Oracle in a Drum

A bright yellow 55-gallon steel drum appeared at the hacienda where I live the other day. I can see it out my front windows, just across the cobblestone courtyard.

It had probably contained some kind of agricultural product, like liquid fertilizer. This is a working farm, so machines and their appurtenances come and go with some regularity. Tractors, hay balers, disk harrows and more rumble past like the latest Transformers at the American International Toy Fair.

I can see the drum—and sometimes I can hear it, too.

The container is empty but sealed, and when the morning sun hits it, a distinct metallic thwump! is sure to follow as the air inside the cylinder expands.

It may happen again as the day heats up, and at sundown—always right around 6PM on the equator—the reverse takes place. The air cools, a vacuum forms inside, and the drum makes a sharp buckling sound. Nothing you can see, of course, just a noise. And it may sound off again later in the evening.

I call this device a Thermometer.

It’s not terribly accurate, with all that thwumping and buckling, but in a place where the temperature usually only ranges between about 60° and 70°F in a given 24 hours, precision doesn’t matter much.

When I came to Ecuador in 2012, I left the American fascination with weather behind, along with its extremes on the North American continent. I can still find and pay a visit to hot or cold weather if I’m in the mood—but that’s Celsius on the cell phone, so not that intense—and I can also leave it quickly behind.

I didn’t want to become one of those elderly retirees who keep a careful and pointless journal of daily highs and lows and rainfall, maybe paired with the occasional bird sighting or seasonal notes (“Nov. 23, First ice skaters on pond”).

That said, I am more than interested in the unobstructed march of climate change and its impact on everything from crops to world hunger to the disappearance of entire species—ultimately, we humans. These are things that matter. Still, here among the peaks of the Andes, we’ll be around long after Miami has gone the way of the Lost City of Atlantis, and Hawaii is a mildly interesting coral reef.

FitzRoy

We can blame America’s weather infatuation on television, of course, but it really began with Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who sailed to fame as captain of Charles Darwin’s HMS Beagle. Later, in 1860, after an incredible 7,401 ships had been wrecked off the British coast in just the previous five years, he got to work on storm warnings.

The Admiral invented the word “forecast.” It was a concept that had been laughed out of the House of Commons just half a dozen years earlier. To his enduring credit—and largely forgotten by today’s TV weather pranksters—he described his foretelling by saying, “Prophesies and predictions they are not.” Forecasts, he said, were an opinion based on the best scientific calculation that was available, and nothing more.

Imagine if you can (you can’t) today’s weathercasters following the example of Socrates. When the Oracle of Delphi declared that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, Socrates devoted all his energies to proving the Oracle wrong.

The most rock-solid weather prediction is still George Carlin’s, in his classic comic role as the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman: “Tonight’s forecast: Dark.”

We’re just about midway through the Atlantic hurricane season, and then winter will threaten in the Northern Hemisphere. Roll out the (weather) barrel.

Better yet, take mine. I’m really not that interested in what little it has to tell me. Many others are, and that’s just fine.

There are better uses for steel drums anyhow.

On Top of the World

In 1970, when an Italian priest named Antonio Polo came to the flyspeck Andean village of Salinas de Guaranda, it was an unknown place, even to the Spanish colonists of the 16^th century. The Spaniards had steamed up from Peru in their conquest of the Inca Empire, right through southern Ecuador, and overlooked it.

“It wasn’t on any map,” shrugs Guillermo, a youthful guide for the local tourism co-op. “They never found us,” even though the town had been producing salt, a vital and coveted product, probably for thousands of years.

Father Antonio had bigger ideas than salt. Over the ensuing years, he inspired the community to form co-ops and establish a medley of businesses producing everything from cheese to chocolate, wool and alpaca yarn and clothing, sausages, dried mushrooms, and even artisan soccer balls, beautifully and laboriously handmade.

Next year, the town will mark the 50^th anniversary of its economic and social rebirth that has spread to other villages even higher in the mountain páramos, and lower into subtropical climes. Thirty hamlets have added their mostly agricultural products into the co-op model that is so often central to local South American economies.

The most obvious symbol of success is Salinerito (“little guy from Salinas”), a brand well known for cheese, chocolates, and much more.

I arrived last week, grinding gears up the absurdly steep and narrow streets, to see two energetic volleyball games in progress in the town square barely big enough to hold them.

“It’s the only flat place in town,” explained Guillermo.

It’s also a good way to stay warm. The temperature hovered just above freezing for the duration of my 3-day stay, with howling seasonal winds that rattled corrugated roofs and made the walls of my hostel creak, day and night.

The natives barely seem to notice, any more than they heed the lack of oxygen at 11,600 feet elevation. They were born here, like Sherpas, while this visitor from the Low Country—only 7000 feet—feels like colossal lead weights have been strapped onto his shoes.

On that first early evening the insistent church bell rang for some time, and I saw people streaming from the sanctuary while others waited in the street outside, bundled against the blustery gusts tearing at their scarves. Then a casket emerged on the shoulders of pallbearers, joining a priest and altar boys for a procession that turned immediately through the gate of the old cemetery next door.

It was a reminder that this economic miracle is principally a community of living, breathing, and occasionally dying people, more so than a tourist destination. In fact, the tourists, while more than welcome, are not obvious—possibly because most of them are Ecuadorian.

The cheese factory is the star at the center of the co-op constellation, employing and buying milk from several hundred members. Some dairy farmers milk with machines, while others perform the job the old-fashioned way and deliver their product on the backs of patient burros.

