A Little Does a Lot

Fred in Rwanda

Each year at this time, Jo and I reach out to help one person who is looking to improve their lot in life. We work through Kiva, a group of people that acts as a go-between to locate and vet people all around the world who need just a little help to get their business up and running.

Up until this year, we have made it a policy to help women because of our experience around the world. The safest loan recipients seem to be women because they invariably will move heaven and earth to meet their commitment to pay back their loans. Men seem to give in to hopelessness more quickly and throw in the towel earlier.

But this year, we decided to take a chance with Fred of Nyagatare, Rwanda because, as luck would have it, we’d just watched a television program last Sunday morning which told about a new technology that has sprouted in Africa where people are able to transfer money instantly and safely by using their cellphones. And Fred is on the frontline using the technology.

Here is Fred’s story via Kiva:

Fred is an enthusiastic entrepreneur who wants to thrive by growing his business. His company is a mobile servicing company that offers mobile retail services to its clients. These services include money transfer, withdrawing and depositing. In addition to that, the company deals in airtime credits, electricity voucher selling and mobile technical support services.

Fred's business is located in rural Northeast Rwanda near the Uganda border. His regular clients are people from his village, but he also does a significant portion of his transactions from people crossing the border by bus. Being able to transfer money, even small amounts, from mobile phone to mobile phone is a revolutionary resource in rural areas. Often when people move to the city for better jobs and economic opportunities, they want to send money back to their families in the rural villages. Through Fred's business, he is creating an opportunity for people in the villages to receive money without having to take long bus rides or relying on other people to deliver cash.

Fred is doing very well in business. He is well-known in the community as a highly motivated entrepreneur and a reliable person. However, he is not meeting all his clients’ demand. With working capital of about $4,000 USD, Fred will be able to triple his business to meet the growing demand for his services.

African Entrepreneur Collective has been working with Fred for about six months, and he has continued to be motivated and inspiring. AEC previously gave Fred a small loan, which he paid off always on time. AEC is thrilled to help Fred with his growth plans, enabling him to support many more people in his community. Fred is very successful and has always fulfilled his payment obligations, and this time will not be different.

Jo and I, in the past, have given small loans to people like Yun for her retail business in Cambodia, Sokhoeun for construction in Cambodia, Bou and her group of farmers in Cambodia, Le for her tailoring business in Vietnam, as well as March for her vehicle in Cambodia. All these women have paid back 100 per cent of the loans they were given and all report their lives have improved in dramatic ways because of the loans.

What we like most is that our donation get used and reused many time over as these entrepreneurs pay it back and the money recycles so it can be re-loaned to another person.

If you like this idea, click on www.kiva.org

Fred lives in Nyagatare, Rwanda  in the northern corner of the country.

A Lesson for All of Us

A scene from the movie "Spotlight" in which editors and reporters struggle to get their arms around the pedophile priest story in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston.

We’ve just returned from watching the new movie, “Spotlight”, which put me in mind of the “must-see” movie I carried across the world for more than a decade while I was working as a trainer/mentor of journalists in countries as diverse at Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan, India, Malaysia, Pakistan and Namibia in Africa.

Back in the day, the story was “All the President’s Men,” about Woodward and Bernstein’s dogged reporting saga that brought down Richard Nixon. I’d have a VHS copy of the film in my briefcase and, when the time was right, I’d produce it for the instruction and entertainment of the journalists I worked with.

“Spotlight” is the new go-to movie for instruction and inspiration for tomorrow’s journalists. What a spectacular accounting of dogged journalism that uncovered the horror of twisted priests in the Boston archdiocese who ruined the lives of countless young men and women. And, as the story unfolds, you come to understand the complexity of the cover-up by the Catholic Church, as well as the difficulties faced by the team of Catholic reporters on The Boston Globe as they struggled to get their minds around the enormity of the crimes.

Back in the day, I would arrange a social evening at each of my stop-overs as I hopped around the globe, working with journalists. I’d provide the beer or soft drinks and chips and we’d watch the movie about all the president’s men.

 I’d pause the movie maybe 20 times so we could dissect the action, the ethical questions, the questions that resulted in ever-more questions, the earning of trust between sources and the reporters, the earning of trust between the reporters and their editors, the endless pressure and abuse that emanated from the highest echelons of the government.  All of that – and more – are repeated and enriched in the saga of “Spotlight”.

And it also highlights – for me, at least – how expensive it is to pay for this kind of in-depth journalism in an era of sinking-and-drowning newspapers. But our country will be the poorer if these kinds of long-term investigative reports are trimmed from the budgets of dying newspapers.

Marking an Anniversary

I wrote the following story at the request of the managing editor of The Namibian, a gutsy daily newspaper in the African country of Namibia. They were preparing to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the newspaper. 

Namibia is a country that sits on the southwest of Africa, between South Africa and Angola. There are 2.2 million people in this sandy, desert-filled country. The newspaper had invited me to travel there to work as a trainer/mentor. This was my first of three visits between 2001 and 2007. I spent a total of 10 months in country. Jo accompanied me for most of the months.

I sat with Oswald Shivute, The Namibian’s reporter in the north of the country, in his little tin shack that was called an office and I soon forgot my troubles in the 115 degree heat of his office. He took pains to give me a history lesson about the tribal situation in the North. The phone rang on his desk and he received a tip that the mortuary at the state hospital in Oshakati was full to overflowing with dead bodies.

He told me about this and said he would call the hospital to see if he could confirm this story. He talked with a woman at the hospital whom he called "sister" and she said there was "no problem." So he reported all of this to me. I suggested that we might want to get in my car and drive over to the mortuary to confirm there truly was no problem.

