Leaving Antonito, Colorado, it is not hard to see two gleaming towers off to the east, the sun glistening off silver spires made out of hub caps, flattened beer cans, wire, window casements and whatever other material comes into the hands of it’s builder.
You drive a few blocks to the east, off the main highway, and, in a residential neighborhood, you come to temples created by a Vietnam vet who came back home after the war.
Dominic Espinosa, who prefers to be called ” Cano”, lives nearby the castle, in a little trailer, and tends to his garden, living off the land as he did when he was a kid with eleven brothers and sisters, his mother a cafeteria worker at a local school. There are interviews where he explains that ” Jesus lives in the castle, ” and that ” God built it. ”
Besides Jesus there are two crossed arrows at the entry to the yard that warn that alcohol and tobacco are poison, but marijuana is the best answer to many things.
It is normal to wonder about people, but the fact that one man would so consistently pursue a goal most others would label eccentric, causes me to think about personal obsessions.
On a personal level, Scotttreks not far from Cano’s castle.
Cano uses metal and wood while Scott uses words.
“Watch out for the stone, ” the short order cook says, as he slides my meal across the counter to me. ” It is very hot.”
I look at a dark stone shaped like a huge pill on my plate, then look at my under cooked meat next to it. The hot stone, it appears, is used to finish cooking the little slices of steak, as us customers desire them. By placing each slice on my own hot stone, I can cook my steak rare, medium, done, or well done, just like I like it. I am not just a consumer of a product, but a participant in it’s preparation.
I’m sure this cooking technique has been around for thousands of years in Japan, but it is new to a trail tired New Mexico cowpoke.
The whole process makes it twice as long to finish my dinner,as it usually takes ,but I enjoy my food more.
Hearing meat sizzle on the stone reminds me of summer backyard barbecues and cooking over a campfire.
At the end of this meal, I am happy with my steak, and, if I have to blame anyone for it’s cooking, it has to be me.
That, I figure, is the final exclamation point of this entire culinary and writing exercise.
The most common vehicles on Marinduque are bikes, tricycles with a cab, tribikes with a cab, motorcycles, and jeepneys.
Jeepneys are the most colorful and most used on narrow winding mountain roads that take a traveler three or four hours to go around an island that is called small by locals.
Jeepneys are versions of World War 11 jeeps enlarged and modified to carry multiple passengers. They are intensely decorated with signs, slogans, horns, bumper stickers. On dash boards are replicas of Jesus with hands praying. There are beads and charms with rooster feathers swinging from rear view mirrors and, on the outside of one, the words, ” GOD WILLS, ” is hard to miss.
For tall Americans or Europeans, you have to bend low when you enter a jeepney and there are railings on the ceiling you hold if you need stability. Windows are small and there is no place to pause and take a photo as the transport moves down the road as quick as the driver can be safe.
Getting down the road is a game of chicken where transports usually stop a few millimeters from collision.
You can rent a car if you need one, but Jeepney’s are an adventure worth having.
Getting around is one of a trip’s great pleasures and getting around in style is the best way to fly.
There are relic hunters who still roam the mountains and valleys on Marinduque searching for World War 2 memorabilia.
They sometimes find helmets, bayonets, mess kits, a lucky photograph of a wife or children in a leather pouch, pieces of uniforms and occasionally, by the side of downed aircraft, bleached bones.
This great world conflict, in the early 1940’s,finished eighty years ago and what we know of it now comes from secondary sources. The generation that fought the war has followed it into history and has left us boxes of stained photographs, old movies and books by historians who have no longer have any living soldiers or architects of the war to interview.
.At celebrations on Veteran’s Day there are a few grizzled vets left who fought in these Philippine jungles, but time has rolled over most of them.
By the side of the road, just outside Mogpog, is a tall piece of ordnance propped up outside a food mart. It is like the biggest ball of twine somewhere in the Midwest, an Indian teepee hotel along Route 66, the Brown Derby in Los Angeles.
To people in the Philippines, Japan is not liked. People remember their grandfather’s killed along with Americans, remember Japanese death marches.
World War 2 fades in significance, buried as generations pile one atop another.
Now, we are into the entertainment age and World Wars are far from people’s minds.
What is funny is that the people that were drawn into World War 11 weren’t thinking about it either.
There are sand creations on beaches.
They start as an idea, then move past idea to become reality.
Artists bring their buckets and shovels, pots and rakes, sticks or bones, bottle caps or string, shells or seaweed to make hair. They kneel in the sand, and, with bare hands, sculpt, as best they can, their visions. When all is done, what they make stands till tides or careless feet sweep them away.
Sandy is Joan’s idea and, in her bag, are buttons, mittens, sticks for arms, an old pink ball cap,a Tecate bottle, and a composition scheme that allows sand to be stacked a couple of feet high.