Strict testing is in place to screen for mastitis and other impurities before the milk is pasteurized and the cheese-making process is underway. In the new facility, built five years ago to replace an aging one, workers dressed like surgeons labor in sunlight filtered through a blue overhead dome. There are sealed rooms for aging rounds of cheese for up to 12 months. That’s some very old cheese in a country where only fresh cheese is traditionally consumed.

Up a steep road—they are all steep in this town—sits a building where men throw armloads of sheared wool off a parked truck. Machines inside wash the wool, dry, card, and comb it, and spin it into yarn that is dyed in dazzling colors. The same happens with alpaca, and much of it goes to the local women’s weaving cooperative to be made into sweaters, hats, and ponchos for sale.

Then there is the chocolate factory, worthy of Willy Wonka (but notably lacking Oompa-Loompas). The climate is far too cold for raising cacao, so it’s brought up from steamy Esmeraldas on the Pacific coast, yielding rich chocolates for national distribution and increasingly for export, especially to Europe.

There is even chocolate infused with Pájaro Azul, a potent sugar cane liquor originating here in Bolívar Province. It contains secret ingredients such as orange leaves and tangerines, sometimes chicken broth, and produces a distinctive blue glow when held up to the light—as for a toast.

Across a street and up a treacherous concrete staircase (watch your head!) a family makes soccer balls. The process is complicated. An air bladder is wrapped with hundreds of feet of string in a perfect sphere, then covered with triangles and pentagons of thin leather, pressed in a heavy mold, baked in an oven, and chilled in cold water. As a final touch, a worker carefully inks the letters pressed into the surface, using something like a hypodermic needle.

The result is a genuine work of craftsmanship, priced high enough that you might want to keep yours on a shelf for people to admire. Not for some kid to scuff around a muddy field.

Local restaurants serve up a tribute to the Salinerito brand. I enjoyed pizza with a delicate crumbly crust and loaded with salami, ham, and cheese from just down the street. Later, a bowl of spaghetti bolognese as good as I’ve had anywhere, topped with grated cheese.

Why Italian cuisine? Is Father Antonio a foodie? These and other questions will have to wait for another time, because he was away on church business.

All good things must come to an end, and I picked my way carefully down through the streets, half of which are currently torn up for the installation of a sewer system.

And here I made my mistake.

It’s common knowledge that Ecuadorians are so eager to be of help that they will give you directions even when they don’t know the way. It’s one of the most delightful things about the people of this country. But any expat knows that you should keep asking until at least two answers match. I did not.

A man told me that the way I had come earlier was closed for paving, and said I should go in the other direction, and “turn right where they are cutting down a lot of pine trees.” The road had been down to one lane when I came in, so his story seemed plausible. I took his advice.

And this is the marvelous serendipity of travel, if you just give it a little time, and try not to be in a rush. Misdirection is opportunity, and the route the man had described transported me through breathtaking scenery, among high hills with clouds streaming over them, sharp boulders, and occasional landslides but otherwise a very fine road.

People in the red ponchos typical of this region walked along the narrow shoulders, herding alpacas, sheep, cattle, or burros, offering a friendly wave as I passed. There were wide vistas of expansive pastures, jagged rock formations, and widely scattered rooftops gleaming in the morning sun.

It was 40 minutes before I arrived at the next town and decided I probably needed to turn back. I asked a woman where I might find a gas station, thinking I could ask for directions there. She paused for a long time, and finally said, without conviction, that there was one near the town square. There wasn’t.

This was a woman who had never had a reason to visit a service station in her life. How I envy her.

But I saw a young man sitting in a doorway under a crudely hand-lettered sign indicating that this was a provincial bus stop. I told him my problem.

“Oh, you can get through that road,” he said. “They’re working, but you can squeeze past.” So I thanked him and turned to leave, but then asked, “What town is this?”

“Simiatug!” he exclaimed, and began singing the praises of his village. I’d like to go back one day.

I returned the way I had come, revisited the scenery and stopped for confirming directions from the tourism office in Salinas, and moved on toward home without difficulty. As an added bonus, I was able to snap a picture of spectacular, snow-covered Chimborazo volcano, Ecuador’s highest mountain, on a rare clear day, with green rolling fields in the foreground reminiscent of a Grant Wood painting.

As John Steinbeck so wisely said, “We don’t take a trip. A trip takes us.” This one was cold, uncomfortable, steep, oxygen-free—and unforgettable.

Moonset, Salinas de Guaranda, Ecuador

Animal Farm

It’s a mob scene every Saturday as tourists and locals alike flock to Otavalo’s famous Plaza de Ponchos, generally regarded as the biggest artisan market in South America. The plaza, a single square block during the week, balloons for blocks in every direction on market day.

There is a hubbub of European languages, English, and Spanish accents from every Latin nation as shoppers weave through aisles crowded with clothing, jewelry, and artwork.

Very few of them, however, will make it just a couple of miles north to the other major market on the same day: the weekly Otavalo animal market.

This one, in the community of Quinchuquí, is somehow more serious. Everyone has a good time, but it is not the county fair, and certainly not a petting zoo.

It is a place where people who make their living selling animals intersect with customers who want to raise animals, or eat them, or both.

Last fall, the local government spent more than a million dollars to build a sparkling new market to replace the old one, where both humans and beasts had slogged through mud and manure and sprinted dangerously across the multi-lane Pan American Highway. The new site is paved and subdivided among the species, with plenty of space for vendors selling food and other goods.

Only the animals are unchanged.