The scene is seared in my mind. We arrived at the mortuary. Oswald, in true Oshivambo fashion stood outside, knocking on the door. He called out three times, "Is everyone well within?" in Oshivambo. He explained this is tradition. I explained that we were at a mortuary and everyone inside was most surely dead. He thought this to be quite funny. 

We entered and came to the office where a tall man sat at a tall desk, looking like something out of a Dickens novel. He was writing in the book of the dead the names of the latest nine dead people. When he finished, he greeted Oswald and apologized for not leaving his book of death until the task was done.

I was introduced and they chatted in Oshivambo about the problem. Problem? Oh, yes. There certainly was a problem, the man said. He was the man who had to deal with it, not the sister in charge of the hospital. He told us he was stacking dead people like cord wood in his coolers.

Now my interest was at its peak. I asked if it would be possible to see the stacked dead. "Oh, no. I could lose my job," he said. I apologized and said we would never want that to happen. Then, he looked up to the ceiling, puzzling out a course of action. He wanted the story to be told. He wanted us to tell his story, his struggle, and his pain.

"If you said you came to the mortuary with the family of a dead person and you saw the dead when they went to retrieve the body, I could let you see this," he said with a sly smile.

Oswald and I discussed the ethics of this white lie. We decided it was okay so the man eagerly called his assistant and we entered the cold storage chamber. There, he swung open door after door. We saw and photographed the stacked dead. 

A man was on one tray, pushed in feet first. A woman lay on top of him, pushed in head first. It would be inappropriate to both have them head to head, he said.

One tray carried three children, with an infant placed under the tray. It was an astonishing sight. We photographed the dead and asked the mortuary manager why it was not possible for these people to be buried. He explained that the government no longer permitted poor people to come for their dead relatives with a blanket in which they could wrap them. They must now bring a coffin. Coffins are too expensive for most people, so the dead have piled up for six months. Now the mortuary can handle no more dead, he said.

We left the house of the dead with a great story, one which became the lead story, with pictures, in the next day's Namibian. It also became the talk of the nation on radio and eventually made it to the floor of Parliament where the ruling party was criticized for this state of affairs. The solution came about two weeks later when a mass grave was dug and the assembled dead were disposed of.

Journey's End

Lobster at the end of the trail. Made the whole journey worth it when we found these beauties for $5.99 a pound in New Hampshire.

We’re back!

Nine thousand, two hundred and five miles after we left Honeymoon Island State Park on the west coast of Florida, we have closed the circle and have returned to central Florida.

The first question I wanted to answer (for myself) related to the cost of our installation of the solar panels on the roof of our rig. Was it worth the expense? Short answer: An unqualified Yes. We spent $2,610 on the solar equipment - a 960-watt array of four solar panels.  So we had to live off the solar panels by not parking overnight in paid campgrounds. That’s fairly hard to accomplish in the eastern part of the U.S. (unless you stay in Walmart parking lots).  But it was a breeze in the West. Out there, there are millions of acres of Bureau of Land Management tracts and much of it is available to the public for free camping. Of course, you have to know which land is BLM land and which is privately owned.

But that's where our handy-dandy 840-page electronic book, Days End, came in. This remarkable document, laboriously researched and prepared by dedicated volunteers from Escapees.com, tells you every latitude and longitude for every free camping spot in all of North America. It was our most valuable possession on this trip and the $10 cost paid for itself over and over.

We were on the road five months and four days. And we paid for campgrounds on 59 nights. Cost: $1,229.19 at an average of $20.83 per night.

That leaves a whopping 93 nights where we parked free. To be fair, some of those nights were in the front and side yards at the homes of our daughters Lynn and Stephanie in Kent, Connecticut, and Colchester, Vermont. Nonetheless, our solar array provided us with the self-sufficiency and blessings of power while living under the sun. And it worked even on the cloudy days. As a result, it’s clear to me that the cost of the system has been paid for by the boon-docking camping we have done along the way. From this day forth, every night we boondock adds to the savings. Hard to beat that for cost efficiency and payback.

Everyone wants to know about mileage, it seems. Considering the wide variety of terrain, and the weight of our rig (32,000 pounds) I'm pretty happy with our mileage. We achieved 9.06 miles per gallon. In the flat lands, we averaged 9.8 miles per gallon. When I consider the momentous mountains we crawled over, sometimes managing to achieve only 28 miles per hour as we climbed and climbed, I'm actually quite surprised that we got 9.06 mpg.

Repairs along the route are a sad and painful story, however. They far exceeded any budgeted amount we had set aside. Our repair bill exceeded $8,940. Half of that came from an unscrupulous shyster repair shop in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where we were relieved of $4,300 for repairs that were poorly performed and which resulted in a near-catastrophe 92 miles after we left his repair shop. Because his mechanics had improperly installed a new fuel pump, the installation failed spectacularly when we drove across Wyoming. This resulted in an O-ring disintegrating and 19 quarts of engine oil sprayed out of our engine, coating the rear of our motorhome, as well as the Honda Fit we tow behind the rig. We were very fortunate that the engine did not seize up from lack of oil. Because of the good work of an emergency repairman who replaced three damaged O rings, we were on the road the next morning, licking our wounds.

And the final outrage came when the original repair shop owner refused to compensate us for the repairs we required. He actually had the unmitigated nerve to tell me his original $4,300 repair bill was grossly inaccurate and he would only pay my new $490 bill if I would kindly send him a check for an additional $3,000 because his staff had under billed me.

Add to this horror story, the blowout of a front tire, $868 to replace it, on the highway. Then our bank of batteries died while we were camping in the wilderness and that came close to $1,000 for replacements. And, finally, we had scheduled maintenance performed that came in at $1,820. So this was a very expensive part of our journey.

