pt at large

Key West: Treasures, Trinkets, and Trash

Gentle readers, that summarizes the southernmost town in the USA, Key West, Florida. Forget that it’s Hemingway’s adopted hometown. It is now a tiny retail carnival town aiming for the lowest common denominator to people who’ve come from afar to reduce fractions. This gloriously decadent island winks, blinks, and hardly ever blushes. It’s a ton of fun.

The epicenter of Key West is Duval Street, a 3/4 mile stretch where the sacred and profane spill into each other with worldly insouciance.

On a post-lunch perambulation, I'm hailed from a darkened doorway by a lovely black woman in a paperclip bikini who promises visions of tawny sugar plums if I venture inside. It is 3 PM. My sweet tooth notwithstanding, I decline with a smile and an air kiss, both returned, by the way.

Across the street, a high-end Coach store flashes a wanton display of plush leather and fashion accessories like a retail store gone wild.

Voluptuous mannequins with postage sized bikinis ogle passersby from tiny storefronts.

And shapely girls at The Bull are ogled by enthralled tourists.

T-shirt and knick-knack shops elevate tackiness to an art form and punctuate every block. The best T-shirt logo, at least the best one I can write into this public blog is “Key West is a drinking town with a fishing problem.”

Bars flourish in this town in which the thermometer has been stuck on 86 degrees for several months. Music blares from Sloppy Joe's, and Cowboy Bill’s Honky Tonk Saloon, and the The Bull and Whistle Bar, where clothing is reputedly optional on the roof deck.

Out of the obligation for journalistic verification, I climbed to the third floor and observed well-formed nakednesses at the bar and lying Cleopatra and Caesar style upon chaise lounges one sunny afternoon. Key West is definitely laid back.


St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the oldest in the Florida diocese, its whitewashed exterior shimmering brilliantly in the afternoon sun, seems to tolerate the frivolity. Sooner or later, penitents may enter to make amends.

An evening stroll down Duval Street is short on nuance and long on neon. Whether you’re straight, gay, or somewhere in between, there’s a seat at some bar for you. Downstairs at The Bull and Whistle Bar, it could be all in the same place. Music pours out of bars and spills into the street, a not too subtle siren call enticing you inside. Not that most of us need much of an invitation.

Parade is the default mode for Duval Street. On any given night, straight piped earsplitting Harleys, bicycle rickshaws, tiny electric glorified golf carts masquerading as mini cars, and ancient convertibles with babes of all persuasions throwing trinkets advertising girlie bars and pole dancing establishments cruise up and down.

This is a Noah’s Ark kind of town. Observe long enough and you’ll see all the species of the known earth: tourists, locals, all manner of certifiable characters, street people, teens with the ubiquitous skate board, shills in front of strip clubs, and very few kids under twelve.

One or two humongous cruise ships are usually docked here. I wonder what the folks from Iowa wearing shorts, white socks and walking shoes make of all this. It’s either Gomorrah or Eden with a guilty conscience. I imagine it might be like walking around a zoo with no bars between the visitors and wild creatures.

Say one thing about Margaritaville, everyone seems to get along. My first night in town, the captain brought me to Mallory Square, THE place to be at sunset in Key West. The seaside bar at Ocean Key Resort and Spa is jammed with patrons, their eyes on the horizon and hands cupping beverages. Great music from a live band hones the edge of the anticipated sunset.

“Have a beer!” A jovial middle-aged couple with enough beers on their table to start a game of checkers offers me a cold one. The sun sets, a million pixels pulse from scores of cameras. And the band plays on.

By the wee hours, Duval keeps humming with the hardiest partiers. By daylight, the whole spectacle begins anew. It never gets old in Key West. More than a few pilgrims have declared this paradise and never left

In case you wonder, there are museums, art galleries and quaint architecture to be seen in Key West. You just have to get Duval Street out of your system first.

Photos by P. Tamburello.

Mallory Square photo courtesy of http://www.sunsetcelebration.org/

The Bucking Toilet: En route to Key West

When’s the last time your toilet acted like a bucking bronco?  Leaving aside that time you hoisted way too many margarita’s, it would be the last time you were attempting to sit on the throne as it was rolling through the swells in the ocean. Like the bronco, the waves are unpredictable. You immediately grasp the reason the “head” in a sailboat is so small.

With no reins to hold onto, you get leverage with your feet against the wall in front of you to keep from pitching forward in your yawing, rocking, rolling, little bathroom on Neptune’s ceiling, then stabilze yourself laterally by pushing against the walls with your arms while doing your level best to ease the release button on one or both of your nether sphincters. 

Your adventure has just begun, matey. There’s the matter of filling and flushing the little apparatus. Since, aside from the accomplished captain,  I am the only crew on this beautifully maintained Valiant 37  blue water sailing vessel, I live in fear that I will, in a careless or flung-around moment, apply too much pressure and break the little intake lever under the pump in/out handle. It does not require a nautical engineer to figure the consequences.

There are many no-no’s aboard a sailboat. Over my ration of grog on the second night out, I confessed my hyper level of concern while operating the ingenious contraption.

Tangle the jib lines? Forgivable - as long as you can untangle them before they’re needed next. Leave a fender over the side after you’ve exited the dock? An embarrassment to the captain, who scoffs at passing boats who’ve been negligent, but tolerates it since I’m on board for only two weeks and will learn fast. Screw up the propane stove? Not good. But, there are always canned goods. 

Render the head inoperable? As the captain, a college buddy who decided two years ago to chuck it all, buy this classic-design sailboat and become a ‘live aboard,’ said, ”That is a walk the plank offense.”

Presently in Marathon Key, 200 miles from where we began six days ago in Fort Pierce, FL, we are about 40 miles from our destination, Key West, FL. The plank has remained stowed.

 

LSU: Hold That Tiger

Louisiana bleeds purple and gold. From September to bowl season, the collective psyches of the citizens of  Louisiana appear to live and die with the fortunes of the LSU football team.

In my twelve day road trip from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Lafayette to Lake Charles and back, nearly every gas station, market, restaurant, bar and grill pledged allegiance to the LSU Fighting Tigers. Caps, mugs, inflatable tigers, pennants, and t-shirts dangled from hooks, hung on walls, and surrounded cash registers.

While using the Internet connection in the Lafayette, Louisiana, Days Inn lounge I was startled to hear a whoop from the office around the corner. A moment later, Miss Sondra, the usually composed desk manager, apologized for the outburst when she realized I was present. It wasn’t embarrassment that flushed her face. The game was on the line against Georgia. If a  sixty mile shout from Lafayette to Baton Rouge would help, Ms Sondra was gonna shout.

Her loyalty is permanent. She informed me of the large purple and gold tiger tattoo over her right sho ulder blade (which I didn’t ask to see to satisfy journalistic curiosity).

During lunch at Poor Boy Lloyd’s in Baton Rouge three days later, the three plasma TV screens played endless loops of the game’s final moments as Louisiana State University defeated Georgia 20-13. 

The LSU campus in Baton Rouge

The Louisiana State University football stadium in Baton Rouge is on the scale of a Mayan Temple. Even considering the sprawl of the 650-acre, 250 building leafy campus on the banks of the Mississippi River, its footprint is monumental.

Mike is a major attraction. He is the sixth tiger to reside here since 1936.

 The only thing the fans left home was Mike VI, a two-year-old 300-pound Siberian-Bengal tiger who lives in mini-savannah captivity in the shadow of Tiger Stadium across the street. When full grown he’ll close in on 700 pounds. During this reporter’s trip to the campus, a continual stream of intergenerational admirers visited Mike.

Mike's penthouse across the street from Tiger Stadium

Speaking of streams, while two undergraduates and I were admiring him from one of the viewing arches that surround his compound, Mike turned his tail to us and puckered up a certain sphincter. An arch of fine golden droplets sparkled in the late afternoon sun and covered us with Mikey-ness. Perhaps  this is Mike's way of inducting Yankees into the Tiger fold.

 

To quote an LSU web site, "Eight nights a year, Tiger Stadium becomes the fifth largest city in the state of Louisiana as over 92,000 fans pack the cathedral of college football to watch the Tigers play.” It is the sixth largest college stadium in the country.

Immense and meant to impress by sheer weight of concrete and steel, cathedral would be the appropriate term.

Since 2000, the Tigers have a record of 49-7 at home. Visiting teams think of Tiger Stadium as ‘Death Valley.” Tickets for Saturday’s game against Florida are being scalped for one grand apiece.

Most ticket holders would rather live on close rations for a week than give in to the temptation to sell.This Saturday, number 4 ranked LSU faces number 2 ranked Florida. It’s a safe bet that every one of the 21,000 undergraduates and tens of thousands of boosters will pack Tiger Stadium.

Game night at Tiger Stadium

One alumnus informed me that LSU has a reputation as the biggest college tailgate community in the country. Twenty thousand, with or without their tailgates in tow, traveled to the game against Washington in Seattle in September. Is the word fan derived from the word fanatic?

Photos, except night shot of Tiger Stadiium above,  by Paul Tamburello

From cradle to dance hall in Southwest Louisiana

 
When’s the last time you saw six-year-old kids on the dance floor? Or little girls or boys being whirled around the dance floor in their daddy or mommy’s arms?
 
If you lived in Louisiana that would have been last Friday or Saturday night at Randol’s in Lafayette or Saturday afternoon at The Coffee Break in Breaux Bridge.
 
Music and dancing is a huge way of life in southwest Louisiana. Who needs Arthur Murray when you can learn from everybody in the dance hall?
 
Friday night, a young brother and sister alternated sitting in the dining room with their parents and grandparents and skipping hand in hand to the dance hall in the next room.
 

The Cajun band Jambalaya (which played in the Lowell, MA Festival a month ago) kicked out one joyous song after another, all in Cajun French. Some kids sat on one of the wooden benches that surround the hall, visible through the glass partition between the dance hall and the dining room, and watched the adults styling to the music.

A shy blonde eight-year-old girl was busy taking digital photos of every couple that passed by - until her grandfather leaned over, took the camera out of her hands, and led her around the floor in a waltz.

On Saturday night, a pair of six and seven year olds stole the show. Got right out there and did their version of waltzing and two stepping. Adults applauded the two kids as if they were contestants on Dancing With The Stars. They beamed with the attention.
 
Earlier that day at The Coffee Break, the children who came to the Pont Breaux Jam, the weekly Saturday 11 AM to 2 PM celebration of Cajun music, were treated royally. While little brother was being danced around to the Cajun music by his dad, little sister was getting an impromptu waltz lesson by one of the men who’d come in from the Café des Amis.
 
Maybe that explains why places like Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, Angelle’s Whiskey River Dance Hall, McGee’s Landing, and Pat’s Fisherman’s Wharf, all in Henderson, and many more places throughout the parishes of southwest Louisiana, are so popular.
 
If there’s a zydeco or Cajun band on the stage, you can bet there’ll be a roomful of men and women working up a lather two-stepping, waltzing, and slow dancing for hours at a time.
 
Music and dance are the glue that holds towns together all over southwest Louisiana. Some day, these little shavers will grow up to be the adults teaching their own kids to dance at Randol’s or The Pont Breaux Jam, or a facsimile thereof. 

Floyd LeBlanc: A Cajun Original

Practically all the regulars who come into The Coffee Break at noon in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, know Floyd. A handful of them who’ve been dancing since 8 AM at the Café des Amis drift in here to listen to more Cajun music. Floyd doesn’t miss much when it comes to fun. He was dancing with as many women as he could fit on his dance card at the café.

He certainly didn’t miss a chance to dance with my pretty traveling companion. That’s when he found out we were out of towners.

“I hear you’re from Boston. Ask me anything about Breaux Bridge you want”, he says and shakes my hand with a solid grip.

“Well, let’s start with the Café des Amis. How long has that place been having dances on Saturday mornings? “

“I’ve been coming here for around 12 years since they began the Saturday dance”, Floyd says. “You know, the place used to be a funeral parlor in the early 1900s. They made caskets on the second floor. Did you see the hand crank rig overhead when you walked into the café? That’s how they got the caskets down from the second floor. Did you see the church across the street? The caskets went from there to the church for burial in the cemetery next to the church. Pretty efficient setup. “

Floyd’s a natural born story teller, After listening for fifteen minutes I could tell that there are three things that Floyd appears to love, dancing, women, and living by his wits. He’s been married 55 years to his second wife. He’s flirtatious, rambunctious and, if the stories he tells me are true, a bit of a rascal.

“I was born in Breaux Bridge and raised in Henderson Levee”, he says, and begins to tell stories. Life was hardscrabble when Floyd got out of the Air Force as a twenty year old. No ready resources, no problem. Floyd began running his own card game and playing pool for money. I get the impression he could size up a mark in a few seconds. Beneath his easy going smile is a man completely aware of his surroundings.

In his gambling days, I believe Floyd would have been capable of beating you into the ground if that was the best way he saw to recoup his money, or get the hell out of a place fast, if the odds of getting it were too long. The fact that he’s 83 years old doesn’t mean this is any less true. He’s about 5’9” tall, maybe 160 pounds and hard as nails. His weathered face has the map of Acadiana etched into it.

Like many men from here, Floyd can read the Atchafalaya Swamp in Henderson like a book. “I bought me a shotgun with my winnings and got into the duck business”, he says.  “I carved a duck call out of wood, set up a blind about a quarter of a mile into the swamp right where Whiskey River Landing is now. I’d call in the birds from my duck blind, shoot them down and row out in my pirogue to get them. People in their cars on the levee used binoculars to see how many ducks I shot. I sold the ducks for $1.50 each.”  His eyes twinkle as he talks and reads my reactions.

Supply and demand doesn’t depend exclusively on money. Floyd had a constant supply of ducks. “I bartered for gas, meat, and occasionally for favors from women," he says with a sly grin, leaving me to guess exactly what that barter worked out.

After Sunday mass in Breaux Bridge, Floyd says he stationed himself at a gas station across the street. Two fingers from a passing car, he handed over two ducks from his morning hunt. Four fingers four ducks, and so on, at $1.50 each.

In time Floyd got a steady job, worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for 13 years. For 21 years after that he signed on with the city of Lafayette, was in charge of maintenance and the town’s electricity.

“I’ve been gone from there for 21 years and the lights are still on, Either I did a good job or they didn’t need me,” he says with another impish grin.

About twenty men and women in the Coffee Break’s next room are playing fiddles, guitars, and triangles and singing traditional Cajun music and here I am listening to the life and times of a Cajun original. I’m not leaving till Floyd gets tired of talking.

“I had my first dance when I was 12 years old, “ he says. “Went to a dance hall in Henderson and watched from a balcony on the second floor. I saw an older woman who looked good and asked her to dance. She said ‘Do you smoke?’ and I said why. ‘Give me a cigarette and I’ll dance with you’, she said.

Floyd pauses a moment. “I said, ‘you wait right here and don’t move.’ I got a cigarette and got my dance with that older woman. (Pause). She was 14.” We both laugh.

Floyd’s father spoke French, his mother French and English.  He went to school when he was five. If he spoke French in school, he got a whipping.

Listen carefully and you’ll still hear thick Creole Cajun spoken around here. It’s certainly kept alive by the songs the players in the next room have been singing all morning and by one woman who sang lyrics to me as we danced in the café this morning.

Floyd married his first wife before he entered the Air Force. He settled in with her in a house next to his mother in law. “She was a bitch,” he says.

One day I told my wife we need to move. She said no. I took off my wedding ring (here he begins to mimic removing his ring) threw it in the wastebasket and said I’m gone. And he was.

When it comes to cards and pool, Floyd calculates the odds. When it comes to women, right from the age of 12, he made his own odds. Floyd first saw the woman who became his second wife at the Catholic church service in Breaux Bridge.

“She was very pretty. I saw her again at a social event and asked who she was and where she lived. I asked a friend to drive me to her house. She was sitting on the porch with her family and walked out to see me in the car. That was it. We’ve been married 55 years.”

The entrepreneurial spirit spreads throughout his family. Floyd helps his daughter run a bed and breakfast place in town, gets on a tractor and mows the lawns of the two houses his son-in-law built nearby.

Floyd’s one of those people who are good at whatever they take on. “I took up golf when I was thirty-seven,” he says. “Been shooting my age since I was 75.”

The jam session is winding down around 1 pm. “Gotta go see the boss,” Floyd says. I don’t know whether that’s an honorary title or whether there’s a power sharing arrangement in the LeBlanc household but I do know that there haven't been many dull moments in Floyd's life.

New Orleans: Donna's Bar and Grill

New Orleans is famous for neighborhood bars where you can hear great music played by local musicians on a postage-sized stage. Some of these places serve unbelievably good food from tiny kitchens. Some people call them dive bars. I call them major attractions.

Drove to Frenchman Street in Faubourg-Marigny  in search of said attractions. Nothing doing for us in Snug Harbor, or The Blue Nile, or Dba's. Not the kind of music to inspire a trip to the dance floor. Might as well be looking for the Lost City of Cibola.

On the way to Frenchman Street, I had happened to look down St. Anne Street to North Rampart several blocks away and saw the dazzling site of the Louis Armstrong Arch.

The arch may not look like much in broad daylight but at night its illumination is as bright as Satchmo’s smile. And a terrific photo opportunity. My travel companion, a Louisiana native who knows the turf, directs me to North Rampart Street so I can salvage the night with some great photos.

 I stand on North Rampart Street’s neutral ground to get a good shot of the arch. Behind me, I hear strains of some funky blues. Must be from a nearby apartment. Whoa! It’s coming from that dimly lit building across the street. Little sign over the doorway  - Donna’s Bar and Grill. Peer in. Live band! Blues! Dance music!

Hustle across the street waving wildly. “Lock the car! We found our dive bar!” I rave.

The next hour and a half approximates a little slice of heaven on earth. Our saxophone savior, Les Getrex and his trio of electric piano, bass, and drums rocks us in the arms of Gabriel with ultra danceable rhythm & blues, swing, and down ‘n dirty blues. Condensation drips down our bottles of cold Dixie beer. No point in wasting time sitting down while St. Les is blowing.

