Godspeed and Hopeful

Hopeful
I’ve been thinking about Godspeed and Hopeful, the two Olive Ridley turtles we released into the Pacific early this week. The eco-resort* we stayed at on the Pacific coast of El Salvador at Barra de Santiago is home to a cement pool full of toddler and adolescent Ridley turtles. Their mothers swim ashore 1 to 3 times a season – this is often precipitated by a strong offshore wind - and lay about 100 eggs in the sand, kiss their unhatched offspring goodbye, and go back out to see. Then a couple of local residents take the eggs and rebury them in a somewhat protected area behind the gate of the eco-resort. Once the turtles hatch 50 to 60 days later they are kept in the pool until the next guest comes along. Then he or she carries the fluttering flapping deep- breathing omnivorous young turtles to the beach and deposits them about 2 meters from the water line. (I read that turtle release was included in the cost of our room.)
We named our turtles Godspeed and Hopeful, because given their 1% chance of survival once they are in the ocean, they will need both.

We gave them a pep talk and rubbed their scutes (my new favorite word; I will be seeking every plausible chance to use it) in an effort to increase their chances of survival to 2 %.


Godspeed
If you think there is something ironic in the efforts made to save sea turtles in a country where the income gap is wider than the Grand Canyon and where the poor are plagued by violent gangs while the rich live with their colonial silver saints and retablos behind high walls topped with broken glass, I would have to concur.
There is nothing wrong with saving sea turtles. It is a good thing. But it feels like part of our fractured lives. One week we are celebrating a wedding with dear friends on an old coffee farm in the hills above San Salvador, and then we come home and work with our garden helper, Oscar. He inhabited the other, the far side of the income gap in Salvador; Oscar's options there were so bleak that his family all pitched in and gave him money to pay corrupt coyotes, and even then he walked the Mexican desert to the US. He has already paid back all the money and regularly sends money back to Salvador. Further irony: because so many Salvadorans have come to the US to work and are sending back dollars to their families, there is disgruntlement in the higher echelons that the much-vaunted work ethic is being corroded. Because the gap between what they are paid in Salvador and what their relatives send them is also large.
It is easier to think about Godspeed and Hopeful and their journey to the bottom of the Pacific.


* Apparently market research led the owners to determine that an eco-resort was the way to lure in customers. Not that there is anything wrong with the resort. Au contraire. But I would suggest you take the “eco” adjective advisedly.

The Latest Verboten Item to take on an Airplane

Not cuticle clippers, not a fountain pen (ink is, after all, a liquid), not pruning shears, not e-coli in a vial or any of the other wonderful and dangerous things you might want to travel with.
It is sand.
I have a charming uncle who collects sand. Perhaps this is because he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, which is perched above the Sahara. Or perhaps this is because he used to dive in the Red Sea. Or perhaps it is because he designs, builds and occasionally travels in submarines. He has sand from deserts and beaches all over the world. And being an engineer, he is extremely well organized and hence his sand is well organized, and labeled. Naturally. His sister (my esteemed mother) brings him back sand from wherever she goes, assuming there is sand there.
So when we were on the coast of El Salvador this past week, walking along the black (volcanic) sand beach, I wanted to bring back some sand for my uncle’s collection. It just so happens that along with gazillions of coconuts in varying states of decay, the beach is also home to more litter than is lovely. We found a littered Gatorade bottle and rinsed it in the warm ocean and then filled it with black sand.

Hopeful, the Ridley turtle, at the beach, heading out to sea

What could be better?
Almost anything not sharp or liquid, it seems. After going through the X-ray machine at San Salvador airport, a security guard looked at my Gatorade bottle full of black sand from many different angles. Finally, I took pity and said, “Es arena. It’s sand.”
“Aha, said he. “That is not allowed.”
“Sand is not allowed?”
“No,” he said, but looked dubious. So he showed my bottle of sand to another security guard (repeat looking at from all angles) who nodded sagely in a negative fashion.
My guard returned and said, “It is not allowed.”
“I can’t bring back sand?” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t bring in any earth. No puede traer la tierra.”
We all nodded sadly, repacked my suitcase, then CSB and I continued on to gate 6.
But upon later thought I was perplexed. I have brought sand back from Morocco, Tunisia, Costa Rica and New Jersey, and no one has ever objected. Was this a security decision, a customs decision (in which case it wasn’t his to make), or a spontaneous & illogical decision?
Naturally, I go with the last.