But, in the final analysis, this trip was not about the dollars and cents. It was a voyage of exploration and discovery. The proud Navajo and Hopi people, the soaring majesty of our mountainous west, the mammoths discovered in the swamps at Waco, Texas, the dinosaur bones embedded in the mountains that used to be at sea level two or three million years ago in Colorado. We’ll treasure the memories and photographs of standing 272 feet below sea level in Death Valley, or driving ever-upward through a mountain pass, 9,144 feet high, with sleet and snow all around us. Scary…but oh so rewarding when the crisis is over and you slip down the mountain into the verdant valley below.

Jo rests at the Cone mansion in the mountains of North Carolina while a storm rolls in from the north.

We’ve enjoyed having our friends participate in much of this ride and hope you gained some worthwhile insights into the people and places along the way.

A Modern-Day Alchemist

Our colorful jar of flower water.

She’s a woman in her mid-sixties, quiet, gentle and non-assuming. She’s Jo’s second cousin whom we have not seen since we were 23 years old.

Linda Tisdale is among the most interesting people we have met on our journey through life and re-connecting with her is a great treat. She is an herbalist, living on 85 acres in the Maine woods in the town of Dexter.

She has built a business during the past 20 years by foraging on her property for leaves, roots and berries. And she has learned how these natural plants interact with our bodies. Linda bought Jo’s father’s camp in the Maine woods and then added other acreage over the years.

We visited with her two times this week and found this delightful and soft-spoken woman to be the genuine article. Jo noted that her grandfather, O.M. Robinson, was in exactly same business – he was a patent medicine salesman at the turn of the 20^th century.

We sat on the terrace at Linda’s home in the woods, drinking flower water from a half-gallon jar. On the jar’s label were the ingredients: Lavender, yarrow, echinacea, rose, self-heal, hearts ease pansy, calendula, black-eyed susan, lady’s mantle, and shasta daisy. All these flowers floated in the water and Linda used a strainer as she poured from the jar into our glasses. The water was a refreshing and complex mixture of soft sweetness with delightful aromas from the blossoms.

She and her partner Carol have a labradoodle that’s just a puppy who sprang with unbridled joy around the garden, then raced to our side and nuzzled, begging to be stroked and petted.

Linda spends her days collecting roots, bulbs and leaves, arranging them in drying racks and then creating tinctures and elixirs by mixing them together and adding water and/or grain alcohol.

These are some of the natural remedies she has concocted for a wide range of conditions:

Anti-Inflamatory: contains turmeric root, ginger root, white willow bark, rosemary and sacred basil.

Clear Mind – memory-enhancing formula: ginko leaf, tumeric root, gotu kola, sacred basil and rosemary.

Heart Circulation Tonic: Strengthens the heart and improves venous circulation. Contains hawthorn berry, ginko leaf, linden flower, lemon balm and prickly ash bark.

Menopause Support: Eases menopausal transition, lessens intensity of hormone-related discomforts and hot flashes, night sweats, irregular cycles, irratibility, anxiety. Contains dandelion root, vitex berry, ashwandha root, black cohosh root, nettle leaf, motherwort and lady’s mantle.

And on and on it goes. She has created a prostate tonic, calm nerves tonic, fever and flu relief and sinus support. Urinary tract problems and even periodontal support can be found in her formulary.

She wants to keep her business small so she doesn’t even have a web page. She has a phone number and an email address (207-924-5172; alchemilla.dexter@gmail.com). Her business is called Alchemilla. 

When she is unable to find the specific root, or plant on her home acreage she says she will buy from organic sources as far away as Oregon.

Linda Tisdale chats with Jo in her workshop. Her bottles are stored at the right of picture. Drying racks for plants hang between the rafters above our heads.

Checking the Tea Leaves

The older I get, the more I like to dabble in the extraordinary variety of tea. It’s a health thing, because I can drink tea without sugar. Not so with coffee. So I have burrowed into the joys of tea.

I’ve also found that it’s best to buy my tea in China. Now, I’m not a big fan of things Chinese because of the endless evidence of minimal quality control, as well as unethical behavior. But they definitely do know something about tea.  And Ali Express is the place to find a million varieties of tea – at every price point.

When we were in Sitka, Alaska, in 2010, we discovered Pu-ehr Tea. It’s strong and fermented. The beauty of Pu-ehr is it’s possible to use and re-use the same tea leaves up to five times in a day. This considerably reduces the cost of your cup of tea, without affecting your enjoyment. It also appeals to my Scottish sense of thrift. But Pu-ehr tends to be quite a strong flavor and I sometimes tire of it. So I’ve moved my affections over to Li-Shan Tea. This is a spectacular tea that comes in five levels of quality. And you get what you pay for.

But I digress. Jo and I wandered into Teavana, a tea-specializing shop in Burlington. There we met a young man behind the counter who definitely was a throw-back to the hippy culture of the 1970s. He wore a straw hat and had numerous tattoos. But he was very friendly and he offered us samples of teas. I said I wouldn’t mind trying the Oprah-endorsed ice tea and he quickly tried to steer me away from that. “It’s the one tea in the store that I wouldn’t recommend,” he said.

So I asked him about his Pu-ehr Tea and he said, “Oh, sure. We have many pure teas.”  No, I said, not pure…but Pu-ehr from China. It was as though I had pressed a secret button in his brain. “Ah, yes. You have come to the right place,” he said. He then went to his private locker and withdrew four paper-wrapped packages. “This must be your private stash,” I remarked. He laughed and said “We carry only one Pu-ehr Tea in the store. But this is my private collection.” He then proceeded to explain the fine qualities of each package. While he rhapsodized on, I sniffed his different wares and asked him where he gets it. He, too, orders directly from China. In addition, he walks a couple of blocks to the Dobra tea house on Church Street, Burlington. And they have eight different versions of Pu-ehr teas.

