Arenal or "sand source": the most active volcano in Costa Rica. Where thousands of houses were destroyed by lava, today there are countless hotels and hot spring resorts for avid volcano watchers.
The discovery that volcanos fascinate me is one concrete outcome of my month- long stay here two years ago. Retracing my steps to the volcano was the one thing I wanted to do personally, since the volcano has become active since my last view of the cone from the pools at Tabacón.
Time has a way of expanding in the presence of running water. Two years ago, I spent three hours watching as fog moved up the slopes of the volcano, revealing the scars of lava, occasionally rising high enough that brown drifts of volcanic ash were visible above the mouth of the volcano.
But time also changes things. Since we were here last, an earthquake changed some of the other volcanos we visited. At Tabacón, the difference of time was most obvious in the growth of trees, making it harder than before to see the volcano itself. And the pool that I spent so much time in before is gone; replaced by two smaller pools placed almost as if purposely so that sight lines no longer allow glimpses of the volcano.
So I moved to a different pool, one I avoided last time because it was crowded with swimmers buying drinks at a pool-level bar, and children and some adults using a water slide. But from one corner, the volcano was visible, and I watched as drifts of clouds moved past, as the entire layer of clouds rose up, never quite revealing the peak of the cone.
As I waited there, I noticed another woman stationary in the middle of the same area of the pool. In the middle of a crowd unaware of the threat of eruption, only the two of us and our companions waited, and waited, hoping to see the red glow of lava.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The different tempos of what happens: on not being in Honduras
Continental Airlines, bless them, extended a no-fee rescheduling of existing reservations only through the end of July, so when I reluctantly accepted the fact that our June 11 reservation would have to be cancelled, I rescheduled one week later. Now, two days out, it is clear that will not happen either; while I have yet to consult Continental's website, I assume there has been no change that would expand the time to reschedule dramatically.
But time has literally run out for me. I was only able to plan this trip, proposed in late May, because I had left the first two weeks in July untouched. That in turn was the outcome of deferring a jury duty call from January to July, and hoping that the claim that the average trial was a few days would be true. Now, after next week, each week has events and duties to carry out, so there is no time to return until the end of this year.
The strands weave in and out; jury duty flows seven months into the future; Honduras could fit in at the end of one possible week of trial, optimistically predicated on possibly deferring yet again into mid-August; flying to Honduras receded one week, and now, like an ocean wave, I see it moving all the way back to December.
My sense of time has become distorted these last three weeks, but at different scales. I spend a few minutes reading news, and six hours later straighten up with a pain in my neck. I wake up at 5:30 feeling alert, despite having less than four hours sleep, and then realize in mid-afternoon that I overlooked the intervening hours entirely. The week goes by and feels like many weeks, dotted with incidents, but with nothing real (meaning here, immediate) that I can recall happening.
And the most extraordinary: I read mail sent by a friend in Honduras working in resistance to the authoritarian regime. I worry, because increasingly the things she is sending, written in Spanish by scholars and activitists, bitterly examine the failure of the US to act, dissect the silences in State Department briefings, and propose that maybe this coup was not unwelcome, maybe it was even planned.
But I don't feel it is my place to argue with her; I am not, after all, living through this, it is not, after all, my country or my history at stake.
So when another of those copied, a Honduran historian, replies with a reminder that his work argues against Honduran history being solely the outcome of US decisions, I feel I can respond.
And so begins a three way exchange between us and a second historian, also a friend of long standing, in which as emails come in, it is sometimes hard to tell who is being challenged or reassured. In Spanish: amiga, that one is for me, reassurance that the frustration does not mean a friendship broken. In English: love you, that one is for whom?
And each message time-stamped individually, to the second. A conversation, but in counterpoint, and I cannot say who is addressing which of us.
But time has literally run out for me. I was only able to plan this trip, proposed in late May, because I had left the first two weeks in July untouched. That in turn was the outcome of deferring a jury duty call from January to July, and hoping that the claim that the average trial was a few days would be true. Now, after next week, each week has events and duties to carry out, so there is no time to return until the end of this year.
The strands weave in and out; jury duty flows seven months into the future; Honduras could fit in at the end of one possible week of trial, optimistically predicated on possibly deferring yet again into mid-August; flying to Honduras receded one week, and now, like an ocean wave, I see it moving all the way back to December.