What we Do in San Salvador

• Eat Pupusas. These are not exactly quesadillas or empanadas but relatives of both, and its unclear to me if they are made with dough or tortillas, but they are usually filled with frijoles and queso, two of my major food groups.
• Watch assassin bees (because, so we are told, all honeybees in Central America are Africanized, hence abejas de asesino) collect nectar from the weeping red bottlebrush tree in downtown San Benito Colonia. (Later I learned that the tree I dubbed bottlebrush because the red flowers look so much like bottlebrushes is in fact called the Bottlebrush tree, which seems a remarkable case of nomenclature making sense. The Latin name is Callistemon, probably because there were no bottlebrushes back when Latin was the lingua franca. It is an evergreen of the Myrtaceae family, originally from Australia.
• Visit Centro Monseñor Romero on the grounds of the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, which is not where Bishop Oscar Romero was shot/ assassinated/martyred in 1980 but it is where 6 Jesuit priests were massacred in 1989 and if you are there when it is open you can see their preserved bloodstained shirts, behind glass, but it was not open when we were there because it was a special employees’ holiday so we only saw the scrapbooks with pictures of the bloody bodies, and it was very gruesome indeed, and we wandered in the Rose Garden where the massacre took place and which is now a peaceful Rose Garden with black baggies wrapped around the branches of certain roses that we assumed to be for grafting purposes. I had to go there, hoping it would be open when the guidebook said it would be open, because the cause of Romero’s canonization if being promoted and not surprisingly there is much controversy regarding this, and how you feel about it seems to depend on your stand on liberation theology. And in case you don’t know, my new novel (Absent a Miracle, have I mentioned this before?) hinges on the possible canonization of a certain Nicaraguan’s possible-virgin great-aunt.
• Go to MARTE, the Art Museum, where we saw several paintings by artists we would like to know more about, such as Mena Rosa Valenzuela & Salvador Salazar & Benjamin Cañas. The museum, last Saturday morning, was full of schoolchildren being herded – unsuccessfully – by teachers and guards, and art students drawing each other.
• Attend the wedding, which is after all the reason we are here. It takes place at a coffee finca above the city of San Salvador and it was a blast to see people I haven’t seen in twenty or even thirty years and consider how much they have aged and then come to the sobering realization that I too have aged in tandem, unless of course cosmetic surgery has intervened and in that case one is sometimes unrecognizable.
The service, in a small stone chapel with ferns growing in its interstices, was officiated by the archbishop known as Your Eminence Ambien, on account of his unmediated drone, something his sous-priests work for years to emulate. I however stayed awake for the nuptial (see previous post for pronunciation hints) homily and so I heard said eminence refer to Saint Anthony, whose feast it was on Saturday, but not to Saint Felicula, whose feast it also was and who in 90 AD was consigned to the Vestal Virgins to weaken her resistance to the marriage offer of Count Flaccus (his real name), but her resistance did not weaken and she was martyred by suffocation in a city sewer. * In this aspect of restraint from mentioning the saint’s gruesome death –and only in this aspect, I feel sure – the archbishop and I are alike. For I too refrained from alluding to Saint Theodosia’s gruesome death on the glorious occasion of Tristram and Nika’s marriage.

* Of course the salient point about this is that in first century Rome there was a sewer system, a much appreciated aspect of communal living that did not make it to vast sections of the northlands until last week.

Paranoia 101

Well, I was reading the El Salvador guide book and the main thrust is that the potential tourist shouldn’t worry too much about its reputation for violent crime, kidnapping, death squads and hooliganism, because things are much improved from the days when gangs ruled the streets.
Which is an excellent point to make in a guide book.

And then my computer guy told me that he only touches people or things outside the house with his sleeve. At first I had no clue why he did this – did he break his wrist? - and then it became clear: PANDEMIC!

And you know how the birds are flying too low and slamming into your windshield as you innocently drive down the road? That is because they all have West Nile Fever. And as soon as a mosquito carrying West Nile Fever bites someone with Swine Flu, a dangerous and creepy hybrid will emerge: West Swine Flu of De Nile.

But we are going to El Salvador for a lovely wedding to be celebrated (in Spanish and Italian) in a chapel at the foot of a volcano.
The volcano has been dormant for years now, but that’s no guarantee of anything.

Am I the last person in the Tristate area to learn about the recent eruption of three underground volcanoes that is causing the gloomy ashen sky and the cold Spring?

Observation Hive, redux

The Observation Hive is back.
All winter long, I knew I was missing the bees and missing the myriad and many sided (six) consolations of their industrious buzz at the north end of the living room; but now that it is back again and thousands of bees are again in residence, I realize how very much I missed it.


Perhaps it is foolhardy or even delusional to think that we can keep an O-hive happily all year long. In order to be observed, the glass hive is only one frame deep and so while there is a Queen performing her regal duties, there can never be the population of a normal hive (60,000 this time of year) and so it seems they cannot make sufficient stores to get through the winter.
Which is not to say I will not continue trying to observe bees all year long.

Last year, after a great season of foraging, waggling, dancing, propagating and honey-making, the hive died one cold October weekend.
It was a very Bad Mother/beekeeper moment.
We had to remove the glass and discard all their tiny deceased apian bodies. How much do 5000 dead bees weigh? Less than 5000 living bees. That is my unscientific, unverified observation.

Yesterday morning, CSB took 1 Queen, about 3000 bees, 3 brood frames and 1 honey-filled frame from a nuc box he’s been nurturing for this very purpose, and installed them in the Observation Hive. Then we loaded said hive up into the back seat of the car (not as easy as it sounds) and headed north to Lyndhurst for the Hudson River Fest. For 8 hours we explained Bees 101 to adults and countless small children. (In truth, CSB did most of the explaining; I was fanning myself.)