Matcha Tea

He then drew us into the Matcha teas from Japan. These are more like green tea powder which is mixed with a bamboo whisk and is infused at a relatively low temperature. He produced a sample of Matcha for us and I told him it didn’t really speak to me. In addition, I steer wide of green things and this was effectively green dishwater to my palate.

We left his store, thanking him for his interest in teas and congratulating him of his passion. We also rejoiced that up here in the northern reaches of Vermont, we were able to meet someone who is so passionate about the simple – and complex – mysteries of tea.

Is This Character-Building?

The journey begins. We get towed from the Walmart parking lot.

I know that everyone likes a disaster story. How about a double-disaster story? Even better. Well, friends, that’s the story I bring to you this day.

Let me start at the first sign of trouble. That occurred last Saturday morning. We’d just driven our motorhome over the mountains of northeast Utah, into the southwest corner of Wyoming. A beautiful drive. But things didn’t sound right when we drove off the highway to get some groceries at Walmart in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

I stopped at a light and noticed the rig was searching for fuel. It was heaving and chugging, something we’d never ever experienced before. We knew there was trouble lurking in the heart of the beast and determined to get parked on the outer perimeter of the Walmart parking lot. After I shut off the engine, I thought I should try to re-start it. Nothing. It cranked and cranked. But there was no sense the diesel fuel would ignite.

My heart was racing as my mind went through all the permutations that might cause this condition. I had plenty of fuel in the tank. I thought it was possible the fuel filter was clogged. I decided to call our roadside support system. They promised to send a mechanic as quickly as possible. He showed up four hours later and changed my fuel filter. That didn’t solve anything. The mechanic said he needed to get his computer so he could plug into the engine to diagnose what was happening. Unfortunately, he hadn’t brought it with him. He left with promises to return in a couple of hours. He called after two hours and said he wouldn’t make it back until the following morning.

When he showed up on Sunday, it took about 10 minutes for his computer to issue a diagnose that the engine would not start because an oil pressure sensor on the fuel pump sensed there was something critically wrong with the fuel system. (Please remember this piece of information. It will come into play in another week.) He said the motorhome would have to be towed to a repair shop where something so serious could be handled.

Not going to happen on a Sunday, of course! I called back my roadside assistance company to relay the news and to ask that they organize a tow truck for me. They took eight hours to get back to me – and that was after I made three phone calls to them, asking if I had been forgotten.

Monday at noon, however, a tow truck arrived on the scene and, after two hours of preparation, including the disassembling of the drive shaft so the rear wheels could rotate freely, we were on our way to the authorized Caterpillar engine dealer in town.

When we got there, we were told no one could look at the motor until Wednesday. We asked if we could live aboard in the parking lot. The owner said we were welcome. We would not be able to live aboard the rig once it was pulled inside the shop, however.

We set up house on a hill overlooking the town. I checked our propane tank and noticed that we were between a quarter full and empty. We knew we needed to get a refill but, of course, we were unable to drive to a propane filling station. We drove the car over and were told the company had a policy that forbids using their trucks to fill motorhome propane tanks.

Now I began to whimper and whine about how I would make a note of that on the letter that I planned to write for the sheriff to find when he opened up our motorhome and found two old people who had frozen to death. My dry humor seemed to work and the young woman asked her boss if there was a way we could have fuel delivered to our home which was about 200 yards away. The boss was kind and said she would make an exception for us. She could not figure out, however, how to bill us because they had no mechanism for billing a mobile customer.

We had a full propane tank within the hour. And the women were still trying to figure out how to bill me two hours later. I came up with the simple solution of asking them how much the propane was. They said it would amount to $57.68. I handed the cash to them and said they could find a place to put it.

Tuesday afternoon, we were visited by the in-house tow driver. He wanted to move our rig inside the building a day early. We would have to pack up and move to a motel. We scrambled onto the internet and found a relatively cheap motel that was 10 minutes away. We gathered up the two cats, the litter box, food, our clothes and headed out.

Wednesday morning dawned bleak, with hail and sleet. We rounded up the cats in their cages and, after breakfast, arrived at the repair shop to find nothing had been done on our rig. The boss told me a commercial trucker had come in on an emergency and they take precedence over motorhome retirees.

By Wednesday night, however, he had plugged in the computer and determined our high pressure fuel and oil pump was bad. This meant, he said, that pieces of metal from the disintegrating pump most likely had entered the fuel rail and we should plan on replacing all six injectors. He had neither the pump nor the injectors in-house and would have to ship them in overnight from as far away as Lansing, Michigan. Do it, I told him.

We returned to our motel and asked to stay another night. The cats were not amused.

Thursday came and went and we were derailed again by a commercial trucker. But the boss promised that he would have us fixed by Friday at 10 a.m. Come then and be prepared to test drive the rig, he said.

We went back to the motel and paid for another night.

Friday came and there was a torrential hailstorm. The hail was like a million Styrofoam beads. We sat in the waiting room until 12:15 p.m. And I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked through the door where customers are not permitted. The sign on the door says all work will stop on the shop floor if customers enter the work area. I found the boss standing beside my great white beast of a motorhome. He asked me for a key to open the fuel filler door. When I opened it, he took a compressed air hose and rammed it into the tank and plugged the remaining space with a cloth. He explained that there is no priming pump on the Caterpillar motor. He said he couldn’t get her primed. And this was his work-around.

