Rollin’ Coal

By Erik Dolson

“Watch this,” I said to Dani as we waited for the light to change.

“What?”

“Out your side mirror.”

When the light turned green, I put the accelerator down just enough to put the Prius in the lane next to us about ten feet behind my exhaust pipe. Then I hit the switch and the pushed the accelerator to the floor. A huge black cloud of unburnt diesel blew out of my Ram pickup and wrapped the Prius like a blanket.

He must have hit his brakes, because he was a quarter mile back before I saw him nose out of the soot.

“Ha! Look at that sorry sucker! Buried him!”

“Why’d you do that?” Dani asked, and I knew right then this conversation wasn’t one I wanted to have. That said, I got a right to my opinion, and what with everything that’s been happening, I was ready to stand up for it.

“Because he was a liberal. Didn’t you see the bumper sticker?”

“An American, just like you.”

“Not a very good one.”

“Who made you the judge of that?”

“Okay, look. I was just trying to have a little fun. What’s wrong with that?” I hoped a change of subject would get us back on track. Usually these trips into town are a good time. We did spend a little more money at Costco than we budgeted, though, and the place we usually have lunch that’s a lot better than what we can find between the bluffs three hours out where we live was closed because of the COVID bullshit.

“Pollutes the air.”

“There’s plenty more where that comes from.”

“Until there isn’t. Then what?”

Dani isn’t usually like that, but she does get a little up on her high horse when her sister comes back to town. Sandy’d been at home for almost two weeks, because of Christmas. I’d kinda hoped that she’d stay in Eugene this year, because of the bullshit COVID scare and all.

“Aw, Dani. Look in your mirror. You can’t even see the smoke any more. Much.” I couldn’t help it, I grinned a little. Rolling coal on liberals does that for me. Danielle heard the smile in my voice. She knows me pretty well.

“The atmosphere where most things live is ony three miles thick,” Dani said.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot Sandy’s back in town,” I said, pretty clear about where I thought Dani had gotten her information.

“You don’t think I can have my own opinions?”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t be putting words in my mouth.”

“That was the thought in your head.”

I would have been better off just denying that, or keeping quiet, but Sandy coming home and disrupting things rankles me a bit.

“I just think Sandy doesn’t understand the world as it really is.”

“She’s seen more of it than you have.”

“Partly on my nickel, too.”

Doesn’t matter to me if Sandy was the best student in our high school when she graduated, or that she’s smarter than me, or that she got a full scholarship to college. It’s partly on my money after all, being a state school. But of course, I don’t get any say in how it’s spent, otherwise Sandy would have a very different view of the world, I’ll tell you that.

Dani just started looking out her window. It was going to be a long drive home. In the mirrors I checked the tarp that covered the groceries in back, the ShopVac and supplies I got at Home Depot for the shed that Glen is helping me build. It was all secure, I know how to tie a proper trucker’s knot.

It wasn’t just the Biden/Harris bumper sticker on the Prius, and I didn’t tell Dani the whole truth when I said I rolled the coal just for fun. I listen to the radio when I go out to feed in the morning. This morning some smart-ass from the city was saying that increasing the price of fuel was one way to slow down global warming.

He has no effing idea what that would do to me. It would mean a higher price to run my equipment, it would cost more to drive into town to spend my money that I’d have less of, cost more to drive into the hills for a beautiful sunset, or down to the Crooked River to fish.

This is my life! Doesn’t matter to him, he lives in some city and takes the bus. He doesn’t pay any part of the price. That’s the thing. He don’t pay the price.

Same with that guy driving the Prius, or that Musk who is building all those electric cars. I can’t do my work out of a Tesla. They say people will charge it at home, and that most people don’t drive more than 30 miles a day.

Maybe if you live in the city, but hell, I have to drive 30 miles just to buy the diesel fuel to put in my truck, and if I’m hauling feed or mending fence, I make that trip three times a week and it already costs me more than $100 every time.

That’s why me and a few of the guys went down to Love’s truck stop just outside of town last week, and parked our trucks in the recharging spots saved for those electrics. Then we piled into Fred’s truck and went to the 86 Corral, played some pool and had a few beers.

Man, those Tesla people were just all besides themselves when we got back, it was the funniest thing I’ve seen since high school when we boxed in Fred’s truck with ours so he couldn’t pick up Lynette for their date. Man, he was pissed for two weeks!

When the price of fuel came down, it was good for us, our families. And America went from being at the mercy of those sand dog Arabs to shipping oil everywhere after fracking unleashed the flow. Kept our prices low and made America great. What could be wrong with that?

Besides, global warming is just another hoax, like the damn COVID virus. Well, they’re real and all, but global warming isn’t caused by people. We’ve had warm spells before, then they’re followed by ice ages! And the COVID is just like a cold. My friend Glen, guy helping me with the shed, is a builder. He had three guys out last week and said they were feeling great after two days and would’ve been back at work but have to stay out 14 days because of the quarantine stupidity.

Glen said the price of lumber is up four times, he heard it’s because liberals want to pay guys at the mill not to work!

That’s a hell of a solution. Men who can work miss out, lose out on wages, those who don’t want to work don’t have to, and Glen has to run his own backhoe setting forms for a new foundation.

Besides, it would be a whole lot better if we all just caught the virus and got better, became immune, and it would have been a whole lot less expensive. I bet we’d have a real Christmas this year if we’d all had the virus by the 4th of July.

Don’t even get me started about my guns. They can’t have them, and they’ll make me into a criminal if they say I have to register them. I believe in the Constitution, and I have my rights.

See, that’s really the thing that started this talk with Dani. The Constitution. Those socialist slime balls stole the election. They’ve been planning it for a lot of years, and are using COVID and global warming to weaken America. It’s a plot, and the Russians and the Chines are involved. They took our jobs, and now they’re taking what’s left.

They’re taking away the America that we built and giving it to people in cities who don’t want to work, I won’t say who but you know who I mean, and to Mexicans who just come in to our country to get better health care than where they come from, and send all their babies to our tax-funded schools.

Why is it that what my grandfather and father and me built, our mothers too of course, is being given away to people who don’t deserve it? It’s more than not fair, it’s illegal.

That’s how they stole the election, too. What happened in the cities. The Latinos. Trump had more votes than Obama ever did, more than that bitch Hillary if you just count legal votes, and Trump lost? Explain that to me. They stole it, and have been working on this since Trump was elected in 2016! Socialists and the deep state have been hatching a plan to steal the election, and to cover it up so perfectly that even Trump judges would be forced to go along!