Between songs, Les starts a Q and A with the patrons, “Where y'all from?” The answers astonish. Along with the two twenty-something girls who came from the neighborhood, the answers were Milan, Kentucky, Phoenix, Hawaii, Philly/Atlanta/LA, and Boston. We aren’t the only pilgrims to have found this place.

There’s more. Every Monday night, chef/owner Charlie Sims puts out a table of free red beans and rice and BBQ chicken after the first break. This happens to be Monday night. You’ve heard the expression “died and gone to heaven.” That would apply to us.

Charlie and his wife Donna have owned the place for 17 years. “After a while you want to give something back, “ Charlie says when I see him peering out of a pass through window into the kitchen. “I’ve been doing the Monday night feed for the past 12 years.”

Donna’s went dark for a few weeks recently when 74 year old Charlie was hospitalized with a stomach ailment. The bar re-opened Thursday through Monday when his son stepped in to help keep the doors open. Charlie returned recently to run the business and keep putting out the Monday night dinner.

Donna’s Bar and Grill turns out to have a storied past. I’m not especially religious, but for a place with this much soul I’m praying Charlie, and Donna, stay healthy for a good long time.

Chef/owner Charlie Sims

Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, City-Wide Garage Sale

The biggest draw on a Saturday morning in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana is the zydeco dance from 8 AM to noon at the Café des Amis.

That is unless you happen to drive over there on the day of the annual Breaux Bridge Citywide Garage Sale.  To say this is a popular event is understatement in the extreme.

Bargain hunters, browsers, and people looking for a good morning’s worth of entertainment piled into town from every town within fifty miles of Lafayette parish.   

No wonder. Garage sales, yard sales, neighborhood sales, and parking lot sales were happening on every street leading into Breaux Bridge and peppered in areas around the entire city.

Merchants along Main Street and Bridge Streets set up merchandise on tables on the sidewalks in front of their stores. Oh yes, and an flea market with more than 40 vendors flourished in Veteran’s Park at the intersection of Berard Street and Martin Streets.

Food? This is Louisiana, honey. Nothing, including funerals, happens in Louisiana without food. We’re talking red beans and rice, BBQ pork, po-boys, funnel cake, and home made lemonade to go along with all American burgers, dogs, and snow cones.

The sidewalks are full of friendly chatter. A woman passing a couple having lunch at a table squeezed onto the sidewalk outside the Chez Jacqueline Bar and Restaurant stops in her tracks, leans over and asks the name of the food on a diner’s plate, “That’s cous cous, Charlene!” she says to her fellow shopper. “I’ve heard of it and never seen it!”

This kind of easy camaraderie bubbles along all over town. The teenage girl in front of Glo’s Fashions sells chess pies that her grand mama, who happens to own the store, made for the sale, and shyly tells me the ingredients. People who've never met exchange opinions about sale items arranged on the sidewalks.

Breaux Bridge has morphed into a village shopping mall. You could probably walk up to a resident’s house and bargain for the rocker on the front porch. On sale are antiques, collectibles, lamps furniture, dishes, embroidery, plants, glassware, purses, bows, pottery, antique tools, and anything no longer held hostage in someone’s attic, cellar, or garage.

The best thing about this citywide garage doesn’t cost a cent. It’s the feel of an America in less complicated, less polarized times.

The range of  political views held by the people walking around town might be narrow but it's there. Probably lots of sons, daughters, fathers or mothers from this parish are serving their country in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The sunshine and massive array of merchandise for sale has neutralized the sharp edges of politics. For this one morning in America, the differences of opinion are secondary to finding a good deal or an item you just found out you couldn't live without . Maybe we ought to consider having a nation wide garage sale.

New Orleans: Music for the soul

Like the Mississippi River, music has a profound effect on New Orleans. Walk far enough through the various neighborhoods of the city and you’ll hear just about every kind of music. Take an evening stroll down Royal Street or Chartres Street and the streets crossing between and you’ll hear violinists, accordion players, guitarists, and someone playing a reed or brass instrument.

Walk down Bourbon Street and you’ll hear country, R&B, rock and roll, and Top 40 at decibel levels that you feel in your rib cage. There’s a good chance you’ll see a ragamuffin brass band playing for tips at the corner of Bourbon and Canal Street. Bourbon Street is delightfully and shamelessly vulgar. We’ll leave that for another story.

Dive bars abound. Good ones. Probably hundreds of ‘em. Street buskers like Brother Hank Bartholomew and blind Snooks Eaglund hang out around places like the Café du Monde.

Snooks Eaglund, harmonica legend in New Orleans

Snooks plays for money and pride. Brother Hank for Jesus. One minute he’s blowing some very funky gospel tinged trumpet and the next he’s sounding somewhere between Al Green and Marvin Gaye.

After enjoying Brother Hank’s performance just beyond the edge of the café’s outdoor patio, pt at large walked over to drop some green into the man’s hat - and was offered a CD to take home as a memento. Hank says the proceeds of his work go to his church, and youth and educational programs. I believed him and parted with $20 on the spot.

Brother Hank’s quiz about whether I believed in Jesus was from the heart, not an act of a street hustler. My response satisfied him that I didn’t need saving then and there. I can work it as I play his CD when I’m on the road to Lafayette.

New Orleans: Died and Beignet-d to Heaven

Café du Monde
800 Decatur Street
New Orleans, LA 70116

The Original Cafe Du Monde Coffee Stand was established in 1862 in the New Orleans French Market. The Cafe is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It closes only on Christmas Day and on the day an occasional Hurricane passes too close to New Orleans.
The Original Cafe Du Monde is a traditional coffee shop. Its menu consists of dark roasted Coffee and Chicory, Beignets, White and Chocolate Milk, and fresh squeezed Orange Juice. The coffee is served Black or Au Lait. Au Lait means that it is mixed half and half with hot milk. Beignets are square French -style doughnuts, lavishly covered with powdered sugar. In 1988 Iced Coffee was introduced to the cafe. Soft drinks also made their debut that year. (from Cafe web site)

Ask anyone who’s been to New Orleans about food to try when you visit New Orleans and right up there with po’ boys, muffulattas, gumbo, and crawfish cakes will be a beignet from the Café du Monde.

As with the above exotic items it helps if you have no idea what to expect and you’re willing to try them because that’s one of the reasons you packed your bag and headed to this version of Paris in America.

A rare slack late afternoon moment...

So you find the café’s green and white striped awnings at the edge of the French Quarter and have a seat in the cavernous, covered outdoor patio - the ubiquitous fans whirring high overhead, tourists and locals chattering away inside, and the rest of the world parading down Decatur Street outside, your own little everyday Mardi Gras Parade.

Soon, a waitress swoops over to your French bistro table with the retro green vinyl seats and chrome tubular frame, and sets down a little plate with three delicate looking square pieces of slightly browned fried dough covered with a mountain of confectioner’s sugar. They’re puffy, delicate looking, and you still have no idea what’s in store for you.

At the advice of your travel companion, a Louisiana native, you drape a large napkin over your lap before picking one off the plate.

First surprise, they’re warm! Just the right heft between a cloud and a doughnut. Open mouth, bite off a corner. Notice a cascade of powdered sugar dropping to the table and onto your lap. Feel your taste buds do a jig and holler “Hey, we’ve never tasted anything as softly tender warmly sweet airly-textured - ever!”

Your companion laughs. Says you look like one of those milk commercials, a big white mustache over your top lip. 

Well. The rest of the natural world recedes for the next five minutes as you devour, in slow chewy mouthfuls, these warm little nuggets. By the time you’re done you’re not sure whether you should go to confession or a Laundromat. 

White powder is all over your face and fingers. You’re aware you’ve had a peak food experience that borders on rapture. Oh yes, somewhere between bites you’ve sipped a cup of New Orleans famous cafe au lait but somehow it doesn’t register.

As you get up to leave, you notice that underneath nearly every one of the fifty little white composite round table tops is a dusting of confectioner’s sugar. You visit the rest room to hose down your face and hands .

The remnants of the taste of those beignets has vanished. The memory, ahhh, that’s another story.

Vendee Globe 13: Rich Wilson Draws A Crowd

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The hoopla of the previous day had disappeared but ripples of Great American III’s return to Les Sables d”Olonne spread throughout the countryside. Securely tied up to the long pontoon dock in the inner harbor, American flag fluttering in the morning sunshine, the Open 60 monohull lay in peace.

For the better part of the previous 121 days, the racing machine had rattled, rolled, pitched and yawed  28,590.2 miles through the great oceans of the planet. If it could talk, it probably would have asked for a bottle of Advil, a good long shower, and a trip to the body shop. Come to think of it, Great American III’s skipper might have asked for the same things.

It might take Rich Wilson weeks to recover physically, mentally, and emotionally from the epic journey. It wouldn’t start today. By late morning, a rising tide of men, women, and chlldren approached the narrow hipped, white-hulled number 37. After spending his first night sleeping in a bed that didn’t double as a roller coaster, here he was, ready to meet and greet. For some skippers, this is work. For Wilson, it‘s oxygen.

Some spectators stand on the perimeter, hesitant to make contact. They’ve come from Paris, nearby neighborhoods, and everywhere in between. Some shout congratulations and ask for autographs. Tons of them would like a photo with the skipper. Rich obliges with a smile. He chats with people in their native language, answers questions, and shakes more hands than a politician on the eve of an election.

And, according to Rich’s longtime pal Myles Jessel, who lives in France and knows a thing or two about French women, there are “les biz,” the light French kisses on the cheek. After photos, women lean toward Rich, cheek turned ever so slightly. Digital cameras flash, grown women giggle. If it weren’t so damned dangerous and hard, I’d be willing to sail a few thousand miles for such adulation.

What’s the draw, I ask Vendee Globe Race Director Denis Horeau. “Human beings are the heart of the Vendee Globe race. Rich is now a part of the imagination and history of the Vendee Globe. People in France admire these men and women who compete. And they know that Rich speaks from his heart.”

Being handsome doesn’t hurt. “Il est adorable! C’est domage il a une copaine (He’s adorable. It’s a shame he has a girlfriend), ” says one woman awaiting her turn for a photo.

Star quality isn’t worth a piece of flotsam, though, if it isn’t accompanied by character. They know he’s genuine. “I’ll est abordable (roughly translated - accessible, open, warm),” says another. “He is interested, some are not that way, some are very closed.” Others comment on his self-deprecating sense of humor.

Rich visibly lightens up when youngsters approach. He was totally enthralled when a six year old bespectacled girl with a mop of red hair and an “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” smile came to say hello with her mom. 

“Weeelson! Weeelson!!”  A short ruddy-faced muscle man built like a fire hydrant barrels down the pontoons. He showers Rich, and everybody within reach, with photos of his previous visits on the pontoons or from his exploits on his native L’Isle d’Yeu. He’s entertaining, a colorful maniac who punctuates his oratory with blast on his trumpet or a dozen one armed pushups. He shouts something about Amitiés Vendée Louisiane and appears shocked that no one, including the French, have a clue what he’s talking about.  C’est la vie.

A woman from Paris comes to see the last skippers to cross the finish line. “I think they have prevailed with longer odds, against harder luck, and endured more difficulties than the earlier rivals who completed the course,” she says.

This is what Rich appreciates about these people. Of course everyone in France was thrilled that a Frenchman won the race.  As Rich said many times, especially after being interviewed by the American press, the French get that winning isn’t the only thing, that the men and women who crossed the starting were there because of their Olympian skills and records of success. They were the crème de la crème. and all winners

A gray-haired fellow drives from Challans, about fifty miles northwest, He wants to welcome Rich himself. “The last one is like the first one. This is a very difficult race. It’s not necessary to win to be appreciated.” Case in point for Rich.

What is it that drew you to come here today?” I ask a middle-aged woman as she walks away from greeting Rich. You’d have thought I asked her about the place of French wine or Impressionist art in the world. She takes in a long breath, sighs, and launches into an answer that would have floored Rich Wilson.

I scribble and concentrate on interpreting her French, which is flowing pretty intensely. “This is a great race, a chance for me to teach content and character,” she says, the little smile lines around her face deepen as she continues.

“When one of my nine or ten year olds looks up and says, ‘Learning these times tables is hard,’ I point to the map on the wall that we use to track the race. You want to see difficult, THAT is difficult…apply yourself like they’re doing and you’ll get there.”

She’s just getting warmed up. Give a teacher an appreciative audience and you’re in for some passionate discoursing about the sheer joy of the job.

“We have them take on the roles of the skippers and make up questions to ask each other. They pose questions such as what’s the hardest thing for you to confront, are you afraid, how do  you confront and vanquish your fears , how do you push yourself when you’re tired?

Spurred on by the sight of me writing furiously and asking her to stop now and then to repeat something I missed, she rattles off topics the Vendee Globe generates for her classroom - weather, geography, the tropics, the continents, the history of navigation, and the great explorers.

“These navigators are role models for all of us,” she finishes, adding a French saying she  uses to stimulate her students: “Au bout de la monde, au bout de soi-meme!” (literally ‘to the end of the world, to the end of yourself’) an expression that has to do with pushing yourself to your limits to achieve what you want.

Where is Oprah? Where is Wolf Blitzer? Where is a team of documentary filmmakers from the Vendee Globe Race Committee? This quote hits the same notes as the joyous fulminating finale to the 1812 Overture, cannons firing, church bells ringing. It’s like this unassuming woman just walked out of a phone booth and emerged as SuperTeacher.

Au bout de la monde, au bout de soi-meme.  Exactly what every one of the thirty men and women was living out when they bolted across the starting line of the Vendee Globe Race on November 9, 2008.

Exactly the kind of theme Rich Wilson has been living his entire adult life.

Vendee Globe 10,11,12: Great American III's Arrival At The Dock

PART 10
ARRIVAL AT THE DOCK

March 10, 2009 at 1:43:19 PM French time, Great American III screamed across the finish line with thirty knots of wind blowing across the deck. And was headed for a rocky shore less than a mile away. “I had two minutes to get the boat organized or we’d be on the rocks. It was like a continuous car crash out there,” Rich Wilson said. How fitting. After sailing 28,590.2 nautical miles, the last eight thousand like running a gauntlet of adverse wind and weather, even the last minutes were fraught with tension. 

Rich quickly spilled air from the sails and bore away. His team jumped aboard from the Zodiac that bounced alongside. Sails were lowered for the last time and the engine was throttled into gear for the first time in months. For Rich, here was a chance to unwind after 121 days, 41 minutes and 19 seconds at sea.

Every one of the eleven boats that returned to Les Sables d’Olonne was an occasion for celebration. Townspeople, friends and relatives of the skipper and tourists flocked to the jetty and lined the ancient canal entrance leading to the marina in the inner harbor. By the time Great American III arrived at the pontoon dock, it was jammed with spectators wanting to get up close and personal.

So what do you say when you haven’t had a chance to talk to a live person in four months and are face to face with a sea of them? For the first minute or so, nothing. Rich stood on deck, his hand tapping his heart in a universal gesture of appreciation.

 Someone in the crowd handed him an American flag. He waved it aloft, probably grateful for the time it gave him to get his bearings.

The slight smile on his face was a few degrees short of a good cry. Buoyed by the cheers, the applause, the good will, he got himself together. This was show time. Deal with the relief, the exhaustion, and the sense of achievement, later.

“Je n’ai pas des mots (I don't have the words),” he said several times as he collected himself emotionally.

“Je n’ai pas des mots. Golfe de Gascogne, Ocean Atlantique, Indien, Pacifique, encore L’Atlantique, c’etait un cours sans fin (it was a race without end),” he began. Then, Oscar-style, he jump-started his small speech with a list of thank you’s. To Thierry Dubois, the builder of Great American III, to Brian Harris, the man who oversaw Great American III’s major refit before the race, to the organizers, and to the French, who are as passionate about sailing as they are about soccer and red wine.

“The trip was hard,” he said in French. “It wasn’t a question of waiting for the other shoe to drop, but of how many shoes would drop.” The last several thousand miles had been truly rough. The dark circles under his eyes told the story as clearly as his words.

A jeroboam of Mumm’s appeared out of nowhere and lightened the mood considerably. A smile replaced the pensiveness on the skipper’s face. The pop, fizz and whoops from the crowd are the unofficial declaration of a successful finish.

Race Director Denis Horeaux led Rich up the gangway amongst throngs of people who wanted to get close to the man who just completed the hardest, most dangerous sailboat race in the world. We are in rock star territory here. Rich was mobbed all the way to the covered staging area erected to formally present the returning skippers to the crowd.

PART 11
AT THE PODIUM
“Le doyen de la cours termine a la 9th place!” (The elder of the race has finished in ninth place!) the announcer shouted to the crowd. TV cameras whirred. The place looked like it was being buzzed by a squadron of digitally equipped fireflies as cameras flashed everywhere. For the next half hour, Rich answered the announcer’s questions in French. With his enormous respect for the race and the people and country that hosted it, Rich did not disappoint.

Three vignettes

1. When asked about Cape Horn, Rich recounted his experience in 1990 when he and a crewmate nearly lost their lives when trimaran Great American I was capsized by a sixty foot wave and was miraculously flipped upright by another one. Hours later, the two men were rescued by the container ship New Zealand Pacific.  Wilson said that it was the encouragement of children across the country in his sitesalive program that he prompted him to re-plan the San Francisco to Boston voyage to beat record set by clipper ship Northern Light in the 1800s.  He succeeded and went on to break three other clipper ship records, all the while connecting online with school children across America.

2. He praised race winner Michel Desjoyeaux. “ When I met him in Port Le Foret after the 2007 TransAt, I asked him if he would answer some of questions about preparation since this was my first time. Michel agreed and said it’s fine if you write them in English. Out of respect and gratitude, and an English to French dictionary by my side, I asked MJ ten questions in French. Twenty four hours later, he emailed me ten answers in English!”

The crowd laughed at the irony. Rich said the exchange repeated itself six or seven times in a two-week span. “How generous he was with information. He is an incredible navigator. I’m happy that he won the race.”