While he was doing this, one of the mechanics was spraying ether into the air intake of the engine and another mechanic was cranking the engine. It caught, coughed, and then died.

They went back to the computer and the computer was saying: remember the oil pressure sensor on the fuel pump sensed there was something critically wrong with the fuel system. Well, you have to change that sensor when you install a new fuel pump. Thank God they actually had a sensor in stock. The moment they installed it, the computer sensed all was well and permitted the engine to start.

I test drove the rig and everything seemed to check out. I paid the bill with that magic plastic card – a mere $4,300. And we loaded all the stuff of life from our car and headed out into the gloomy afternoon.

Oh, but remember, I promised you a double disaster? Well. It’s waiting for us 92 miles down the road.

All was well for 91.8 miles. Then all hell broke loose. Red lights, orange lights, buzzers and bells went off on the dash. As luck would have it, however, we were 100 yards away from an exit on the expressway. I pulled off and drove the rig 150 yards into a Flying J truck stop.  Bells were still clanging when I stopped the rig. A trucker ran up to my window and said, “Do you know you’re spraying oil out the back of your rig, sir?”

I walked back there and found our Honda Fit coated in black oil. The entire rear cap of the motorhome was blackened with sprayed oil.

I called the truck repair place that had obviously messed up the repair. I reach the owner and he said he would make it good if it was caused by his people. He also gave me the phone number of a diesel repair shop in the town where we stopped. I called there at 5:40 p.m., expecting to be told I was out of luck because the Memorial Day holiday weekend had started and no one would be able to help us until Tuesday. But no. They said they’d send someone out in an hour or so.

And this brought Sheldon into our lives. Sheldon arrived in his truck and, within an hour, he uncovered the cause of our second disaster: an O-ring on the connection of the new oil pump had been installed improperly and had disintegrated. 

Before he started the engine, Sheldon poured three gallons of oil into the engine. Even then, the oil was low by about two quarts. But it permitted him to crank the engine and check for the leaking oil.

He returned to his shop, located another O-ring, and a spare, happily. For, when he took the pump assembly apart he discovered a second O-ring also was badly installed and was crushed. He reinstalled the pump. I called the owner of the original truck repair and he said to fax him the bills and he would make me whole.

We set out on Saturday morning with fear and trepidation in our hearts. But Sheldon seemed to have fixed the problem. No more red flashing lights and bells going off. We took the car to a car wash and emulsified the oil coating. Then, when we got to Cheyenne, Wyoming, we found a truck washing place for the cleaning up of our rear. Unfortunately, the residual oil on the radiator and other parts of the engine found its way back and re-coated the rear so that part of the nightmare remains.

Now, of course, I question the entire week of madness. Did the pump break down and send metal into the fuel rail? Did the injectors need to be replaced? Yes, the sensor definitely needed to be replaced. But that was a $134.10 part. We'll never know, of course, because the mechanical wizards do their work in secret, behind that closed door. What the customer can't see, he can't really question. 

This Land Is Our Land

The view through our windshield while camping in Canyonlands National Park.

We left Moab, Utah, after lunch on Saturday. We crossed the Colorado River and marveled about being alongside the Colorado River more than a week ago while we stayed at the Grand Canyon. Big, big river.

North of Moab, we found a two-lane road that took off to the left. Down that road we went, looking for a campsite for the next few days. A free campsite, of course. Thanks to the federal government – and the American people - there are millions of acres of land in the west that are owned by the United States. But these are not national parks. The Bureau of Land Management is responsible for taking care of these lands.

If you live in the eastern half of the U.S., chances are you rarely come in contact with BLM land. But this is a national treasure. The BLM leases a few million acres to cattlemen and their cows roam at will on the unfenced land. There are lots of cattle grids on the roads. And then, thank you America, there are designated areas for camping. You’re only allowed to stay at a site for 14 days. Then you must move along. No squatting!  I have learned about this national treasure through being a member of the Escapees Club, a group of full-time live-aboard people who have built an enormous compendium of knowledge about these – and other - camping lands. As a member, I was able to buy and download an 840-plus page file that is devoted to free camping sites in the U.S. and Canada.

And so we have come down the little two-lane road about 12 miles and we saw an area designated for camping. We drove down a dirt road, found a group camping site that was taken over by VW buses – maybe 15 of them. No room for us. So we retraced our steps and then took another dirt road down to another area. We saw a honking great motorhome on a rise and there was a fifth-wheel trailer alongside it. It looked promising but we dared not go down the dirt road without knowing what we faced in case there was no place to turn and leave. So we stopped our rig on the main dirt road and walked into the bush to reconnoiter. 

We came upon gold: a gorgeous site on the edge of an escarpment. We look out to the north and to the west.  We have nothing but mountains all around us. Mt. Tomasaki, 12,271 feet, and its brother Mt. Peale, 12,721 feet, are on our eastern horizon. Both are cloaked in thick snow. But we’re in gorgeous weather – 59 degrees as the sun sets on our left.

We’ve set up house on the escarpment with only cattle in view, no people. Up the hill behind us, a couple has been wrestling with a tent. It took about an hour but they seem to have mastered it and it no longer is flying like a green flag. I wandered over to greet another couple who is parked about 100 yards away behind our rig. They came in from Eagle, Colorado, today. After we chatted for a while, they told us their goal is live aboard fulltime and do what we do.

Life is not without its stresses, of course. Earlier this week, we were playing out this exact scenario, camping in Canyonlands National Park. We’d driven in there on a whim after Jo spotted a tiny note on our atlas which simply said “Newspaper Rock”. We had no idea what that meant, but we were up for a little side trip so we veered off the main road and bumped along a two-lane “open range” road, which means, “Be careful. There are live cattle wandering and which might bolt onto the roadway.” And they did. At least, one did a couple of days earlier. Its bloated body lay with legs in the air beside the road. As good a warning as any motorist needs.