So that’s really why I put that Prius in a cloud of American-made diesel smoke. Because that S.O.B. liberal thinks he won, and it’s my job to show him that this isn’t over, not by a long shot!

At the end of our one-mile driveway, Danielle and I pulled up to the house. We’d gone to Costco last, so groceries were in the far back of the truck so we could unload those before the building supplies.

“Hey, I’m going to help you unload the truck and then head on over to Mom’s,” Danielle said.

“You going to spend the night over there?”

“Yeah, Sandy’s headed back to school pretty soon, and I’d like to spend some time before she leaves.”

“You coming back afterwards?” I hated that I couldn’t help myself from asking. I hated that it took Dani too long to answer, even though she said all the right things.

“Yep. Because you’re you, and for all that, I love you anyways and probably always will. I’ll be back tomorrow sometime after church.”

“It’s just not the same, Dani. It’s not the same as it used to be.”

“No, it’s not. But it never really was.”

She kissed me on the cheek, then slid out her side of the Dodge. We took the groceries into the kitchen together without saying much, and she put them away while I unloaded the rest of the supplies down where I was building the shed.

Don’t want to mask?

By Erik Dolson

This is how a Republican shows he is morally bankrupt:

“Mask-wearing has become a totem, a secular religious symbol,” one Republican strategist told The Washington Post. “Christians wear crosses, Muslims wear a hijab, and members of the Church of Secular Science bow to the Gods of Data by wearing a mask as their symbol, demonstrating that they are the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else.”

Not only does this “Republican strategist” denigrate religion, by comparing the wearing of a COVID mask to a Christian Cross or Muslim hijab and, one assumes, also a Star of David; he (I just think women are smarter than this) misrepresents the reason why most of us who wear masks do so.

Let’s make this personal. He claims I belong to “the Church of Secular Science” without a clue as to my faith or affiliation. Then, claiming I “bow to the Gods of Data” proves he does not believe in science nor in data. In other words, he prefers ignorance and being uninformed.

Then Republican Strategist claims I wear a mask to show I am “the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else.”

This is utter bullshit, but similar bullshit pours from the mouths of other Republicans eager to reflect the ugliness of Trump, giving us a pandemic of president pandering. I am sick and tired of this divisiveness, of men like this spreading lies about what I think, about what I think about my neighbors.

So let me clear this up. Here are the reasons I wear a COVID mask:

I wear a mask to save American lives, maybe of a loved one, maybe my own, and maybe yours. I wear a mask to save my business, which depends on healthy customers. I wear a mask because I am a citizen of the United States who shares the air with my fellow Americans when we are out together trying to feed our families.

It’s not socialism, nor dictatorship, nor about being superior. It’s just good citizenship based on good medical advice. Got that?

To the Republican Strategist who demeaned me, my faith, the various faiths of my fellow citizens, my integrity, and my morals, I extend this invitation: Take your greasy, manipulative lies about me and my intentions, wrap them in the COVID mask you obviously don’t use for its intended purpose, and shove the whole wad up your ass.

Your flatulent ethics are poisoning America.

(Photo by NYT)

Good God, Democrats

by Erik Dolson

Seriously? This is the best Democrats can do? Goddamnit.

Where in hell is the wicked smart, 50 to 60 something, experienced enough, visionary, charasmatic man or woman (I really don’t care) to lead my America into the next half century of challenges that face us all?

Hey DNC! Don’t you watch TV or the movies?! There’s your prototype. Find a Martin Sheen or Louis-Dreyfus! Look at the GOP! Their two most popular presidents were a “B” grade movie actor and a reality TV star! Can’t you figure it out?! Liberal bona fides don’t matter. The filters are too fine.

You have the most unpoular president in recent history, one who didn’t win the popular vote and hasn’t gathered many more supporters after three years in office. You have tremendous issues to run on, and, in Clinton and Obama, two of the best politicians to advise you. Why can’t you figure this out!?

You bumbling party incompetents are going to put up a candidate to lose against a man most people recognize as deranged, who is harming America, using the constitution to clean himself and to whom you will give another four years because you can’t find, across all this great land, a woman or a man who inspires, a leader around whom Americans can come together?

Then your system is broken. It is designed to fail in some fundemental way. Please, please, fix this before it is too late.

A new political party

By Erik Dolson

My friend The Editor said yesterday that he is not represented by either major political party. Mountain man in style yet utterly modern, educated in history, a gun-toting liberal (though he’d deny that liberal tag), his values are timeless and he has no place to turn.

Me either. America needs a new political party, so I’m going to start one. It’s important to understand that I’m completely unqualified for this effort, and that this shortcoming has never stopped me before.

A party needs a platform, which is something to stand on, or stand for, I’m not sure. But it seems that we all want freedom to be who we believe ourselves to be, and I can stand for that.

So the first plank of this new party is to advocate for personal liberty. That is tied closely to personal responsibility, to preserve and care for one’s self. To fail, if that so happens.

So this party favors opportunity over equality. We recognize that persons of varying desires and abilities will necessarily have different lifestyles. Rather than guarantee equality, we strive to provide opportunity which will lead to a striving that will benefit all.

A society without opportunity will become destructive. For this reason, a “meritocracy” is favored over an “inheritocracy.” There is a point where accumulated wealth will be redistributed.

The second plank is to recognize that while an individual has liberty, we are also a community. Community has a responsibility to preserve itself, and community requires common values and behavior. We need a common language to minimize friction, and reenforce that we are a community. That language has been and should continue to be English.

Individual persons and community benefit from education. This shall be provided to all citizens until their 18th birthday. From their 18 birthday to their 21 birthday, all individuals shall provide service to the community, with an opportunity for extended service. This contribution will be compensated with direct income and/or additional education equal to years served.

Consequences are necessary for change of behavior. At the same time, it’s an uncertain world and sometimes life is harsh. It’s not always the fault of the person who suffers.

Universal health care is a basic human right. Individual persons and the community benefit from optimum health. This not “free.” Each persons shall contribute on an individual basis a “co-pay” to reduce the likelihood of abuse of the service. Additional service will be available to those who choose to make additional contributions, but a percentage of these contributions shall go to preserving the basic care for all. Opportunity, not equality.

The dynamic relationship between community and persons will always have friction. In general, preference should be given to the rights of individual persons who meet their personal responsibilities. In disputes between persons, bias shall extend to those persons who would expend energy and resources.

A baker can bake a cake for whomever he or she chooses. Marriage is a contract between individuals. Government shall have no role in determining who shall or shall not be married, aside from enforcing / mediating those contracts.

A key word in this platform is “person.” Corporations are not persons. They are self-sustaining organisms in their own right, their existence dependent on successful pursuit of profit in a competitive universe, creating jobs and wealth as a byproduct. This is a good and necessary process. It feeds us.