Most tourists visiting this market won’t be buying a pig or a duck, but it is a great place for snapping photos.

At the entrance, a young man lifts a stubborn calf that is determined to lie down. Nearby, three people struggle to stuff a squirming half-grown piglet into a burlap sack for the ride home—literally “a pig in a poke.”

The pig is winning.

There are chickens by the crate, by the truckload—baby chicks, fighting roosters, hens, and chickens of exotic breeds. Most of them sit morosely, with their feet tied, waiting to be hauled off. Ecuadorians consume upwards of 250 million chickens a year, not to mention some 3.6 billion eggs.

And because this is Ecuador, of course there are guinea pigs, a treasured national delicacy that fattens up fast, rich in protein. It seems that no one here ever had one as a pet in their second-grade classroom.

A section for sheep and goats houses a surprising diversity of species. Both are raised for meat, while sheep are also sheared and goats milked. It’s not uncommon to see a few goats led from house to house, to be milked while the customer waits. That’s fresh.

When I visited yesterday, there was even an alpaca.

While chickens easily dominate the avian section, other birds are well represented: turkeys, ducks, and geese, from chicks to adults.

Those cute rabbits will become stew, not Easter pets, so don’t get too attached.

On the sidelines, a man with a microphone and a truckload of bargain cookware works a curious crowd, more reminiscent of a Southern California swap meet than this vision of Noah’s Ark, run aground­­ in the Andes.

Cows and calves are usually the first to sell out. A good milk cow can bring a thousand dollars or more. When you see a man or woman tending two or three cows, grazing on weeds alongside a road, it’s fair to assume that the cows represent the family’s entire net worth. They don’t own pastureland for cattle. Buying decisions aren’t made lightly.

And that’s why this picturesque market is a little on the serious side, and the stakes higher, than your average state fair.

Where They Ain’t

It was the 1950s, in the glow of the postwar boom of interstate highways, motels, and the family cars for which those “motor hotels” were made.

I can remember clearly, even though it was sixty-some years ago, standing on an early summer morning under a crisp blue sky, a fragrant breeze filtering through the pine trees. We gazed up at the somber stone countenances of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt carved into Mount Rushmore. The silence was worthy of a cathedral.

Our family of six were the only ones there that morning. That’s hard to believe in the hindsight of history. But we were early and more would come, that day and every day, around 900,000 that year. These days there are three million annual visitors to those same craggy faces.

We moved on to Yellowstone, where there were already complaints in the late 1950s that tents were squeezed so tightly into the campgrounds that “their ropes crossed.” It was an affront to campers who imagined that they alone were meant to revel in the park’s 3,472 square miles.

Lewis family photo

The “long boom” lasted until the recession that began in 1973, and by then Americans and others were permanently afflicted with wanderlust. Travel was within the reach of a rising middle class. Maybe it was the lingering effect of a great war, but we swarmed over landmarks like the assault on Omaha Beach.

And the impact can rival the bomb craters of Normandy. As The Atlantic observes, “If tourism is a capitalist phenomenon, overtourism is its demented late-capitalist cousin: selfie-stick deaths, all-you-can-eat ships docking at historic ports, stag nights that end in property crimes, the live-streaming of the ruination of fragile natural habitats, et cetera. There are just too many people thronging popular destinations.”

Here in South America, examples abound. Among the most obvious is Machu Picchu, the 15^th century Inca citadel high in the Peruvian Andes. More than 1.5 million people visit each year, which is more the double the traffic recommended by UNESCO, placing a delicate and irreplaceable treasure at risk. (In the 1400s, for reference, about 750 people lived there.)

Now, to the horror of archeologists and historians, Peru has started work on an international airport in the Sacred Valley that was the heart of the Inca Empire, and is the gateway to Machu Picchu. Scientists predict irreversible damage to fragile ruins and destruction of watersheds—a sacrifice to insatiable tourists, and to a nation that is just as eager for their dollars, Euros and pesos.

I will never visit Machu Picchu. I decided that even before I knew of the airport scheme. It’s for the same reasons that people watch NFL games at home instead of trekking to the stadium: the pictures are better, the seating more comfortable, and a beer is less than $10. It would be nice to have gone 50 years ago, before the worst of the crowds arrived, but not now. I won’t contribute to the stampede, or add another footprint. I’ll look at the pictures, of which there are millions, and consider other destinations, which are beyond counting.

The solution to overcrowding—or “overtourism”—is simple: Go somewhere else.

Or, in the spirit of a venerable slugger’s motto, “Hit ‘em where they ain’t.”

Belén floating market, Iquitos, Peru

When I went to Peru a couple of years ago, I purposely passed up Machu Picchu for a week in Iquitos, a faded rubber-baron capital of the Victorian Era, so deep in the Amazon basin that it can only be reached by river or air—no roads. I wandered the streets, met the people, explored markets and museums, and sampled foods like iguana and a fish called paiche. I stayed in a hotel with occasional internet service and was never handed a tourism brochure.

In Chile, most people make a beeline for Patagonia, which was enough to send me in the opposite direction, to the otherworldly Atacama Desert, the driest in the world, often compared to the surface of Mars. Its geysers and salt flats and strange trees and animals were like nothing I’d ever seen—not even in Yellowstone, or the deserts of Baja California.

I didn’t meet a single North American tourist.