Some of the hundreds of petroglyphs at the rock.

We took our time and wound our way downhill, via hairpin bends that would be great for a sports car, but not so much fun for a 38-foot motorhome with a Honda Fit tagging along behind it.

Newspaper Rock was worth the trip, though. It was a spectacular petroglyph site of the ancient peoples who lived in this area between 550-1300 A.D. The rock is maybe 35 feet tall and 100 feet wide. Its dark red face had been stained almost black and the early peoples had used the smooth surface as a “newspaper” or blackboard on which they made all manner of drawings. There were turtles, rabbits, hunters with spears and arrows, even a horseman with a mounted Indian. The site’s explanatory plaque did not even try to offer explanations of “why” this was here. It just is. And it’s a treasure.

I stopped by and chatted with a National Parks worker who was cleaning out the bathrooms at the rock. I asked him where we might be able to find a campsite for a few nights. He looked at the size of our rig and suggested there really were only two places in Canyonlands that could cope with a rig our size. He suggested we try about 18 miles further into the park but warned the slots fill up quickly.

We drove the Honda in so we wouldn’t waste diesel fuel on a wild goose chase. We found one camping area but Jo was unhappy it had no gravel on the road in and she feared we might bog down. So on we went and came to Indian Creek. We circled the area and found most of the sites were occupied by tenters, with cars or vans. But we found there was a group camping site, occupied by two rigs with lots of room for us at the far end of the area.

We scooted back to our motorhome and drove back out, hoping no one would grab our space before we got there. We were successful. So we set up shop under a sheltering cliff. We had a million-dollar view of the distant mountains. And we had rabbits wandering at will in front of our windshield – thus providing night and day entertainment for Ian and Fiona.

But the best laid plans often go awry. And they did just that when the sun went down and our solar panels stopped pumping energy into our six house batteries. Within an hour of sunset, our battery meter began to warn us that our voltage was slipping fast. And our refrigerator door panel began to flash a warning of low voltage.

We turned everything off and began a worrying night. We went to bed early but sleep was impossible. I schemed about remedies. We were too far off the beaten path to have any cellphone service and that made it impossible to use the internet to find replacement batteries. 

We slept intermittently and I told Jo I wanted to get up before the dawn and go through each cell of each battery in our bank to find out which cells were bad. So we were up in the pre-dawn blackness at 5:30 a.m., with my hydrometer, measuring the specific gravity of all 18 cells. Four of the six batteries had cells that gave me readings that indicated there was no life left in those cells.

We knew this was almost inevitable after I installed the solar panels on our roof. The fellow who did the installation warned me that the weak link in the chain was the battery bank. Because we have no idea how old the batteries were when we bought the motorhome three years ago, we thought it was just barely possible that these are original batteries which would place them at 10 years old. 

I had asked my Alfa Owners group online for an opinion, and one of the best helpers came back to me with the opinion that 10 years on batteries is not impossible, particularly if the batteries have never been stressed. His opinion was that the way people use their motorhomes usually means they keep them plugged into shore power almost 100 percent of the time. So the batteries never get depleted. Batteries have a lifespan that is measured by the number of times they are discharged and recharged. If they mostly are sitting plugged in they never get discharged, he said.

Anyway, we decided we should start the diesel engine at get on the road as soon as we could see the cows on the roadway. How did I do that with dead batteries, you ask? Happily, we have two 12-volt batteries back with the engine and their job is to be there to start the diesel engine and not much else. We were back at the main road to Moab by 8 a.m. That allowed us to stop and be back in communication through the internet. I searched for a store that would carry 6-volt wet cell batteries and phoned the store. 

Derrick, the manager, told me he could get us fixed up if we could get to him. We got to him in another 90 minutes but Derrick said he only had four batteries but would be happy to order six fresh one and get them to Moab by 8 a.m. the next day.

Now we had to find a place where we could plug into shore power for the day and/or night. Not so easy to do in this humming little town of 5,000 people. Everyone had pre-booked their camping site at all 15 campgrounds in town. I was getting depressed and a little bewildered about our options when one campground owner suggested we try a new campground that had recently opened in town. We did and they had a single site available for a single night only. We grabbed it.

And Derrick, true to his word, had the new batteries for us when we arrived at his store at 11 a.m. Saturday. It took a couple of hours to label every cable and connection and Derrick was decent enough to pull the old batteries from my rig and insert the new units into their place. He left me to do the wiring and cleaning.

Now, we sit parked in majestic and splendid isolation on the edge of our escarpment. Sunday morning broke cold and bleak. Temperatures were in the low 40s and rain swept through. As soon as the dawn broke, however, the solar energy began to move from the panels into the new batteries. I sit, mesmerized, not even understanding how that is possible on such a dark and dreary day. Yet we are receiving energy from a hidden sun. Magical!

Canyonlands National Park is an place of overwhelming majesty and peacefulness.

Into the Valley of Death

I’ve been hearing in my mind a poem, written by Alfred Lord Tennyson:

Jo sits, tiny, under this arch in Death Valley.

Half a league, half a league,
 Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade.”

It has nothing to do with our present situation in Death Valley. But it shows, again, how the human mind works. I learned the poem as a boy in Scotland. And now, as we drive into the Valley of Death – California-style – I could still hear the trailbreakers who had gone before on a mission of death and destruction.

