Before you get somewhere you have to go somewhere.
The collection of airports this trip will be those in Albuquerque; Denver; Newark, Houston and Santo Domingo. With checking in, security, eating, waiting, layovers, flight time, twenty hours will go by as quick as a Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry marathon on Saturday afternoon television.
At eleven this evening, waiting for Newerk ticket agents to check in to work and get us boarded, all the familiar sights are in play..
There are transport golf carts picking up stragglers who have trouble walking long distances between terminals and gates. There are security men and women with walkie talkies on their hips, blue ball caps, and whistles dangling around their necks,looking vigilant. There are pilots dressed for work, standing in line for coffee but able to whisk past security easily. An announcement, repeated often, advises us ” not to take luggage from strangers and report such incidents immediately..” Bartenders do inventory and waitresses make sure they have two pens for taking orders.
The Newark air terminal is clean and a United Airlines hub. There is shopping here for those that want it and many travelers, even at this late hour, are plugged into the internet, charging cell phones, playing video games or watching movies.
Some hours later, leaving Newerk, flying at night around eight hours, Scott is coughed up in Santo Domingo feeling like Jonah exiting the damn whale that swallowed him.
Picked up by Berluis at the Santo Domingo airport, whisked down Avenida of the Americas past palm trees with the Caribbean Sea on one side, industrial areas, hotels, restaurants on the other, my Airbnb accommodations are waiting for me.
Escaping snow is one of my main directives.
If I see a penguin, I’m going to check my airplane ticket, call the pilot a drunk, and demand a full refund.
If I wanted to be cold I would have gone north instead of south.
Trips start with me saying the name of a country three times while hopping up and down on my left foot, twice.
There are 195 countries in the world, according to Wikipedia. I can’t see them all, in this lifetime, so I usually choose countries to visit that look warm and friendly, have good pictures from people who have been there, and good reviews by fellow travelers.
Sometimes friends and family give me their dream vacations.
Pat, who keeps Scotttreks.com flying with tech genius, suggested the Dolphin Fountain in Mazatlan, all the five star restaurants in Paris, the Great Barrier Reef for diving. In the Dominican Republic he likes LaRamada, the north side beaches, the grave of Christopher Columbus, Altos de Chavon and Casa de Campo.
To celebrate my ninth travel ring, I buy myself a brand new Dominican Republic guide book at Barnes and Noble, full of places to see, foods to sample, music to tap my foot too, places to hang my hat.
There are 195 perfect countries on this planet to visit, thousands of cool places to explore, and friendly hospitable people in all of them..
Scott is getting ready to ramble, once again, but hopping three times is getting difficult
I wish I had a magic carpet to make getting there and back home as easy as Mom’s apple pie with a big scoop of ala mode.
” Tumbling Tumbleweeds” is a Roy Rodgers cowboy song, sung around the campfire with fellow cowhands on a starry night, with a crackling fire, when the herd is quiet and coyotes are howling harmony.
The song’s lyrics are plaintive as the western landscapes shared by cowboys, Indians, outlaws, and cattle.
” See them tumbling down/Pledging their love to the ground/Lonely, but free, I’ll be found/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.
Cares of the past are behind/Nowhere to go, but I’ll find/Just where the trail will wind/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.
I know when night has gone/That a new world’s born at dawn/I’ll keep rolling along/Deep in my heart is a song/Here on the range I belong/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds… ”
The last lines of the song crawl into my tent and bite me.
We all have songs to sing, but tumbling is what I like to do the most.
The map on one of the Starbuck’s walls shows several continents.
When you spread the world out, pin it to a wall, you take out all its bumps, contours, unknowns, inconsistencies.
When Columbus laid out his world map on the sturdy table in his Captain’s quarters his map didn’t show him his crew’s fears, terrible ocean squalls and rolling waves taller than the three little ships in his expedition, stacked one atop the other..
When John Glenn walked on the moon, the maps in NASA headquarters didn’t tell the consistency of the sand that he hit his golf ball off of.
This world map focuses on longitudes and latitudes best suited for growing coffee, just one of Starbuck’s many products.
Our world has knitted together so tightly that we can enjoy foods from far away, foods that Kings used to have difficulty procuring. Now we don’t have to travel to a coffee zone to enjoy fresh coffee.
This little girl is talking to her mother on her Apple wrist phone. The only person on the planet using wrist communication devices when I was her age was the newspaper comic strip hero – Dick Tracy. Kids have come a long way since the 50’s.
What new technologies will come true in this little girl’s lifetime?