Don’t tell the tour companies, but there’s no need to prospect over great distances to discover hidden gems. In the Ecuadorian town of Chunchi, a day’s bus ride away, a woman in the hostel kitchen cured my intestinal flu instantly with a single cup of oregano tea. That freed me to learn more about the nearby volcano called Cerro Puñay, where a pyramid shaped like a sacred macaw may be over 4000 years old. In Zaruma, a centuries-old gold mining town, wooden sidewalks, roofed against the rain, recalled shootouts in the Old West.

In the Amazon Basin river port of Misahuallí, monkeys scamper through a park and steal anything that’s not nailed down. A motorized canoe will take you anywhere on the Rio Napo, one of the great tributaries that flows into the Amazon, for pocket change.

Overtourism is steadily destroying some of Europe’s greatest cities. Venice has started using a scale of one to 20 stick figures to forecast the daily degree of overcrowding. The other day a 900-foot cruise ship rammed a city wharf as it delivered some of the day’s masses.

In a hopeful sign, a new article recommends Treviso, Venice’s “quiet neighbor.” It has canals, too. Not crowds.

Go. Somewhere. Else.

A friend has been posting photos this week on Facebook of his tour of charming, timeworn Greek villages on craggy islands in the Aegean Sea. There’s a whole world full of temples, pyramids, archeological sites, museums, mountains (1,000,809 of them), historic cities, rivers, waterfalls, beaches, monuments and—best of all—wide open spaces.

The Seven Wonders of the World should be a serving suggestion, not an upper limit.

Where will I go next? I’m not telling, but the choices are infinite. I’ve been investigating a few prospects in South America for the coming months, from near-local to transcontinental.

It is still quite possible to recreate those Rushmore “cathedral” experiences. I’ve done it dozens of times. The simple secret is to do it where everyone else isn’t. Your planet will thank you.

Machu Picchu photo by McKay Savage

When Nuisances Attract

Consider, for a moment, the Doctrine of Attractive Nuisance.

No, really. It’s an actual thing, found in US tort law. Anyone who has managed a radio station, for example, knows about it. So do farmers.

Radio towers, often located in remote areas under the watchful eye of no one, are a magnet for both children and childish adults who can’t resist climbing them. That’s the reason for the tall fences. If someone climbs the tower anyway, or gets electrocuted, it just means the fence wasn’t high enough.

In the eyes of the law, the tower owner is likely to be liable for possessing a nuisance that was irresistibly attractive. The climbers are off the hook – if they live. By the same token, if children trespass on a farmer’s land and are injured, it’s likely that the farmer, not the trespassers, will be prosecuted.

The philosopher Jeff Foxworthy has noted, “If you have ever climbed a water tower with a bucket of paint to defend your sister’s honor, you might be a redneck.” Perhaps, but it’s the water utility that should be worried about legal exposure.

So that’s the Doctrine. As a retired person, I worry that my head is filled with just this kind of scattered information, diligently accrued over a long career, yet no longer of the slightest use to me. I feel like I should wrap it up and bequeath it to someone, but that seems impractical at best. Who would want it?

Nobody could possibly find a use for the whole salmagundi of assorted expertism I happen to possess—and especially the bottomless chasms of ignorance that yawn between those items.

It’s a sketchy asset. Case in point: I speak pretty fluent Spanish—a serendipity of education and experience that eventually, accidentally, converged with retirement in South America. But I attempted several other languages over the years and got nowhere. I took a semester of Chinese and learned one word. Which I have forgotten.

I know how to start a new company, and have done it several times and abetted others. But I wouldn’t know how to start a car engine if it balked, or saddle a horse.

I know how to fish; I’m not even sure what “cut bait” means.

One obvious way to impart my scattershot experience is though consulting. I’ve done some of that—despite the profession’s sometimes dodgy reputation. The ingenious website Despair.com says of consulting, “If you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”

Fortunately, there’s hope for people who, like me, agonize over the conviction that their priceless accumulated wisdom must be preserved and shared.

They may be wrong.

Enter the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a documented cognitive bias that is one of the great levelers of conceit and hyperinflated swagger. Named for two Cornell psychologists, it holds that “people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low-ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence.”

Or, to quote Alexander Pope, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” It can lead to unjustified overconfidence.

It’s not the same thing as a low IQ. Dunning-Kruger is not the equivalent of “stupid.” Anyone can experience its effect, and most people probably do from time to time. Even genuine experts on one subject can easily assume that their expertise spills over into topics they know far less about.

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies,” declared Friedrich Nietzsche.

Let others worry about such complexities. For the rest of us, Dunning-Kruger brings us back to earth, like a paint can plummeting from a water tower.

Liberated by retirement from tower watch duty, we can pursue creative pastimes, undertake volunteer activities, even dabble in business, and worry less about bestowing old, used knowledge on people who really don’t need it. Let them get it like we did, through trial and error and dumb luck.

For as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.”

Attractive? Or just careless?

Other People’s Money

It’s probably the single biggest mystery that confounds expats and foreign visitors to Ecuador: why is it so hard to find change?

Merchants race up and down the block when a five-dollar bill is tendered, as if terrified by the countenance of Abe Lincoln, coaxing other vendors to part with coins. Bank tellers often refuse to give change—even to each other. A $20 bill is the limit on what you can reasonably expect to negotiate, and even that can be difficult.

I’ve been given hard candy in place of a few pennies. I was once offered cell phone minutes instead of change—and that was at a bank.

It may be the most simplistic, literal (and inaccurate) definition possible of the term, “money supply.” There just isn’t enough to go around.