Back in 1849, as Europeans pushed west to the gold fields of California, a party came through Salt Lake City, Utah Territory. They arrived there, way to the north of us, just after the Donner party had tried unsuccessfully to make it over what became known as the Donner Pass. The Donner party ended up resorting to cannibalism to stay alive. 

The latest settlers were anxious to move on despite the warning that it was too early.

They opted to roll south with their wagon train. But they kept running into forbidding mountains that refused to let them pass. Eventually, after two months, they hit what became Death Valley. And on they rode, into the valley of death. They made their way through the valley. But the mountains refused to release them. On the western side of the valley, where Jo and I stopped, we learned the party burned some of their wagons, killing their oxen and drying the meat before facing the high Sierra Mountains.

At the other end of the bizarreness spectrum is the story of Death Valley Scotty. He was a con man who had ridden with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. In his downtime, Scotty sold people on the notion that he had discovered gold in Death Valley and was offering partnerships in his gold mine. A life insurance executive in Chicago, Albert Johnson, bought into the scheme but then decided to head to Death Valley to see his investment in action.

Scotty lined up a bunch of pals on the mountainside to “ambush” the party as it moved through Death Valley. The idea being to show Johnson how difficult it was to run the mine (which didn’t exist). When one of the “ambushers” got shot by mistake Scotty called off the attack. Johnson saw through the scheme but, amazingly, his enjoyment of Scotty overcame his sense of being conned. They remained pals for the next 42 years.

A tiny part of Scotty's Castle, deep in Death Valley.

Johnson, in the meantime, fell in love with the valley. His wife and he decided to build a stunning winter home after they found a piece of land with a powerful spring on the property. They employed Scotty to be the house entertainment. He would sit with the guests and spin his yarns about Buffalo Bill and his prospecting days.

Jo and I hiked into the canyons, carrying our water supply. It was pretty hard on the hamstrings…but oh-so-rewarding to uncover the treasures that are off the beaten path. We headed south to Badwater, 272 feet below sea level, where we were able to walk out on the lake bed of salt crystals. And we climbed Zabriskie Point to watch the eternal sun sinking behind the snow-capped mountains in the west. What an experience.

Now we are headed easterly and have stopped for a breather in the fleshpots of  Las Vegas where there’s a casino on every block. We stayed in the luxury of an RV Park because it is impossible to find places where we can just pull over and park overnight for free.

We took advantage of our location to drive the car south to the Hoover Dam, a project that I knew was enormous. But I had no conception of how truly incredible it is. Back in the 1920s, the Colorado River was the giver of life and the taker of life because it was untamed. It tore apart the land during the spring runoff.

Washington decided to control it by building a gigantic dam. Construction started in 1932 and was supposed to take six years. The men were hired by the thousands to divert the Colorado River to permit the coffer dam to be started. They worked 363 days of the each year (they were off on Christmas Day and July 4) and they were paid between 50 cents an hour and $1.50, depending on the job.

The dam was so big (think Egyptian Pyramids) that much of the piping had to be manufactured on the site because no road would accommodate the trucks to transport material. The millions upon millions of tons of concrete were creating so much heat as it cured that the engineers had to engineer a cooling system that pumped ice water into the concrete in steel tubes. And the project was so well organized that they managed to complete it two years ahead of schedule.

Jo and I took the underground tour where we could see the massive generators producing the electricity from the water passing through the dam. And we could feel the thrum of the energy passing up through the concrete into our legs.

I knew it was going to be a big, impressive project. But my mind was incapable of grasping the massiveness of the dam. We stood in awe as we looked at Lake Mead, created by the dam. Even with the horrendous drought that the squeezing the West, the lake is an overwhelming sight. It’s been a long time since I’d felt such pride in the accomplishments of this nation. Maybe part of that pride springs from listening to the people from so many different nations who stood alongside us and were equally in awe of the magnificence of the dam.

Hoover Dam, right, allow the Colorado River to roll west, under this massive new bridge that transports you to the East.

Welcome to Mexico...Sort Of

Pancho's Cafe is side by side with Clarisa Luken's periodontist and implants office.

You drive to Yuma, Arizona. Turn south, off the expressway. There’s an enormous parking lot, owned by some Indian tribe I’ve never heard of  before. They charge you $6 to park the car for the day. Then you pass their auto-teller (last chance to get dollars) and walk through a narrow passage, through a one-way gate and now you’re in Mexico. Easy-peesy.

We’re in the tiny town of Los Algodones –there’s maybe 3,000 people living and working here. The weird thing is that most of these people are opticians, dentists and pharmacists and their staffs.

This tiny town is designed exclusively for Americans to walk there and be served. It’s safe. It’s close. It’s another world. We walked across and were immediately approached by touts who sought to lure us into “their” favorite dentist or optometrist. Once you make it through that gauntlet, you then have the challenge of making your way along the sidewalk past the dozens of swarthy men and women whose job is to relieve you of your dollars by selling you silver chains, Mexican blankets, foam jigsaw puzzles of North and Central America with the various states of Mexico and the U.S. and Canada being the pieces of the jigsaw.

Our first task was to find Myers Optical. Our campground hosts in Yuma suggested it was a good place to go for glasses. And, since Jo wanted both reading and long-distance glasses, Myers was on our list. We found the store and the lady behind the counter explained they could test her eyes for free and then fit her with two pairs of glasses, including the lenses, for $90. All of this could be accomplished in two hours, she told us.

After working on her eyes for half an hour, the optometrist took Jo outside, with the optical measuring device still attached to her head. He wanted her to look up the street in daylight so he could do the final adjustment of the prescription under real-life conditions. Pretty strange, but quite effective.

They told us to return in two hours and the glasses would be ready.