3. “When I passed Cape Horn on January 26, there was a new president of the United States.” The crowd cheers. Barack Obama was France’s choice during the election. 

 “Before Thomas Jefferson became the third president of the United States, he was the ambassador to France. As ambassador, Jefferson said ‘Every man has two countries, his own and France.’ He was absolutely correct.”

The audience cheered vigorously. Rich has a bit of the ambassador in him, too.  He has an affinity with the French people he’s encountered. They’ve been warm, generous, and most importantly, appreciate the dreams of these skippers, what they risk and what they give up in order to realize the dream of competing. 

And it doesn't hurt that Rich is addressing them in their own language, unusual for an American athlete in any sport.

After the thirty minute ceremony, as rain began to fall from leaden skies, organizers whisked Rich to the media tent.

PART 12
IN THE MEDIA TENT

More cameras. lights, and action. The folding chairs in the media tent were filled with family, friends, schoolchildren from local towns, and any adult who could get a pass to gain entry.  On the dais sat Rich Wilson, Andy from the Vendee Globe Media Center, a Vendee Globe official, and a translator.

“Il est differente que les autres, il est intellectuale,” mused Corinne, a middle-aged local resident who’d witnessed every previous arrival. (He’s different from the others, he’s an intellectual.)

Well, he was one quite exhausted intellectual. It takes time to adjust to terra firma, where your environment isn’t jangling around as if you'd spent the last four months living inside the cylinder of a cement mixer truck.

Vignettes.

1. Taking on the Vendee Globe race:
“At first I said no - too long, too hard, too dangerous. What began to intrigue me was associating it with a global campaign with schools across the world. We set up booths at conventions, got commitments from countries as far away as China. The international program didn’t pan out the way we wanted but we got a robust national campaign together and that’s when I jumped in.”

2. “Would you do this again?” Andy asks.
Rich first quotes Samuel Johnson: “He who goes to sea for pleasure would go to Hell for a pastime.”  Mind you, Rich is still talking in French. Much laughter from audience. “I don’t want to sail around the again but you don’t have to sail around the world to appreciate it and to dream about it,” he said.

3. “Other skippers reported having hallucinations due to lack of sleep, did you have any?”

“No but I heard that Jean-Pierre Dick hallucinated that Jesus Christ was on the foredeck trimming his jib,” Rich says, waited a moment and added. “at least he had a good crew.”

Rich then recounted a surreal dream that had him flummoxed - during a week that featured a parade of storms, he dreamed he needed a 20 ton steel cable, the kind that lifts boats from the water in boatyards, to lift his boat out of the water to placidly remain above the 85 knot wind-packing storm the weather charts predicted was on the way.

"When I woke up I looked for the storm on the radar and realized I had only a 2.4 baud connection capacity on my computer that would make it too slow to download the steel cable and wondered how I’d be able to do it. That,' he said dryly, “I realized when my head cleared was the wrong question to be asking.”

Toward the end of the interview, Andy asked for questions from the school kids.

“How many times have you won the Vendee Globe?” a child asked. After the laughter had subsided, Rich responded. “When I was getting my physical exam by the race doctor, he said to me ‘Anyone who finishes the Vendee Globe is a winner.’” More applause.

Rich thought a moment and added, "One day in November before the race, a young boy standing with his school group listened to me talk about why I chose to enter the race. 'C’est importante participer (It's important to participate)', he blurted out. What an important life lesson. That is exactly what I was doing."

When media conference concluded, Rich was mobbed for autographs. In between a radio interview and photo flashes, he greeted every autograph seeker and every man and woman wanting to tell him how much they appreciated his demeanor and his respect for France.

As the tent emptied he was approached by teachers who wanted a photo opportunity with this French-speaking American who had just tangled with the toughest sailing race in the world that started and ended in their home port. Every one of the finishers was a winner to them, too.

Like a gregarious and popular politician, Rich waded into the crowd of youngsters. His wide smile and beaming eyes belied the fact he was running on pure adrenalin. He was in his element again.

Vendee Globe 7,8,9: Great American III Claws Her Way To The Finish

Six posts about the days preceding American skipper Rich Wilson's crossing the starting line of the Vendée Globe solo, non-stop, 26,000 mile, round the world race that departed Les Sables d'Olonne, France on November 9th appeared in this blog in November, 2008.

The Vendee Globe is called "The Everest of Sailboat Racing." Nineteen of the fleet of thirty boats that began the race on November 9th did not cross the finish line. Rich Wilson, at the helm of Great American III, did.

The next series of entries recount Wilson's completing the race, his return to Les Sables d'Olonne on March 10, 2009, and the generous welcome given him by the French populace there.

PART 7

From Les Sables d’Olonne, France to Cape Horn - the first 19,500 miles of the race

When Rich Wilson turned the corner around Cape Horn on January 26, 2009, and headed north for Les Sables d’Olonne, he thought the worst of his Vendee Globe solo, round the world race was behind him…  wind and sea turbulence galore from the Atlantic down south to the Indian and east to the Pacific.

His Open 60 monohull had surfed down mountainous swells in the Southern Ocean at speeds of over 20 knots. That might have been fine for some of the newer boats and skippers who were accustomed to blazing down the white crested swells at speeds that make most sailors blanch.

Rich was skittish about pressing too hard. He knew he had one shot at this race and this was it. His strategy was to get to the finish line. He had about a quarter of a million school kids glued to his daily progress through the school program he created at www.sitesalive.com. For the first 15 weeks of the race, Rich filed photos, made Podcasts, and wrote ship’s log entries for kids around the world who were following him online.

Most skippers sailed to win. Big sponsors, big money, big pressure to succeed. They sailed aggressively, pushing their boats to their limits. The Open 60s are built with one purpose in mind - to go fast. They are aquatic rocketships with canting keels, adaptable water ballast, dual rudders, carbon fiber masts and booms, They’re capable of speeds in excess of thirty knots. For a landlubber, think NASCAR and 210 mph.

Rich Wilson sailed to participate. At 58, he was the eldest competitor in the second oldest boat. By the time he reached Cape Horn at the tip of South America, 18 of the fleet of 30 had abandoned the race. Broken masts, fried electrical systems or having rudders sheared off after running into flotsam or large sea creatures had punched out 17 of them. Another boat would have its keel ripped off and would abandon the race in the Azores, a few thousand miles from the finish line.  Rich’s mantras: sail safe, don’t break the boat.

Most of us will never experience hurtling 45 degrees down confused seas in the pitch black of night with wind shrieking through rigging, water thundering off polycarbon topsides, everything in the boat rattling around like dice in a Parcheesi cup. Adrenaline and stark raving fear rule that ride. Somewhere in between is exhilaration as you realize you’re having the race of your life. It’s the nitro-glycerine without the heart attack.

One skipper had his femur snapped when he was on the foredeck and his boat nosed into the trough of a steep wave and stopped on a dime. His momentum slid him into the bow pulpit, breaking bone and dangling him over the side. Somehow he managed to crawl back into the cabin. Two days later the Australian Navy found him and brought him to safety. His boat, worth the GDP of a small nation, was lost at sea.

If you or your boat don’t break before you get to the finish line you’ll have sailed south from Les Sables d’Olonne, France, passed the equator, keeping the world’s great capes (Good Hope,Africa; Cape Leuwin, Australia; and Cape Horn, South America) to your left, Antarctica to your right, then sailed north up the Atlantic Ocean till you arrived at Les Sables d’Olonne about 28,000 miles later.

You will have been physically banged up, had to improvise repairs on electronics, software, rudders, sails, rigging, booms, windvanes. You will have hoisted yourself perilously up the mast to inspect or repair. You will have crawled through the bowels of the boat to find where the seawater trickle was coming from. You will have eaten hundreds of meals by popping a plastic bag of freeze dried food into boiling water. You will have used a bucket for a toilet and kept yourself hygienic with wet wipes and the occasional shower if rain fell while you were in temperate zones.You will have asked yourself why you decided to enter the race.

You would have been on the lookout for icebergs and growlers (semi-submerged chunks of icebergs)  south of the "furious fifties" latitudes and be required to pass through ‘ice gates’ set up by the race committee to prevent you from sailing too far south in search of better sailing conditions. You would peer into dark corners of your soul.

The winner, Michel Desjoyeaux's Foncia, crossed the finish line in a record breaking 84 days on February 1st, 2009.

Photos courtesy of www.sitesalive.com

PART 8

Contrary Conditions Test Mettle

So here was Rich Wilson on January 26 catching a glimpse of Horn Island off Cape Horn (the dark spot barely visible on the horizon), looking forward to trade winds and favorable weather that would propel him toward the finish 7023 miles away. He’d covered 19,500 miles. The boat leading the pack was 5200 miles ahead and would finish the race six days later. Rich thought he was in the home stretch.

Not.

The next 36 days tested Rich Wilson to his core. Fierce wind, no wind, confused seas, glassy calm seas, wind directly from the direction he was heading, or directly behind him… just about everything that makes sailing difficult.

“These boats aren’t made for upwind sailing,” he said. “When they go to windward they take a terrific pounding. Every moment you’re waiting for something to break.” That included himself. One night he was catapulted clear out of his bunk and lacerated his skull in the process. Imagine a freight train hurtling downhill on the railroad ties alone, no rails, and you get the idea of the racket and the movement.

February’s weather systems kept pinning him to the west, at one point less than fifty miles off the coast of Brazil. Weather charts contradicted one another. Sometimes Rich read the tea leaves right, sometimes wrong.  Time and again, the fickle hand of fate slammed the door leading to favorable wind conditions for Great American III.

Ship’s Log entry on February 16 (99th day at sea):
“Still going. We have our own private low formed off the Brazilian coast to bend the wind in a more adverse direction than even the northeast trade winds would be. Had perhaps 16 or 18 thunderstorms come through this morning: rain, wind, no wind, 50 degree wind shifts, sails up, sails down, heading for France, heading for Mexico, pounding, crashing, keel on, keel off, start over. Knocked the wind charger, already loose, completely off its mount to dangle by its wires. Maybe tomorrow will be better.”

There was always maintenance. Replace the auto-pilot steering linkage bolts twice (the first time in the middle of the night, of course), clean the desalinator, figure out a way to put a new shim under the mast to tighten the rigging, tinker with cantankerous self-steering mechanisms, were but a few of February’s tasks.

At one point well north of the equator, he was closer to Newfoundland than the finish at Les Sables d’Olonne. The usually sanguine voice on daily podcasts became strained, occasionally discouraged. Ship's Log February 24, 2009:

Day 107 - Frustration
1711 UTC, 31/16N 41/16W, 2.5 knots, @315T. Heading away from France, trying to cross the high pressure ridge. After that, you have to look at the weather maps to see how long this could take. A high pressure system comes in very far north to give northeast winds from here to France. "Frustrating" does not describe what I feel.

The constant adversity kept grinding him down. Wilson became brittle but he did not break.

PART 9

“Trigging” his way to the finish

A cruel irony is that for better part of the last week of the race, the wind filled in directly behind Great American III. This led to a Wilsonian tutorial on sailing a big rig downwind.

March 7, Day 118
Ship’s log

It should be understood by all viewers of the Vendee Globe website, that because positions are taken from the boats four times per day, the course shown on the map might bear little or no resemblance to the course actually sailed by the boat. I haven't seen the website in a while, but I would guess that the route that is shown for Great American III shows basically a straight line from the second high that I went around. That is not what has happened.

Since the second high, we have sailed an absolutely symmetric zig-zag course toward the finish, because the wind at the top of this high pressure system, which is moving precisely exactly at the same speed as we are, is precisely west to east, thus we can only sail 40 degrees on either side of that, and thus not head straight for Les Sables d'Olonne. And given the trigonometry of that (sin 45 degrees = 0.7071), if we are sailing 10 knots on our zig zag, we are in fact only making 7 knots toward France. This is why it is taking us so long to get to Les Sables d'Olonne. And right now, we are only sailing in 10 knots of wind, and making 7 knots of boat speed, 40 degrees off course, so in fact we are only making 4.9 knots toward the finish. In fact, since we crossed the equator, we have not had the bow actually pointing at the finish.

In case there was any doubt, this sealed the appropriateness of the nickname the Vendee Globe organizers had bestowed upon our man Rich (the M.I.T. graduate): “The Mathematician”. The Vendee Globe had been treated to its first trigonometry lesson.

March 10, 2009

Forty-nine hours after posting this "lesson," at 13:43:19 French time, Skipper Rich Wilson and Great American III crossed the finish line at Les Sables d'Olonne. Race time: 121 days, 41 minutes and 19 seconds.

From Farm to Market: A Lesson

The ghost of Cesar Chavez tapped me on the shoulder at about 4 pm this afternoon. He’d been lurking in the shadows of the eucalyptus trees, waiting for the right moment to give me a message from the beyond.

After walking the farm perimeter to find the exact spot where an irrigation channel entered one side of the farm, I saw Señora Teresa busy over in the melon fields. 

“Que pasa?” I ask.

“Maleza,” she answers, pointing to the giant weeds she was pulling from the earth.

Their lush foliage was blocking sunlight to the vine-bound melons below them. They had to go. Senora Teresa was working her way row by row through the two acre field yanking them out by their roots.

 How hard can this be, I thought. How about showing some solidarity here for the field hand and pitching in. After twenty minutes I was dripping. 

"Cuanto maleza?" I asked in my basic Spanish. The melon field was feeling larger and larger as I got sweatier and felt muscle fatigue setting in. 

Teresa laughed as if I’d just told her a joke. She made sweeping gesture with her small hands that encompassed the whole overgrown field. My jaw dropped. She laughed some more.

 Many of the weed clusters had deep tubular roots. One of us would routinely be sent reeling backwards in an indecorous attempt not to land on our rear ends after a weed cluster gave in to a sustained tug. Pulling weeds felt like trying to pull a bucket of cement out of a deep well with a small rope.

 After two hours, my back was aching. We had cleared about six of the at least sixty rows. I had no idea how she kept plugging away so vigorously. Neither of us is a spring chicken. The señora is a tough one.

The ghost of Chavez - farm worker, labor leader, civil rights activist - smiled benignly as I slowly walked from the field in the fading light. Working conditions for farm workers that he fought for in the USA during a big chunk of the mid 1900s are in place here.

"If they need medical care, they go to the health insurance place (or send a relative with their ID card (carnet) to get a "bono" that entitles them to a free or very low cost visit to a local clinic or doctor and/or prescription.  They get lab tests the same way," says farm co-owner Susaan Straus.

"We pay payroll taxes in to the Chilean system monthly ahead of each paycheck for each employee in 3 categories - health care, accident/employment insurance  and retirement," she adds.

The next day, Don Pedro, 68 going on 40, and another field hand used poles with a type of sickle taped to the end to cut the heads off the weeds and effectively kill them. Teresa worked a few rows away, yanking and yanking and yanking.

If the weeds aren’t destroyed now, their seed pods will mature and create more havoc next growing season. And they’re so tough that the tractor’s furrowing blades can’t turn them under the earth. They’ll remain tangled atop the soil making a next planting of this field in about two weeks nearly impossible.

The next afternoon I spotted Ricardo pruning orange trees. More back breaking work. If oranges touch the ground they will not be saleable since they’ll ‘crease.’ The taste and texture will be fine but they won’t look perfect. And fruit that touches the ground is susceptible to invasion by spiders or other insects that harm the tree.

Ricardo has heard about my trial in the field the day before. In the spirit of giving me a full farm experience, he says, “There’s another pruning tool over here.“

Every limb that is two feet or less from the ground or is so heavy with immature fruit that it touches the ground must be pruned. I discover that orange trees have thorns. I bleed. I find out that thorns can puncture gloves.

By 9 pm the sun begins to set. I am grateful. My knees ache. My back is stiff. I'm starved. I wonder how many days I could do this before my gringo back, shoulders, arms, and hands would surrender.

My visits to the fruit section of the market will never be the same. The rainbows of artfully arranged fruit now have a history. Field workers continents away have cultivated and harvested much of it. This is the only life Teresa and Don Pedro have ever known.

A simple life. A physical life. A life totally unknown to the shoppers squeezing the oranges and tapping the melons in the Star Market.

Birthday, Chilean-Style

Sunday, January 18, 2009

I am wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. It is a dozen degrees below freezing in my hometown of Watertown, MA, U.S.A. I, however, am settled for a couple of weeks at a small farm in Nogales, Chile. It is Sunday, January 18, 2009, the equivalent of a late June day in the southern hemisphere, So yes, I’d be happy if all I did today was watch the sun arc from foothills of the Andes and set behind the Coastal Range that shoulders into the Pacific Ocean.

My hostess Susaan has more ambitious plans. She’s delayed the annual family birthday party she holds for her husband Ricardo, who was born ten miles away in Quillota, so I could participate in the event. I am in for a festividado grande. 

A bi-hemipsheric couple, they spend spring and summer in Boston then spring and summer in Nogales.They're ambitious, too. They've put sweat and dinero into a plan deliver an income stream from the orange trees, melons, corn, and vegetables they've been assiduously planting here for the past several years.

The farm is smack in the heart of what is called Chile’s breadbasket. You can practically hear food ripening on vines or popping out of the rich soil. Fruits and vegetables and flowers you buy at your local market might have come from within a few miles of this little farm situated on a cerrillo overlooking fifty acres of orange grove and melon and corn fields. The gentle breeze cools, the sun dazzles.

People begin arriving at noon … the party ends when it ends. Believe me, the guests are not here out of obligation. They’ve driven here to Nogales from Santiago, from Viña del Mar, Quillota, and Valparaiso. You don’t drive hours to a birthday party of a gregarious favorite father/uncle/cousin and then sit around like a wallflower. You pitch in with your presence, whether with the occasional wry remark or an outlandish story or to toast Ricardo German Ceriani Inostroza.

The invitees are young marrieds, some couples married longer than the age of the trees surrounding the farmhouse, some couples on a second marriage or having ridden a rocky road and survived, and children from assorted marriages. They have one thing in common today. They are going to have a grand time.