The US dollar has been the country’s official currency since 2000, when it abandoned the sucre in the midst of runaway devaluation. Worth about six to the dollar in 1932, Ecuador’s national currency plummeted to 25,000 to the dollar just before it was abandoned. It’s now the equivalent of Confederate money; something you could use to wallpaper the den.

Ecuador is by no means the only country to use the dollar as its official currency. Others include El Salvador, Zimbabwe, Timor-Leste, Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands. Several others use greenbacks alongside their own currency, or those of other countries. In Zimbabwe, the dollar is the most widely used among eight official currencies, all of them foreign, since its own became worthless in the late 2000’s due to hyperinflation.

The dollar is widely accepted in Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, and Cambodia, among others. Despite mostly right-wing alarmists’ claims that the collapse of the dollar is imminent, it remains the most widely-traded currency by a country mile and is indisputably the world currency. (The real business of the Cassandras is usually the sale of gold or cryptocurrency.) Just do a Google search on “the US dollar will collapse” and take your pick of shrill conspiracy theories.

Daily Foreign  Exchange Trading, 2018

Oh, I suppose the dollar could crumble eventually, if you wait long enough. Just look what happened to the denarius of Marcus Aurelius. It vanished, along with the Roman Empire.

Which does nothing to explain the shortage of change in Ecuador.

In fact, Ecuador, like Zimbabwe, mints its own coins. Its penny, nickel, dime, quarter, and even a half-dollar are exactly the same size as their US counterparts. US one-dollar coins are immensely popular here (therefore often scarce). In Zimbabwe, one dollar is often considered a lot of money, and the need for smaller coins is more acute.

In Ecuador, it’s the smaller bills that are in especially short supply. You could close your eyes and successfully identify many five-dollar bills by touch, because their popularity leaves them as worn as an old Kleenex.

It all comes down to this: when a government decides to use another country’s currency, it gives up the ability to print more when a financial crisis arises. That might have been good news in a country like Venezuela, for example, teetering on the edge of the abyss because the printing presses literally can’t keep up with the rate of inflation.

In a country like Ecuador, it’s closer to an inconvenience; the aggravation of really needing all that change that might be found in the pockets and purses and between the couch cushions of 17 million citizens.

And while a sovereign nation might nibble around the margins of the problem with targeted taxes or tariffs, the only real solution to a short money supply is found in maintaining a positive trade balance with the United States. That way, you get dollars in return for the goods you sell, and the national coffers are replenished. It also doesn’t hurt that Ecuador is an oil-producing country (although the smallest member of OPEC), because oil is priced in dollars.

Ecuador has experimented with so-called virtual currency, so far with limited success, and is offering incentives for the use of credit and debit cards that don’t place demands on a limited supply of cash. Zimbabwe has made efforts to switch to a cashless economy too, even to the point that clergy stand in the aisles with card-reading machines while parishioners swipe their tithes.

Aside from these currency parallels, by the way, Ecuador and Zimbabwe couldn’t be more different.

Perhaps we are approaching the twilight of the cash economy anyway. A Miami bank president told me, “People just don’t carry as much of it as they used to. Some businesses refuse to accept cash, preferring credit, debit or iPhone pay instead. I’m sure that must be contributing to the shortage in places like Ecuador.”

What about the effect on the United States itself of other countries’ use of the dollar? The principal one, which is slightly beneficial to the US, is something called seigniorage. It represents the cost of putting money into circulation versus the value of the goods that money will buy, and unless you are finishing a PhD in economics, this is already more than you want to know on the subject.

For the savvy expat, you just learn a few tricks. You learn not to go into the bank first thing in the morning on Mondays, for example. That’s when merchants, mostly women, stand in line with large handbags stuffed with bundled bills and heavy bags of coins, waiting to make their deposits from the weekend’s business. They will spend a long time at the teller’s window as their currency is counted.

Later, if you’re lucky, you might hope to get some of that change yourself as it makes its way back into circulation.

Road Trip

It was just before dawn on a recent Sunday morning when I got in my vehicle with two friends and headed for the coast of Ecuador to deliver a package. Our destination was the beach town of Salinas, and although it hadn’t occurred to me yet, it would be the first significant road test since I bought my new Chinese pickup five months earlier.

Salinas

Driving in Ecuador can be deceptive; like riding through a hall of mirrors that stretches both time and space. It is a small country, no bigger than the state of Nevada, yet able to distort distances in a way that evokes the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, where visitors ride on a sinking floor while cartoonish family portraits elongate on the walls.

(With all due respect to Disney World in Orlando, Tokyo Disney, etc., the only real Disney theme park is the original that I grew up watching on TV, founded in Anaheim in 1955. Sorry.)

The trip would take us from the high Andes to the flat coastal plains, from 8000 feet down to sea level, clambering down through several changes of climate, varieties of regional roadside food stands, and assorted challenges of the open road.

Our route took us about two hours south, nearly to Quito, then veered off to the west by way of San Miguel de los Bancos, on a tack toward the city of Santo Domingo that avoided some of the worst mountain roads that are almost always shrouded in fog and rain, and bedeviled by landslides. From there it was roughly south on the highway known as E-25 to the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest, and a hostel with air conditioning that charged just $12 a night. We took our package inside for the night.

Guayaquil

The air conditioning in the truck also worked very well, which is a good thing, because Guayaquil is always sweltering. Its waterfront Malecón 2000 stretches more than a mile alongside the wide and sluggish Guayas River that is the city’s access to the sea and what makes it the country’s busiest port.

The river was also a handy route for French and English pirates who looted the city repeatedly beginning around 1687. Advisories from various embassies suggest that a certain subset of Guayaquil’s citizens still carry on the pirate tradition.