However, pursuit of profit can impinge on the liberty of persons. This will happen if corporations become too powerful, and they will in a competitive universe because evolution favors the powerful and leads to the powerful becoming even more powerful.

We need rules to arbitrate between individuals and keep corporations in check. To enforce the rules we need government. Government shall be made up of persons, and elected by individual persons.  Government shall favor competition, striving to maximize competition between corporations for the benefit of persons and community. Too big to fail is a failure of this process. Many competitors in a transparent environment benefits persons and community.

Lobbying by corporations, whereby corporations determine the actions of the government charged with regulating their behavior, is prohibited. Wolves shall not write rules governing the care of sheep.

But among the rules are rules that keep government itself from becoming too large and powerful in its own right.

Persons have a right to privacy, and complete ownership of their personal information. At the same time, persons and community benefit from maximum transparency when it comes to shared interests.

Corporations do not have a right to privacy, nor does government. The community’s business shall be conducted in the view of the community.

That ought to do it. Smarter people than me can flesh out the few details left over (smile).

Oh, the new political party probably needs a name. I’ll suggest American Citizens Together, because it captures the most important theme. It also lends itself to great banners and bumper stickers.

A.C.T. Now!

Ack! I’m conservative!

By Erik Dolson
I received a text from the Bernie Sanders people yesterday, asking if I was on board with his new campaign to become president. I told them “No.”

No, because Bernie is stepping on his necktie. Elizabeth is scaring people. Too many others are saying “YES!” to fringe ideas. Bill Clinton and Obama know what the message has to be. Is anyone listening? 

Message: “America is facing challenges and is under attack. We need to face these challenges and attacks with policies that benefit ALL Americans, not just the top one percent (Republicans) or one-issue groups (Democrats).

Owners of capital are investing in automation, not in people. We are losing jobs to Asia, and to robots that build cars or pick crops. Our economy will founder if Americans don’t have work: social security, medicare, infrastructure, military, all depend on America working — and buying. To work, Americans need health, education, and infrastructure, not tarrifs, monopolies, and corrupt politics.

America’s health care system is a relic left over from WWII. We have the most expensive medical care in the world, but our health is just average in terms of outcomes. Why? Because special interests take advantage of their power in Congress to line their pockets with our tax dollars.

For solutions, Conservatives and Democrats can together look to the free market, but not the hoax we have today. Government should not get into the business of making medicine, Ms. Warren, but Americans should be able to buy the least expensive high quality medicine from any place in the world, Mr. Romney.

We need to lower “barriers of entry” so new companies with new solutions can enter the market. Reduce patent periods. Enact policies that favor investment. And ultimately, either break up or restrict oligopolies that are killing Americans with their profiteering by jacking up prices by 200 percent, 500 percent, 1000 percent on drugs that have been around for decades.

Medicine should be tested by our government for quality and purity. It is not “bureaucratic” to ensure health and safety. How does it happen that blood pressure meds sold to millions of Americans were made with chemicals from China contaminated with carcinogens? How does it happen that insurers or pharmacy benefits managers did not tell patients these drugs were contaminated?

We need to accept that robots have arrived and are taking what used to be high paying, middle class jobs. We can not prevent this, because other countries will outcompete us if we do. But we do need to guarantee that the information age does not lead to an age of American impoverishment, even more divided between those who own robots and those without jobs, which is where we’re headed now under Republican management. This will involve hard redefinitions, but if Americans don’t have income, businesses don’t have market.

If we pull apart, we will fail. If we pull together, we are unbeatable. Everyone in America, Democrat and Republican, libertarian and socialist, has a stake in the outcome.

Sadly, the Republican party has decided to lie to America by claiming that tax cuts were evenly distributed, that we can’t afford decent health care for all, that a rigged economy  represents a fair and honest playing field. These arguments are the result of money buying power to rewrite laws in their favor.

Democrats have tough disagreements. Gay rights versus a baker’s liberty to choose for whom to bake a cake. The difficult line between abortion and a woman’s right to choose. Individual freedom to achieve versus the right of an individual to fail, and expose all of us to the reality of being human.

Everything can’t be done, and Democrats should not try to do everything, or promise everything. But generally, the Democratic party offers the best chance of success for farmers in the midwest, for displaced factory workers in the northern states, for coal miners left out in the southeast, and for coastal cities facing massive disruption as the world grows hotter as the result of unfettered greed. 

But to develop a winning strategy, Democrats HAVE to listen to people outside their own tiny circles. So, no, Bernie, you are not the right candidate for the job.

Ideas are what Democrats have to sell. ALL of America is the market.

What if Trump were on my side?

So. Trump was having affairs with porn stars just after his son Baron was born, and his wife was recovering from pregnancy. I smiled as I thought this might make the “moralists” or religious right who continue to support him squirm a little bit.

Then Holly shared that she’d asked herself if she could support Trump, despite his disgusting character, if he advocated for other policies she believed in. Read more…

What color is your “blue?”

Back in the early days, when the internet was trying to define itself, different web pages sometimes looked different on different brands of computer, depending on which browser was being used.

The pages would be “rendered” (drawn) differently, depending on algorithms used by both the sending and receiving machine.

For grins and giggles, let’s pretend that each “me” of us is a user, and what we think of as “what’s real” is simply the way our browsers (brains) render the input we receive from others machines that, in turn, have to render their inputs, and often do so imperfectly.

What’s drawn depends as much, or even more, on the receiving machine’s algorithm as it does on the dots and dashes transmitted by the sending machine. We all are building and changing our algorithms daily. Most of us, anyway. I know a few who haven’t changed much since the 70s, but that’s another topic.

I bring this up because it’s important to think about why we think the way we do, and to understand that we can hold fast to our “rendering” of reality without much certainty that it is “objectively” true.

In fact, there ain’t no such thing.

Kitzhaber stung by butterfly

On February 18, 2015, Dr. John Kitzhaber, former governor of Oregon, fell from a cliff 100,000 feet above the floor of the Willamette Valley. Though he was climbing with others, he fell alone. His legacy, found near the capitol in Salem, did not survive.

Many focus on the last moments of his climb, and wonder how an avid outdoorsman could succumb to such a fate.  An autopsy has shown, like many men of his age and “lone-wolfness,” Kitzhaber suffered a malfunction linked to the “Y” chromosome, leaving him vulnerable to a sting by the blind butterfly, Femme Fatale.

Femme Fatale has evolved attributes that attract the susceptible, usually a man with strength and resources who can contribute to her wing span and survival through summer storms. Attached securely to the back of his neck, the butterfly has access to neurons between brain, heart and testes.

