Going out without an umbrella is taking a risk in San Pedro Town.
Rain is forecast and today doesn’t disappoint. A woman, passing in a golf cart, waves back at me while I video this drenching.
The storm is over in fifteen minutes. It gets hot and humid as water begins to evaporate, flows into low spots, and soaks into sandy soil.
Residents love rain and talk ruefully about dry season.
” In summer, ” they remind me, ” you would sell your own mother for a rain like this. ”
My mother would be the first to tell me to enjoy this moment today.
When the rain is done, I head back to my lodgings, walking down a dirt path that looks like an aerial view of Minnesota’s 11,884 lakes.
Not even a mother knows where her kid’s will end up and what they will or won’t accomplish.
Life, as a puddle swallows my right tennis shoe and rain water soaks my tennis socks, is mostly a blessing, as long as we feel it that way.
San Pedro Town waits for her photo shoot like a beautiful model that has spent her whole life understanding what people see when they think they see her.
November 2, 2015 is a walking day.
I smell a fresh cinnamon roll and go searching for it. Cold, fresh squeezed orange juice would be perfect. This whole day has a wide open schedule and ” have to do ” is not in my poker hand.
San Pedro Town is hardly bashful.
Her bikini is only a few strings holding up a small triangle of cloth.
Whether it is Saint Thomas, Saint John, Dominica, Grenada, Bequia, Boca Del Toros, or San Pedro Town you see Caribbean similarities immediately.
Ambergris Caye is off the coast of Belize and runs along the second biggest barrier reef in the world with tourism its primary income stream.
There are foreigners here who make their retirement dollars stretch but opportunity is in a rising real estate market, a chance to open a business where locals don’t have the money, education or desire to start one of their own. Waiting at the airport, the sun is dropping and I can hear reggae on boomboxes in little neighborhood bars where men play domino’s and women complain about other women.
Coming back to the Caribbean is like coming home.
Jack, my host, doesn’t get to the airport to pick me up but a taxi dispatcher at the airport uses his personal cell phone to call Jack since my cell phone doesn’t have service here. Jack asks him to call Orlando. The taxi dispatcher calls Orlando and Orlando picks me up in fifteen minutes and delivers me to the Chez Caribe.
” Glad to see you, ” Jack says, sitting on a couch on the bottom floor front porch in a T shirt, levis, flip flops and shaven head.
I sit and listen as he practices ” La Bamba” on an old acoustic guitar and then get introduced to my room. It has a yellow green color scheme like my own house in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. It is small but will do fine.
Being picky usually doesn’t have good consequences.
I come from a land of manana, and, making the most of where I find myself is my normal plan of any day.
This ride is not smooth, but it isn’t bumpy either.
Down below us are little green islands sticking their heads above the Caribbean Sea like turtles, fishing boats, and turquoise water. I can almost see the grassy bottom of the sea from the air.
We are packed tightly in the plane and our pilot navigates by looking through his planes front window through rotating propeller blades. He has a small instrument panel and this flight is analogous to riding a city bus in the sky but it is the quickest and cheapest way to get to San Pedro Town from Belize City late in the afternoon.
Enroute, we land first at Caye Caulker, another tourist destination. We deliver a few guests, then make a U turn back to the beginning of the runway we just landed on. The pilot turns us around, again, and we take off for San Pedro Town, again. The plane’s little tires suffer from potholes but we lift off just before we reach the runway’s end and the water’s beginning.
Leaving the United States at 8:00 am and arriving in San Pedro Town at 5:10pm, on the same day,for two hundred seventy five bucks total, is a good piece of travel.
It is good to be out of New Mexico and have people ask me again where I am from.
This passport takes me to 2021, well past end of the world forecasts.
Closing in on Belize, an airline steward passes out forms to be completed in ink for Customs and Immigration Officers in Belize City. These days all travelers need a Passport and are asked to provide one as a prerequisite for International travel.
The Passport is an odd document, more legal than personal, more business than pleasure. If you really want to know about someone you shouldn’t ask for their Passport; you should ask for their diary.
These days the Passport lets me move about the world in anonymity. Governments, who can barely keep roads paved, are not going to get to know me well enough to know if they are safe from me by looking at my Passport.
I complete forms because I am told I have to.
Do people run the State, or does the State run people?
If I don’t belong to myself, to whom do I belong ?
This trip the window seat is mine.
It is most difficult to be in the middle seat with a window passenger on one side and an aisle passenger on the other. Invariably those seat passengers are overweight, have to use the lavatory, don’t speak your language or want to talk about their kids. The window seat is good because you can look out a spyglass porthole window, see the wing shaking and try to guess what state or country is below you. If you grow weary you can lean your head against the plane’s thin skin and feel it vibrate until it puts you to sleep.
For most of this flight I don’t even see Earth.
When you see a break in the clouds you get to look at water, fields, cities, freeways, runways. Occasionally a fantasy pops between my ears about landing the plane on clouds and taking a hike, but that whim goes quickly as it comes.
Only angels walk on clouds.