My sense of time has become distorted these last three weeks, but at different scales. I spend a few minutes reading news, and six hours later straighten up with a pain in my neck. I wake up at 5:30 feeling alert, despite having less than four hours sleep, and then realize in mid-afternoon that I overlooked the intervening hours entirely. The week goes by and feels like many weeks, dotted with incidents, but with nothing real (meaning here, immediate) that I can recall happening.
And the most extraordinary: I read mail sent by a friend in Honduras working in resistance to the authoritarian regime. I worry, because increasingly the things she is sending, written in Spanish by scholars and activitists, bitterly examine the failure of the US to act, dissect the silences in State Department briefings, and propose that maybe this coup was not unwelcome, maybe it was even planned.
But I don't feel it is my place to argue with her; I am not, after all, living through this, it is not, after all, my country or my history at stake.
So when another of those copied, a Honduran historian, replies with a reminder that his work argues against Honduran history being solely the outcome of US decisions, I feel I can respond.
And so begins a three way exchange between us and a second historian, also a friend of long standing, in which as emails come in, it is sometimes hard to tell who is being challenged or reassured. In Spanish: amiga, that one is for me, reassurance that the frustration does not mean a friendship broken. In English: love you, that one is for whom?
And each message time-stamped individually, to the second. A conversation, but in counterpoint, and I cannot say who is addressing which of us.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Being in Omoa
Yesterday I was supposed to return to Omoa, but with the situation there, I am instead still in California. I deferred the trip for a week and hope that by then I will be able to follow through.
But not being in Omoa has me thinking about what it was like throughout June. Omoa is small, so that we walked to the site every morning. Because of the earthquake, our original plan for where to stay was delayed. So for the first two weeks, we were in the only hotel in town that was not located directly on the Caribbean beach.
Instead of a beach-front view, our first hotel was on a dirt road that once was quiet, until around 2003. That was when a natural gas depot was built, illegally, at the end of the road. So every morning and far into the evening, parades of natural gas trucks went back and forth down the road.
The gas depot involved construction of breakwaters that have destroyed the beaches I remember from my first visit in 1977 to the Omoa coast. The speed of the damage is evident when you talk to people who own the businesses along the beach. Some of these are now half in the water-- restaurants that literally have one post offshore.
The place we moved for our last two weeks, after water service was restored in the wake of the earthquake, is a modern small bed and breakfast right on the beach. If there were beach. Instead, the owners have put in place a stone retaining wall to try to keep more erosion from happening. They pointed out that when they bought the property, there was a street in front of it and the beach on the other side. Now all this is gone.
But as we discovered, there is still a way to go into the ocean, down masonry steps the owner put in place. Once in the caribbean, the water is clear as glass, and small fish nibble at your toes. Floating is by far the best way to experience these waters.
On a clear day, you can see the distant point of Manabique, today over the Guatemala border. For us, the names along this coast are redolent of history: Manabique guards the bay of Amatique, and between Omoa and Manabique is the town of Masca. These are all places mentioned in colonial documents as pueblos de indios.
When I walk through Omoa's streets, I see histories glittering in the heat of the sun on concrete. The indigenous past comes through in naming; the colonial period asserts itself in the bulk of the 18th century fort, but also more subtly persists in the layout of the main streets.
More elusive is the nineteenth century, the early republican period. Reportedly graves enclosed within the walls of the original Spanish fort, El Real, built in the 1750s, commemorate people from that period, poorly documented in archives and almost ignored in contemporary presentations of the Fortaleza. But the fortress itself actually is a testament as much to that period as to the colonial one that gave it birth, as it was rebuilt to house prisoners of the new republic.
Most occluded today is the modern history, when banana companies thrived for fifty years. But much of this history persists in the memories of the people whose families came to Omoa then, or later, when the Fort became a notorious jail holding prisoners of a dictator.
Being in Omoa confounds the idea that time passes. Time persists. The traces of its accrual are everywhere, they have not gone away. The fort, built originally on the edge of the sea, today faces a soccer field, beyond which is the mangrove swamp that promotes the advance of the shore away from the fort itself. Between the mangrove and the walls of the fort time is literally sedimented.
But not being in Omoa has me thinking about what it was like throughout June. Omoa is small, so that we walked to the site every morning. Because of the earthquake, our original plan for where to stay was delayed. So for the first two weeks, we were in the only hotel in town that was not located directly on the Caribbean beach.
Instead of a beach-front view, our first hotel was on a dirt road that once was quiet, until around 2003. That was when a natural gas depot was built, illegally, at the end of the road. So every morning and far into the evening, parades of natural gas trucks went back and forth down the road.