There is evidence Kitzhaber may have been stung at least once before by a similar species, rendering him even more susceptible.

Those not exposed to butterfly venom will not grasp the reality-distorting vertigo it induces. Laws of physics seem suspended. Solid walls, inviolable boundaries, the very ground and certainly the mountain path traversed by the former governor, are as if painted on soft curtains that shift and billow in ever changing breezes churned by the butterfly’s softly pulsing wings.

From the outside, it’s as if the sufferer has lost touch with “what’s real” and is blind to appearance, context or consequences. From the inside, it’s as if “what’s real” is just out of reach, pushed farther and farther away by toxins of need, greed and illusion.

Inducing a state of false symbiosis, Femme Fatale attaches her goals to those of the victim, and values are twisted to appear mutual. The result is an exceedingly convincing illusion that the path towards her desires is a path shared and will bring fabulous, if intangible, reward.

The blind butterfly knows only that resources she needs to keep flying are available. Flying is her only goal. Often a butterfly will leave a trail of the broken until the day she loses her shimmer and is seen as another creature altogether.

Ultimately, that’s the tragedy. Right to the point where she takes wing again, those stung by Femme Fatale feel a wondrous future waits just around the next bend in the path. It may be a different path and a different future than they envisioned before the toxins took hold, but it becomes the only one they believe in.

It’s common for them to exclaim, as footing is lost in the loose dirt of illusion, “I love her!” just as the butterfly releases her grip and lets them fall to their fate, while she flies to embrace another.

Refuge

The power outage blacked out the entire island nearly until midnight, but that wasn’t what caused me to leave Bocas del Toro.

I admit to some nervousness, walking down the street with a thousand dollars, cash, in my pocket after one boy perched next to the ATM was shouting to friends in Spanish while others wove through the crowd on bicycles, nearly invisible in the dark.

Store and restaurant owners pulled pickup trucks up on the sidewalk, shining headlights at front doors where they were often standing, watching to make sure customers paid clerks inside who totaled charges on handheld calculators. A few stores, those with freezers, had generators that surged and rattled and illuminated bluish fluorescents.

The Policia Nacional slowly patrolled up at down the main street, occasionally turning on their red and blue overhead lights, but not getting out of their truck, not adding much to a feeling of security.

Candles were lit on tables in those places that had gas to cook, but the outage took down the community  water pumps, too, so water mains had no pressure, sinks wouldn’t wash, toilets wouldn’t flush. There would be one seating.

There was an edge to it all, a nervous energy that for some may have been intoxicating, to others intimidating.

But that wasn’t what caused me to leave Bocas.

Bocas was becoming easy. I was starting to like it, settle into a routine. I’d been there a week. Probably a couple of days too long, in fact, but if I’d left earlier I would have missed out on the ending of the Bocas story. That’s always the way it is. We don’t know what the story is about until we move past the most meaningful moments to see it in perspective.

I will remember an evening in Bocas for the rest of my life. Not the last one, when the lights went out, but the evening before, when Alycia, Olivia and I were having dinner.

I’m calling them Alycia and Olivia, because it may be important to protect their identities. I learned some things that make me want to be a little cautious about disclosing their backgrounds, especially Olivia’s. I don’t trust any form of communication any longer.

Plus, we don’t have all the letters on the keyboard to write their actual names.

I first met them at the highway bus stop outside of Quepos nearly two weeks before. They’d gone to the bus stop before they were actually going to take the bus, to see where the bus stop was, to see if the bus actually stopped there, etc. I learned that’s what Alycia does. It was beastly hot on the asphalt, they were asking questions. Olivia looked Hispanic with beautiful olive skin and black hair, Alycia was wearing the Muslim scarf, and covered.

They were an incongruous pair and smiled at me when I tried to talk to them in Spanish.

“We don’t speak Spanish,” said Olivia in accented English. “We are from Germany.”

They both laughed when I shook my head in mock confusion, opened my hands to indicate their very unGerman appearance. “We are Turkish,” said Alycia, reminding me of the deep ties between Turkey and Germany, and stories about resentment over the more recent flood of workers into Europe.

We talked for a couple of minutes, I learned they were going to Bahia Drake. I was going to Boquete. Adios.

Looking back it seems absurdly coincidental that they would be at that bus stop and eight days later we would run into each other in another city, in another country. But that’s the way it is on the road. After a while you don’t even question it.

It was still a surprise when I saw them walking in Bocas. Despite a building fever and my head feeling like an inflating hot air balloon, I’d gone out for a walk and something to eat, I saw and recognized them, said “hi.” We went into The Pirate, a restaurant on the water, and we talked for an hour. They told me about traveling through Europe and Africa.

They are doctors. Alycia is an internist at a community hospital, Olivia a cardiologist specializing in atrial fibrillation at a teaching hospital. They live in Hamburg, Olivia “in” the city, Alycia closer to her family in a surrounding area. They asked what I did and we talked about that. I asked, “where are the boyfriends?” expecting to hear about boyfriends were back in Germany.

“That’s just what we were asking ourselves!” said Olivia, and Alycia laughed her silent laugh and nodded her head. Their plans were fluid, but they wanted to go out to the outer islands, maybe to the cave hidden deep in the mangroves, maybe to Red Frog beach. Those were on my schedule too, I gave them my contact info because the manager of my hotel was setting up these tours up and he made it easy.

I didn’t hear from them in the morning, though, but felt like crap anyway, sweats alternated with naps, and wrote them that the next day might work out better. Outside my window a family, or three families, lived in buildings ten feet wide. The end building looked like it was thrown together under the eaves of the middle space, which was open to the street except for a blue tarp stretched across what would have been a wall. I winced every time I watched barefoot children, either the four year-olds or one of the toddlers, pick their way through shattered concrete blocks piled across the entry. Not once did anyone try to clear a path.

As evening rolled around, I went out to get something to eat. I was talking to Avi’s friend Ben at a local gathering place when Avi called me to ask if I would join Valerie and a few others as she trained new conservation guides at the turtle nesting beach. It would last until midnight and we’d meet in an hour.

I went back to my room to dress in black so as not to spook the turtles, take not nearly enough Tylenol to break the fever, and pack water. We saw a nest, but no leatherbacks up on the sand.

When I got back, I had an email from Olivia, she had just gotten my note and wondered if the next day would still work out for a trip. Yes, I wrote back.

At dawn, rain pounded on the steel roof of the hotel, floated trash in the streets. I wondered if that’s where the bones I saw in the water at the port came from. Obviously the day’s trip was off, but I kept postponing until the sun began to break through. Though he did not like the direction of the wind, Avi called the dive office to see what conditions were like.