In the air is the most boring and least risky period of any trip.
In the air your only concern is landing safely.
On land, your concerns multiply exponentially.
Sunday morning the Albuquerque, New Mexico International Sun port is a grocery cart rolling down a hill.
Jets jockey to gates as ticket agents fire up their computers, troubleshoot, load passengers and baggage. This time through security there is a change that makes me wonder whether security has to be all or nothing to make the country secure, or whether exceptions make security Swiss cheese – dangerous and full of gaping holes.
I am given a TSA Precheck, randomly chosen.
This allows me to walk through a separate screening station where I don’t have to take off my belt or shoes. I still have to put my carry on bag, computer and pocket’s contents into gray plastic tubs on a conveyor belt that rolls them through inspection, then walk myself through an x ray tunnel extending my arms above me and clinching my hands above my head.
I don’t argue with security officers and proceed quickly through the gauntlet to have pre-flight coffee, check e mails, check my passport and connecting flights, and slip into yet another travel itinerary.
Exceptions to rules make us less secure, but gives us our humanity back.
I am, despite my hate of security inspections, working on my fourth travel ring for the forefinger of my right hand. This will be another Scotttrek’s journey outside the U.S. where it is still easier to enter illegally than leave legally.
It isn’t here yet but Halloween is galloping down the road and the headless horseman will soon be here.
New Mexico and Mexico have much in common this time of year as our town celebrates both Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos or ” Day of the Dead. ”
There is no border between the countries of Mexico and the United States and buses run regular from Juarez to Albuquerque. Everyone here knows border talk is just talk and the cultures of North, South and Central America are merging like shoppers at a great flea market.
Brother Mark, visiting for a few days from Denver, wants a photo in front of the Breaking Bad Bus that takes visitors on a tour of Albuquerque locations featured on the popular TV series of the same name.
Shopping, we find pinon incense for his wife Leigh in one of the shops off the main plaza. There are also flashy ceramic tiles, polished rocks, pinon coffee, chili socks, wooden Indians, serapes, Day of the Dead skulls and statues, turquoise jewelry. One shop has Breaking Bad posters on the wall, and, in another, Sheldon looks at the world with his Big Bang Theory.
When you say the words Halloween and Albuquerque, over and over again, you start to lose your mind.
On the way out of Old Town, I scratch my head to make sure it is still up there, and, thankfully,it is.
I’m on my way soon for Belize and Ecuador.
I don’t, like this headless horseman, want to go anywhere without having something between my two ears.
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There aren’t many rides on this Midway but those that are here give kids a thrill.
Precious children are flung through space, turned upside down, and hold on screaming for dear life.
This circus has an old time Ferris Wheel. There is the Hammer and the Swinger, the Fun Slide, Mad Hatter Tea Cups, a Spinning Wheel, and a Fun House. Families buy ride coupons at small booths and hand them to scruffy men or tall lean teenagers wearing John Deere ball caps. They wait in lines for a ride to finish and then are loaded into seats, baskets, or capsules like bullets into a chamber.
The amusement area at the Punkin Chunkin Festival is a maze of pipes, high voltage electric cables, gears, pulleys, wheels, wire cages and seats, sounds of straining engines, lights, chain link fences to keep people going the correct direction. Machinery is always looking to grab hands in the wrong places.
Parents take pictures of their offspring spinning through the air, rushing down a long slide sitting on burlap bags, spinning in tea cups, or locked inside a metal cage that keeps them from falling when they are upside down twenty feet in the air twisting like a dust devil.
In old days the circus had elephants, animal acts, bearded ladies, carnie games, clowns and dancing girls. The circus has shrunk, almost vanished.
You don’t need a tattooed lady when women in the crowd have tattoos of their own inked in public and private places.
Video games have become our new Ferris Wheel.
In the distance, ATV’s and pickup trucks wait for this year’s contest to begin, looking themselves like small tin cans hung on a fence post for target practice. They scurry around after each shot, mark where pumpkins come back to Earth and send back GPS co-ordinates that help calculate the distance of each shot.
On the firing line there is activity as half a dozen cannons are lined up and crews are checking mechanisms, counting pumpkins, and figuring how to beat competitors. The King and Queen of the Punkin’ Chunkin’ Festival has been crowned. Winners of raffles have been announced. Lunch is winding down and stragglers hurry to grandstands from full parking lots.
There are a few issues, but, by one in the afternoon, pumpkins are being launched, one after another. There is a siren to warn us of a firing, then, a few seconds later, an explosion.
Pumpkins shoot out of the barrels hot. If you are sitting just right, you can track the pumpkin as it leaves the barrel, follow it in its arc till it plummets into the field and splatters into harmless slices of pumpkin pie. No one gets injured, maimed or killed in this war. It is country fun for country folks.
The distances are announced over a simple public address system and the crowd cheers for a good shot.
The winning shot, this year, travels 3185 feet. Competition is fierce and people enjoy the annual event.
Trying to do it better is what keeps this country alive, even if it is chunkin’ punkin’s, spitting sunflower seeds, or tossing cow chips.
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