The adults gather under the farmhouse’s wrap around porch, the backyard swimming pool beckons the younger generation with a call as mighty as the Sirens drew Ulysses.

Add plenty of good Chilean wine, assorted liquors that match the tastes of certain aunts or uncles, limes from the trees on the farm for gin and pisco sours, soft drinks for the kids, bottled water, and you have enough for the entire entourage to relax.

It may be a universal phenomenon but for the first hour the place looks like a Shaker meeting.

The men find the makeshift bar and talk man stuff… the stock market, cost of living, politics, and tell jokes. The women congregate and confab about their children, their husbands, and things I probably couldn’t have understood even if I were fluent in Spanish.

This was a time for stories, a little gossip, and for the live wires in the family to shower some sparks with their comic routines. I laughed heartily at one comedienne’s story that brought the house down and drew the men into the audience. I was clueless about content but had no doubt about her exquisite timing, mimicry, and total control of the audience. I didn’t need to understand the language to feel a part of the goings on.

Ricardo, naturally gregarious and fun-loving, was holding his own. He’s a master at teasing people in a charmingly disarming way.

He was indeed the life of his own party, horsing around with Susaan and including everyone in his joking around. It’s easy to see why people would drive hours to be here today

Elders doted on the assorted children in the crowd and, gasp, the teenagers actually seem to enjoy being a part of the party. Kids and young teens were in the line of fire of adoration. A walk past an aunt or uncle routinely resulted in a tender pat on the head, a bear hug that lifted them off their feet, or a giant smack of a kiss on the cheek.

This was the kind of intergenerational festivity you’ve seen in foreign movies, al fresco with blue skies, ripe sunshine, gentle breeze, and filled with people who need no instruction on how to have a good time. I have dreamed of experiencing a party like this. Today is a dream come true.

 

After a couple hours of splashing and laughing and eating olives from local trees and cheese from local goats, guests are enlisted to assemble a long table along an entire side of the porch. It is heaped with huge bowls of pastas, salads, vegetables brought by the guests.

The dinner’s last course is the presentation of el torte, the birthday cake made by Ricardo’s sister Uka, Instead of the Happy Birthday song, a vigorous meringue of a chant and response is hollered, the exclamation mark being everyone raising their arms straight up to the sky. The energy from this is nearly enough to blow out every candle on the cake.

Traditions are born here for the youngest and reinforced for the oldest as they listen to the new or the well-worn stories, oral history passed on down the line, In twenty or thirty or forty years the younger ones here will be telling the stories and kissing a future generation of children on the heads or wrapping them in hugs when they pass by.

Parties like this are the glue that binds families together. Way better than weddings and funerals. All there is to do is to soak up the warmth and love and add a few drops of your own.

Snapshots of some of those drops...

swim with your sister's son...

 

sing...

hang out with your cousin...

 

share with your dog...

 

enjoy the outlandish stories...

 

that are being told...

 

relax...

 

hug your uncle, Tio Raul...

 

be wished Happy Birthday from an old friend...

 

and a nephew who can't wait for the cake...

Nogales, Chile, Part 1

ptatlarge in the southern hemisphere...again...

Chilefarms, the farm of my dear friends Ricardo Ceriani and Susaan Straus, will be the center of my universe from January 15th to the 28th, my fourth annual visit (click photos to enlarge).

The sun rises over the foothills of the Andes, oversees life in rural Nogales, Chile...

and sets behind the Coastal Range that plunges into the Pacific Ocean about thirty miles to the east.

At first, it appears this is country life in the slow lane. Not so, amigo. It is like stepping into a bright room from the shadows of winter in New England. It takes time for your eyes, ears, and nose to adjust to new stimuli.

Listen. A tractor rumbles in the distance, workers call to one another across fields that grow much of what you buy in your own supermarket, bees buzz all over the clover and fruit trees. Lapwings and blackbirds hover raucously over the fields. Horses snuffle in their corrals.

Look. Wheelbarrows full of cantaloupe  and honeydew melons and corn are trucked from the fields, cows and horses fed. Hawks soar overhead. Hummingbirds zip atop the laurel and morning glories.

Sniff. The farm is in the orange and produce business but hosts  horses, chickens, dogs, one cat, and a few bulls. The pungent smells of hay, oats and manure waft from the barn. By noon everything the sun is baking emits its own subtle scent.

Something is being planted...

irrigated...

 

weeded...

replanted...

taken apart, rebuilt... 

polished, or repaired...

every minute of the day - although visitors get a pass until jet lag is overcome.

ptatlarge,with camera, is by now a fixture around the farm. His lame Spanish makes the locals laugh. At a meal when he asks for el burro, por favor, thinking he's asking for butter for his batido, people laugh and say we'd love to see you try to put a donkey on that little piece of bread! But I am welcome here. That makes all the difference in the world.

COMING NEXT... a Chilean birthday party and more goings on in Nogales, Chile, Part 2

Nantes, France, on the fly

November 10, 2008

After the spectacularly attended start of the Vendee Globe the day before, the port of Les Sables d’Olonne began returning to post pageant normalcy. Three days before a homeward bound flight, ptatlarge headed for Paris. The smaller train line from Les Sables d’Olonne to Paris switches to a main line in Nantes. Vague memories of a majestic cathedral pictured in a college history book began to tug at me. What’s the rush? The train stops. I stow my duffle bag in the well-organized train station at 10 A.M. and hit the street.

The broad boulevard that fronts the train station is dotted with small hotels and businesses. Across the boulevard is a lovely park. The city seems pocket-sized. How lost can I get? I head for higher ground up a narrow street that borders one side of the park. I know that if I keep scanning the skyline, the spires of the cathedral will lead me to its altar.

The cobblestones of the smaller streets glistened in the light autumn mist. The old architecture and lack of McDonaldry make me feel as if I’m an extra in a François Truffaut movie.

One of the best things about trying to find something in new city is that serendipity rules. In the next four hours, I’ll find that imposing cathedral and a handful of unexpected bonuses. At many intersections within the old city I feel I’m living Robert Frost’s poem 'The Road Not Taken'. In my version, if you don’t like the road you chose, you just walk back and start again. Or you keep going and wonder what’s around the next corner. What you’re looking for and what you’ll find…well, that’s all part of the adventure.

The first surprise is the Jardin des Plantes. The sprawling botanical park was the brainchild of Louis XIV in 1688. Even in November, the muted pastels of autumn are set off by several shades of dense green from evergreen, shrubbery and lawns. Shouts of children horsing around a park playground balance the serenity of the still waters of ponds that snake through the grounds.

Exit the park gate and follow a hunch to follow the sign for Musée des Beaux Arts, the Chapelle de l’Oratorio and higher ground. The Musée on the right will have to wait for another time. If I’m going to spend time indoors, it’s the cathedral I want.

Aha!

Halfway down the street, the nave of the cathedral pops into sight, preceded ironically by a most worldly poster for a modern dance company performance. Got to love France. The religious and the profane within the same blink of an eye. Both will attract an audience. And perhaps some of the same one. Mon Dieu.

I feel smaller and smaller as I circumnavigate the nave to reach the façade of this magnificent structure. I push open a great oak door. I’ve entered St. Peter and St. Paul’s Cathedral.

If a peasant were born the year the first stone was laid in 1434, his lifespan probably would be less than the fifty years it took to complete the façade. The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the French and American Revolutions and America’s Civil War passed before the last stone was laid on Christmas Day, 1891.

Daylight filters through stain glass windows in what seems a mile overhead (114 feet, to be exact). The echoes of visitor’s footsteps float like clouds amongst the massive vertical columns. I’ll spend the next hour craning my neck to appreciate the stained glass, vaulted ceilings, the small chapels in its nooks, and those massive pillars that support the immense cathedral. 

My major goal fulfilled, I hit the street again. The square in front of the cathedral is quietly commercial. The locals drive by without looking up. The ancient cathedral is as much part of the landscape as the gray November sky overhead. Time to head back to the train station but not in a direct line. Narrow cobbled streets, spokes from the hub the cathedral represents, point in all directions. Deep breath… how about that one?

Five minutes later another ancient vision appears at the end of a narrow street - The Castle of the Dukes of Brittany - an ancient fortress dating back to 1499, recently restored. And another feast for a tourist. Moats, drawbridge, parapets, sculpted facades, watchtowers, spires, and bell tower. Perfect for a production of Cyrano de Bergerac (which it was) and destination for loads of students and their teachers.

My zig zaggy route back to the train station passes park fountains, hotels, and small businesses. And, mais oui, one sex shop.

I find my way back just in time to catch the 2 pm train to Paris.

While I’m typing away for this story, I research Nantes. A four-hour assessment has its limitations.  Pocket sized city - Not. Try 270,251 according to a 1999 census, behind Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse and Nice.

This city on the Loire River been around since before Julius Caesar referred to it in Commentarii de Bello Gallico, the translation of which Ms. Conlon drilled into me in ninth grade Latin class.

In 2004, Time magazine  described Nantes as "the most livable city in all of Europe.” I would return in a heartbeat.

Click any photo to enlarge

Vendée Globe 6: To the starting line

 The little town of Les Sables d’Olonne shouldered aside every other city and hamlet in France and became, for this one day, the capital of the French sporting world. November 9, 2008, would be the start of the Vendée Globe Around The World race. It seemed like the entire countryside within Pays de-la-Loire was lifted up on one side and its citizenry all tumbled through a funnel that poured into this seaside town.

At dawn, cars were vying for parking places along streets over a mile from the Vendée Globe village. Camper vehicles that had arrived the night before dotted the roadside. Driving in from his accommodations several miles from town, Rich Wilson began to fidget at the wheel as traffic began to crawl. This was the last time he’d be piloting an automobile for a long, long time.

Getting to the marina put him in the mindset  he will live with on Great American III for the next three months at sea - go as fast as possible without breaking anything.

The sky at the horizon lightened to a steel gray as we pulled into the parking lot designated for the racers and organizers.

Rich and Ellen had a few last quiet moments...

and ptatlarge wishes GAIII good luck.

After days tinkering, checking, double-checking, stowing, and arranging, time was up.

.

The last freshwater rinse for the foredeck...

 

as Rich's crew attaches halyards to mainsails...

and readies the wind generator.

An eerie calm settled over the dock like the fine mist that was falling from the leaden skies. Goodbyes were said. Akena Vérandas skipper Arnaud Boissière holds his son close for the last time till around next spring.

Rich wishes his friend Unai Basurko, Spanish skipper of Pakea Bizkaia, good luck...

then waits for his turn with the French crew he's known for decades...

until it's his turn.

Shortly after 9 am, at four minute intervals, the thirty Open 60 monohulls were towed by from the dock, through the fishing and commercial fleet in the harbor. A tremendous hullabaloo erupted as each boat passed - cheers, air horns, boat sirens - as helicopters hovered overhead.

The population of Les Sables d’Olonne is 15, 000. By 1:00 pm, an estimated 300,000 men, women, and children were squashed into every possible space along the harbor and the stone-lined narrow channel that connects it to the Atlantic Ocean. For today, this was World Cup Soccer and the Tour de France all rolled up into one. No one in this part of France wanted to miss the spectacle.

Team members were allowed to stay aboard and assist with raising sails for the start three miles offshore and take photos of the engine shaft which had to be sealed. By thirty minutes before start time, the crew had to have leapt into the Zodiacs that had escorted the boats out.

Moment for GAIII... Halfway down the channel, a crowd sees the American flag fluttering from Great American III’s stern and begins to sing the Star Spangled Banner. The French know the first verse and sort of hum the rest.

Rich, standing on the bow, gestures to the crowd, hand over heart, a big lump in his throat. The improvised banner reflects the French elation at the election of Barack Obama. From the comments he received on the dock, Rich knew he was riding a wave of goodwill generated by the election of Barack Obama a five days before this Sunday, November 9, 2008.

Once GAII disappeared from view, ptatlarge headed for the pressroom...

to watch the race on national TV.

An hour after the sleek Open 60s departed, it was a shock to see the pontoon dock bereft of the millions of dollars worth of the world's fastest monohulls. As in Cinderella, the clock had struck and the world at Les Sables d'Olonne had lost its magical luster...

and the channel to the sea returned to the normalcy of commercial and fishermen's traffic...

while just outside the harbor, the skippers jockied for position at the starting line just off the coast.

Photos, unless labeled "Ouest-France" in right corner, are by ptatlarge

Vendée Globe Statistics: _• 15,000 spectators on the water in 100 passenger boats, and 300 recreational boats;_• 300,000 people on the ground_• 1,200 media and journalists including 380 overseas. _• At the start time 150,000 people were connected to www.vendeeglobe.org

Vendée Globe 5: Demi-gods Of The Seas

“Reeech, Reeeech…” they shout. And Rich Wilson invariably emerges from the cabin of Great American III, where he’s been sorting out about 100 things on his pre-race to-do list, to sign autographs and talk to the the kids in French. 

Rich Wilson knows his real audience. He visibly lightens up when school kids congregate at Great American III’s stern.

 “On this race we have 26 different newspapers all across the USA which will publish a 15 part weekly series, all under contract. We have five more newspapers which will promote the program on line. We will get to six million readers for the weekly pieces 250,000 – 300,000 school kids participating, and a 60 page teachers’ guide,” he says.

Rich will spend the better part of the next 100 days in and out of his cabin, holding on for  dear life, as his Open 60 design monohull is battered by the storms he knows that are lurking in the ‘doldrums’ then surfs wildly down the huge swells of the  southern ocean on his way around Antarctica.

 

To the spectators on tbe docks, the 30 skippers who qualified for the Vendée Globe race are demi-gods, super stars of the seas. Dee Caffari (GBR), skipper of "Aviva" , signs...

The French love the sea, the drama, and the preposterous nature of this race, sailors hurtling around the world on unpredictably turbulent seas in their sailboats constructed with carbon fiber and dreams.

The race was founded by a Frenchman, Philippe Jeantot. Of the thirteen racers who qualified for the first race in 1989, only seven finished - all Frenchman, including Loick Peyron (now with more gray hair but no less a fire to win this race).

Every previous race (1989, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004), and now this one, has had a predominantly French lineup. Think of it as a NASCAR event on the water and having a chance to chat with one of the drivers on the day before the race.

Everyone is in awe of these men and women - such as Samantha "Sam" Davies of "Roxy" (GBR), trying out her foul weather gear.

 

It is regarded as the ultimate in ocean racing. When you get close enough to a skipper like America's "Reech" Wilson, get his autograph, and have a chance to wish him "Bon courage!", you are one very happy kid.

Vendée Globe 4a: Team and Retinue

Rich has known Hugues and Flo Riousse for years. They arrived  at Les Sables d'Olonne from their home in France as soon as Great American III did and have been mainstays in readying GAIII for sea. Hughes actually worked on boats Rich's father owned. Quiet and knowledgeable, they are fonts of knowledge, cultural and nautical. In response from one of my dozens of questions, Flo eplained how France is divided into 22 administrative regions, each subdivided into 'departments. Les Sable d'Olonne is in the Pays-de-la-Loire region and in the department of Vendée.

Rick Williams, chief technical advisor, weighs in on every aspect of Great American III's readiness: sails, computer systems, hardware. He's worked with Rich in previous sailing campaigns, knows how the skipper wants things done and makes it happen.
He's had thousands of miles of cruising and racing experience on multi-hulls and monohull sailing vessels...a good man for Rich to bounce ideas off and listen to.

 

Dianna Fletcher - in charge of publicity for Great American's historic challenge. From the  press rooms to the pontoons during race week, Dianna tried to capture everything and everyone on her camera.

 "Trip" Lowell (L) , longtime friend of Rich's, was ready to do anything anytime. He hauled equipment, loaded supplies, scrubbed the decks - a one-man committee getting things done that needed to be done...like testing a harness for going up the mast.

Bill Griffen, USMC, retired, and Rich were deeply moved as they read a email from Jacques Adelee. In honor of the November 11th anniversary of Armistice Day, two days after the start of the Vendée Globe race, Adelee offered to bring Rich one of the flags he uses to decorate graves of American servicemen who died in WWII in one of the cemeteries in France.

Griffen watches an emotional presentation as Jacques Adele, accompanied by his wife Nadine, presents the flag to Rich on November 8th, one day before the race commences.

Ellen Stone sorts food for the race. Rich is provisioned for 120 days. A skilled organizer and trusted confidante, she's assembled a packet of 'inspirational readings' Rich can pull out of a packet when he needs a 'pick me up.' In a race of this magnitude, every skipper will have days he/she needs such a packet. Rich loves poetry. He can recite "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" on cue.

Three of the "Big Boys," supporters of Great American III, with Ellen Stone: Robert Shotwell, John Scolley, and Bill Metcalfe.

Scott Hamilton, another "Big Boy" who's come to see Rich off, presents him with a string of Tibetan Prayer flags. The five colors represent the five classic elements: Space, Air, Water, Fire, Earth. The four animals representing the four cardinal directions are drawn in the corners and the Wind Horse in the center of each flag. As they flutter into tatters, they carry the prayers to the heavens.

Bob Shotwell presents Rich with an all-purpose "Leatherman", a toolbox-in- the-pocket gizmo that will tied to Rich's belt for the next three months!

Calories! Chocolatier Patrick Gelencser's business card was a cannister of chocolate (in Rich's left hand) he and his two sons delivered to each skipper. It will be a miracle if any is left by race's end.

 

Nonnie Burnes, Massachusetts Insurance Commissioner, and Rick Burnes, Co-Founder and Partner of Charles River Ventures, are Rich's long time friends. Avid sailors, they understand full well the challenge Great American III faces in the coming months.

Thierry Dubois comes to wish Rich good luck. Dubois sailed the Open 60 now known as Great American III in the 2000 Vendée Globe.

Brian Harris, General Manager of Maine Yacht Center in Portland, Maine, was in charge of refitting Great American III. The yard rebuilt the boat's bow, modified its canting keel, and installed all new electronics, a new navigation system and a new engine.