“It is perfect. You will have an amazing trip,” he said, “amazing” a word he uses frequently that indicates the color of his world.

It was just the three of us in the Panga, now a private tour. I turned to Alycia and said, “Since you’re the one who plans everything, is there something you want to do first?”

“Dolphins. I want to see the dolphins,” she said, enthusiasm childlike. She held her hijab, or scarf, to her head with one hand to keep it from blowing in the wind. Olivia smiled and nodded, wind blowing through her hair.

Our boatman found a pod of dolphins in aptly named Dolphin Bay, a huge flat expanse of water bounded by mangroves. Roots descended from branches and laced into the mud like an ominous aquatic fence. He slowed the boat just enough to create a large wake, inducing dolphins to jump and play 20 feet from the stern of the Panga. We laughed in delight.

When we got to Zapatillo, I asked if there was anything I could do to make it easier for Alycia to enjoy the water, I was willing to go to the other side of the island if need be, though there were enough people, my presence would not have made any difference.

She said no, though she had clothes for swimming, she didn’t really feel like going in the water. She lay in the shade of a perfect palm on the perfect beach on this perfect island while Olivia and I put on masks and paddled at the edge of sand and reef for an hour. Alycia got up once and looked out to where Olivia and I had been before a gentle rip carried us down the shore. When she turned in our direction I waved, she saw me and waved back, then went back to sit in the shade.

Sunlight brightened orange and yellow fish, red and green corals, in water so clear it could have been bottled. Several times, Olivia rolled to her back, mask in her hand, arms out, just drifting in the warmth of Caribbean salt water, eyes closed. Floating.

Alycia embraced the day from her place on the beach. Her modesty of behavior, manners, speech and appearance never dampened her thoughtful honestly, intelligence, ability to laugh. She didn’t use her faith as a shield against ideas that differed from her own. When I asked how she could be so non judgemental, she said she did not know enough about anyone else to judge them.

I pressed a bit, how did she avoid disapproval of those not adhering to her standards? She said again it wasn’t her job to focus on others but to care for others, a belief rooted almost as deeply in the culture of her parent’s village in Turkey as in Islam. She was as charitable and giving, and forgiving, as anyone of any faith, anywhere.

“My mother would buy a large car, not to have a large car but because she just assumed we would do things as a family, and her friends and our neighbors would have needs as well.” Alycia’s family had been poor, as well as Sunni, in Germany. Her father immigrated first, met her mother who happened to be from a village not far from his own.

“We had everything we needed, and if we did not have have something, we made do with something else and it was just as good. This is another reason why I am the way I am,” she said.

“Everything’s always good for her!” exclaimed Olivia.

Alycia was the one who planned their vacations down to the most minute detail, and then checked everything three times wherever they were on the road. What she was doing two weeks before when we met on the road in Costa Rica.

Olivia and I teased Alycia a little about checking and rechecking and rechecking. And Alycia laughed with us, but then had the last laugh. The evening before they were to leave Bocas on a shuttle to San Jose, she walked them by the shuttle office, where she found out they were not going to be picked up at their hotel as they’d been told. They had to be at the boat dock.

They would have missed their ride, maybe the plane back to Germany. But this is Alycia, so of course she had a “Plan B,” and probably a “Plan C,” one of which may have been to catch a flight from the Bocas airport to San Jose. If plans change and she has make adjustments, she does, and doesn’t mind.

I asked if her personality, her tendency to want everything managed, came from her faith, or had drawn her to her faith. “I think my faith and my character compliment each other,” she said with a smile, avoiding my trap.

I sat in the bow on the way to lunch. The restaurant was built on stilts well out into the clear water of the bay. We saw starfish five feet down in crystal clear water, a sloth hanging from the branches, it was hard to see, like a basketball caught in the net. Sitting side by side in the middle row seats, Alycia looked about trying to absorb every detail, one hand holding the scarf to her head; Olivia closed her eyes, imagined she was flying as wind blew threw her luxurious black hair.

Back at the dock we sat and talked. At some point the conversation rolled around to what they would be doing when they got back. Olivia was not looking forward to the 70 hour weeks, a presentation in Berlin in April and another in San Francisco in May. Seventy hours?! I asked. That is her average week, she said.

Alycia nodded her head and looked at Olivia with love and compassion. The 12 hour days, six days a week, often dealing with life and death decisions, were taking a toll.

“I wonder at times,” she said, pointing to laugh lines at the corners of her lovely eyes.

They talked about the ten years of doing this before there might be a break. Alycia said at one point that Olivia was giving up ten most important years for an uncertain outcome. I asked what the goal was.

Olivia said that it was important not to give up, that others were working just as hard. I said she could be anywhere in the world, doing nearly anything she wanted. She kept returning to a vagueness about not giving up, not disappointing others. I asked who would be disappointed and she acknowledged everyone she knew was telling her the same thing, and so would her father.

It was a fascinating shift, Alycia in her scarf advocating for less rigidity, fewer dictates, more personal happiness or satisfaction; Olivia describing the need to do things because she should. It wasn’t until the next evening I would discover why.

“Why do you do it?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“70 hours? That’s about 12 hours a day, six days a week. That doesn’t leave any time to have much of a life.”

“Maybe that’s why I don’t have much of a life,” she said with a half-laugh.

Alycia nodded and said, “My life is not too easy, but not nearly as difficult as Olivia’s. I have more time off.”

It seemed incongruous. The conservative, observant Muslim who wore a scarf and did not go in the water at the beach a few hours before, had it ‘easier’ (stupidly inadequate word) than this woman who wore bright sundresses over a lithe body and floated, hands out and eyes closed, supported by the warm salt water for minutes at a time; who sat with her eyes closed facing forward as the boat raced and wind blew past her face and through her hair, imagining she was flying.

I admit these images colored my reaction. I admit I thought 70 hours of work per week was an especially high cost for a woman of her youth and beauty, even a research cardiologist at a teaching hospital.

But I also gained momentum from Alycia when I asked why she wasn’t participating in the conversation, and she said, “Olivia and I have had this conversation many times. I am thinking it is good for Olivia to hear this from somebody else.”

“Why do you do this?” I asked again.

“Others do this. My advisor does this. Other doctors do this.”

“Are they just like you? Do they like to dance like you do?” I’d earlier confessed I danced to music as if possessed, that I’d left a woman who told me to stop dancing and act my age, that I planned to dance all the way to my grave. Her face had lit and she exclaimed “I love to dance!”

