Working on my trucker's tan

Simple directions: Get on I-15 north and drive 5-6 hours. Turn east, half an hour till the freeway ends at the only stop light in Boulder City. Find a motel and a pub and I’ll see you in the morning at the Starbuck’s.

Road trip!

Armed with appetizing accessories in the passenger seat: Motown greatest hits, a bowl of watermelon, sliced raw red peppers, Lightening Hopkins and a Mountain Dew.

East L.A. is home to the golden “firme” oldies of the ‘60s where low rider meets the surf set and everyone just got along, mostly; when R&B was soulful and the drum machine hadn’t been invented. It’s also the birthplace of urban non-sequiturs like the faded oversized plastic palomino on a stick looming over a storage facility.

The trick is to get through Corona in fourth gear. Corona is a vortex in which everyone living in Riverside and L.A. counties are required to pass through twice daily. There are four traffic lanes in each direction and an inside shoulder wide enough there ought to be a commuter lane, but only serves to collect the unfortunate carnage of couches and appliances. Reminds me of that awesome book by Melissa Fay Green, Praying for Sheetrock; about a clandestine community living amongst the pines, surviving on freeway flotsam at a treacherous interstate exchange in Georgia while the local sheriff looked the other way.

 Just as I’m pondering this wide inside freeway space, said space is consumed by a temporary wall and a long field of fill dirt, dotted with earth-movers, not remotely moving. If these are my tax dollars at work, they’re taking an awfully long unauthorized cigarette break because at 3:45 p.m. they are abandonded.

Massive wide loads of what look like tubes for a nuclear plant weave across three of those lanes, with their little parasitic support vehicles buzzing at their heels. I weave through them up and over the Cajon Pass, pounded by winds at Lake Elsinore; the L.A. basin is now just a memory.

As oldies give way to freeway country music on the radio, a sign suggests Barstow.

Yet there is nothing taller than three feet living out here, for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Until an oasis of gas stations appears. The guys flipping advertising arrow signs at the edge of the offramp are from competing gas stations: Arco and Valero. It’s a price war. Only they have the same prices. Two young Russian couples hand roll harsh tobacco looking metro chic outside the Starbuck’s attached to the Arco station.

And in a few more miles: Billboards! Alien Beef Jerky! Now we’re talking. Not sure if this stuff is veggie approved, but we gotta take a peak. And Bun Boy Restaurant and Motel. I wonder how many tweekers it took to think that one up?

 

Farther still, a sign announcing the California Welcome Center. Amen’t I welcome yet? I started in San Diego.

You know you’re in Nevada when castles and blinking lights tower out of the sands like a strange (bad) dream out of a deep subconscious fear of cities. This of course leads to the biggest mirage of all: Las Vegas, at dusk, just enough light to see the necessary exit to high tail it out of there.

Hmmm, wonder how she got that shot?

El Rancho Boulder Motel is three blocks from the Boulder Brewing Company. Through the brewery windows, a hockey game glows on the t.v., behind chairs stacked on the tables, the place having closed a half hour earlier. And the bar next door doesn’t carry BBC beers. Hmmm, there’s a story here.

But the story I came for is water, and how quickly we’re sucking Lake Mead dry. So quickly they’re tunneling underneath it for three miles and putting a third intake pipe there because the other two are already compromised by our rate of consumption and also of evaporation.

I can commiserate about the evaporation. By noon I had gone through two liters of water and two quarts of Gatorade. The sweat is ripped right off your skin, leaving salt ripples. I could attract four-legged animals in a pasture with this skin. Things don’t melt here. Melting implies there’s moisture in the end product. Here it’s more like things are freeze-dried or turned to pillars of salt.

It’s a simple fix really, on the lake. A canvas pool cover. They could employ the local swim teams to pull it across the lake, leaving a few areas open for recreational boats. How hard could that be?

Doing the speed limit headed back south, the desert is mind numbing on this edge of the Mojave National Preserve. This is where the undead of one-hit wonders live freely in perpetuity on the airwaves. Can’t someone put a stake through Supertramp?

 At last, Yermo, and Peggy Sue’s 50s Diner. It must be a requirement that all roadside diners house lost dinosaurs and aliens.

Finally the temperature cools as I travel down through the Cajon Pass, anticipating the spread of humanity again, around that last mountain, to see: there it is… a basin of smog, like a hammer in your psyche. And Corona: second gear. Ah well, it is rush hour.

My skin feels the call of fresh water and a lathering of linden flower lotion. I even treat myself to a stop for fresh basil, escarole and feta cheese for a salad, and splurge $4.99 on a bottle of wine.