The next morning we drove a straight highway between endless plantations of bananas, plantains, and coconut palms in the shimmering heat. Roadside signs advertised coco helado, which is simply a coconut kept in the refrigerator. Upon request, the vendor lops off the top with a machete and pokes a straw inside for about a dollar. Other stands were loaded with several varieties of mangos and what must have been tons of bananas.

We stopped for breakfast at a pleasant open air restaurant advertising ostrich burgers and breakfasts served with a slice of buffalo meat. Two live ostriches vouched for their authenticity out front. I just had the scrambled eggs and fresh mango juice, but the whole thing reminded me of nothing so much as the kind of theme restaurants and way stations you find along the interstate highways in places like South Dakota.

Rolling into Salinas by early afternoon, we quickly discovered the advantages of arriving on a Monday. Street hawkers were pushing deals on hotels and boat rides, and there were real bargains to be had. After some brief negotiation, we secured a three-bedroom beachfront apartment normally priced at $120 a night, for $50. There were good restaurants too. The night was quiet. Another advantage of Monday.

In the morning we took a chance on traveling north by way of the coastal highway, parallel to the Pacific and bypassing cities like Guayaquil and Quito before we would finally have to turn east. For a while, it worked well. We drove along miles of unspoiled and unpopulated sandy beaches caressed by gentle surf. We also hit a lot of speed bumps, Ecuador’s favorite device for slowing things down. They appear not only in parking lots and on frontage roads, but unexpectedly on major highways. Sometimes they are highlighted by bright yellow paint, and sometimes they are nearly invisible, giving your suspension a wrenching experience.

Just past the fishing village of San Pablo, we spotted a commotion on the beach: a couple of boats, several trucks, and a lot of people clustered in the surf. We pulled over to find fishermen dragging a net from the water and scooping thousands of flopping fish into crates and loading them on trucks. Gulls wheeled overhead, and pelicans jostled for position on all sides.

It was a colorful photo op on a beautiful day. Nearby, next to a spiky, deflated blowfish, a young brother and sister filled a plastic bag of fish for their dinner. I never was able to find out exactly what kind of fish they were.

Our luck changed just a couple of miles up the road, in the town of Monteverde. Traffic came to a halt, and a policeman directed us to the left. Then we turned right, toward the center of town, but everyone was turning back, gradually looping us around to the harried police officer again. He conceded he was new in town.

The fishermen had organized a strike, and had blocked the highway completely. This is what happens in Ecuador when aggrieved groups of people have a point to make. They block the highways. Sometimes for a few hours, rarely for a few days. We turned back, going south toward Salinas once again.

The map showed a highway going back to Guayaquil, but we couldn’t find it. Then we saw an interchange under construction behind mountains of soil, and a bit farther south, a detour sign that had the crazed look of a ransom note. It guided us through the winding dirt streets of an impoverished village for a few blocks, and then on to a beautiful four-lane divided highway heading east. We were on our way again.

In Guayaquil, we saw a dead man, partly covered with a tarp, the victim of a motorcycle crash. Beyond the city, we climbed again into the mountains where thick fog and rain awaited us on hairpin turns. We made it just about nightfall, as the rain ended, to the historic city of Riobamba. Back above 9000 feet, the air was cool once more. So was the hostel, which required us practically to drive through the living room to one of two parking spaces in the back.

In the morning we headed north once more, through Ambato and Latacunga – stopping for a plate of lamb stew, and some of the cookies known as allullas for which Latacunga is famous – along with its prison, and being in the path of high-speed mud flows from the powerful volcano Cotopaxi when it inevitably erupts one day. I was home by midafternoon, having driven nearly a thousand miles in four days.

But here’s the thing. Sadly, the package we delivered to Salinas contained the ashes of an Ecuadorian friend who had died a few days earlier at the age of 33, after an abridged lifetime of poor health and worse luck. He had made it his última voluntad—his last wish—that his ashes be scattered in the sea off Salinas. So that is what we did. We hired a boat, rode a few miles offshore, and dispersed the ashes with only a dozen curious seagulls looking on, perched on a creaking channel marker.

In the days since, I’ve had time to consider what really was a moving experience. I’ve attended more than enough funerals, but this was my first experience with ashes. Far more than the artfully presented Departed at a wake or funeral, ashes as fine as sand are incontrovertible proof that the person really is gone. It concentrates the minds of survivors on memories instead, which – except perhaps for the truly famous – is the most we can wish for: to be remembered.

Maybe that was all he wanted, and if so, he succeeded brilliantly.

And he would have loved that trip.

Our Lunch with the Inmates

From the archives—and a memorable December long ago.

(London, Dec. 12, 2001)—Lunch at Pollo Soho began unremarkably at our cramped booth next to the kitchen door.  It was, after all, an indifferent little restaurant tucked into a small space on a narrow street in London’s Soho district.  A quick and easy lunch, we figured, and then back to the office.  The experience would fade from memory in an instant, like a thousand other rushed repasts.  We didn’t expect The Ritz, and in that sense, we were not disappointed.

In hindsight, it’s difficult to remember the precise moment when things started to go so hopelessly wrong that they would eventually cross the line to hilarious, and beyond.  Our first clue should have been the countenance of the harried waitress, who approached our table clutching the menus.  She looked like a wild-eyed rabbit being stalked by a ferret.  If she didn’t actually have a nervous twitch, she probably does by now.  She scattered the menus toward us and darted furtively away as chaotic crashes erupted behind the kitchen door.  Four heads swiveled, like owls, toward the new sound.