“Do we know if ‘doing this’ makes them any happier than it makes you? What’s the goal?” I asked.

“My plan was to do this for ten years. Then it should not be so bad.”

“I tell her she is using up the most important time of her life!” Alycia said.

“Do others who have done this for 10 years have it easier?” I asked.

Olivia grew sad, and shook her head. “I can’t just quit. It would be such a disappointment.”

“To whom?!” I asked. “What do your mother and brother say? What would your father say?”

“They say they want me to be happy. My father would tell me to be happy.”

“Does the 70 hours you will work next week make you happy?”

“I love my work. 40 hours of my work every week would be perfect,” she said.

Alycia looked at Olivia with such compassion, it startled me. Several times already I had seen what I could only describe as unconditional  love and acceptance.

The next day our guide, a different one, pushed us too fast. He used his motor when he should have used an oar. The guide in the boat in front of him put his fingers to his lips once to tell him to be quiet. We followed the meanders through the mangrove to the small dock. There were three dugouts hauled up on the mud, and a few huts a little further into the jungle. God, it sounds so pretentious to write something like that, but what do you do when it’s true?

We crowded another group that arrived at the mangrove entrance just before we did. I think the other guides teased him about wanting to be first.

At the cave we wandered through passages where the water was cool, and chest deep. The rocks were slimy with either mud or some sort of growth. I was at the end of the pack, there was a group of Spanish and Germans ahead of us.

My favorite were the bats flying about, squeaking to find out where everybody was standing, resolving all those squeaks bouncing off bodies and cave walls while in fast flight. The mud was red, my white shirt, the only color I have since I shipped everything else home, was a mistake. Our young guide kept pushing us forward. I finally told him to back off, there was no room to advance because of the party in front of us.

Alycia stayed back, coming only about half way. It would be a bit of a drag wearing all that wet. Plus, she was wary of things like stagnant standing water, mosquitoes, etc. maybe especially since Olivia contracted malaria when they were in Africa last year or the year before. The cave was good enough, but not spectacular. I’ve wandered the lava tubes around home, also a land of volcanos.

We motored past beautiful sailboats coming in to Red Frog beach. Some were of deeply varnished wood and polished brass; catamarans of shiny white, meticulously clean fiberglass, and one megayacht, incongruously named “Secret.” There is no way I can imagine to hide a secret spoken so loud, but the world’s a big place.

“Join me for lunch on my runabout?” I asked Alycia and Olivia, waving nonchalantly at “Secret,” getting the hoped for laugh.

We wandered up and down the wide gravel road to Red Frog Beach, went up the wooden walk way and then scrambled a ways up a leafy and somewhat slick slope, Alycia wanting  to get a photo of a red frog. No luck.

Alycia and Olivia stayed on the sand, I body surfed and tried unsuccessfully to wash cave mud from my white shirt in the waves. Our allotted hour and a half over, we banged our way through the chop in the fiberglass Panga back to the hotel, found a store that sold local chocolate and agreed to meet at six for dinner.

That’s where I would hear a story that both pained and filled my heart, at the very same time.

I’d changed into the black shirt and black shorts and smiled that I’d worn “both” of my “out-on-the-town” outfits in five days. Alycia said to just walk the length of the street in front of my hotel until it ended, I would run into theirs. It took longer than I thought.

As we walked back toward the restaurant, I made a comment that Alycia must have booked a hotel close to the airfield just in case they missed the boat. No, it wasn’t near any airport, they both said, though it is near the soccer field. I walked them back the way I had come.

“I get that you might have missed the runway lights, but the control tower? The planes?” I pointed past the soccer players. Olivia laughed when she saw a plane and realized how many times they’d walked past without noticing. Granted, the “control tower” wasn’t much over 30 feet high.

The small restaurant where we had dinner was rough, chairs on a mostly dirt and sand floor, the front door a section of garden lathe leaning up against the fence. But the food had been great when Avi and Valerie let me take them to dinner there. I was in the mood for good food rather than spending more for tourist fare than it was worth, even with a table on the water. Alycia was quiet but said she would perk up once she had eaten.

At some point, it came up that they would not likely share their next vacation. Alycia planned to do short trips in southern France or Italy, Olivia planned to return to the place where her family came from in Turkey. Southeastern Turkey. Near the Turkey, Iranian, and Syrian borders. That’s a dangerous place, I said. She said something else, then said, these are my people, “I am Kurdish.”

Olivia was three when her father disappeared the first time, her little brother was one. Apparently her father, a teacher, had taught or written an article or pamphlet that rebuted a claim by Attaturk that all of of the people in Turkey were Turks. Actually, Olivia’s father wrote, there were several ethnic groups, including Kurds, in Turkey.

They came for him. They took him. They didn’t release him until months later.

That happened more than once. Then, on the first day of school when she was about six, her father took her to school, presenting her for her education, she remembers.

“This is my daughter, she is here and ready to learn,” I think she said of that day, the day he fled to Germany the first time, in fear of his life. He was gone for years.

Olivia remembers living at her grandfather’s house between the front lines of proTurkey fighters and what I assumed were the PKK, Kurdish independence fighters. She remembered bullets coming from both directions.

Her father returned to his family. His own parents wanted him to take over their farm, be prosperous as they were, and to be quiet. But her father was an idealist, with his own passions, unable to hide those passions in classrooms where he taught. Children tell stories to their parents, parents tell others. After a year he left once again, probably for his life. When Olivia was 13 or so, her mother moved with her two children to join her husband in Germany.

“I was not an easy child,” Olivia said. “I told her I did not want to go. I told her I did not want to trade the many I knew and loved in Turkey for one I barely knew in Germany.”

They moved, nonetheless. But six months after they arrived, maybe a year, her father was diagnosed with cancer. He had months to live. Olivia wondered, again, what was the point. They had lost him, found him, lost him, found him, and now were going to lose him forever.

But her father was not yet finished.

“He would talk to me, late into the night,” she said. “Every night, every chance he could. I would say, ‘stop! I can’t hear another word!’ But he wouldn’t stop, he would just say that when I needed it, I would remember these things he had to say.”

“He was trying to pour everything he knew into you, trying to make up for lost time?” I asked.

“Yes, I think that is true.”

“You said you were angry when you had to go to Germany for a stranger, but you have said you loved your father. When did your anger change to love?”

“I think it happened over time, while he was alive and after, when I began to realize what I meant to him.”

“As a man probably about your father’s age, and a father, I can only imagine the urgency he felt,” I said. “His need to make up for lost time, past and future. My guess is that he felt like he wanted to open your head and pour everything he knew inside.”