Ready for the next road trip! I promise, my next one, maybe. A video.

Mission to Milot

A turbo prop Saab 340 dropped into a patchwork of irregular green squares leading up to impossible mountains peaks. From out of the clouds we were delivered to the stifling humidity of Cap Haitien airport, a small building divided down the middle for the coming and going.

Slow moving mounds of unspeakable waste bobbed down the stream in an open trench on its way from somewhere to somewhere else, paralleling the crowded main road. On the outskirts of a diesel landscape, paved lanes gave way to dirt where funding ran out, and suddenly we were dodging burros and goats on approach to Milot, our hospital compound home for the coming week.

We danced together with mosquito netting until our dorm was sufficiently chaste.

The tap water is diseased, the Coke too syrupy, but the beer is good; the town a blend of tropical Caribbean colors and decayed French colonial domination.

Hopital Sacre Coeur is a maze of concrete hallways, shabby plastic mattresses that can be hosed off, and loose wires hanging. Armed guards protect the compound from aggressive vendors selling fried incarnations of bananas or house pets. Random used latex gloves commingle in corners beside carcasses of weeks-old meals.

We are introduced to a solemn but happy NICU unit with infants and mothers seeking a miracle, as two men carry a stretcher through the yard bearing a body wrapped in a bloody cloth.

There is a full moon over Haiti tonight.

 

Neither the driving rain on the tin roof, nor the anxiety over the next day’s mission kept the nursing students from a sound sleep. Such was the strategic scheduling of the day’s expedition: hiking to La Citadelle, a five-mile slog up cobblestone streets, into a beguiling mist some 3,000-feet above the town. These people living along the side of the mountain with no water or sanitation, watching us pass, would be our patients.

 

Morning rain flooded the cholera tent. Patients pushed their IVs and waste buckets to the patio shelter. Inside the neighboring canvas army tent, students Stacey Price, RN, and Amanda O’Keefe were trying to find a vein in a severely dehydrated young girl while a man my age gasped for breath through an oxygen tube on the next bed, and an immaculately dressed young woman with an innocent smile sat patiently in a wheelchair, leaning over her swollen leg, deformed by filiariasis, the open sores dripping onto the floor.

Relatives propped their shoulders against the opening of the heavy canvas tent, sometimes collecting a bed pan from their loved one, emptying its contents into the banana leaves just outside the tent. When the woman with heart failure and a swollen belly and legs from the anemia was moved to the hospital and her urine-soaked sheet stripped from the bed, it was the last sheet. 10:30 a.m.

No amputation for the man with gangrene today. Maybe tomorrow.

Nurses took turns holding the month-old preemie abandoned by its mother. Two students instructed new mothers in proper breast-feeding: the 17-year-old with twins sat on the floor and draped her upper body across the bed. The other, in a pale pink silk nightie, stared straight ahead as her two-day old wailed behind her. Racked with pain from her C-section she had assumed she had no milk to give him. Propping the baby on a pillow below her breasts, her son made up for meals missed. That evening, before dinner, we watched a C-section in an immaculate operating room, performed by a well-equipped team of Haitian doctors and nurses moving in seemless waltz to deliver an 8-pound baby boy named Carwyn.

It was not the rain on the roof but the voodoo drums that kept us awake past midnight.

These are nurses: before filing over to a breakfast of local grapefruit and French toast (go figure), all beds were neatly made, with mosquito netting taut at the corners. Discussing the despair over the lack of basic medical supplies, a handful of students proposed coming back to run a black market in masks, gloves, gauze and Tylenol.

They are ready for the real world.

My new best friends are the surgeon from Guinea Bissau who came to assist Haiti after the earthquake, and stayed on. He speaks perfect Spanish. And the female doctor from Cuba. Then there's the medical stenographer from Calgary.

Milot is a vortex for the medically gifted, wanting to help. But no one is immune. The radiology team from Boston is down for the count.

It is a medical question here when one asks whether you are (able to) eat rice and beans for lunch.

Motionless children in their Sunday dresses try to smile through exhausted dark eyes lying prone in their cholera beds: a wooden plank with a hole cut in the middle; a plastic bucket strategically positioned underneath.

 The ladies seated beside the tightly-spaced beds on the second floor are knowing me now, from the day before, when I was kind, wordlessly acknowledging their efforts to care for a loved one in the hopeless ward. Today they welcomed me where they were cooking and washing, because I am a woman, and women are collaboratively nurturing. It was non-verbal; universal, sweet.

