One Month Anniversary:

The lodge is getting packed and I’m realizing how privileged I am to speak the most important language on earth. The Ruski can convey his thoughts on Gandhi with perfect grammar, the Italian can tell me how his foot ails, the French Canadian can share my pleasure at leaving the northern cold, the Slovaks can tell me what it’s like to sleep under the Eiffel Tower and the Germans can ask me what time tomorrows boat leaves. Cheers to English imperialism.

I am slowly coming down with a classic case of Island Fever. The seas are closing in, and Pumpkin Hill looks shorter every day. The dive sites are most familiar and all the parrot fish look the same.

I want to be in Munchen for Oktoberfest, see the serenity in east Asia, be in Brazil the most interesting country in the world, then head south for Argentinan Patagonia. I want to be in Tennesee for Bonnaroo and in the Green Triangle to suffer the monotony of trimming season.

I don’t want to stay here, but I don’t want to go home either.  Walking home in New York, looking at the sad disgusting faces of the drivers of the new SUVS, whilst creating bubbling noise about their daily digestion of superficial culture on their shining white phones that can do so much it is almost considered magic, or god. Coming home from jobs where they produce nothing that they themselves or their consumers can tangibly see, working eight hours in hopes that someday soon they will receive the privilege of working twelve. That is why the human condition is so weak. We work all day, for people we don’t like, generating plastic and plastic related “things” that serve a purpose that bears no true emotional relationship to our lives. Our souls are half full, there can be no true joy until real work has been done, our food is half rich and our fun is half hearted. It’s like were playing a viciously competitive game of monopoly, where all you want to do is beat your best friends and make them cry like little girls.

There are moments when I am blown back, astonished that there are not only few, but many, seemingly even most people who disregard compassion, instead choosing hatred, violence and pain. Do they not see that compassion is peace and peace is love, the purest most righteous and desirable thing that has ever been known.

The 6^th

Went to the American bar to watch the football game. It was the United States verse Honduras qualifying game for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the first of two for Honduras in the North American, Caribbean, Central American bracket. When the U.S scored the first point the Hondurans, enraged, drew knives and machetes, someone ran out and came back with a can of gas, threatening to burn the bar to the dirt. I snuck out the back to use the restroom. I returned four hours later, or however long a football game takes, and found Honduras beat the United States 2 to 1. Jubilation was in the air.

It has been a month since I have seen or heard any news, other than that of the Coconut Radio. Whenever I have the opportunity to take a peek my chest fills with electric dread and I must turn away in haste. The farthest I got was glancing up to the right hand corner of the yahoo news, you know, where they post the most searched and usually wind up cutting it off. It said “Cats kill millions”. I instantly slammed the computer shut and sprinted of the sea.

I hope to return home to hear some sort of shocking news, something like, “Governor Chris Christi agrees to bathe in the Mississippi River, raising the water level enabling continued shipping commerce.”

Industry & Trade

I spoke the other day of the millionaires of Pigeon Cay. At the time I thought it quite literally to be a fishermans tale. But I talked to someone today who caught a “White Nose Fish” and soon following this catch he went out and bought himself a nice new house.

There is a sleek 1200 horse power speed boat that was left as a gift for the coast guard.  Simply found, empty, floating off shore.

The aeronautical cowboys used to visit the power plant to cut the power to the whole island for those clandestine arrivals and departures, not that it was necessary after midnight, electricity was turned off on the island at that time anyway. They would bring a string of lights to the municipal airport for the very late night arrivals.

Every day the black helicopters chop over my head. Americans. So you can stop wondering why the drug war has a price tag of $20,000,000,000 a year.

The dive boat captains refuse to go to the north side in the afternoon, so as not to risk seeing anything they are not supposed to. See no evil, speak no evil.

I myself, walking along the trash strewn north side beach, more vibrant than the visible spectrum of light from all the lovely plastic fragments, found a quadruple sealed bag. Rectangular in shape, yellow rubber covered by blue plastic covered by pink plastic wrapped in duct tape. Sliced straight down the center, empty. Some one had a really good time…. Or someone had a really terrible time. 

“Super Bowl Sunday”

The dive shop called in sick today, the lot of us snuck off to Water Cay. The Salva Vida did not have her engines at 100% so we took two dorys. I along with 23 others were on Hermans boat, it looked as if we were taking the nighttime cruise from Cuba to Florida.

We passed Pigeon Cay. Some say that this small sleepy Cay of old fishermen, living in old shacks and houses packed so tightly together has more millionaires per capita than anywhere else on this blue and green earth. This being attributed to their luck in fishing for square grouper.

We arrived on Water Cay and promptly set up camp. Drinks were concocted and food ingested. The slack line was set up for all those who enjoy frustration. Soon the tropical rain arrived, while some took shelter around the coconut bark fueled fire, tropically shivering, Herr Osterich was enjoying his first game of baseball. All the way up until when the wet grip of a small bat turned it into a throat seeking missile. I turned as Osterich fell to the ground unconscious. This allowed for some practical EFR training. After a good amount of fumbling he was strapped down to a boogie board with weight belts and shivering he was sent sailing for the main(is)land.