Before and after visit to Juanita's hairstyle.

We wandered across the street and into a quiet courtyard where we found Pancho’s Café. We bought a pair of coffees and Jo spotted Juanita’s Hairstylist store. While her coffee cooled, she stepped in and asked what they charge for a haircut. It was only $7, so she returned to the table, finished her coffee and disappeared inside Juanita’s where she received a superior trim. Later, we found another hair-dresser offering men’s haircuts for $2.99 and women’s cuts for $4.99.

We spent the next hour wandering through drug stores and liquor stores. Jo showed some interest in a silver neck chain and we danced and whiled away half an hour negotiating for the right price. The salesman wanted us to understand the difference between pure silver and the cheap stuff. He took a cheap necklace between his fingers and lit his cigarette lighter, applying the flame to the fake silver. It turned black in three seconds. When he did the same test to the real silver, there was no discoloration. Okay. Now we got down to serious negotiating. He wanted $28. I wanted $10. We danced for 10 minutes, with lots of good-natured sparring and joking. In the meantime, Jo threw a ringer into the negotiating by selecting a heavier - and more expensive - chain.  We ended up settling on a price of $14 for the new, heavier chain.

Now it was time to return to Myers Optical. They sent a runner off to retrieve the two pairs of glasses. We wandered back to the border where we met an older American woman who was ahead of us. She told us she had left her passport in her car and was scared the Immigration people would not let her back into the U.S. I told her she shouldn’t worry too much. She’d do well in Mexico – particularly with her teeth and eyes.

She talked to the official and explained her predicament to him. She wrote down her home address and phone number and he sent her on her way! Who says it’s hard to enter the U.S.!

One-stop-shopping for your Viagra and your dental implants at Clarissa Salazar's office.

It was Wild in the West

Tombstone today is very much like it was back when the west was won.

The 26th of October, 1881, will always be marked as one of the crimson days in the annals of Tombstone. A day when blood flowed as water and human life was held as a shuttlecock, a day always to be remembered as witnessing the bloodiest and deadliest street fight  that every occurred in this place or probably in the territory.

-Tombstone Nugget, October, 1881

The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was a 30-second gunfight between outlaw cowboys and lawmen that is generally regarded as the most famous gunfight in the history of the American Wild West. The gunfight took place at about 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. Wikipedia gives us many of the details:

It was the result of a long-simmering feud between Cowboys Billy Claiborne, Ike and Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLaury, and opposing lawmen: town Marshal Virgil Earp, Assistant Town Marshal Morgan Earp, and temporary deputy marshals Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Clanton and Billy Claiborne ran from the fight unharmed, but Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers were killed. Virgil, Morgan, and Doc Holliday were wounded, but Wyatt Earp was unharmed.

The fight has come to represent a period in American Old West when the frontier was virtually an open range for outlaws, largely unopposed by law enforcement that were spread thin over vast territories, leaving some areas unprotected.

Despite its name, the historic gunfight did not take place within or next to the O.K. Corral, but in a narrow lot next to Fly's Photographic Studio, six doors west of the rear entrance to the O.K. Corral on Fremont Street.

About thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds. Ike Clanton filed murder charges against the Earps and Doc Holliday, but they were eventually exonerated by a local judge after a 30-day preliminary hearing, and then by a local grand jury.

The gunfight was not the end of the conflict, according to Wikipedia. And on December 28, 1881, Virgil Earp was ambushed and maimed in a murder attempt by the outlaw cowboys. On March 18, 1882, Morgan Earp was shot through the glass door of a saloon and killed by the cowboys. The suspects in both incidents furnished solid alibis and were not indicted. Wyatt Earp, newly appointed as Deputy U.S. Marshal in the territory, took matters into his own hands in a personal vendetta. He was pursued by county Sheriff Johnny Behan, who had a warrant for his arrest.

This is all lived and relived multiples times a day at various spots in town. It’s become an industry and people drives in on buses to live this little piece of history.

Jo and I arrived in town early and made our way to the courthouse which now is a museum and is run by the Arizona State Parks. It’s a good display of  life back then, with lots of artifacts, including guns and photographs of life in Tombstone. Its reason for existing was the silver mine just off Main Street.

We walked the streets and loved the feeling of a Wild West town that lives on in the covered sidewalks on Main Street. The collection of cowboys who lounge on the sidewalks and troll for business. You’re greeted with lots of “Howdy, partners. Welcome to Tombstone.”

You can get a drink at Big Nose Kate’s Saloon. Kate was named because she was nosy, not because her proboscis was an unusual size.

We took in the sights and then mounted our Honda and moseyed out of town. On our way back to Benson, we passed through St. David, a tiny town with a quite beautiful Benedictine monastery. We stepped into the coolness of the adobe structure and found a cool, quiet place away from the searing sun.

There’s a meditating pool off to the side of the monastery where giant koi fish  pushes their noses to the surface in the off chance you have come to feed them.

Fluted columns rise 
straight into the sky 

at the Chiracahua 

Mountains National 

Monument.

Earlier in the week, we drove many miles to the Chiracahua Mountains where we followed in the footsteps of the great Apache chiefs Geronimo and Cochise. Both of them tried to fight off the encroaching white horde that made its way across the prairie and into the desert of Arizona.

This made their last stand in these startlingly beautiful mountains. The Apaches fought relentlessly against European colonization – beginning with the Spanish in the 1500s. They quickly learned to handle horse and weapons acquired from the newcomers. Ultimately, the Chiracahua Apaches surrendered and were settled on reservations in Oklahoma and New Mexico.

We felt the spirit of those warriors as we hiked the paths up and down rugged cliff paths where the winds were blowing at more than 35 knots.