The gas depot involved construction of breakwaters that have destroyed the beaches I remember from my first visit in 1977 to the Omoa coast. The speed of the damage is evident when you talk to people who own the businesses along the beach. Some of these are now half in the water-- restaurants that literally have one post offshore.
The place we moved for our last two weeks, after water service was restored in the wake of the earthquake, is a modern small bed and breakfast right on the beach. If there were beach. Instead, the owners have put in place a stone retaining wall to try to keep more erosion from happening. They pointed out that when they bought the property, there was a street in front of it and the beach on the other side. Now all this is gone.
But as we discovered, there is still a way to go into the ocean, down masonry steps the owner put in place. Once in the caribbean, the water is clear as glass, and small fish nibble at your toes. Floating is by far the best way to experience these waters.
On a clear day, you can see the distant point of Manabique, today over the Guatemala border. For us, the names along this coast are redolent of history: Manabique guards the bay of Amatique, and between Omoa and Manabique is the town of Masca. These are all places mentioned in colonial documents as pueblos de indios.
When I walk through Omoa's streets, I see histories glittering in the heat of the sun on concrete. The indigenous past comes through in naming; the colonial period asserts itself in the bulk of the 18th century fort, but also more subtly persists in the layout of the main streets.
More elusive is the nineteenth century, the early republican period. Reportedly graves enclosed within the walls of the original Spanish fort, El Real, built in the 1750s, commemorate people from that period, poorly documented in archives and almost ignored in contemporary presentations of the Fortaleza. But the fortress itself actually is a testament as much to that period as to the colonial one that gave it birth, as it was rebuilt to house prisoners of the new republic.
Most occluded today is the modern history, when banana companies thrived for fifty years. But much of this history persists in the memories of the people whose families came to Omoa then, or later, when the Fort became a notorious jail holding prisoners of a dictator.
Being in Omoa confounds the idea that time passes. Time persists. The traces of its accrual are everywhere, they have not gone away. The fort, built originally on the edge of the sea, today faces a soccer field, beyond which is the mangrove swamp that promotes the advance of the shore away from the fort itself. Between the mangrove and the walls of the fort time is literally sedimented.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Independence Day with fireworks
I have often been out of the country on July 4, so I have developed a mixed relationship toward the holiday. On the one hand, I would like to imagine being part of a crowd watching fireworks as the evening grows darker. On the other hand, I hate crowds.
So normally, if we are in the US, I think about going somewhere where I might be able to glimpse fireworks. Last year, on the spur of the moment, we tried to find somewhere high enough in the hills to look out over the bay and catch sight, perhaps, of fireworks from the east bay and San Francisco. My first thought turned out to be everyone else's destination, so eventually we ended up in a crowd of people waiting in a park with very poor lines of sight. But paradoxically, that made each thing we managed to spot seem somehow more of an event.
This year, I had thought we might go to the waterfront in town, since at worst all 20,000 residents might show up. Then earlier in the week we saw the signs up saying the fireworks had been cancelled. Not really a surprise; the fire danger is all-too-real.
So I probably should have expected it, when last night the sounds of fireworks started to be heard. Apparently, somewhere along the way, the cancellation was cancelled.
There is something very different about fireworks experienced as a series of sounds instead of light effects. (I know from experience that we cannot see anything from our yard; the hill blocks the view to the waterfront, even though there is some acoustic anomaly that makes sound carry across it perfectly.)
I imagined the sounds as green and gold firebursts. Happy Independence Day.
So normally, if we are in the US, I think about going somewhere where I might be able to glimpse fireworks. Last year, on the spur of the moment, we tried to find somewhere high enough in the hills to look out over the bay and catch sight, perhaps, of fireworks from the east bay and San Francisco. My first thought turned out to be everyone else's destination, so eventually we ended up in a crowd of people waiting in a park with very poor lines of sight. But paradoxically, that made each thing we managed to spot seem somehow more of an event.
This year, I had thought we might go to the waterfront in town, since at worst all 20,000 residents might show up. Then earlier in the week we saw the signs up saying the fireworks had been cancelled. Not really a surprise; the fire danger is all-too-real.
So I probably should have expected it, when last night the sounds of fireworks started to be heard. Apparently, somewhere along the way, the cancellation was cancelled.
There is something very different about fireworks experienced as a series of sounds instead of light effects. (I know from experience that we cannot see anything from our yard; the hill blocks the view to the waterfront, even though there is some acoustic anomaly that makes sound carry across it perfectly.)
I imagined the sounds as green and gold firebursts. Happy Independence Day.
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