squint into the windows of garden apartments, and imagine the surreal delights of living half under, half above ground. I make judgments based on window treatments. I wonder who came up with that strange conjunction of words: window treatments. I think about Iggy touching hundreds of objects that have been touched by hundreds of other hands that have also touched objects in hundreds of other places, and the world seems simultaneously enormous and compact.
Then we climb on the chipped but much loved camel of the camel park of Fort Greene.

Things I cannot tell you about Nicaragua

There are several things I cannot tell you: how many billboards we saw featuring the smiling well-fed face of Daniel Ortega. This is not for lack of trying. I stopped counting at 165 because it was a) depressing, and b) driving CSB a little nutty. I can tell you that I saw more billboards sporting Daniel’s mug even than telephone poles stenciled with the silhouette of Agosto Sandino. We saw other fine murals as well.

I cannot tell you what was the meaning of the caravan of straw-covered wagons or why they were washing their horses, though I will point out that the horses (& cows) in Ometepe also were being washed, and either horses in Nicaragua tend to get washed in Lent, or horses in Nicaragua tend to get washed all year long, but we were only there to see it happen in Lent. Or the meaning may have nothing to do with horses or Lent or bathing, but instead be about a certain incredibly loud cricket, the loudest cricket I have ever heard, a cricket that sounds like a siren, or at least like the wailing of a not-mythical two-legged creature.

There is very little I can tell you about the buses in Nicaragua, except that they are very old American school buses, so old that they never transported you or your children. Possibly they transported your parents to school, a very long time ago, before environmental regulations. After having been deemed unfit to carry American children to school, these buses were sold to Mexican entrepreneurs, and when they were too decrepit for Mexico, they were sold again to enterprising Nicaraguans. I cannot even show you a picture of a Nicaraguan bus, because I neglected to take one, possibly because I was focused on staying aboard, or upright, or alive. Even after having wasted a considerable amount of time scouring the Internet for a suitable picture, I have not found one that captures the Nicaraguan bus as I came to know it: crowded or extremely crowded; still advertising its long ago provenance as the Southern Willits County Union Free School District; blasting Mayan Reggae music; having at least one young salesman squeezing up and down the crowded aisles selling patent medicines; having seat legs piercing the metal floor and suspended perilously above air, with views of the rutted road below; and with baskets of fruit and 100-pound bags of pig food on the roof, and also, us. Here is the view, on the roof, heading from Monte Rosa to El Viejo.

I wish I could tell you that the rash that returned with me from Nicaragua, or rather, appeared almost immediately upon my return from Nicaragua, has a name and a cure. But I can’t do that. Aside from making me very itchy and hence very cranky, it – the rash – has the additional attribute of making me paranoid. I may have wasted quite a bit of time looking for Nicaraguan bus photos on the Internet, but I have wasted far more time looking for possible causes for rashes upon returning from the tropics. The possibilities are legion. The first site I go to is Chagas, and Chagas is not anywhere you want to be. Chagas is a parasitic disease caused by a flagellate protozoan, and its very name fills tropical travelers with dread. In CSB’s son’s room, he has taped to the wall (Plywood, makeshift) a Peace Corps notice about the dangers of Chagas. If you get bitten by an insect vector – somewhere on your face - the bug will then suck your blood and defecate nearby. You may develop symptoms immediately, or you may not. One of the lesser symptoms is a rash. In the later acute phase of disease, things far worse than rashes will happen to you. At that point, I stop reading about Chagas disease, and change my search words, and come up with Miliaria, which is prickly heat rash and you probably won’t die from it. (But can you die of paranoia?)

In Nicaragua we witnessed several religious rituals devoted to obscure saints. I can describe them but not necessarily explain them. San Benito of Palermo and his broom, for instance. Naturally most Nicaraguans were delighted to have a Latin American pope, except for the Evangelicals, who think the Pope, whatever his provenance, is the Antichrist.

As my favorite son so aptly put it: If you receive a package in the mail today, it is not from me.

[Last week we were away in Nicaragua, now we are not. But in order to maintain the illusion of immediacy, I am going to pretend, here in SQD, that we are still in Nicaragua. Even though we are not. In Nicaragua it is very hot and dusty, and anyone can tell you that I will never use my laptop in a dusty or sweaty atmosphere because I am just a tiny bit OCD on the subject of keyboard cleanliness. Also in Nicaragua, we had infrequent Internet connections and dicey electrical power, conditions not conducive to blogging in the moment. That is why we have the willing suspension of disbelief.]

Ometepe is an island in Lake Nicaragua, now more properly called Lago Cocibolca, and it is the largest volcanic island in a fresh water lake in the world. You may not know this fact. I have been to Nicaragua countless times and I did not know this fact, but CSB’s son Colby, who is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nicaragua, did know this fact. It was his idea that we go to Ometepe with him, and it was an excellent idea. However, while we were in Nicaragua we were told – often - that Ometepe is the largest island in a fresh water lake in the world – without that all important adjective: volcanic – and I spouted that fact to several people and insisted that yes, of course it is larger even than Manitoulin in Lake Huron. For which assertion I apologize. Ometepe is only the 10th largest island in a lake, which is still very large. It is the largest volcanic island. There are two volcanoes: Concepcíon and Maderas. Concepcíon is a perfectly symmetrical cone and still active, having most recently erupted in 2010; Ometepe’s residents declined to evacuate. Maderas is lower (1394 meters) and dormant; its slopes are covered with rain forest and there is a lagoon inside its crater. The two volcanoes are connected by an isthmus, which gives the island the shape of an hourglass, or a dumbbell, or mismatched breasts, or a bikini top. So quite naturally the island’s creation myth involves a pair of star-crossed lovers, Ometepetl and Nagrando; their parents will not allow them to marry and as a result they prefer to die together. In death, Ometepetl’s beasts swell up to become the twin volcanoes of Ometepe, and a furious rain floods the valley to create the lake.