Family support! "Les Soeurs," Rich's three sisters, Anne, Eleanor, and Sarah, with friend Margaret McGovern (taking photo of pt in action), helped send Rich off.

As did John and Leezy Sculley.

Bill Metcalfe is about to set Great American III loose on its greatest adventure yet...

 

 which sets off a flurry of everyone taking pictures of everyone else!

Neal Skorka, an unseen presence, has been the captain of Rich's website www.sitesalive.com for years.

And pt at large has been scribbling notes, hanging out in the Vendée Globe press room, and taking pictures all week!

Vendée Globe 4: The People

The Vendée Globe Village was a magnet that attracted  800,000 men, women and children.

Update 12-21-2008: Of the 30 boats that crossed the start line on November 9, 12 boats have had to abandon the race, 10 due to mechanical failures or dismastings, one due to an injured skipper, and one case of the boat running aground while attempting to make emergency repairs on the Kerguelen Archipelago, 49 degrees south, 70 degrees east, midway between Africa, Antarctica, and Australia.

This is the 42nd day of the race. From the leader to the last boat, there is a span of 3954 miles, around two weeks sailing time. The lead boat is 11,785 miles from the finish and is nearly halfway through the course, the last boat is 15,739 miles from the finish.

 

 Click photos to enlarge.

 From October 18 to November 9, teachers, tots, grandparents, lovers, tourists, and anyone interested at getting a stunningly close up view

of the most magnificent sailboats in the world

streamed through the temporarily erected pavilions then down the ramps to the ‘pontoons” to which the boats were tied.

The pavilions contained restaurants, cafes, educational exhibits, a media center in which the skippers and organizers were interviewed, and, of course,  merchandise.

A memento junkie could find enough free full color posters and pamphlets given out in the entry tent to cover every room in the house.  

The entire experience was free.

You could spend euros on ‘jambon fromage’ baguettes or traditional crepes or souvenir paraphernalia but not for entry to this quadrennial event that was a cross between a nautical Disneyworld and a full fledged national occasion.

In order not to lose their charges in the milling crowds, teachers had their kids wear something that would visually stand out. So every so often, a little island of red slickers or yellow rain hats would be seen moving along like a teeny chunk of flotsam caught amongst the taller adults in the tide of spectators flowing down the dock.

 

For ptatlarge, this was a chance to capture the range of people enjoying the event...

and capture moments...

of spectators spectating...

either captivated by each other...

 or by the activities aboard the Open 60 yachts a few feet away.

All photos, except top photo, by ptatlarge

Vendée Globe 3: The Education Pavilion-2

Les Sables d’Olonne is a thriving fishing and commercial port, a city in the Vendée “department” of the Pays-de-la-Loire region of France.  The Vendée Globe event is a unique public-private enterprise with fiercely held local roots. Everyone from the Vendée Chamber of Commerce down to local businesses is a proud collaborator in the success of the race. They realize it attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors and illuminates the bounty the area offers tourists and locals alike.

It’s as close to a family run mega event as you can imagine. The major private enterprise footing the bill is Sodeb’O, a small processed meat and catering company based in the area and a market leader in refrigerated products including pizzas, sandwiches, pancakes, and hot dishes.

For the citizens and businesses of Les Sables d’Olonne and the Vendée area of Pay de-la-Loire, this event is as big as the Olympics. They leave nothing to chance in their goal to make it a perfect event.

 

Of the 15,000 square meter ‘village’ of temporary pavilions the partnership erects in the marina every four years, 600 square meters are devoted to education. So when the skipper tells me to visit it, I head up there.

 The education pavilion is a kid’s dream of a place. Around every corner, there’s an activity to get your hands on or a well-produced video to watch.  Two prominent videos show “What is the Vendée Globe?” and “Twenty four hours in the life of a skipper.”

 Want to see what it’s like to maneuver a boat on the open sea?    Step up to the tiller or a wheel and watch a video in front of you point a boat through the water in the direction you’ve headed it.  Want to know how to raise the main sail? Grab the halyard at the “mast” installation and haul a Dacron sail up a mini mast, then lower it.

It’s no wonder the girls nearly outnumber the boys in the line. Samantha Davies  (Roxy) and Dee Caffari (Aviva), both of Great Britain, are two of the 30 high profile skippers who qualified for the race.

Cutaway models show the innards of an Open 60 featuring what life is like about an Open 60: how and what the skippers eat, how they relax or celebrate rounding Cape Horn or open gifts loved ones have packed for them for special occasions, how they try to keep hygiene with Spartan amount of water, what they use for the bathroom (a plastic bucket!), how and where they sleep and communicate to the outside world, how they manage sails and keels and ballast, how radios use satellite to relay beams, and how solar power works.

Organizers tout local industry. Les Sables d’Olonne still produces sea salt: a poster shows how the desalinization process works.   

“Become a fisherman,” a hands on panorama scene wired to a series of occupations shows the types of fishing opportunities that exist right off the pavilion’s water’s edge. 

Another display shows the geology of the coast: reach your hand into a hole recessed at its base and feel the different kinds of rock and sand of which the coast’s layers are composed. 

Organizers are making their case for their youngsters to find vocational and environmental reasons to stay put in the region instead of migrating to urban areas.

 The atmosphere in the pavilion is electric. The decibel level is high, the good kind of high that registers as engagement not cacophony.

Many high school aged kids and grade schoolers are focused on particular exhibits in order to answer questions on forms their teachers oblige them to complete. No one complains about answering questions about the Beaufort Scale or survival gear the skippers must have aboard or the heights and weight of the Vendee Globe boats. They’re too busy doing what they love. Getting their hands on things and watching videos. When they finish, they’re prepped to finish the day by walking a few hundred yards down to the ‘pontoons’ to see the most exotic sailboats in the world.

Adults can try their hand at steering in a virtual environment. They’re fitted with goggles and do their best to keep an Open 60 sailing in a straight line.  Spectators see how daunting a task this is as they watch the video screen showing an Open 60 plow through the water with a landlubber at the helm. And shake their heads in amazement that the skippers being interviewed in the 800 square meter multimedia area in the next pavilion manage to accomplish it.

Rich was right. This was as fine an off-site educational environment as I'd ever seen. And a place to have as much fun as the kids. 

Vendée Globe 3: The Education Pavilion-1

“Visit the education pavilion, you’ll love it,” Rich Wilson says after he’s given me a tour of Great American III at the dock in Les Sables d’Olonne, France. Rich is the only American to qualify for the quadrennial Vendée Globe single-handed, around the world, non-stop, with no assistance, 25,000 mile race. He’ll be at sea about 100 days.

Anyone who does this sort of sailing qualifies as being a certifiably driven person. At the Vendée Globe  starting line on November 9, 2008, there were 29 other skippers who, for their own reasons, needed to pit themselves against the muscle and fickle fury of nearly every sea and ocean on the planet. They put themselves on an aqueous rack, knowing it might break them or their thoroughbred 60-foot monohull sailboats. It’s not that they don’t care. They simply know a piece of their psyches would wither and die if they didn’t test themselves in this event, called the “Everest of Yacht Racing.”

Rich Wilson, at 58 years of age, knows his days of high wire sailing are dwindling. What isn’t diminished is his desire to connect with school age kids.

He knows that ocean adventure and the life lessons learned from it are a natural fit for teachers, parents and kids. He’s proved it three times between 1993 and 2003 with three voyages aboard his trimaran Great American II in which he broke records established by the fastest ships in the Age of Sail, all the while sharing the adventure at www.sitesalive.com with thousands of students, including mine.

For the next three months at sea, in addition to making sail changes, studying weather maps, plotting courses, repairing anything that goes bump in the night - from software to autopilots to sailing gear - he’ll be making pod casts and writing essays for his educational program.

“On this race we have 26 different newspapers all across the USA which will publish a 15 part weekly series, all under contract. We have five more newspapers which will promote the program on line. We will get to six million readers for the weekly pieces 250,000 – 300,000 schoolkids participating, and a 60 page teachers’ guide,” he says.

I’ve known him since 1990, the year he and his crewmate aboard the trimaran Great American I, spent several hours upside down in 65 foot seas about 400 miles from nowhere off the tip of Cape Horn, but that’s another story.

 Rich visited my fourth graders and me as recently as 2003, after breaking the Hong Kong - New York clipper ship record set by Sea Witch in 1849. He’s a natural in front of an audience of any age, easily identifying ‘teachable moments’ as they pop up in his presentations.

Now Rich, aboard Great American III, an Open 60 monohull built in 1999, is five days from departing for the biggest challenge of his career.

When a guy of world-class stature says, “Check out the education pavilion,” you do it.

Vendée Globe 2: Skipper, Teacher, Entrepreneur - Rich Wilson

Part 2

Rich Wilson of Marblehead, MA
Great American III, click photos to enlarge

For recognition on the continent, the Vendée Globe solo ocean race around the world is on par the Tour de France and World Cup soccer. French sponsors cough up between 7 and 15 million bucks to build a competitive Open 60 racing boat. 

During the week preceding the November 9th race, it seemed as if every man, woman, and child from the Vendee region of France and many from well beyond, came to Les Sables d’Olonne (south of Nantes) to see these mythic racing machines tied to the dock in the active fishing port.

Over several days, hundreds of thousands of people surge slowly up and down the long pier, inches from the sterns of these million-dollar thoroughbred sailing machines. They peer inside the cockpits, check their programs to see who is captaining  each boat and salute skippers with shouts of encouragement when they see them aboard. The top ten skippers who began the race on November 9th are super stars. When one of them strides down the dock, the crowd parts as if Moses were crossing the Red Sea.

The only American who qualified for the 2008 Vendée Globe is Rich Wilson of Marblehead, MA. The guy has super star credentials. He’s been vaporizing sailing records since he was the youngest skipper to win the Newport - Bermuda race in 1980. He’s handsome, smart, tough, and unflappable when the going gets rough. He epitomizes a certain American ideal of the restless adventurer, relentlessly on the move, dreaming up and mowing down one goal after another, always in search of another challenge.

Well, he’s found the ultimate nautical challenge here and the crowds who see him when he emerges from Great American III’s cabin from time to time realize that.

They respect the 28 men and two women who have qualified, regardless of the order each might finish the race.

At 58, he’s the oldest skipper in the race ("Je suis un homme vieux dans un bateau vieux [I'm an old man in an old boat]," he jokes to spectators in the passable French he's resurrected from his school days.) His boat isn’t the fastest, it is one of the oldest, and he’s not going to win. Some dreams will gnaw a hole in your soul if you don’t challenge yourself to try them. For a world class sailor like Wilson, this “Everest of ocean racing” is one of them.

Rich Wilson may have the most impressively eclectic resume of any skipper in the race: businessman, high school teacher, defense analyst, desalinization plant consultant, investor, container ship industry analyst. All preceded by Math and M. B.A degrees from Harvard College and an Ocean Resources Management degree from M.I.T.

Ask him and in a heartbeat he’ll tell you his favorite venture  - founder in 1989 of Ocean Challenge, Inc., producing interactive programs related to oceans, rainforest, wetlands, and marine life for the K-12 population.

From 1990 until 2003, Wilson parlayed his sailing challenges into “learning adventures” with schools across the country. On his trimaran Great American, the skipper and one shipmate would attempt to smash trans-oceanic records set by the great clipper ships.

His first attempt to break the San Francisco to New York record set by Northern Light in the Gold Rush year of 1853 ended in a near tragic experience as his vessel was capsized in 65 foot seas off Cape Horn. He and his shipmate escaped death when their trimaran was miraculously turned right side up by another immense wave and subsequently rescued by a giant container ship, New Zealand Pacific. Great American was swallowed by the sea. Most mortals would have called it a day and thought up less dangerous ways to engage in the learning business.

Not this man. The response Wilson felt when he visited the classrooms with whom he’d been linked by radio telephone and newsletter as part of his ‘learning adventure” so overwhelmed him that he decided to try again. From 1993 until 2003, aboard Great American II (History),  Rich and a shipmate broke clipper ship records set in the 'Golden Age of Sail' from San Francisco to Boston (Gold Rush), Melbourne to New York (Australian Gold Rush), and Hong Kong to New York (China Tea trade).

Rich Wilson visits my fourth graders after his 2003 Melbourne-New York record-breaking voyage on Great American II

Wilson pioneered use of the internet for interactive learning long before it became mainstream.  In 1993, he hooked up with Prodigy and classrooms across the country, including my own class of fourth graders in Brookline, MA, followed his voyages online.  Newspapers on both coasts carried news of his voyages in a weekly “Newspapers in Education” series. The archives of past voyages and daily progress in this year's Vendee Globe race is online at another site Wilson created, www.sitesalive.com.

Today, the website bursts with life in the present tense aboard Great American III. Each day Wilson types a ship’s log, transmits a podcast, and includes the ship’s coordinates overlaid on a google terra world map. The essays often reflect on science, geography, history, and math. The podcasts give a kinetic sense of the grueling job of making the boat go as fast as it can without breaking: incessant sail changes, often based on computer generated programs matching wind and sea conditions to optimal sail load and course. And the human element, the knowledge Wilson has accumulated in his lifetime at sea.

"A primary motivator for me is the huge sail program we have going on in the USA. Twenty five newspapers are publishing a weekly series I write from the boat. Those are important to write well. I don't send the first draft but have it right by about the seventh, eight or tenth draft," he says matter of factly in a recent podcast. "That keeps me inspired, and excited."  He goes on enthusiastically to describe taking a picture of a squid which landed on his deck, imagining the excitement of "kids who've never seen one before." The man's a born teacher.

On the second day of the Vendée Globe race, a violent wave tosses him like a rag doll across the cabin ramming his back into a metal handrail. He lays crumpled, in fear and intense pain. Crawling to a transat phone, he consults his onshore doctor. They figure he’s cracked a rib.  He slows the boat down so he can recover. Every pull on the ship’s ropes and crank on the coffee grinder winch in the cockpit produces extreme agony in his back. Not a whine in his voice. Just a plan. Pull himself together then sail on.

Parents, teachers, and the rest of us following Wilson’s quest understand what school-age youngster’s are learning by this man’s example. How to deal with setbacks and adversity and not lose faith. Make Plan B and keep going. And take pleasure photographing of squid, flying fish, and the moon and stars from a coordinate on the planet none of us will ever occupy.

One last-minute interview before the November 9 start

Incredibly, no American corporations have signed on to sponsor him. Considering his audience, maybe the National Teacher’s Association should kick in a few million. And for every parent who’s looking for a role model who is tough, smart, modest, grounded, and one of the best in the world at what he does?

How about kicking in ten bucks and bookmarking http://vg.sitesalive.com on your kid’s computer.

Vendée Globe 1: One American vs. the World

Part 1
Background/click on photos to enlarge

In the entire sailing universe, only 30 skippers qualified for the Vendée Globe solo, non-stop, 26,000 mile, round the world race that left France on November 9th. One of them lives in Marblehead, MA.

It is appalling that the local media hasn't jumped on the chance to feature the accomplishments of this world-class sailor living in our midst. He is the only American who qualified for the race. Of the 30 boats that crossed the starting line, 4 have already had to abandon the race: two boats were dismasted in violent seas of the first two days, one hit a submerged object, and one suffered a failed electronic system.

Rich Wilson of Marblehead, MA is a crafty veteran. Another shocking fact, considering the world-class event he qualified to enter, is that Wilson has no deep pocket sponsor.  He steadily sails on buoyed  by private contributions and a ton of pluck.  The biggest media presence is through the educational site he's created. About a quarter of a million school kids and their teachers are following Wilson on www.sitesalive.com. If you really get inspired after reading about him, make a contribution to his campaign right there.

pt and his fourth graders followed Wilson's progress on three record-setting voyages (1993, 2001, 2003). We read his captain's logs, checked his daily progress, sent him messages via his online site, once received a call from him while he was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and welcomed him into our classroom in 2003. ptatlarge spent the five days prior to the race start as Wilson's guest in Les Sables d'Olonne, France.

In France, the Vendee Globe race is up there with world cup soccer. The sailboat race sets off every four years from Les Sables d’Olonne,  a huge commercial fishing port on the coast of France, hogs headlines in French newspapers for the weeks before the start, and draws hundreds of thousands of spectators. It is the most spectacularly demanding ocean race in the world. In America, it is virtually unknown. 

What is the Vendée Globe? Start at Les Sables d’Olonne, leave the Cape of Good Hope/Africa  to port (your left, for you landlubbers), leave Cape Leeuwin/Australia to port, leave Cape Horn/South America to port, leave Antarctica to starboard (right) and finish at Les Sables d’Olonne. 26,000 nautical miles. Non-stop. Without assistance. In around 100 days. In specially designed 60 foot monohull sailboats. Alone.

 An equally understated description would be, start at the bottom, walk up until you’ve gained the top, then walk back down… Mount Everest.

The French are madmen when it comes to ocean racing. In the late 1980s, Phillippe Jeantot, twice a winner of BOC Challenge round the world race, decided that sailing solo around the world from port to port wasn’t a pure enough nautical experience. 

“Time is a necessary factor to attain perfect harmony with one’s sailboat. We had to forget about stopping. A round-the-world race, without stopovers or assistance, such were the conditions to reach the desired communion,” he said. 

Leave it to a Frenchman to reduce the monumental challenge to spiritual journey. Gallic temperament thrives on bold dreams. Jeantot sparked the imagination of the Vendee region of France to dare to host it. To this day, they have a firm grip on it, recognizing that it pumps money into their town and fame to their region. Think of how proud Boston is of the original Boston Marathon.

Never underestimate what zeal and mild insanity can produce. In 1989, the first Vendée Globe was born. Thirteen sailors set off from Les Sables d’Olonne. For public consumption, they might have put on airs of confidence and bravado. Many observers doubted they’d all come back alive. But they did. And were lionized by the public.

The skippers who pursue the Vendée Globe are knights of the sea. To finish this race is to touch the Holy Grail. Carbon fiber and leading edge design technology replace fiery steeds in the tournament. The first six finishers receive cash prizes. The rest, who finish or whose boats break in the effort, go to their graves knowing they looked into the eyes of the most brutal ocean race in the world and did not blink.