The door, it should be said, was a heavy wooden slab that looked more like a barricade than a passageway.  There was a horizontal slot cut across it about waist-high, and on the inside could be glimpsed a counter top where plates of food were placed for pickup by the waitstaff and delivery to the tables.  Another slot below it was a depository for dirty dishes.  It resembled an armored box office.

We soon learned by observation that the cooks (or blacksmiths, or whatever they were) signaled the waitresses by pounding on the other side of the door—not gently or subtly, but with ham-fisted blows that evoked images of Boris Karloff trying to escape his dungeon cell.

The waitress came to take our orders—two soups, an avocado appetizer, two orders of garlic bread, and four pastas.  She scribbled this on the ticket and shoved it into the big slot, where an invisible hand snatched it away into the darkness.

Twenty minutes passed, as we watched the surrounding scene become ever more frantic and disorganized.  The restaurant’s whole business seemed to unravel before our eyes with dizzying speed.  The waitresses would come to the barricade, bend over, and shout through the slot at the unseen cooks beyond—sometimes in English, sometimes Italian, and once in Russian.  It was obvious that some orders were wrong, and most were just late.  Customers in other booths were glowering at their empty tabletops with hooded eyes.

Our waitress, now wearing a dangerous expression, finally approached us with two bowls of soup.

“Here is your spinach soup,” she said to one of our colleagues.

“I ordered cream of asparagus soup,” he replied, not unkindly.

She offered him a glazed stare.  “We don’t have any asparagus soup,” she said evenly.

“But it is on the menu.”

“I know.”

Something in her crazily calm face muzzled him, and he shrank back into the corner of the booth.  He took the soup—a watery gruel of chopped spinach and thin broth—without argument.  It was awful, he soon reported.

By this time plates of pasta could be seen crowding together on the shelf behind the slot, their clotted sauces growing cold.  The waitresses repeatedly came to shout angrily at the cooks through the slot, spraying spittle on the spaghetti.

We heard a waitress negotiate with the restless people in the booth behind us.  “If you need to leave now, it’s OK,” she confided.  “You don’t have to pay.  But why not stay and see if it comes in time?”

Moments later their orders finally did come, and they dug into them.  The waitress returned with bad news.  “I checked with the cook, and since you’re eating it, now you do have to pay.”

Another woman—possibly the manager—actually opened the big door and went inside.  We could hear her shouting over and over, in a Wagnerian tone, “Is anyone working in the kitchen for the first time today?  Anyone!?”  Getting no answer we could detect, she finally tramped out and slammed the heavy door behind her.  Cold plates rattled on the shelf in her wake.

I began to imagine that the kitchen was really that of an adjacent competing restaurant, where enemy chefs had sawed the slots through the door in an effort to confuse and ultimately ruin the business of Pollo Soho.

If so, it was working.

Only two plates of pasta (still not ours) remained on the shelf.  The Colossus of Rhodes thudded his fists against the raised drawbridge.  Another waitress stomped up to the door in an exasperated huff and grabbed the servings of congealed carbonara, jerking them out through the slot just as a backstage cook tried the aerial application of a fistful of finely chopped parsley.  The intended garnish missed the now-supersonic food entirely, shooting out of the slot and drifting onto the floor like a cloud of green snow.

This is the kind of moment that makes milk come out of a schoolkid’s nose.

It just got better from then on.  One angry waitress returned two plates of food to argue with the cooks that they had sent her to the wrong table.  “They tasted the food at table 4,” she screamed, “and it’s not theirs!”  They informed her the orders were for a table downstairs, whereupon she picked up the sampled servings and carried them off again toward unsuspecting diners.  We began to appreciate our vantage point at the kitchen door.

The rest was anticlimax.  Our food did arrive after about an hour, and it was cold and tasted like flour.  The piece de resistance, a plate of cold garlic toast, was delivered at the end, like dessert, by an exhausted and shamefaced waitress who knew we didn’t want it any more and took it back instantly.

But we didn’t care.  Once we realized this was performance art, and not lunch, we couldn’t have been more pleased.  It was the new Blue Man Group.  We rose to our feet with cries of “Author, author!” and promised to nominate them for the International Venice Biennale Award.  The similar Turner Prize was wasted just this week on one Martin Creed, a man of meager talent who created a bare room illuminated with lights that flash every five seconds.  Judges praised the installation’s “strength, rigor, wit and sensitivity to the site.”

Flapdoodle.  This was lots better.  We paid our £5.50 apiece with gratitude and returned to our desks as patrons of the arts, refreshed, challenged and spiritually fulfilled.

(The restaurant’s name has been changed to protect the guilty, although I’m pretty sure it’s long been out of business.)

The Indentured Valley

“Writing a column is easy,” said the sportswriter Red Smith in 1961. “You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”

That’s part of the reason I never wrote a column – that, and the fact that no one ever asked me to. Having to cough up perhaps a thousand words of prose three times a week would be enough to give most people chronic writer’s block.

A blog is so much better. When I don’t have anything to say, I just don’t say it.

And when a real dry spell sets in, it’s time to take a trip.

El Valle del Chota

This one was easy, only about 25 miles north on the excellent Pan American Highway, to the parched and gritty Chota Valley. Certainly easier than it was for many of the valley’s forebears who left Africa unexpectedly, not to mention unwillingly, starting in the 17^th century.

That would have been a hundred years or so before a young Kunta Kinte departed The Gambia.