This morning I’m reflective.
It is good to have children in our world but they have to grow up quicker than we did.
Girls like to sing the blues too.
Their blues are mostly about guys that don’t leave quick enough or stay long enough, guys who can’t make up their minds and stick with what they finally decide on, guys who drink too much or not enough, guys who are running around looking for thrills when thrills are right there at home.
Blues seem to come with human territory and the girls, tonight, are putting on a good show for friends and guests at the jam.
When the place closes down and everyone goes home, some here will meet the blues first hand, and probably have a drink in their hand.
Meeting our own and other’s expectations is often difficult.
For things to work out, a whole lot of tangibles and intangibles have to be rowing in the same direction
My last conversation with a skeleton was at an Albuquerque Starbucks, on Halloween.
Before that, I shared a sidewalk bench one sunny afternoon, with a man of bones in Tulum, Mexico.
Today, outside the Kaktus Brewing Company in Bernalillo, New Mexico, another set of bones greets me.
I wouldn’t swear to it but I believe this skeletons right toe is tapping to the music in perfect four four time.
Good blues can bring back the dead, but they often make us feel like we want to die first.
It’s always bad luck to walk past a skeleton without tipping your hat.
Teaching and playing are different disciplines.
Some musicians play. Some musicians teach. Some musicians both play and teach.
There are lots of filters that can keep a teacher’s message from reaching his students gas tank. If Chadd could just run a USB from his brain to my brain, he could download his considerable music knowledge and we wouldn’t have to wait for me to go through hours and hours of practice.
At the heart of every jazz solo is technique, clarity of thought, pureness of emotion, and an intent to swing.
There is, unfortunately, no USB connection that can bypass practice.
My attempts to master flute playing have been unsuccessful.
Chadd tells me the oboe is the hardest instrument to play he has ever tried.
I’m stuck with alto sax and clarinet, my original horn.
Right now, playing one horn well is about all the gas I have left in my tank.
Right now, listening to Chadd play a flute solo, is as close to the flute as i want to be.
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If you want to know what people are looking for, count the cars in the parking lot. Tonight, the parking lot is packed.
The dance floor is also packed,dancers barely having enough room to stand. The band is hitting their notes, ladies are dressed to kill, the audience rocks with the steady booming salsa rhythm and yell when a tune is done for another one just like it. Latin music has hot harmony, high note trumpet playing, fluid solos and tight, intricate, group ensembles.
When Ladies get dressed up to dance salsa, they light up the dance floor and have smiles that are contagious.
Tonight, this is a party to be at, especially if you are a little kid on the bandstand.
I thought, at first,the little boy on the band stand was the son of a band member but was told his parents have been bringing him to sing and be on the stage since he was three.
Watching the little boy sing with the band is worth the price of admission.
It never hurts to start any passion early, before you are told you can’t do it and you best find something more serious to do with your time and energy.
This rock, more than a stone but not a boulder, in Embudo Canyon in the Albuquerque foothills, has been moved onto the trail, by something other than wind, water or wishes.
It appears to have been lifted from a nearby mound of dirt. Where the rock used to be, on the mound, is a small hole that matches it’s size perfectly.
” Let’s move it back, ” Alex laughs.
If we move the rock back will some cosmic order be disturbed? Has moving rocks become against the law in an open space monitored by cameras and posted signs? Maybe the rock likes it here closer to the trail and doesn’t want to go back to where it was?
We keep walking quickly through this crime scene.
This situation has man’s dirty fingerprints all over it and I’m not putting things right.
Not wanting to get involved is a perfectly normal thing to do these days.
Eric, a retired Army Ranger, who patrolled streets of Iraq in full battle gear, has told me violence is a way of life and controlling or neutralizing it was once his mission as well as his livelihood.
When I talk with a man who has had to take another human life, regardless of reason, it makes me listen closer.
At Dion’s Pizza for lunch, the inscription on the man’s T shirt ,ahead of me in the order line, reads, simply, “ Deliverance of Controlled Violence. ”
I am at a loss to fully understand what this means? Is violence bad, or does it depend on what force is used to accomplish? If you use violence to subdue a violent person are you breaking the same law they are? Does this guy’s uniform legitimize his kind of violence? State violence- acceptable? Individual violence not acceptable?
I don’t know violence like Eric ,or this SWAT warrior, but I know about words.
You only need to get a few cattle to head for the barn to get the whole herd moving in the same direction.
Sweet talk and glorious words beat violence any day when you want to control, suppress, or channel human behavior.
The war for our minds is always being waged.
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