Of the 13 sailors who qualified for the first 1989 edition, 7 finished. All Frenchmen. The 6 others, from France, USA, South Africa, were either eliminated because they needed assistance or retired because their boats broke. Extreme sport was born.

In the five races since then, one sailor drowned and one was lost at sea. The skippers won't talk about it, but death is an invisible passenger on every boat that has ever entered this contest. The sixth Vendée Globe got underway Sunday November 9th  at 1:02 pm. Three hundred thousand spectators cheered them on as they made their way to the starting line three miles off the coast of Les Sables d’Olonne.

The American flag waved briskly from the stern of one of the Open 60 class boats: Great American III skippered by Rich Wilson of Marblehead, MA.

Obama tide reaches shores of France

November 3, 2009, Paris, en route to see the start of the 2008 Vendée Globe Round the World Sailing Race in Les Sables d’Olonne…you didn’t have to read an opinion poll to feel France’s enthusiasm for the candidacy of Barack Obama.

The Metro was plastered with photos of Obama as I made my way to make the train connection from Paris to Les Sables d’Olonne.

 

November 4th, news of his victory splashed across the plasma TVs set up in the Vendée Globe press room in Les Sables d’Olonne…
 

and again in the Metro when I returned to Paris on November 10...

and on billboards the Charles de Gaulle Airport on my return to the States on November 12th.

Of the thirty sleek Open 60 monohulls tied to the race dock, Rich Wilson’s Great American III was the only American entry here. Being the sole American presence, Rich and the Americans with him were swept along on Obama’s coattails. We were a tiny nautical delegation entrusted to receive congratulations on the wisdom of electing our new leader.

My best memory is from the misty morning of November 4th. The news of Obama’s election was the buzz. The French feel Obama will respect Europe and in general and France in particular. They are hungry for a sense of positive leadership from our side of the pond.

“Obama, c’est bon, c’est trés bon!”  A ruddy-cheeked woman had planted herself a few feet from Great American’s stern. She enthusiastically saluted us Americans gathered in Great American III's cockpit with a mittened thumbs up.

For a moment, the world felt a lot smaller - and more friendly.

"Louisiana-Proud Radio" - Music by the mile

The soundtrack for driving through the prairies and swamp lands of southwest Louisiana is right on your car radio. Hit the scan button while driving from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Henderson, Lafayette, Lake Charles, then down Route 27 to the gulf coast towns of Creole, Cameron, and Holly Beach, and you’ll hear old time religion, some top 40, and then POW, you’ll hit upon 100.3 FM and its neighbor 101.1 FM. If the reason you’re in Louisiana is to dig the indigenous music and dance culture, you’ve found the Holy Grail. And you’re in for a sociology lesson on where pop music’s deepest roots are buried.

If you’re under the tender age of 40, you’ll find out what radio used to sound like before it became solidly commercial. There’s “KBON, brought to you by Southern Barbecue Sauce, a Cajun tradition since 1957.” 101.1 FM in Eunice plays a gumbo of Cajun, Country, Blues, Swamp Pop, Zydeco, Oldies, most of it played and sung by Louisiana musicians.

The endless flatlands lining I-10 become drenched with some of that Southern sauce when accompanied by Little Alfred singing Louisiana Soul with “You Can Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” Wayne Toups and The Jambalaya Cajun Band playing a sweet little Cajun waltz, and an impromptu interview with Terry of Terry and The Zydeco Cowboys, who happened to drop by the studio with his wife.

Louisiana versions of “Sixteen Candles” and “I Want My Baby Back Again” with the distinct doo wop beat that characterized the late fifties appear in the midst of this. The writer imagines a whiff of Aqua-Velva and recalls his first awkward close dance with a girl at the Friday night dance at the Boys’ Club in small town America. This trip, meant to create memories, momentarily plumbs them.

We tuned in one day to hear “I want to wish Happy Birthday to Loyce ‘Topsie’ Babineau and (several other people named too fast for us to write) who live in Eunice, Crowley, and Houma.” Between “songs coming up by Red Beans and Rice and Louisiana Boogie with Kim Brasso, brought to you by Cypress Bayou Casino and Shorty’s,” we heard the daily fishing report. This is exactly what their target audience of 35 to 64 year-olds wants to hear.

Every time KBON’s signal faded we tried clicking down to 100.3 FM looking for KLRZ, “The Ragin’ Cajun,” out of Larose. It took about a hundred miles to discover it shares the same bandwidth with 100.3 KRRV FM out of Alexandria.  At KRRV, we got an earful of Johnny Allen’s  “You’re Nobody’s Darlin’ But Mine” and Ronnie Milsap’s “I’ve Got A Houston Solution in Mind” rather than the spicy Cajun, Blues, and Swamp Pop mix we were looking for on KLRZ.

All the stations got mixed up in a spicy aural jambalaya that fed us for days. Ping pong back and forth and you’ll hear a Cajun version of “I’m Just A Gigolo,” then a Louisiana cover of Waylon Jennings’s “I’ve Always Been Crazy But It’s Kept Me From Going Insane,” and occasionally be startled to hear a song you recognize like The Rolling Stones “Beast of Burden.”

There’s a Cajun force field in the bayous that will not submit to commercial radio. You won’t hear the same song twice in a day. You will hear news and weather at top of hour, plus a health tip of the day brought to you by a local pharmacy. This is “BWM” radio (Before Wall Mart), where sponsors include The Cajun Trading Post in Carencro that advertises - “We have motorized ice chests you can ride, “ and “The only thing we can’t fix is a broken heart.”

Listen to KBON long enough and you’ll hear the forebears of blues - horns and all, rock ’n roll, and soul, along with zydeco and Cajun music. The common denominator is a dance beat. Whether you’re Sunday driving down a two-lane road or ripping along a Louisiana interstate, your fanny will be wiggling in your seat. The music isn’t everyone’s cup of gumbo, but if it’s yours you’ll spoon it up every time you get in the car.

Cafe des Amis: Morning Thunder on the Dance Floor

From brass bands playing on street corners in the French Quarter to Cajun bands playing mixes of zydeco, blues, swamp pop, and country in roadhouses all over southwest Louisiana, you're never far from music - and a place to dance to it.

“And Saturday morning, we can go dancing from 8 until 12 over in Breaux Bridge,” says my traveling companion.

“You mean Saturday night,” I reply.

People don’t dance at breakfast time. It’s just not done. I mean, you might be dancing Saturday morning at around 1 AM but that’s really Friday night. Saturday morning you’ll be bagging a few extra hours of sleep, and upon awakening you’ll listen to the quiet gurgling of hot water dripping through a filter basket of fresh ground coffee and stare at the large print of the morning paper, confirming that war hasn’t broken out somewhere. Somehow or other, dancing, which requires energetic motion and hip-torso coordination, doesn’t come to mind until well after noon.

Not so, Bucko. You’re in southwest Louisiana where zydeco dancing and coffee are as common a combination as red beans and rice.

By the time we arrive in Breaux Bridge, the outer walls of the Café des Amis are twitching from the happy sound of Cajun and Zydeco music and god knows how many feet pounding on its floor. One step inside is as unlikely a world as this Yankee has ever witnessed.

The five-piece band on a makeshift stage is deep into a two-step, a hundred people or so are packed onto a dance floor created by removing half the tables and chairs in the place, and another hundred or so are either watching the action from the bar on one side of the room or from the handful of tables jammed up at the rear of the café.

 The smell of coffee, bacon, and biscuits hangs in the close air. If you could roll it into cigarette papers, you’d be high on it all day. It felt like the whole place had been struck by an errant lightning bolt of energy.

The joyful music seems to create a “One World” vibe in which truckers and tourists, motorcyclists and accountants, blacks and whites, rub elbows and wise-crack with one another. A school of sardines couldn’t pack themselves any closer onto the dance floor and definitely wouldn’t be having as much fun.

If you’ve ever wondered how so many people can squeeze out of one of those clown cars at the circus, you’d conversely wonder how you and your honey could possibly squeeze into the dense pack of people on the dance floor.

By the time the song is over, you feel like you’ve been dancing in a crowded elevator with miraculously friendly people. No one’s feet have been stomped and you don’t feel jostled. And that person hollering with joy as the fiddle and accordion match solos is you. Cajun music was made for this. And you haven’t even had lunch yet.

 “Those people sitting at the tables are the tourists,” one guy in a cowboy hat says to me. I’ve apparently acquired a stamp of approval by squeezing onto the dance floor with my partner for every song since arriving. The sweat running down our faces, not to mention our goofy grins at the utter joy of finding this place, has elevated our status. Plus the fact that we’re pretty good at dancing, if I do say so myself.

Other than one break Leon and the Zydeco Flames took to sit down and eat breakfast (photo right), the music lasted till exactly noon. It was about that time we became card-carrying honorary citizens of Southwest Louisiana.

Bourbon Street to Jackson Square - the many faces of New Orleans' French Quarter

The French Quarter is a tiny piece of New Orleans that packs a big wallop. Eat muffulettas at Central Grocery or po'boys from Johnny's for lunch, find one of the good restaurants on Royal Street for dinner, and never be too far from the sound of a brass band the lure of a tarot card reader. Much of the Quarters' architecture dates back to the late 1700s. It's a piece of old world charm wearing a baseball cap.

On any night, Bourbon Street is a sea of college-aged fun seekers, intent on consuming as much alcohol and having as much fun as humanly possible, and an equal number of tourists entertained or horrified by watching the spectacle of it happening.

The gaudy street with the boozy name runs the length of the French Quarter, from Canal Street to Esplanade. By late afternoon, this sleazy sleeping giant awakens. Like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors”, you can practically hear it yawling, “FEED ME!” By dusk, the police have closed the street to four-wheeled traffic. By Saturday night, the street becomes a Mississippi River of humanity.

The entire mass, like a two dimensional conga line, weaves its way through the street, bathed in the garish glow of the neon lights of saloons, restaurants, strip joints, and trinket shops that live off it.  Shills line the street entreating passersby to come on in and sample whatever is on the other side of their doorways- “Big Assed Beers,” lap dancers, “men who look more beautiful than women,” packed bars and bands playing music with enough volume to tickle the soles of your feet as you walk by.

Occasionally, glitter seems to fall from the heavens. Look up on the wrought iron balconies of the Omni Parker House and you’ll see tourists, mostly of the male persuasion, laden with arm-loads of Mardi Gras beads, intent on getting the attention of partiers of the female persuasion who just might do something provocative enough to attract a blitz of said beads. As a social experiment, I got the attention of a group of these men in an effort to snag one of the baubles and had the experience of feeling invisible for the first time in my life. I would have done way better had I been equipped with a good pair of bazoombas. Oh well, next lifetime.

It is entirely necessary to have witnessed the nocturnal version of Bourbon Street to appreciate the matinee version. As if a cosmic hand pulled the plug, quietude reigns. Like the college students who roamed it hours before, the street seems to be sleeping it off.

The hum of automobile tires coasting slowly down the street replaces the cochlea rattling decibel level of the evening before. Piles of plastic beer cups, soiled napkins, and party beads are swept into refuse trucks. Tanker trucks hose down the street with a sweet smelling wash of water and suds. Without neon, Bourbon Street in daylight looks like an aging actress, relaxing with a cup of coffee after she’s removed her stage makeup.

The rest of the French Quarter has remained well mannered day and night. Away from Bourbon Street, the Quarter wraps its arms around you on early morning walks down narrow streets, showing off her brightly painted three and four story buildings with shuttered floor to ceiling windows graced by wrought iron balconies, many spilling over with the dense green foliage of hanging plants.

The scores of hotels, eateries, shops, and galleries that fill this small section of New Orleans curled against an elbow of the Mississippi River in the southeast part of the city will soon bustle with activity. The clip clop of horse carriages on sun-bleached streets, music from street bands, and the clatter of foot traffic over slate and brick sidewalks are the leitmotif of a day in the French Quarter.

Jackson Square, an emerald gem set in the midst of the Quarter, is surrounded by historic buildings. The famous Café du Monde lies one block beyond. By day, the promenade around the square is given over to artists and musicians. 

By dark, most businesses in the buildings have closed. Luminous islands of tarot card readers and psychics, their small tables and chairs bathed in candlelight, glow gently in the dark. Readers sit pensively and softly solicit couples that walk by. The adventurous, perhaps seduced by the pungent scent of patchouli or a whim to hear their futures foretold in such a romantic setting, choose a chair and hope for the best.

 A tourist destination for thousands every day, the Quarter is also home to people who live in apartments and condos hidden behind wooden doors that line the narrow streets. It’s always a surprise to see a resident pop out of a door, brief case in hand, and head to work. And more of a surprise to catch a glimpse of a daintily manicured courtyard behind one of those doors

New Orleans is of European lineage, founded by the French in 1718, ceded to Spain in 1763, reacquired by Napoleon in 1801, then sold to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The French Quarter, rebuilt by the Spanish after two disastrous fires, is the oldest part of the city (Vieux Carré). The buildings with their floor to ceiling wooden shuttered windows that open to narrow balconies with wrought iron railings are architectural remnants of the late 1700s. Like Paris, this enclave has old world elegance.

The Quarter has its own scale and style. Magic? Yes...

Cajun Country: The Beating Heart of Southwest Louisiana

Southwest Louisiana breathes music. pt at large spent the past ten days sampling gumbo, Dixie Beer, red beans and rice, and spending nights and one memorable morning dancing to Cajun music. The fiddle, accordion, bass, and drums that comprise most bands capture a range of joy and heartbreak with a rhythm and levity that displace every thought but one...find a partner and step out on the dance floor.

Forget about Louisiana as a state. It’s a state of mind. Full of crawfish po' boys, gumbo, and shrimp, what really holds the state together is music. Nowhere is this more evident than in bayou country.

Southwest Louisiana breathes music. It exhales from radio stations, juke boxes in restaurants, and bars and dance halls in places like Lafayette, Breaux Bridge, and Henderson. Zydeco, Cajun two-step, pretty little waltzes, Whiskey River jitterbug, and swamp pop at close quarters so you can taste the sweat on your honey’s cheek when you pull her close and move as one to the rhythmic beat, and oh yes, the absolute joy of inhaling that music.

This is roots music. No fancy clothes or shoes necessary. Just the ability to open your heart for a couple of hours to music born of sunshine, toil, and the displacement of the Acadian people two centuries ago. Now it’s the music of fishermen, farmers, truck drivers along side college kids, smooth-shaven lawyers, young professionals, and more gray haired grandparents than you’ve ever seen within a country mile of a dance floor. Women wearing cut offs and cowboy boots, sundresses that stick to their perspiring bodies, and tank tops with black jeans are just as down as any of the bluejeaned men in the dance halls. When a woman is of a mind to dance, she marches straight to the first man she sees who’s shuffling his feet in time with the music and pulls him to the dance floor.

There may be some mating games going on amongst all the happy hip shaking couples, but the custom is four or five minutes of whirling to the sounds of accordion, bass, fiddles, and drums then look around for another grinning partner with whom you can spend the next few minutes on the dance floor. Sitting down is out of the question until the band decides to take a break. Hell, you’ve got all week to sit down. This is the weekend in Cajun country. There’s a possibility that you’ll catch up on some sleep, there’s a likelihood that you’ll do some laundry and stop in at the local grocery store. But there is no doubt whatsoever that you’re going to find a place to dance.

There’s the big ol’ Whiskey River Landing dance hall in Henderson tucked between the levee and the shore of the Atchafalaya Swamp where there’s dancing on Sunday afternoon from 4 pm to 8 pm. An 82 year-old farmer dances with his wife, his weathered face wearing a devilish grin that just might have been responsible for his wife saying “I do” five or six decades ago. The man’s been up since 5 am feeding cattle and here he is wearing his wide brim hat, clean jeans and pounding the floor with his leather boots just as vigorously as any young buck in the crowd. From the jammed dance floor to the walls lining the building, the place was packed. Jeffery Broussard The Creole Cowboys made sure of that.

“You don’t come from around here, do you,” says Jean Prejean, a wiry man with a shaved head and one gold earring, as I’m taking photos of the band stand and the swamp just beyond one of the huge picture windows that line the rear wall of the Whiskey River Dance Hall. My T-shirt and shorts don't look out of place but only a tourist would want to take that photo. For everyone else the place was as ordinary as a 7-11.

Prejean is a 56 year-old carpenter who lives three miles down the road. “I used to truck up to Boston, still know some people there from when we kept track of each other on our CB radios,” he says. Dressed in his black T-shirt and jeans, the man has some of the most original dance moves I’d ever seen. “I’m self taught,” he says proudly, “been dancing since I was a baby. I’m the man who laid the dance floor at Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge,” he says.

Any zydeco dancer within a hundred miles knows the Cafe des Amis is the place to go for live music and dancing from 8 am till noon on Saturday. This is not a typo. Let me put it this way. When the band begins playing at 8 am, most of Louisiana might be on their second cup of coffee; the people at the Café des Amis are on their feet dancin'.

For people down here dancing isn’t recreation, it’s a way of life. Saturday night in Lafayette, Randol’s was full of men and women and their children, couples, singles and exactly two tourists- this writer and his dance partner. The restaurant has a sprawling dining room, a small bar and a pine-paneled dance floor surrounded by a low wooden railing. Two fifty apiece, “for the band,” got you a wristband to enter the dance floor.

The band was kicking up a storm of zydeco, waltzes, and Cajun jitterbugs. Over the hand-lettered sign proclaiming “Salle de danse” was a shelf loaded with pieces of parade floats and Mardi Gras costumes. Two giant fans whirred cool air onto the dance floor to neutralize the 90-degree humidity that sat like a fat cat on the countryside just outside the rough-hewn pine paneling.

This is the kind of place Jean Prejean probably had his first dance. Amongst the couples nearly every dance you’d see a mommy or daddy whirl around the perimeter with a toddler in his/her arms. Grade school kids sat with their parents tapping time to the music. Every so often Parain and Marain (grandpa and grandma) or mom or dad took a turn leading one of them through a dance.