“Yes. My mother was angry. ‘What about me?’ she said. But still my father talked to me, constantly, about anything, about everything. He told my little brother to ask me questions after he was gone, to learn what he needed from me.

“Maybe that’s why he stays so close,” Olivia said this last with a laugh to Alycia, who laughed with her in turn.

“I don’t know why he did not talk that much my mother, so she could tell me and my brother.”

“Because he wanted you to hear it from him, he wanted to know it had been said to you in the way he wanted to say it. Your mother might have left something out, or filtered it in some way,” I said.

“Yes, I think that may be true,” she agreed after a moment.

“Olivia, have you ever talked to anyone about PTSD?”

“What is that?” she asked.

“Post Traumatic Stress.”

“Why? I do not have that, I do not dwell on these things.”

“She does not,” added Alycia. “Olivia is not one who cries, ‘look at me, look at how sad I deserve to be.’ ”

Olivia’s mother, who did not remarry, was or is a draftsman, later a designer or draftsman for aeronautical parts. “She is a very strong woman,” Olivia said.

“Do you think your experience as a child has anything to do with your feeling that if you are not perfect, constantly trying, then you will have failed, disappointed others?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

We left the restaurant to get a cola nightcap elsewhere in town. A somewhat attractive, possibly inebriated woman was sitting in a chair just inside of the restaurant, maybe waiting for an order to go, maybe waiting to go with an employee after the restaurant had closed.

The woman looked for a moment at Alycia and her scarf, a moment at me, then did not take her eyes off Olivia all the way to the door.

It was dark, warm and humid when we got to the street. I was glad Alycia and Olivia did not seem ready for the evening to end,  I certainly was not. We walked 500 meters along the street outside.

A very stoned, handsome surfer was walking the other way in a group. I watched his eyes lock onto Olivia. As he walked past, his head turned nearly 180 degrees, completely oblivious to the fact I’d turned to look at him. Ten steps later, after all the synapses in his brain decided to pull in the same direction, I heard him call out “You are SO beautiful!”

We found a cola in another restaurant, after leaving one where the service was so poor I did not want to give them a dime (no coincidence, it was part of the hotel where I spent my first night in Bocas). Alycia talked about knowing she was loved, the sense of security.

“Neither of you drink?” I asked.

“No no,” said Alycia, a smile at the obviousness of her answer. “I don’t at all, but Olivia will have a glass of wine. Though she never gets drunk.”

“Not when I am with you!” said Olivia, with a bright laugh.

It was not always easy being a “woman of ethnicity” in Germany, even in the medical profession. Bigotry was not overt, and rarely from patients regarding the quality of care, but there could be “differences.” Olivia did not necessarily believe in a Kurdistan, though she may have been avoiding the topic. Alycia laughed when she said her mother liked that she traveled, but would not want her to be “any more selfish.”

“What about YOU?” Olivia asked at one point. I said I had not had a drink in decades, but she said, no, what about my life, where did I come from?

I confessed to a somewhat difficult childhood, an abusive father and mother disabled by booze, but was not about to go into detail after what I’d heard from her. I deflected to talking about children, our need to feel connected.

“I can’t believe at times how indifferent the world can be, how things like politics and power can be so disruptive or destructive. All your father wanted was to tell what he thought was the truth,” I said. “Look what that did to your family.”

We talked a little about romantic love. Olivia said it doesn’t last, something I’ve heard from others.

“Yes, but maybe being ‘in love’ is replaced by true love,” I said.

When asked, Alycia said something about loving someone for the right reasons, for what they could bring the family, and it seemed, the community. “You can learn to love the right person,” she said at last.

“That sounds like you’re buying a HOUSE!” said Olivia.

“I think she meant loving someone, as opposed to falling in love,” I said.

“Yes, but still!” Olivia said.

Olivia had been in love, it ended, she was not going to go into detail besides saying he was incredibly handsome, and sophisticated. She may have fallen out of love after a year, but it lasted too long until it was actually over.

He had reached for her as she pushed him away, he may have promised anything and everything, which she said would have just deprived him of respect. She was Turkish, she said, which she equated with a state of constant heartbreak.

“Maybe I am Turkish too,” I said, and we all laughed. “I often wonder ‘where is my companion?’ I wonder if I didn’t try hard enough, or if I tried too hard.”

“Olivia, how many times have you told that story, the one from tonight?” I asked.

She shrugged, said maybe pieces to her boyfriends, maybe a few times, if not in this detail. Alycia said she’d never heard it in this much detail.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I want to thank you, for sharing what I can only imagine was your father’s ache to make up for lost time, and for time lost. His love for you, his sense of near panic to communicate who he was. The sacrifice and the loss is both so painful, and so beautiful.”

“That is what I came to understand,” she said. “What I meant to him. That’s when I knew I loved him.”

“Did you tell him? I asked.

“Yes, at the end. He said I didn’t need to say, he knew it.”

I walked them back to their hotel. It took 10 or 15 minutes. Somewhere on that walk, Alycia said something nice about when we first met, at the bus stop, for two minutes or so, two weeks before.

“I told Olivia then, here was someone interesting, someone we could travel with, if we were going the same places,” Alycia said, Olivia nodded. Her saying that gave me a deep joy, but I never trust my own emotions.

I shook hands first with Alycia, then shook hands with Olivia.

“You need to see the Pacific Northwest,” I said. “It’s my backyard. I’d love to show you around.”

They walked into their hotel, I walked down the long dark street to mine. On the way, I tried to take a picture of the partial skeleton of some sort of creature that was lying at the bottom of the deep gutter that ran in front of the houses and out into the sea.

For all our sophistication, for all our wonderful words and grand edifices, we remain such a primitive species.

I didn’t leave Bocas the next day, as I’d planned. Now I had to digest a father’s immense but truncated love for his daughter and his family, wondering how he dealt with leaving them for years, if he was torn between patriotism and love, the sacrifices his ideas demanded from him and from those, like his Olivia, who had not chosen the battle, how that may have created a fear that if she stopped striving, she would be overtaken by the chaos that first enveloped a child only three years old.

All this contrasted with Alycia’s calm certainty that doing the right thing was the right thing to do, knowing she was loved and the comfort that brought, within a faith that controlled as it sustained, without any sense of deprivation.

When these thoughts had been put in their proper place, in my heart if not completely understood, it would be time to leave. To stay longer would have been to risk all this beginning to dissipate, something I did not want to happen.

I was working on all this when I heard him, before I saw him. I was drinking a coffee, meditating out over the water, sailboats boats rhythmically swaying in the marina, and further out, at anchor. Morning light threw everything into stark relief, it was not yet too hot and there wasn’t yet the droning pulsation of outboards as water taxis dove through their own wake.