 But some women can be negligent. My African doctor pulled no punches berating the mother of a 2-year-old with malnourished, sunken eyes and the largest stomach tumor he'd ever seen. The child looked 80-years-old. He had shown signs of a tumor in November, yet she is only now seeking help. He said he hadn't seen anything like this since Africa. The ignorance of some parents, he said, is killing defenseless children.

  The security guard has the rum. $12 for the three star, $14 for the five star. We're all laughing under the full moon, to forget some of what we've seen. But as I turned off the light, peeling back the curtain onto the courtyard, I watched our doctors holding down one of the compound dogs, putting an end to his wicked ways. In the morning I wrote:

They killed the dogs last night.

Around midnight.

They caught Quattro on the porch, weaving through the knees

At the poker table,

seeking a morsel or a scratch behind the ears.

They did it in the courtyard outside the kitchen door

 these doctors in scrubs

With their needles, arms crossed, sure their methods were sound.

Nurses and students came to their doors, some walked circles crying

Around the pack of doctors preying on the compound mascot

As he wailed a primordial plea for mortality.

BigLove and MamaTits they caught down the road.

But we still heard it. Doors slammed, muffled tears and quick conversations

Floated over the walls and wafted towards the waning moon.

They’d killed chickens. Attacked a Haitian pediatric nurse walking alone.

The conversation was short.

If the Haitians think we value the dogs more than we value them, what’s to be done?

Sister Anne said the big black one was clever. They had to entice it with food.

It was hard on everyone in the end, she said in her lyrical Irish way, very hard.

It’s what she said yesterday morning

Bringing food to a skeletal woman in the wound care ward

 whose family had abandoned her.

In the morning before dawn

I stepped cautiously across the killing floor to fill my water bottle

On the porch where a stethoscope hung from the iron window grate.

Jason Malig forgot how small the beds are. He’d rolled over in his sleep and woke to find himself suspended in air, arms outstretched, caught like a fly in his mosquito net. The streets were quieter this day, the second anniversary of the earthquake that brought hundreds of wounded and volunteer doctors to this rural town of 25,000 souls. All that remains are the six long canvas army tents that still serve as spill over clinics and a mural. The only marking of the memory is a four day weekend for schools and the hospital clinic.

 The cholera epidemic was imported by visiting U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal carrying a Bangladeshi strain of the disease in October 2010. Haitians are now wary of all U.N. workers, who travel in white jeeps, dressed in fatigues carrying weapons.

  In the women’s wound care ward, Sister Anne brought juice, fruit and bread to the emaciated young woman with necrotizing fasciitis, a fungus that is eating away at the remaining skin on her stomach and thighs. 

Dr. Sisse was draining a massive leg infection into a bucket, cutting gangrene from a woman’s big toe, taking vital signs from a woman with breast cancer so severe it had consumed her nipple from the inside out.

Haitians often seek care from a local herb or voodoo doctor before coming to the hospital. One voodoo doctor poured oil over a woman’s belly during a troubled labor, then set her on fire to release the demons. The baby was saved but the mother could not hold him for eight months. A man died from a root doctor’s treatment for hiccups. By the time doctors at Hopital Sacre Coeur see people, it might be too late to do more than amputate a dead limb or simply house the patient till they die.

We were all summoned to the hospital. A distraught father was wringing his hands over his son, badly burned Madelin Innocent, 4. Thin gauze covered his little body, he was in shock.

A pot of boiling water fell on him the night before, but the tap-taps (truck taxis) had stopped running, so the family had to wait until morning to bring him in. The boy’s clothing had fused into his skin in places.

  In a triage of international languages, the team administered a vile of valuable morphine, and Malig, the former combat medic, hummed softly to the boy as Dr. Sisse, three students, two nurses set to work scrubbing and debriding the burned skin, then anointed the wound with Silvadene cream, a topical treatment no longer used in the U.S.

That evening Yniole Charles, 39, gave birth to her third child. An eight-pound girl entered the world with barely a moan from her mother. She was caught by veteran Haitian nurse Tanya Paul and two students. The baby’s father was anxiously waiting in the maternity ward and proudly shook everyone’s hand when he saw his wife and daughter gingerly tucked into bed.

  “Bet you never thought you’d be off-roading in an ambulance,” someone said as the entire group bounced along the rutted road to the village of Thibeaut. A hospital outreach worker with a megaphone alerted the community on Wednesday that a medical team would be at the church on Friday. And there they were: 80 faces from knee high to stooped over, dressed in their very best, singing a hymn in Creole by way of welcome.