There was nary a shred of self-consciousness from the children. They were as at home on the dance floor as a catfish lazing around the bottom of the swamp. The kids’ eyes were bright with excitement. This music was more than happy notes coming from diatonic accordions and ancient fiddles. This was birthright, a sense of belonging that would never be erased by distance or profession.

Music floats lazily over the whole of Southwest Louisiana. Like the Spanish moss cascading over cypress trees in the Atchafalaya Swamp, it’s fed by nutrients floating naturally in the hot, humid air. Hurricanes, floods, and man-made assaults may affect what is on the ground. They will never still the music in the air.

Spring Training

Spring Training
Grapefruit League

New York Mets vs. Cleveland Indians
Tradition Field, Port Saint Lucie, FL
March 20, 2008

Smaack. 
There is only one sound like this. A stick of white ash swung in a powerful arc by a man with powerful forearms collides with opposing force against a sphere of horsehide hurtling toward it at 90 mph. The trademark sound of a national sport.

Marching into the dark maze of walkways leading to the grandstand of a major league baseball park sets you up for one of the peak visions in American sports. The walk up a narrow ramp then POW!  the impossibly immaculate emerald green of the playing field set off by the terracotta base paths with three marshmallow pillow bases. Perhaps it’s the scale of seeing the whole shebang - seats, field, walls, lights - with one glance. Or the simplicity about it, grass and dirt, blue sky overhead for day games, dusk settling in for night games. If you’ve only watched the sport on TV, you’re unprepared for the scale of splendor in this grass.

The two team managers meet with umpires at home plate to hand in their lineup cards, the national anthem is played, defensive players jog to their positions, fans cheer. The grand old game begins, an American ballet, soap opera, and occasional roller derby all wrapped into one. The game is an extraordinary mix of deliberate acts laced with moments of blinding speed and physical skill. Over the next two or three hours we will cheer, gasp, groan, clap, chat amiably with people we’ve never seen before - and perhaps have nothing in common except that we are here together. And would never choose to speak with on the outside world.

The cement beneath the seats will become littered with peanut shells, beer cups, and hotdog wrappers. Every so often a really big smmaack resonates through the stadium when a batter connects the sweet spot of his bat with the incoming pitch. The crowd erupts in a reflexive roar.

Assembled around you are more people that live in some small towns in America. Rush Limbaugh followers, NPR devotees, atheists, god fearing people, vegetarians, tree huggers, teamsters, and none of them at this moment with an ax to grind. Except maybe why the manager leaves a pitcher in the game too long or why he doesn’t pinch hit for a certain batter.

And in a spring training game in Florida’s Grapefruit league, even that doesn’t seem to matter much. For a few precious hours the walls of the ballpark keep the worries of the world at bay. We drop our worldly judgments like so many peanut shells. That’s worth the price of admission right there.

Don Pedro Biernay, a gem in the Chilean rough

Saturday February 2, 2008

Fine dust from the earth he tills is etched in the lines of his sun-weathered face. The dirt embedded under the nails of his small strong hands is the same dirt that produced the cantaloupe you may be having for breakfast today.

I've watched him work during my two-week visit to Susaan Straus’ and Ricardo Ceriani’s 50-acre farm in Nogales, Chile. He harvested 20,000 cantaloupes during this time - cantaloupes he had grown from seed. Each afternoon the fruit dealer’s truck lumbered out the dirt road to the highway, Don Pedro had confirmed the melon count on board.

That was for starters. By 8:00 AM other days, he’d hitched his fifty pound steel plow behind his muscular, dutiful red mare, LaRubia, and tilled several acres of corn fields. He’s prepared several more acres for a cabbage crop. He’s repaired rustic farm implements as they wear out and kept his eye on everything that moves or grows.

Don Pedro Biernay is 66 years old and has worked the fields since he was 16. He splurged once and took a week vacation. God knows how he relaxed. Born in Quillota, about two hours north of Santiago and a short drive to Nogales, Don Pedro and his family have lived in a small shack on the perimeter of this farm for decades. His grandfather immigrated to Chile from France.

He hasn’t reported in sick in fifty years. Sore and tired, yes, but way too proud to stay home. For the painful arthritis, he captures a honeybee and allows it to sting his shoulder. He says his shoulder feels better after the treatment. (Note: a Google inquiry surprised me with accounts acknowledging the effectiveness of this treatment.)

When my friends Ricardo Ceriani and Susaan Straus bought the farm from Sr. Saffi, Don Pedro was in the same category as the outbuildings - he came with the farm, a wizened miracle in a battered white leather hat.

He reads and understands the dirt beneath his feet, the clouds over his head, and things that grow around him with the ease with which you digest your morning paper. The birds, sun, weather, and winds speak to him in tongues he understands.

How often does the newly planted corn field need to be irrigated? Don Pedro knows. What will grow faster, melons or potatoes? Don Pedro knows. How many seasons will that plot of land produce alfalfa for Ricardo’s horses before it’s time to plant something else to give the land a rest? Ask Don Pedro.

He leads a hard, simple life. A few years ago, his fourteen-year-old grandson was killed as he stepped from behind a bus into oncoming traffic. Shortly thereafter, a daughter bore another grandchild. “God takes away with one hand and gives with the other,” Don Pedro said to Ricardo not long afterward.

Every morning, I see him, immaculate in his clean blue and white shirt and work jeans, making purposeful strides to his next job. I've never seen him at rest.

When it comes time to celebrate, his 5’8” 135 pound wiry body can consume and hold prodigious amounts of local red wine mixed with Coca Cola. And, as he did at the Saturday BBQ to celebrate the completion of the framing of a new barn, he holds forth with the same vigor he puts into plowing the land.

Class lines are still distinctly drawn here in the post-feudal countryside. Don Pedro is an “old school” laborer. He’s never approached, never mind entered, the Patron’s little farmhouse on a tiny hillock 100 yards away. but here in the barn that will hold orange produce before it’s shipped to market, he sits across from Ricardo, the Patron, and yaks with him as though they were a couple of country boys enjoying a Saturday picnic.

Here I was, sitting next to Don Pedro, a part of and, due to language barrier, apart from the celebration, when I heard the word “Clinton” and realized he was asking me a question.

“He wants to know who you think will win the election, Hillary Clinton or the black man Obama,” Ricardo translated for me. I felt some kind of cultural lightning bolt had struck the corrugated metal roof of the barn.  A major recalculation on every assumption I had about Don Pedro and god knows how many others in the Spanish-speaking country crowd around me was in order.

For the next 15 minutes, with Ricardo acting as the UN interpreter, I had a conversation with Don Pedro about the US presidential election, the Yankee and Confederate war about slaves (he wanted to know which side was ‘blue’ and which side was ‘grey’), the president who was a woodsman and had a tall hat (Lincoln) and the American war about tea and why it started.

“How do you know about these things?"  I said, wondering if he could read the incredulity writ across my face.

“I read, ”he said with a grin that did little to disguise a sense of pride.

“He says he used to lie down with a candle on his chest and read every night when he was a boy. When it got too late his father would make him blow out the candle, “ Ricardo said. “Once he went all the way to Valparaiso to find a book.” I recalled the story about Honest Abe allegedly walking miles to return a book. Here was another country boy with a thirst for knowledge sitting right beside me.

Apparently, I’ve had to travel several thousand miles into the southern hemisphere to relearn the “Don’t judge a book by its cover” lesson. I suspect it won’t be the last time I’ll need to relearn it.

Chile Farms Wednesday January 23, 2008

10 am, Wednesday, January 23.  I survey my temporary fiefdom at Susaan and Ricardo’s farm in Nogales, Chile. The epi-center of “Chile Farms” is a wood frame little castle located on a hillock overlooking their orange groves, alfalfa tracts, and fields full of ready for the picking cantaloupes and corn.

Ensconced in a comfy chair on the corner of the veranda that surrounds their farmhouse,

I’m surrounded by an agrarian kingdom Birds twitter, roosters crow, dogs bark, a tractor chugs through the orange groves, and a pool filter gurgles in the back yard.

Panning to the east on my left, I see the tip of the stable, the frame of the new barn which will hold orange produce, and the steep foothills of the Cordillieras de los Andes, dotted with avocado fields and wild espina trees. Beyond them lies the forbidding mountain range that is the spine of South America.

Straight ahead, just over the screen of my laptop, are one corner of Chile Farms’ orange groves and sprawling fields of a neighbor’s neatly rowed green pepper plants with a wedge of shoulder high corn tucked between them. A peek of one of Ricardo’s horse corrals and a patch their vegetable and herb garden lay at the bottom of the hillock.

To my right, the azure pool with its terra cotta tiled deck, and a small patch of lawn bordered with wild flowers. And just over the scrub espina trees on a hillside there are the tops of eucalyptus trees that surround Ricardo’s practice rodeo arena. The backdrop from there is the foothills of the Coastal Range. The Pacific Ocean lies 15 miles to the east beyond.

Time here is measured in growing seasons not by calendars embedded in Blackberrys. I can get used to this.

pt in paree:an american in paris

Forget about “Old Europe.” While Paris is as old world as it gets, the City of Light has been a watering hole for change ever since the Romans built administrative offices on the Left Bank of the Seine centuries ago.

At any given time, a Parisian is either talking on a cell phone, eating, drinking coffee, or seated in a cafe doing all three. I assume they work someplace but that’s an afterthought. When they pull up a tiny chair at a sidewalk café, they extricate themselves from the business of the day - the world can wait.

ptatlarge has arrived in late spring and tout le monde strains to be outdoors on a spectacularly blue sky Sunday.  The ones with the maps are the tourists. On any given day, their array of digital devices soak up gadzillions of pixels to capture the history, art, architecture, monuments, squares and scenes on the river Seine.

click on any photo to enlarge it
The world-class Paris Metro hums through stations every two to five minutes. Electronic signs display the names of the trains coming and the time they’ll arrive, and they damn well arrive when the display says they will. The only thing they have in common with their cousins in NYC or Boston is the graffiti sprayed or scratched onto the surfaces.

You can reach any district in the city, from seedy Monmartre to swanky Louvre in minutes. Over 4 million people a day use the Metro. Occasionally a dapper man with an accordion sets up inside the door. For a few magical moments, it feels like the spirit of Edith Piaf, “The Little Sparrow,” floats through the quiet rumble of the train.

 Up on the surface, ooo la la, Paris is visually stunning. The Boulevard Périphérique that rings the city seems to have locked it into an architectural time warp. Look down the narrow side streets, many of them still cobblestone, and you’re gazing at streets that resemble an eighteenth century etching.

Paris is stubbornly retaining its sense of scale. Six stories is about the limit for most buildings. Paris is so totally non-American. No big box stores, steel and glass skyscrapers, miles of blazing neon. It doesn’t seem to be devoured by a consumer economy. Its swagger devolves from its history not its height.

Considering the whopping number of cars jockeying through rues and boulevards, the degree of horn honking is minimal. But the whine of motorcycles, which are like a plague of locusts, is often overwhelming. And yes, you can still spot a cyclist with a two-foot baguette or two poking from the backpack.

Is it a coincidence that the word insouciant is derived from French? I’m not naïve enough to think that Parisians don’t have family problems, marriages on the rocks, or business failures but there’s an uncommon amount of laughter and smiling going on here. Does drinking wine with lunch make that much difference?

And where is the hauteur? I see smokers, animated sidewalk cafe story tellers, waiters who bring food and drink on time then let me sit and watch the world go by, water trucks daily rinsing the streets, tons of really small cars that can park on a postage stamp and use thimbles full of high priced gasoline, but I experience none of that Gallic disdain that I’ve been warned about. 

I walk by bakeries and brasseries and am lifted into another dimension with the aromatics of baking bread or garlic being sautéed in butter. And I drink vin ordinaire for less than three bucks a glass. Could my high school French be that disarming to the locals? I begin to think that this whole French arrogance thing has been cooked up by the Italian Ministry of Tourism.

Paris seems  to be in a state of equilibrium in which traffic jams, strikes, noisy elections are taken in stride. The legacy of writers, poets, painters, revolutionaries, and royalty here is breath taking - Picasso, Monet, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Stein, Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, Rodin, Degas - the list is longer than several baguettes. With this history, why would the Parisians even think we Americans were worth the effort to get haughty about?

It’s not paradise. Paris hasn’t escaped the political malaise that has crept into the mainstream life of other urban centers. It has growing pains as we do. It’s just not in a rush to crush its past to embrace its future.

Back here in my home territory, spring is in full bloom - forsythia, daffodils, and cherry blossoms ignite the landscape long dreary from winter.

But, ahhh, I miss the magic of those narrow cobbled streets, the church steeples, the public squares - both the tiny jewels and the colossal - and the proud mantle of history that drapes itself so un-self-consciously over the City of Light. April in Paris was magic.

Playing in Pucon, Chile

“I don’t want to frighten you but some of what I’m going to tell you might sound scary. What I’m going to tell you are not probabilities but possibilities. There are some dangers in river rafting. The more closely you listen to what I’m going to tell you, the better the chances are you’ll have a good experience. You probably wont fall out of the raft but if you do, you’ll end up with a story you can enjoy telling for a long time.”

The short, sturdy young man with a beard and reddish brown hair falling in ringlets to his shoulders has called us to order on the bank of the Trancura River, nine miles from Pucon.

At this moment, I wondered whether it might not have been a better idea to sign up for the Class 3 rapids rather than the Class 4 version flexing its blue muscles behind us.

One of us did fall out of the boat. And yes, we have recounted that story about fifty times since it happened on the Trancura River in Pucon, Chile a few days ago (see map below).

pt was at large again in the southern hemisphere. Dominated by the nearly 10,000 foot snow capped spectacle of broad shouldered Mount Villarrica, an active volcano that vents sulphurous steam daily, Pucon has become a destination for Chileans searching for a summer playground. The place is drop dead beautiful, still quaint with a small town feel. For now.

Developers see dollar signs all over the mountain and lake strewn district of nature preserves, rapids, waterfalls, thermal pools, and volcanic black sand beaches. If I return in a few years, much of the local charm may have been swallowed by commerce but in the meantime, you can walk around this tiny hamlet in less than an hour.

And that’s exactly where we four gringos found the Trancura Raft Company. And ended up wearing wet suits, helmets, and listening to a river guide calmly describe how to save our lives if we fall out of the raft in the downdraft of a whitewater rapids.

Jordan is a certifiable river rat. He gleefully recounts stories of the startled look in airline employees’ eyes as he plops his banged up 6’6” orange kayak onto their baggage check platforms. He’s floated like a cork on some of the world’s more cantankerous rivers, ones that would swallow rookies like us and not even burp after the effort. This particular Class 4 rapids is a stroll for Jordan. For us, it’s a test of our mettle.

His blue eyes coolly survey us to calculate how his speech is registering and probably estimate which one of us is most likely to fall overboard. Jordan states facts much like a surgeon. He says what he intends to do, what the possible dangers are - all of them in unvarnished matter of fact tones - and finishes with saying “in all likelihood, it’s going to turn out fine”. Right.

During his dissertation, a little voice in my mind, the one that values survival, is nattering, “Do you need to do this?” And in spite of fear, I really want to dance on the edge of safety, to feel the rush of fear-fueled adrenaline, to feel more alive because I’m closer to death.

Like “Proud Mary”, we were about to go ‘rollin’ down the river’ - except a lot faster, a lot wetter, and a lot closer to the water.

Finished with his introduction, Jordan turns us over to young Capitan Raul. We drag the raft into mountain-fed river and immediately grasp the wisdom of wet suits. Now that Jordan has trained us how to hold the paddles, Raul tells us what to do with them.

For the next hour, my entire nervous system will be poised to follow commands of  “Forward!”“Fast Forward!” “Back!””Down!” “High Side Left”“High Side Right”. Immediately.

Our crew of six is made up of me, my three Chilean friends in front, plus two guides in training and Raul steering the raft from the stern. And several kayakers whose job is to ride herd on the raft, pick up any of us who fall out and can’t make it back to the raft, and paddle ahead on the lookout for anything that might impede our safety. Plus have fun by barrel rolling their little one man kayaks 360 degrees, doing a fine impression of frolicking seals, water shedding off their sleek kayaks, wet suits and helmets as they resurface after a bracing rollover.

Practice over. The voyage begins. The two men in front and the two women in the middle get real quiet.

I can see the first white water from my perch on the front right side of the raft. More impressively, I can hear it. I swallow hard and take a deep breath. I feel like a foot soldier waiting for his commander to order me up and over the top of the trench.

“Forward!” Then, “Fast Forward” shouts Raul.  The image of accelerating a car and then heading for a bridge abutment comes to mind. Rock outcroppings, churning water, flash by. The bow abruptly dips, plows into blue water and pops to the surface. Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhhhh! Was that my voice?

“Paddles Up!” (the victory salute after we negotiate each of the rapids), shouts Raul. It’s amazing how much energy you can put in a shout when it's fifty percent excitement and fifty percent relief that you're still alive. We’re rockin’.

The totally incongruous hard paddling right into the rapids begins to make sense. Raul is lining the raft up for the best entry and we’re the propellers. He’s also a thrill provider. Just when we think we’ve become masters of the river, he heads us into white water sideways, then once backwards. And when he shouts, “Down!” (crew slide off the sides and onto the floor of the raft) you’ve never seen a bunch of AARP members move so fast. None of us wants to learn how much pain a boulder could inflict on a body liberated from the raft involuntarily after an unexpected lurch.

Halfway down the rapids we head for shore for one short portage, a short vertical climb over hardened magma, through dense underbrush full of roots, then re-board the raft after a steep ten foot rock climb down.

The portage is around a constricted set of falls with only two narrow ways through between rock outcroppings. The drop creates nasty “hydraulics”, as Jordan calls them, capable of sucking kayaks and people down under the surface and keeping them there, and rocks that would cause severe damage to a human body or a kayak.

Raul and others tied the raft to a line and tethered it through the falls.