To get to Ometepe we take a ferry from San Jorge to Moyogalpa. The ferries are famously old and rickety, but you can sit on the bridge and have spectacular views of the island.
At Moyogalpa we get off the ferry and walk into a cloud of tiny white motes, gnats, bugs, flying insects. We don’t know what they are, but they envelope the entire port, they fly into our noses and ears and mouths; they cloud our vision. They don’t sting or bite us, but they make us very nervous. They feel like a plague. Later we will learn that these are chayules, miniscule gnats that come with a change in the atmospheric pressure, and the wind blowing in from the lake. They hatch en masse, live for three days and then disappear. That was the explanation we got, and it is a relatively good one, until we start to wonder: why? Why do they exist? As insects go they appear to be entirely pointless, and yet the more I learn about insects, the more I realize that most of them have some kind of function; it may not be a function I can selfishly appreciate, but they have one. They rely on other creatures, and other creatures rely on them, for food, for aid in hatching, for dissemination, for the entomological meaning to life. So why do chayules exist? If you worry enough about that question, you will mind less picking them out of your nose and spitting them out of your mouth.
From Moyogalpa we drive along the shore and then across the isthmus. We drive very carefully because if there is one thing the Ometepeëños don't want, it is for you to drive too fast. The road, the only road, is interrupted randomly and often by sleeping policemen. If you chance to drive too fast over a sleeping policemen you can easily rupture your gas tank or oil pan, and then you can provide income to whatever local mechanic is lurking nearby in the shade of a palm tree. Watching the gringos slam on their brakes a few seconds too late is a schadenfreude-ish form of entertainment.
By sheer luck, and CSB’s brilliant mastery of Nicaraguan roads, we arrive unscathed at our hotel, a recently renovated banana finca on Playa San Domingo.
It takes about an hour to get there, and then another 15 minutes on the rough road through the banana fields. Until we see the vast lake again. It does indeed look like an old hacienda. A man with a high pitched – almost falsetto – voice greets us as if he knows exactly who we are;he brings us fruit drinks, and shows us to our rooms. We appear to be the only guests, until a bald & chatty Brit wanders over. Meanwhile, we never register and never tell Señor Falsetto our names. Perhaps he thinks Colby is a movie star and we are his aged handlers. We lie on hammocks that swing between the columns of the porch in front of our rooms. He tells us about the howler monkeys that will wake us in the morning. He is knowledgeable about local plants used as natural dyes.

Every morning and evening, a young boy on a horse leads his cows and a few horses down to the beach and they amble into the water to bathe. I assume they are bathing. Then they retreat to the shaded palm grove. I have no idea what the cows and horses do all day long.

The most wonderful (sparkling, luminous, head-scratching) art I have seen of late is a floor covered with sifted hazelnut pollen at MOMA, in the Marron Atrium – that big open space where I have also seen Marina Abramovic stare at someone for hours on end (she stared for hours, I did not), and also a collection of a Chinese woman’s hoarded objects that included every used toothpaste tube she ever had.
Since CSB built our observation hive, I have become far more intrigued by, and intimate with, pollen than I ever could have imagined. Every spring the bees start bringing it home in their pollen baskets, and packing the nutritious grains into their honeycomb. Because we have such a variety of plants here, we get to see a wide range of pollen, in colors that go from carnelian red to orange orange to sunflower yellow. For a brief time when the scilla take over a patch of lawn, they bring in blue pollen. But never very much blue pollen, never enough for the atrium at MOMA.

The pollen covering the floor at MOMA is hazelnut pollen, which the artist, Wolfgang Laib, collected personally on his property in Germany. Given that Laib is not a honeybee, and is not anatomically blessed with pollen baskets on his back legs, he has to collect the pollen manually, purposefully and laboriously. Accompanying the show is a video of Laib in Germany, with jars full of yellow pollen, sifting pollen through a cheesecloth, and collecting pollen from conifers. Sadly, the video does not show him collecting hazelnut pollen. Which is rather a shame.

When I described the show to my friend LB her nose started to twitch and her eyes started to tear up. “How many allergy attacks were there?” she asked. It had never occurred to me that this pollen field posed a public health threat. “With all that pollen flying around?”
“It wasn’t flying around,” I insisted. “It was just sitting there on the ground, glowing.”
“But with all those people breathing and walking around, it had to be agitated.”
This seems like it should be the case. But I was staring at this big square of pollen, and I did not see anything flying around. Not a single grain. LB suggested that the artist or the museum must have secured the pollen with some fixative. But I insisted that there was no fixative. And the more I consider it, I think the reason the pollen shimmered is that it was in fact moving just the tiniest bit.
Especially because it was hazelnut pollen, which is anemophilous. Most fruit trees bloom and then pollinate in the springtime, but not hazelnut trees. Their pollination occurs in the winter: wind carries the pollen from the male catkins to the female flowers, and there it rests until spring when the actual fertilization occurs.

We still don't know why there wasn't an epidemic of sneezing at MOMA last month. Yes, last month. I regret to say that as usual I saw this show at the last possible moment, and as of yesterday the show has closed. Wolgang will be sweeping up the pollen and funneling it into jars - a process that is sure to agitate the grains even more than your breath or mine - and then he will sell the jars to collectors, who will probably not feed it to their beehives.

More apian SWAG

Just when you thought it was impossible to acquire, or even conceive of, more bee-themed articles of clothing, check out what your BFF found in Vermont. CSB, being such a snappy dresser himself, is eager to squire me around in my fetching new hat. He may even borrow it.