As helper, my job is to capture seawater in a bucket, add beach sand and mix with a shovel till you have a material that will pack, hold together, and allow itself to be shaped.
It takes ten buckets to make ” Sandy “, and, when all is done, our borrowed shovel is returned to a hotel closet and the bucket is washed out and fresh water added for Felix the cat.
After photo documentation of the event, Sandy is left to face her public
The whole project is considered a success when strangers stop to take pictures for their Facebook pages.
On the wall of a shop,these Cupid twins smile lustily, with a trace of the Devil in their expressions.
Cupids are often known to have smiling faces, flowing blond hair,rotund bodies. They fly in the air with ease and are particularly in evidence in palace gardens where men and women socialized in times past, held heart to heart talks on shaded benches and exchanged beautifully penned letters.
In this shop, the twins share one arrow and one common purpose – to release their arrow into unsuspecting humans and send them into the tizzies and trifles of love.
Poets, from Shakespeare to William Carlos Williams, extol the virtues, joy, pitfalls and pratfalls of love, a human condition celebrated on Valentine’s Day with flowers, cards, gifts, fond words, grand gestures.
None are immune from Cupid’s arrows and these grinning faces already have plans for this evening when they will fly out a partially opened window, buzz the town, and find victims.
Once shot by an arrow the results are not fatal, but wounded lovers sometimes yearn for death instead of living with the pangs of love.
Love and lust have little in common but they often bump each other in the night.
Along the Hotel Zone main road in Tulum, Mexico there are diversions.
There are small coffee shops that sell Mexican coffee, flavored with sugar, and delicious pastries for individual palates. Restaurants push seafood, Indian food, Italian, Chinese, Vegan and Mexican cuisine.Bars serve late at night and hotels have Vacancy signs hanging where they can be seen. Boutiques display designer clothes for women who need to look good, always, whether they are on the beach, dancing in a disco, taking kids to soccer practice or listening to pickup lines in the grocery.
Moments before this photo is snapped, a long legged woman in red, positions two mannikins on the street in front of her shop.She carries one out to the street under her arm and stands it next to the other.
With both mannikins positioned she turns and strides back to open her business. It is early in the morning and only a few vehicles are on the road. Light filters through trees and through her loose fitting dress that moves seductively as she walks.
It is not difficult to see who is and who isn’t a mannikin.
Movement shows life.
There are several postcards about keys on Scotttreks.
There is one postcard on a Montevideo door lock and three keys that look the same. There is one postcard on a break and enter situation in Belize when Jack’s renter doesn’t leave a key and he has to get his AirBnB apartment ready for a new tenant coming soon. There is one postcard on a key found at an Albuquerque golf course parking lot, the key to the box of forgotten dreams. Now, there is one postcard on a bent key to room number 10 at the Yoga Shala in Tulum, Mexico.
At the beach, you don’t have pockets. This key and its colorful leather chain fit comfortably around my neck.
The odd thing about this key is it’s severe bend..
It took a lot of not paying attention to do this kind of damage.
Where this bend comes from is a story known to Angelique in the Yoga Shala office. She reminds me ,when I mention it ,that she has another key to my room if this one fails to work.
In Mexico, there is no need to fix anything if it isn’t broken.
When you walk in Tulum, you become accustomed to meeting bones.
There are full fledged skeletons sitting on park benches, skulls with sunglasses and jaunty caps on shop shelves, brightly colored ceramic skulls with smiling teeth and bulging eyes. It is February and Halloween has long since been packed away in warehouses.
In Mexico and other warm climates, death is never packed away. It is on display and in your face as you sip coffee, have a pina colada on the beach, drive in a taxi to a tantalizing tourist adventure.
I sit next to this fellow and have a conversation about the best beer in town.
He tells me he misses drinking,going fishing, his wife and kids.
He tells me he doesn’t have much advice, but his all time best advice is that ” people hang themselves in their own nooses.”
I ask him, gently, what noose caught him?
He turns and smiles at me with good teeth, and says, ” You got an hour? ”
You never know who you will meet on your morning walk.
This burro is grazing by the side of the road, and, moments earlier, posed for a photo with a young man and his girl friend, who then snapped this photo of Scott in reciprocity. The burro decides he isn’t pleased with us and kicks his hind hooves, warning me to stay the proper distance away.
He is a sturdy burro and in Nicaragua he would be hooked to a cart pulling sand and cement bags to a construction job.
Where you are born in this world makes a difference. You can overcome a bad birthplace, but, if I were a donkey, I would be perfectly pleased calling Tulum, Mexico home.
People call this boy an ass, but he has his world by the tail.
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