The next stretch includes the biggest drop of rapids, presided over by a huge boulder in the middle. The gringos had become a cocky bunch, ready to take the plunge. Until Raul shouts “Fast Forward!” and seems to steer directly for the impassive giant. Adrenaline rules. Raul shouts commands - white water churning, frothing, hissing, the raft closing on the boulder and the drop, and the crew paddling furiously right into it. It was twenty seconds to eternity.

The bow rams the boulder, stalls for a moment then with a lurch, pitches abruptly down at a 45 degree angle. One moment I’m in daylight, the next I’m encased in a dark blue cocoon of solid water. The world goes silent for two seconds. I nearly gag on the water that’s been driven up my nose and down my throat during the drop.

That’s where we lost Susan.

As water sluices out of the raft, I look back. There is no one was where she was sitting half a lifetime ago. Silence.

Up rockets her yellow helmeted head a few feet from the raft. One split second later, her husband Ricardo springs to the side of the raft, reaches over, yanks her up by her life jacket, and lands her inside like a tuna.  Cheers. Laughter. Relief.

The coiling rapids behind us are morphing into stories we’ll tell for days.

Capitan Raul asks if we want to jump overboard to float last few hundred yards on our own.  I’m in. As instructed, I’m on my back, feet facing downstream, my life vest giving me buoyancy. My outstretched arms steer toward the shore of the river a few hundred feet from the same place we’d donned our raft gear a couple of hours earlier.

We chatter like school children after a wild ride on the roller coaster. We’ve conquered the unknown. Today.

Being alive means more than just breathing. Can we exist without testing our limits? In the past, we would have been the foot soldiers of history, crossing prairies, oceans, or deserts, risking danger to find our promised lands. Today, we sat in a tough-hided rubber raft to ride the rapids because we wanted to find something within ourselves.

Passing the test today doesn’t mean we’ll be able to pass it again. But we know it will be waiting for us. Tomorrow.

IF YOU GO:
The Trancura River Class IV rapids are located 14 kilometres east from Pucón. It is ideal for the most daring and adventure-seeking who will encounter  turbulence and strong rapids. For safety the raft will be guarded by a safety Kayak during the whole adventure.
USD 50 fee includes guide, transportation, insurance, wet suit and shoes, wind-jacket, safety helmet, paddle, life jacket and towel.

Pucon is 789 kilometers/493 miles from the capital, Santiago de Chile. TurBus Company offers ten hour overnight service to Pucon via the North PanAmerican Highway, a wide asphalt road in very good condition. Dinner and breakfast included. Buses are quiet, air conditioned, with reasonably comfortable reclining seats and clean lavatories.

Geography:
Pucon is south of Santiago (and  east of Villarrica, shown on map). Both Villarrica and Pucon are in the "Lake District" of Chile.

 

Chile: A rooster crows

Notes from ChileFarms in Nogales, Chile, a small town nestled in a valley between the foothills of the mighty Andes and the Coastal Mountains lining the Pacific Ocean.

A rooster crows.At first a solo cock a doodle doo in the darkness at 6 AM then more insistent invocations as the sky begins to pale. During the velvety black night, every star and galaxy ever created was visible, as if scattered into the cosmos by a high rolling hand playing with the order in the universe.

By 6:30, the Southern Cross will fade into the cosmos. The rural countryside in this central region of Chile is beginning to awaken. In a few minutes the black and white lapwings will begin their incessant gull-like chatter as they begin swooping over the fields in search of food. Dogs will bark. Tractors will sputter and horses will neigh as they begin to cultivate the fields.

pt at large has launched his first communique from South America, where he’s come to visit his friends Ricardo Ceriani and Susaan Straus at Chilefarms, their farm here in a fertile valley in Nogales, Chile.We all know that apples and pears grow on trees. Who knew that peaches, avocadoes, lemons, limes, quince, figs, walnuts, and almonds do too? Not pt at large until he saw them with his own eyes in the past week in this country. Dry and sunny days range from the sixties to the nineties. Warm temperatures of spring and summer melt snow from the mountaintops ringing the valleys. Miles of irrigation channels water a staggering variety of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and flowers. The chances are good that much of the produce in the aisles of your local supermarket is grown in the Mediterranean-like climate here in the middle of Chile.

Chile is a country of contrasts. A look at the Spanish, Indian, and Anglo faces in the Metro, the ultra modern subway system in downtown Santiago reveals the history of the country. A view of Santiago from a steep mid city hilltop shows an immense example of sprawl, a city spread out from it’s center at the Plaza de Armas for miles to the foothills of the Andes on one side and the coastal mountains on the other. Millions of people from rich to poor, from high rise to hovel. The city is intensely alive. Buses, taxis and cars hurtle down the roads but the pace on the sidewalks is leisurely. The tourist learns not to set one foot into the street until he has confirmed there are no microbuses careening down the street less than a meter from the sidewalk. An imaginary sign on their grills might read “Take no prisoners.” Old Santiago and new Santiago live incongruously happily side by side. In the Paseo Moneda, a shopping district downtown, middle class, country people, kids with purple hair and black goth attire, Indians, and tourists like me fill the street. A cultural anthropologist’s dream.

This country is leapfrogging from the nineteenth century to the twenty first. Horse drawn carts might be driven by a farmer with a cell phone in his hand. Santiago is a huge metropolis with every bit of the commercial trappings of downtown USA. There are things to be consumed and Chileans are getting the hang of it. Slick billboards on the outside and large TV monitors in the underground Metro show snippets of news, the arrival time of the next sleek quiet train, and an amazing amount of jiggling cleavage, which made me wish the train to be at least two minutes late.

Poverty is a fact of life here. Money is hard to come by for many but if they aren't buying something, Chileans are selling something. And showing entrepreneurial creativity. Fruit, newspapers. crafts, food, of course. But also yellow plastic wind up baby chicks, used parts for every kind of machine, lipstick and makeup, old tools and rags are spread out on shawls on the sidewalk. An object only becomes of no value until it disappears, melts away, or is worn down beyond the original elements from which it was composed.

Nogales is an hour and a half drive northwest of Santiago. The two lane road has been replaced by a superhighway leading all the way to the Pacific coast. Commercial complexes that support the country's massive growth-spurt line the roadside.Cement companies, propane and electric plants, trucking companies, business complexes sprout like crops in the scrubby plains. Miles and miles of avocado trees ordered in soldierly fashion line the steep hillsides and fertile crop-bearing fields along the highway.

Condominiums packed like avocado trees on the steep mountainous coast are being built by the hundreds on the fifteen-mile stretch along the huge crescent shaped bay from Con Con to Valparaiso, a Chilean Riviera aborning. An upper middle class is forming in Santiago and the first place they want to play go to play in the South American summer between December and February is this central region of the coast,

The road leading from the new "Ruta 5" highway to Nogales was a bumpy dirt road until just last year. This year it is paved... a macadam metaphor for the changes happening all over this country.

Peace and Plenty Beach Inn, The Bahamas

Peace and Plenty Beach Inn
Queen's Highway, Georgetown, Great Exuma Island, Bahamas
(a mere 1758 miles south of Boston)
February 14, 2006

A flip-flop marinated in Coppertone might have tasted good in this little piece of Paradise. The brilliant aquamarine water of Elizabeth Harbor in Georgetown was frosted with dainty whitecaps in the brisk southeast breeze. The Blizzard of '06 had just blanketed the northeast and here sat your reviewer in a polo shirt and shorts amongst sailors, tourists, and a few locals having lunch in the dining room of the Club Peace and Plenty Beach Inn. Somewhere to the north, denizens of the northeast were seeing their breath crystallize as they huffed while they shoveled snow. I was busy spilling sand out of my beach shoes on Great Exuma Island in the Bahamas.

Embedded in Caribbean DNA is an affinity for colors most Americans haven't seen since finger painting class in kindergarten. The peach toned walls in the dining room, ceiling fans overhead, smooth white tiles underfoot, were the opening salvo of color. Lined with windows, the dining room was perched over the royal blue and yellow striped awning of a tiny poolside bar. Emerald chaise lounges encircled a pale blue mini pool and the whole terrace was bordered with a low wall of flat peach colored rock overlooking the harbor. As if this weren't assault enough on a poor Northern boy's limited winter sensibilities, the sandy ribbons of beaches on Stocking Island lay invitingly a few miles off to the west. Lunch was almost an afterthought.

Conch burgers are a local favorite. Tiny cubes of conch in a slightly piquant batter are fried to a crusty brown and served on burger buns with lettuce tomato and onion. In truth, New England fried clams have a more distinctly oceanic flavor but - all due respect to Gloucester, Manchester, Portland, and Provincetown - aren't served with a view like this. Bahamian fish and chips stood up to New England's version. Chunks of grouper, golden fried in a delicate simple batter, were moist and flaky. The chicken wings weren't appealing to look at but pronounced tasty by my dinner companions, even though the kitchen had run out of the spicy sauce that reputedly fired them up considerably. Virtually all foodstuffs arrive by boat. The savvy tourist quickly adapts to two quirks of life in the Bahamas: island time and "we ran out of that."

The range of the Bahama's water color makes you wonder what planet you're on. The word paradise often comes to mind. There are certainly vistas in my native New England that inspire awe but none of them can match the sight of Caribbean beaches in mid-February.

pt at large spent five idyllic days relaxing with good friends on a small island east of Georgetown, with only two trips into town to reconnoiter and get a feel for the culture, history, and the native and adopted residents of the island. I’m already looking ahead to next February when I hope to be invited back to visit my friends on Elizabeth Island, a ten-minute boat ride from Georgetown, and one light year away from a New England winter.

www.peaceandplenty.com

Fish Story

SSSSSSSSZZZZZZZZ…the sharp  metallic mechanical whirring of a fishing reel being unspooled by a big fish pierced the afternoon air. “Fish on the line!” shouted skipper Paul Wagner. “

We had been cruising right on the edge of the soundings line, the border between depths a marine depth sounder can accurately record and the gorgeous blue water over the underwater canyons too deep to record on the depth sounder.

Marine paradise, two miles off Great Exuma on the southeast end of the Bahama Islands. A dozen brilliant shades of water from blue to green, sandy beaches, warm trade winds kissing my bare shoulders, clean salt air blowing through my hair. New Englanders are rendered speechless with sights and sensations like this. We’d been trolling in the deepest blue water for about an hour and a half.The hope of fresh fish for dinner was fading. But disappointment is easy to absorb in paradise. The music of that steely rachet spooling from the fishing reel put the idea of fish back on the front burner.

Blue water was foaming from the thrust of the 150 HP outboard on the 21 foot center console Alcar fishing boat. The rod bent and whipped. Whatever was on the line was in full flight mode.

Command structure ensued.

“Take the helm and throttle down!”
“Reel in the other line!”

The captain began to reel in, pause, tug the rod, reel in again, pull his shoulders back and tug the rod in from his perch on the stern deck. Four minutes later the black mackeral-like markings of a thirty inch wahoo were within sight.

“Open the fish box!”, the captain shouted as he gave a final heave and landed the writhing fish into the fish box in the stern, slamming it shut as soon as the line was cut.

Recipes* for a fresh wahoo dinner began in earnest.

*The winner:filet of wahoo, rubbed rubbed with salt, T hot chili oil, lemon juice. Marinate for couple hours, served with salsa of avocado, lg tomato,half onion, cilantro,  juice of one lemon. salt and pepper.

The Gates: An installation by Christo

The Gates: An installation by Christo and Jeanne Claude Christo
Central Park, New York, February 12 – February 28, 2005
February 19, 2005

Want to go to a really big party? Want to see what a multi national, polyglot, block party looks and sounds like while it’s strolling google eyed at 7500 steel and plastic “gates” covered with 1,067,330 square feet of brilliant saffron colored, recyclable, rip-stop fabric and temporarily plunked over 23 miles of NYC’s Central Park trails and paths?

Get in your car, take a bus, hop the train, hitch a ride, just get to NYC to enjoy this wonder. Total strangers start up conversations with each other, passers-by offer to take the photo so you can stand with your family, significant other, or the family pooch, with a magnificent backdrop of billowing saffron shimmering in the breeze.

It’s like an old fashioned love in, now playing in the nation’s grandest city park. And on February 28, poof. It will be dismantled, disappear and become an urban legend. Most visitors will revert to their insular habits, roller-blading and cell phoning their way through the park.

Is it art, is it farce, who cares? Why does it work? Is it the brilliant saffron color; or the immense scale of the project; or the Central Park setting that Frederick Law Olmsted, another visionary, designed in 1858? You’ve got to love that these two artists have been trying to get their Gates installed since 1979.

It’s nothing but nylon, plastic, and steel but it’s turned out to be the best kind of interactive device of this young century, an oasis for the spirit. Thousands of participants are looking one another in the eye, talking to one another, and sharing from some invisible well of good will. That’s art that borders on a divine plan.

for info, photos go to http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/tg.html

Robert Treat Paine Estate, A National Historic Landmark

Robert Treat Paine Estate, A National Historic Landmark
100 Robert Treat Paine Drive · Waltham, MA 02452 781-314-3290
http://www.stonehurstwaltham.org/

On a recent trip just west of Bentley College on Beaver Street in Waltham, MA, pt at large spied a sign proclaiming Stonehurst Estate. Intrigued that he'd never noticed it before, he jotted down the name, and vowed to have an Excellent Adventure there some day. A summary of his January 28, 2005 visit, with background data for history buffs in the audience, follows.

The Robert Treat Paine Estate represents an intersection of 19th century Americana in which architecture, landscape design, social conscience, and genteel opulence intersect.

The social conscience was provided by Robert Treat Paine (1835-1910), a great grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. After amassing a fortune in railroad and mining investments at age 35, Paine retired to a life of philanthropy (one hopes he wasn’t a robber baron and engaged in philanthropy to assuage his guilty conscience). He founded building and loan associations and organizations to teach crafts to working class of Boston, even hosted an annual picnic at Stonehurst for members of these organizations.

His marriage in to Lydia Lyman was a match made in Boston Brahmin heaven. Mrs. Lydia Lyman Paine had summered nearby in what’s now known as The Lyman Estate. In 1866, the Paine’s built a “modest” Second Empire Mansard style summer house on land given them by Lyman’s father. From April to November, they relocated there from their city dwelling on Joy Street, Beacon Hill, Boston. In 1880 her father, a wealthy shipping magnate, died and left Lydia his fortune and land on the hill overlooking the couple’s summer abode.

Thanks to the ten live-in servants who attended to household operations, the Paines had enough expendable energy to produce seven children, and by 1883 their summer home to seemed the size of Old Mother Hubbard’s shoe.

Thus entered two giants from the fields of landscape and architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and H.H. Richardson (1838-1886). By a curious coincidence, Paine had been head of the building commission which awarded Richardson the commission to build the famous Trinity Church in Boston (1872-1877). Richardson was no phony, though. His Trinity Church in Boston remains one of the ten most architecturally significant buildings in the United States. His plan for Stonehurst demonstrated his command for designing open space interiors and structural ingenuity and mark him as a precursor to Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Adventurer forgives you if you’re not aware of the brain behind the design of Central Park and the U. S. Capitol grounds. But the “Emerald Necklace”, the series of parks and playgrounds surrounding Boston? Who but Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, another son of Boston.

Richardson and Olmsted, who lived ten minutes from each other in Brookline, MA, were a Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig tandem at the peak of their powers. They relocated the original Paine house 1000 yards to a higher elevation that commanded a sweeping view of the surroundings, and their imaginations seemed to ascend with it.

The architect and landscaper spoke in the same tongue and their the materials surrounding the mansion site became their vernacular. Richardson used its uncut glacial boulders to construct the tower where the first mansard house and the larger addition converged. Predating Queen Ann styles which would soon emerge, he used saw tooth and fish scale wooden shingling to set off its Romanesque arches, which were one of his signature designs.

The interior, although on a grand scale, is made inviting by the honey tones of the wood paneling and hand wrought woodwork throughout. Balustrades, columns, ceiling beams are all meticulously crafted (showing the influence William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement in England).

The mansion’s siting offered maximum light penetration through wide windows during the day. During a walk through the interior, the Adventurer was slack jawed at the subtle rose tones of the Sienna marble the couple chose for the hearths as they toured Italy to furnish their little love nest, and the wall and ceiling palette, influenced by Japanese art, deep soothing terra cotta, clear cobalt blues. The grand stair case in the central foyer is smashingly elegant, a blossoming of hand turned wood ballisters leading in three stages to the second level, under the canopy of a thirty foot ceiling. Although the mansion was designed for central heating, the Adventurer easily deduced why the Paine's repaired to their home base in Boston. It would have taken the veins of one of Paine's larger coal mines to heat the place for one season.

Outside, Olmsted configured the curved terracing from the glacial boulders that were strewn about the property, and relocated the site’s plants and trees to set off the house. The house achieves an organic unity with its surroundings. In 1970, the Paine family turned the entire estate over to the city of Waltham, MA.

The Adventurer gives this museum’s and its surrounding grounds a thumbs up for those who’d like to see how two geniuses integrated their art and the environment to construct a Brahmin family’s dream home, a creation remains gorgeous to behold.

It must be noted with some perverse satisfaction, however, that upon his January visit to this national landmark, the structure exhibited some of the same problems with ice dams (called “water infiltration” when it occurs in a historic landmark) that bedevil pt at large’s own manse.

In fact, were it not for pt at large, the day’s only visitor, the water pool upon the finely waxed oak foyer floor may not have been detected till the following morning, during which time irreparable damage would have been inflicted upon it. As it happens, pt at large pointed out said infiltration to the docent, then orchestrated a search mission for a barrel to receive the incoming H2O, and sought access to the second floor to ascertain the source of the influx.

Due to his acuity, pt at large was excused from paying the entry fee and may some day be in line for a preservation award from the trustees of the operation. Being modest by nature, he will undoubtedly demur from the attendant publicity but may relent by accepting an offer to use Stonehurst for a bash for all his friends and admirers, including, dear reader, yourself. Stand by for details.