The valley runs east and west across three of Ecuador’s northern provinces, carving a deep and desiccated gash through otherwise fertile farmland. Along the flat river bottom, there are lush fields of sugarcane and fruit trees. But the steep hillsides soar into arid, inhospitable desert on all sides. The word most often used to describe the valley is “dusty.”

It was the Jesuits who established vast land holdings in the mid-1650s on behalf of the Spanish Crown, converting into sugarcane fields expanses of territory so great, they often weren’t even measured. A system of forced labor known as la mita decimated the indigenous Kichwa population, and beginning around 1690 they were replaced with hardworking slaves imported from Africa. The captives were hauled by Portuguese, French and English traders, first from Biafra, and soon after from the Luanda region, and the banks of the Congo River in Central Africa.

Slavery was abolished in Ecuador in 1851—a dozen years before Abe Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—and the former slaves from the region settled in the Chota Valley. (There were many more of them to the west, starting with a group who escaped a ship bound for Peru off the coast in 1533 and established maroon settlements around Esmeraldas.)

Carpuela – Google Maps

Although the surrounding hills are dramatic, the floor of the valley is not a pretty place. The minuscule hamlet of Carpuela, for example, is a collection of tin-roofed cinderblock homes that could only be brightened by La Bomba. That’s a kind of drum, and a style of music played by groups called la banda mocha, combining guitars, drums and even instruments made from desert plants.

A disproportionate number of Ecuador’s finest professional soccer players come from the valley; household names like Agustín Delgado and Geovanny Espinoza who must give local youths the kind of faint hope for greatness that possesses young players in the baseball camps that ring the Caribbean, or that inhabits the dreams of aspiring NBA players in the American inner city.

The town’s residents grow crops like black beans on small parcels of land, or seek out day labor. Not far away is a place where the valley’s signature product is sold, and the one most directly connected to its roots: masks made of clay that is dug from a nearby hillside and transformed into visages that are undeniably African in origin.

In a testament to the ongoing marginalization of Afro-descendant people in Ecuador, I stopped at two different stores within half a mile of the place to ask where I could find the famous masks made of clay. The owners, both Ecuadorian mestizos, both friendly, said this was the first time in their life they had ever heard of such a thing.

Alicia & Mask

But there it was, a nondescript house except for two statues on the roof portraying a black couple, the man with a hoe over his shoulder. Inside was a large room whose walls were covered with masks, and a kitchen at one end. A friendly but somewhat shy woman named Alicia explained that an Italian NGO used to support a greater number of artisans, but the program had ended and hers was the only showroom left. And she promised an expanded collection in time for the New Year.

I chose a mask that was not my favorite right away, but quickly seemed to grow on me. It is the tall, narrow face of a woman, with large, expressive eyes and a turban.

The travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux talks about collecting on his travels, which he says is not really shopping, but has more in common with hunting.

“Collectors are not merely possessors,” he says. “They are themselves possessed by the search, and at last by the objects of their affection.”

Theroux also writes about collecting the relics of ancient Hawaii, where he has a home. He says they can no longer be found in Hawaii at all, but often appear in galleries and antique shops in Europe.

I’ll return to the Chota Valley for the New Year, to see the new masks. With the artisans down to a single obscure outlet for their creations, this powerful connection to Ecuador’s formative past could be a dying art form.

Casting out Demons

A new cliché is infesting the headlines lately: it’s the word, “rebuke.”

“Global Summit Rebukes Trump.” “Demands from Democrats Draw Sharp White House Rebuke.” “Trump Attacks Rosenstein in Latest Rebuke of Justice Department.”

It’s on the front page of newspapers and news websites everywhere. The New York Times uses the term about 65 times a month on average, according to its own search function. A Washington Post search returned more than 6000 uses of “rebuke,” but in an unspecified time period.

One thing is certain: there’s a whole lot of rebuking going on.

I’ve written before about clichés in journalism, a “pet peeve” of mine (which, of course, is itself a cliché). They drove me nuts during a long journalism career, and they keep getting worse, especially when they defile the fine, lost art of the headline writer:

These days, everything is a “landscape”—political landscape, media landscape. Sometimes even an “ecosystem.” Events “gain traction,” “resonate”(or fail to), and have “bad optics.” This kind of banality befouls the air, and the airwaves, with improper parts of speech.

It is the incoherent, reflex jargon of people with little to say, and 24 hours a day in which to say it.

“Rebuke” serves as a clear indicator of today’s hyper-polarized politics. And like all clichés, it was initially a good descriptive word that quickly became too much of a good thing. It has an ominous, Biblical implication to it, like something used to cast out demons.

“Correct, rebuke and exhort,” says one oft-quoted verse.

In fact, there’s at least one Christian merchandising website that offers a hat that could give MAGA a run for its money.

Some of the most unforgettable headlines were wrong. (“Dewey Defeats Truman”) Others were the noteworthy work of the tabloids, and not only the likes of “Headless Body in Topless Bar.”

With journalism’s embrace of social media, today’s headlines have been sucked dry. We are left with:

“Here’s Why.”

“Here’s  How.”

And the loathsome listicle approach, “5 Takeaways.”

Headlines have become mere clickbait; just another discouraging descent from the high plain of smart journalism into the swamp of vapid social media.

In an age where a vacuous plaything like Twitter masquerades as journalism, it’s little wonder that cries of “fake news” gain so much (ready?) traction!

It’s not as though both real and fake journalism don’t exist. They absolutely do. It’s just that you can’t tell them apart.