56 children located the Queen (she’s painted with a blue dot to facilitate this).
4 adults confided that they were either allergic to bees or had been stung and hospitalized
1 man, on his way to meet his motorcycle in Odessa, used to keep bees in Thermopylae, Wyoming

Then we brought the hive home and set it in its proper place.

The first known reference to an observation hive is in the Natural History of Pliny (23-78 AD). He told the story – probably apocryphal – that Aristotle inserted a piece of transparent stone, probably mica, into a bee hive, in order to watch the bees at work. But the bees were so indignant at the invasion of their privacy that they obscured the glass with ‘clay’. (It was most likely propolis – a remarkable sticky substance good for everything from sealing up a hive to curing laryngitis - and the bees will certainly fill in any available space beyond their requisite ‘bee-space’). Not just any creature foils Aristotle.

Have I mentioned how happy I am that Observation Hive is back?

Kevin, the numbers and the birds

The roman church likes numbers and equivalencies, which would explain the precision with which – back in the Dark Ages – seven pilgrimages to Glendalough equaled one pilgrimage to Rome, which equaled one plenary indulgence.
The royal Kevin was seven years old when his parents sent him away to live with the monks. Later, he lived for seven years as a hermit in a Bronze Age tomb inside a cave at Glendolough. It is said that he preferred animals to humans – a not uncommon trait among saints, oddly enough - and his devotion to chastity was so extreme that he once pushed an importuning female into a bed of nettles.
A few years ago when CSB and I visited North Wales, we traipsed around with Tristan Hulse, hagiographer par excellence, and saw many holy wells - often indistinguishable from any other verdant spring but with rags tied to the overhanging branches - and rocky saints' beds. This was not exactly what CSB had signed on for and he exhibited what is often referred to as the patience of a saint. He, alas, is not a saint, but speaking of patience, Tristan did tell us how many hundreds of years ago Kevin stood in a cold stream and prayed with his arms outstretched. A blackbird came and laid her eggs in the palm of his hand, and so he stayed there, still as could be, until the fledglings hatched and safely flew away.
Apparently cold feet are good for longevity, because Kevin of Glendalough lived to be 120, dying in 618 AD.

The Post nuptial report

(Have you ever wondered why nuptial is pronounced that way it is, instead of the way it looks? Put another way, have you ever wondered why it isn't spelled nuptual? Even given the eccentric and occasionally absurd pronunciation of the English language, this irks me. But onward.)
I am still in a fog induced by last weekend's wedding of Tristram and Nika. (Additional fogginess provided by recent dilation of eyeballs for retina examination. Results: eyeballs look good.) And I would like expatiate on some of the happy moments of the weekend, the beautiful bride, the pink champagne, the charming South African cousins, the speeches, the beautiful bride, the sun finally shining, the flowers, the lavender in her upswept hair, the trumpets in church, the poetry of Emily Dickinson & the letters of Rilke, the ringing of the church bells, my son's gracious & sublime speech (the course of maternal pride runs strong these days), the beautiful bride, her father's speech, her mother's charm and ebullience and mother-in-law solidarity, the music ("Straight from Astoria,Queens") by Tristram's nursery school classmates, still making great music, the children dancing all night, the sheer happiness of their love.

But it really is too much, so I will instead tell you what Tristram's younger cousins learned at his wedding:
Out on the dance floor, M, a college roommate of Tristram’s, took aside Dylan (13) and Christian (13) and told them that dancing up a storm was the surest way to get laid.
Later when he saw them spooning up honey from the jars of specially bottled Let it Bee Local Honey(in honor of the sweetness of the newlyweds) M asked the boys about “honey shots”. Upon trying the honey he suggested that it would be a great date strategy as well. (Note to self: a new marketing strategy for Let it Bee Local honey? Put a Buzz in your Libido?*)

From the groom’s godfather, P.U., they learned of Tristram’s weekend outing in Greenwich Village at age seven (21 years ago), and his fascination with the Condomania Store (it used to grace Bleeker Street, in more innocent times). Being a dutiful godfather, PU endeavored to explain to his young charge the raison d’etre for such things, in all their myriad colors and flavors. Surely there were several godfathers in attendance wondering if they had fulfilled their duties properly.

Back at their hotel, the young cousins learned that an AMPLE SINGLES event does not mean there are piles of one dollar bills. It is a dating party for large people, very large people. And in some cases, the skinny people who love them.

According to the bride’s father, the key to a happy marriage is deciding early on who will be right and who will be wrong. In all cases I know the wife is right and the husband is wrong; there is rarely an exception to this rule. This struck me as very wise. I suspect that had we followed that simple precept, my ex and I might still be married. Or maybe I am reading way too much into this.
Another surefire path to marital bliss, according to the bride’s father, is to assign unimportant decisions to one spouse (where to live, where the children will go to school, how holidays are celebrated) and important ones to the other spouse (whether to bail out GM, whether to invade Iraq, Syria, Iran, or North Korea). I don’t need to tell you who decides what.

*Thanks to my brother-in-law Hal for this copy.
Photos by Lee Hewitt