Afterwards we set about wandering the island, playing with fire, trying to break language barriers and breaking open shells to get out what I truly hope were almonds.

I went to sleep that night as mentally fresh as one can be, laying alone on a table on the end of the dive shops dock looking at the stars, imaging what they must look like beyond the peaks of the Gracias a Dios, where no human lumens penetrate.

I thought about the college I would have been otherwise enveloped in at that moment. I thought about the professors and students who thought they really knew something. It wasn’t how to save lives or grow food or create machinery or even make contributions to any type of math or science. Still their egos grew fat off of mass delusion and towered over the studious innocents. I wrote this for them.

Being smart is realizing you know nothing.

Being intelligent is using the nothing you know to do something.

Being an intellectual is saying everything without knowing or doing anything.

1^st

I spent the morning creating irregularly shaped tortillas. They tasted warm and delicious but I’m not sure if it was worth all the dough all over the walls and floor and my clothes.

Took money out from the bank to pay for the diving. On the way back I took a detour since I was borrowing a nice bike and found myself in a traffic jam. Motorcycles and mopeds were stuck behind a mess of black cows. The running of the Utilian Bulls. Just off the boat, there were over twenty squeezed tightly heading up the small road. I first passed a lazy one off to the side taking a nap, in the process of being agitated by some village girls. When the opportunity arose the herd took it, running up the steps trying to get into the grocery stores and china shops as the owners tried to slam their doors on their faces. The cowboys in the lead pointed for the cows which way they would like them to turn at a fork, they responded more to the yelling and big wooden sticks the young cowboys in the back and flanks held high.

Both literally and figuratively, my life is a room filled with piles of open books, lying face down, pages of varying unbalance. Resting on the bed, floor, table and on top of each other is a Twain and a Phalanuk, Steppenwolf, Farenheit 451, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and a Kerouac I’ve been reading for two years. Not to mention another whole pile of dive text books.

Walking down main, late at night, suddenly my foot kicked a weighty asymmetrical object that went flying, I knew from some sort of combination of senses, including sixth and seventh ones, it was not something I have ever kicked before. Looking down I saw the largest crab I had ever seen. Coloured as the armies desert fatigues, he looked up at me and said in a melancholy voice, “what’d you do that for jerk”.

The 30^th

I used up a quarter of a tank chasing down a mammoth, six foot Southern Ray. The instructors apron strings have been severed, so I have begun to float solo. My fancy watch informed me I went into decompression at 136 feet and then, simply assuming I was dead, failed to give me any further advice. I hope and believe this was because I went free diving wearing it an hour before and lacking a free diving setting the computer  thought me mad.

I found the skipper whom I was seeking, he is sailing for Belize on Saturday. I assumed he was looking for a crew, but rather he was seeking passengers for $450 US a head. He had his own vessel sitting in Roatan and was borrowing his friends sloop to raise funds for engine repair. Never the less he was most interesting. A young, good looking German who two days ago, being a stranger, I wagered for a bottle of rum that he was not gay. My victory was ensured as he told me of his Kava drinking days in Vanautu. Jealous of the native girls attraction to him, a black magician cursed him and his boat, so as he sailed away he found himself perpetually just a few meters out of the winds reach. In a personal doldrum he motored for the breeze but every time he approached the wind, as it had been doing for days, simply stepped out of reach.

I told him $100 and I’ll cook, we will see in two days.

Post Script: Man cannot survive on Krazy Glue alone. I was prematurely appreciative about the glues repair job on my sandal. But through some battlefield tech testing I discovered World War Two parachute cord mixed with the sticky creates a sort of high powered fiberglass that has held for five action packed days.

The 28^th

I think we can call the cycle officially gone. They call this paying the “island tax”. If that is so, it’s tax season. Night one my bike and my cheese.  Night two, Jermaines fancy shirt. Night three my diving brief case, empty and moldy. Word is some crackheads moved into the neighborhood, and you know how they get. Someone suggested I go tell the policia, but I don’t see how successful that would be in a country where they recruit only Guatemalans into the military because they can’t trust the Hondurans.

But as always, all energy eventually equalizes, this time almost immediately. I found a Patagonia jacket in the bay, smelling of the lowest of tides and zippers rusted still. Still, I am proud to wear a product of Yvon Chouinard whom I have a new found respect for in his loving protect of Patagonia the land.

On a clear day you can look South and see not the coast, due to the earths curvature, but the grand mountain range on the mainland. A majestic range, running from east to west as far as my eyes could see. The tallest in the country at 9000 feet, they call it the Gracias Adios, which I only desperately hope is true.

Post Script: The range is actually called Gracious a Dios. As Columbus sailed out of storms reeking of fatality the mountain came into view, and the Spaniards naturally thanked God.