The moment  was interrupted by a high pitched, demanding voice that dripped with condescension: ”A single shot. Then you steam the milk and put it on top. Can you understand that? Can you understand anything? Not a full cup!”

When the Panamanian woman put the cup on the counter, he said, “Oh, shit! Nevermind!”  and left it in front of her, stormed past my table to sit on the bench right in my view of the sailboats.

He struggled to find a lighter in his pocket, tore at a pack of Marlboros until he got one to his mouth, lit it and sucked down the smoke while glaring out at the day, his head jerking about as if on alert against threat.

I know it didn’t help my attitude that I got full face of his second hand smoke.

Another bird. Angry Bird. His eyes were intense, his motions uneven, what appeared to be a constant state of anger had stripped every ounce of fat from his body. His veins and arteries layered over his legs and arms as if they were on the outside of his body, the skin was drawn back tight against his downturned grimace of a mouth, longish white hair going everywhere.

Angry Bird could have been any age between 55 and 75. His voice was pitched high and came out with a drawl. I don’t know Southern inflections so I couldn’t tell if it was Texas or Georgia or someplace in between. All I knew was that it was an amplified screech of fingernails on a chalkboard to me.

Eventually he was joined by a woman 20 or 30 years younger. She too lit a cigarette, and they sat silently looking out over the water. He picked up a magazine and put it down, picked it up and put it down, not finding any absence of self. She asked him something I could not hear, but his reply was loud enough for everyone to hear.

“There’s no point. They can’t make a simple latte without ruining the whole damn thing!”

His feet tapped a ceaseless rhythm, or when he had his legs crossed, the suspended foot jerked up and down, as if keeping time to a drumbeat. He didn’t tap ash from his cigarette, he threw it from his cigarette and sometimes it landed in the ashtray.

When another Panamanian woman came to work the counter, he gave it another try. This time carried the cup to a table, poured sugar into the cup and attacked the mixture with a spoon. He poured some of the coffee into the saucer from which he loudly slurped, bent over so the spill went to the table instead of his lap.

He did that twice, left the saucer and carried the cup over to where his companion sat in the sun, tried to light another cigarette but had trouble with cup, lighter, cigarette pack until his girlfriend said, “Here, let me help.”

One more sip and Angry Bird stood, took the cup over to the table he had now trashed with spilled coffee and empty sugar packets, used the saucer he drank from as an ashtray, left the cup and went back and picked up his magazine.

“It has no flavor. They put in too much water,” he said. Girlfriend got up and brought him back a Coke.

“Do you want to go someplace today? Girlfriend asked. “We’d have to go early, I know you can’t be out in the heat.” Angry Bird growled a reply I could not hear.

“Nobody could stand being out in this heat for long,” she amended.

At some point, Avi took over from his staff all care of this man and his girlfriend, asking every 15 minutes if there was something they needed, something he could get them.

There was generally a pinwheel of activity at the restaurant that ended in a dock over the bay, people coming through to take tours, surfers loading boards on Pangas, locals or near locals gathered for lunch, and a mix of languages, with English not the most common. Angry Bird scowled and looked out over the bay.

Avi was once on the phone speaking Hebrew to a friend or business associate. Many in Bocas are from Israel. When he clicked off, Angry Bird asked, “What language was that you were speaking?”

“That was Hebrew,” Avi said.

“Is that like Yiddish?”

Avi gave an explanation of the difference, most of which Angry Bird did not seem interested in. When he stood up a little later, he banged his head on the TV that hung from the post over the table. It was a good thwack and made my head hurt just from the sound.

He sat right back down, rubbing his head from the pain, glowered up at the TV, looked down at the table. When his girlfriend asked if he was alright, he said he should have just stayed home, where he knew where everything was.

Later he asked Avi where there was a good restaurant, and when Avi wrote out his list, as he had done for me and for others, Angry Bird asked if Avi would go with them.

“I don’t speak the language. What would you think about coming along and helping us out?”

“Of course, I would like very much to do this,” said Avi.

When I complimented Avi for his professionalism and patience, Avi said, “There is always a story. If I react in the wrong way, it is on me, it would poison my whole day. I choose not to let that happen.” I wanted to ask how long Angry Bird planned to stay at the hotel, but knew they had as much right to be there as me.

Then the lights went out in Bocas. The entire island was dark. Avi taped flashlights in the hotel hallways and to posts on the deck for the guests. I went to get the cash I needed to pay my bill from the ATM at the bank on the other side of town.

While I was gone, Angry Bird managed to bring out an iPad or something, a music player of some sort, and for everyone’s enjoyment played an assortment of his favorite songs from the 70s and 80s, and of course there was Country.

He and his girlfriend got good and drunk, began to start conversations with everyone else, regardless of how far away they were sitting. If that was across the deck, Angry Bird and girlfriend just raised their voices. If the other person was from Boston, they talked about the bombing at the Boston Marathon. If they were from New York, it was the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

They didn’t have much to say to me, I was from Oregon, nothing much happens there and I didn’t much encourage the exchange.

So, even though the lights went out in Bocas, that had nothing to do with my decision to leave. It was just time to go.

A course I’d like to teach

I would like to teach a Freshman college course. I would name it, “Essential Tools,” and it would center around three texts:

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter.

Guns, Germs, and Steel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997, Gödel, Escher, Bach in 1980. Kahneman won a Nobel Prize and Thinking, Fast and Slow summarizes much of his earlier work.

The course “concept” would be “Who are we, and how did we get this way?” It’s not political, and would puncture much of what pretends to be political discussion. It’s not religious, and would be rejected by fundamentalists of any religion. And it’s not Philosophy, because it talks about things we understand.

There are other great books out there, of course. I won’t name any other favorites because every time I bring this idea up in conversation, other people immediately provide their own list. There are obviously too many “essential texts” for any of them to be essential. This is mine.

I lament that I seem to be as old as I am, that I feel as if humility has been replaced by entitlement, that thoughtful discussion seems quaint, that ideas that take more than 140 characters to “articulate” are boring, that “reality TV” does not offend, that compromise is thought of as surrender, that “on-message” is more important than governing, that “news” has been replaced by opinion in a media war of words where “truth” is collateral damage, that I am living in a declining culture that has given so much to the world.

In teaching this course, I’d hope to give a sense that some of the ideas we hold most sacred are fictions that we have been told, and that we tell ourselves: useful, satisfying and false. I’d hope to call out those assumptions we regard as absolutes, and create a sense of wonder.

I’d hope that one student, somewhere, would be able to make a difference, do what I’ve never done.