  All of us wanted to meet Jean Lomsina, 102. She had never seen a doctor and walked to the church with her cousin, Cleanyanta Lendor, a sprightly 89. “She’s obviously doing something right,” said student Derrick Duarte. “Her blood pressure is better than mine.”

The team had only a few daylight hours left that afternoon to barter on the street and poke their heads into the cemetery where the gate was finally unlocked. A groundskeeper, if one can say the grounds are kept, reached into one of the caskets dug up and deposited above ground for lack of payment, and pulled out the skull, hair and all. Goats pranced and did what goats do best among the once stately grave markers.

  One of the vendors handed us a book that translated English into French and Creole. Lesson 13 was titled: “Jean is looking for work. Today is not Jean’s lucky day.” Fortunately, Jean got lucky in lesson 14. The average annual income in Haiti is $400.

  Just as we returned to the compound gates, a funeral passed solemnly by, towards the cemetery.

That night and throughout the next day's 17 hours of travel home to San Diego, the talk was of chai lattes and curling irons, football and drinking water from the tap.

 

Where the mind goes

I know there will be a sunrise somewhere above this marine layer when it’s time for such things.

  For now I walk in my secret bubble: 100 feet of visible space on a steep dirt trail leading up through dusty green sage brush. I pause to tighten my laces, one foot up on a metal railing that has no other obvious purpose for being here. A rustling like sheets of sandpaper colliding precedes the life form that has suddenly penetrated my bubble: a woman wrapped in an inflated silver space blanket floats down the trail towards me like a misplaced pan of jiffy-pop popcorn transported through space atop black spandex leggings and hiking boots.

 Her shoes shuffle. I’m thinking she must be tired, returning from a pre-dawn journey to her space ship parked on a side street. But I watch in silence as she taps the pole where my foot still resides, turns and walks back up the path to join another woman barely visible just outside the gray mist. As I start up the same trail, passing this duo, the companion, dressed in red and black horizontal stripes, adjusts her ear buds, allowing muffled accordion music to escape.

My lungs dig deep for extra oxygen as I hurry to put them behind me, return them to the outskirts of the bubble. My mind surges forward to focus on the steepening slope before me. I have a friend who rides a bike up this hill, I remind myself, urging my legs to compensate while I coax my lungs to rise to the occasion.

  This same marine layer sensory isolation bubble wraps itself around me at dawn the next morning in the surf zone. It is the first day of a much-anticipated swell radiating from a New Zealand storm. Beyond the cool fog I can hear the waves break at the point, well out of sight. But I can faintly make out a ghostly surge throwing itself against the outer wall of the caves, scattering cliff-dwelling cormorants. Then the eery silence as I wait for the remnants to reach the sand bars beneath me at the shoreline.

  Back at the center, my center, in this isolated moment, the waves are perfect: steep peaks with enough power behind them one stroke sets me on the face for long, carving rides. Here on the edge of one million urban residents, I share this space in time with three adult leopard sharks. What came before and what has not yet arrived are outside the marine layer, outside our perfect center, outside this moment. When we are completely present, we are reminded of what truly matters. I may be here a minute, maybe an hour; it could be all day. But the gift of this perfect breath in rhythm with this ocean, and with the Earth the previous day, I will carry for a lifetime.

It is still with me the next morning: plunging on my bicycle down a hill that I am not sure I can ride back up. That same sensory cocoon is training my focus on the flotsam and jetsam in the bike lane just ahead of me. Wherever my mind might wander outside this cool grey cloak, outside this moment, it has learned to find its way back home again.

MPW magic

Clinton Missouri was slammed by a tornado of anxious young documentary photographers last week. Farms, schools, care facilities, even the doughnut shop were impacted by the assault of image hungry photographers searching for moments in a haystack. Randy Cox was as pretty as a picture, as always.

Every now and then we faculty and crew were allowed outside for a glimpse of the Missouri sky. Kim Komenich and Barbara Davidson threw gang signs, while Jim Curley and Craig Walker waited for beers.

Matt was on the guitar, while Ben monitored critiques via bicycle.

 And the townsfolk that came to the final show got the chance to greet old friends. And when we pulled up stakes, the cafes and bars got back to normal. At least now they have something new to talk about.

And the late night tongue lashings from faculty hasn't left any permanent scars.... we hope.

Midlife Crisis

A midlife crisis usually comes with a V-8 engine or too much makeup and a short skirt. Mine, if indeed this is midlife, and if indeed that constitutes a crisis of some magnitude, is topped with snow and requires sleeping in tents at high elevations.

 The volcanic peaks of Mts. Kilimanjaro and Whitney have too many domestic chores on their respective geological plates to venture forth and visit each other’s magnificent landscapes.  Children of the same Mother, their values were shaped with the same sense of responsibility to nurture the juvenile ecosystems that depend on them. Whitney has spent millennia cultivating a handsome granite profile to attract mature winter storms to nourish the giant sequoia forests below.  Kilimanjaro holds glaciers gently under the folds of her volcanic skirts so they won’t  melt too quickly under a punishing sun.

To hike both mountains within five months was not a crisis averted, but a feast of gifts bestowed by friends who knew having a sarcastic, energetic, vegetarian photographer along would provide a necessary comic relief.

For a native Californian, Whitney is a rite of passage. Yet I am slow in following so many predictable paths. And therefore the super highway of hikers flowing like ants hauling a spilled load of cracker jacks up and down the tallest mountain in the U.S. smothered any sense of solitude. No matter. The perfect remedy came in following behind a group of three hikers just leaving the portal. Older than myself (imagine!), I overheard one cheerfully proclaim, “I don’t need to go where no man has gone before, just where I have never gone before.” Smile.

Water from the previous week’s flash floods and thunderstorms left uprooted pines scattered across the landscape at lower elevations. Lone Pine Lake was an angry, murky child refusing to mirror the marvelous granite arms reaching into her ponds. Pines twisted and exposed, their bark torn away by forgotten fires, glowed gold and amber against the otherwise green landscape. Open meadows with nothing taller than the stalks of Indian Paintbrush wildflowers rimmed streams born from under shelves of snow and ice.

Hikers whispered as we passed, “she has an ice axe,” and I smiled to myself, letting them believe I knew the first thing about ice climbing. I had read enough to attempt to self-arrest if there was a sheet of ice along the ridge, but that’s it.

We tucked ourselves behind rock ledges against the wind at Trail Camp, Crystal and I read the ingredients of our freeze dried meals. Mine had twice the calories, but I was loathe to leave any uneaten because there was so little room in our bear canister.  We counted the minutes after sunset, forcing ourselves to stay up till at least 8:30 before retiring to our tents.

Awake at 1:30 a.m. I crawled out of my warm bag to stare at the Milky Way spread like magic dust across the sky just above the jagged peaks leading to Whitney. Against a blackened wall of rock, the tiny dots of headlamps bobbed back and forth on the switchbacks, striding for the summit before dawn. I fell back asleep watching for a promised meteor shower, waking just as a red glow seeped over the eastern horizon.

Frank the jackrabbit led the way over patches of ice on the rocky trail, daring me to count the switchbacks. We passed weary hikers on their descent, and at the ridge that divides the Sierras, Trail Crest, hikers from all directions paused in reverence.

The jigsaw stack of rocks piled precariously before us separating Sequoia to the west from the Whitney Zone on the east defied the strong winds leaping out of the cold western shadows forcing us to reach for windbreakers and gloves. This trail was over 100 years old, yet still just wide enough for one person before dropping into a catastrophe. How was this possible: to be walking this amazing razorback ridge with these views? How was it possible I’d never been here before? Did everyone see it the same way? Even these tourists with no day pack or sweater?

It wasn’t until after the last sheet of snow, halfway up the final switchbacks that I felt the dizzying effects of altitude. Too close to the top to stop, I willed away the creeping headache and buzzing in my ears and we signed our names to the register beside the stone hut. I signed for my brother who was here 30 years ago. Girls weren’t invited on such trips back then. They certainly didn’t carry ice axes.

If Frank is a jackrabbit, I am a certified mountain goat. Back at Trail Camp, packing our gear for the trek down to Outpost Camp, the ridges above now looked surreal. I would like to have stayed longer. Maybe I will be back.

  The perfume of pine gave way to incense cedar as Mirror Lake came into view. Strange birds like round pheasants crawled through the thorn bushes at Outpost Camp and a ghost woman paced back and forth through camp until dark when two hikers returned to the tent she circled most often. A fury of water rushed down the hillside at the edge of camp, carrying our dreams down river with the last light of day.

Pancakes the size of wagon wheels waited for us at the Portal Café. But we sensibly feasted on buttery hash browns, toast; a normal breakfast, before heading back to Lone Pine where people are either about to climb, have just come down from Whitney, or came just to stare. Everyone has a story about that majestic granite profile, holding steady through eons of harsh snows, blistering sun and in between. This was mine. No crisis, just another wonderful journey with friends.