2018 was a year of plateau management for me. It’s what you do when you start to question whether the destination you have been pursuing is going to be worth the effort, or if, when you arrive, you will have an “and this is it??” moment. Those times when you realize it’s been a while since you checked your internal compass, something reminds you that life is short, and is this really what you want to be doing right now. If life is a cruise, sometimes you need to reposition the ship. That means getting back to a familiar starting point, regaining your bearings, removing barnacles on the hull, and sometimes without taking on any new passengers. That’s what I did last year, and I thought it was a mistake to write about the experience, as if the usual destinations were all that mattered. I changed my mind. I’d like to tell you a little about my year in dry dock. It has been a vivid reminder not to mistake motion for progress, and that there is value in accepting the stages in the lifespan of every vessel.
In early 2018, after returning from a half year in Argentina, I partnered with my friend Carolyn in the purchase and rehab of a 32-foot, class C RV, with the intent of touring parts of continental North America, with a 55+ RV resort in Florida as a home base to return to. Neither of us knew anything of consequence about RVs and RV living. It made sense to us to start small and inexpensively and learn as we went. As it turned out, that was a very wise decision. We learned a lot more than just about RVs. We found a delightful park with a small lake, lots of birds, a few alligators, a library, heated outside swimming pool, organized pool volleyball, billiard room, shuffleboard and bocce ball courts, and coin-operated laundry that was less than half the cost of others nearby.
The RV park includes this lake with lots of fish and alligators. You throw the fish back in, and swimming is strongly discouraged for the most obvious of reasons. The best time to spot the alligators is at night. Their eyes shine brightly in a strong flashlight beam.
More important than all of this, however, we found ourselves surrounded by an amazing support group of retired professionals and tradespeople who knew all about RVs and recreational motorcoaches. No matter what challenges we faced with our new acquisition, we never lacked for good advice on the cheapest, most effective solutions to everything. Small things like a sweater catching fire because it was too close to a heating element, or figuring out why the waste tanks were overflowing, or how to cook with only 35 amp service, or making sure the propane systems weren’t leaking, or what to do about the massive leaking around the windows during the first hard rain.
Even though some of the motorcoaches in the park cost a cool $300-$400,000, everyone is budget conscious. The bigger the coach, the more expensive the repairs. None of the vehicles and permanent residences are considered investments. They are part of a lifestyle, and they change hands in brisk trade. Insiders rarely buy coaches from dealers, but wait for surviving widows who don’t know how to drive the rigs their husbands always drove for them to sell, usually at heavily discounted rates. They really have no use for the motorcoach any more, aren’t likely to travel alone, the lot rent is a cash drain, and coaches that sit too long develop problems. Many of the RVers purchase a motorcoach for a time or reason, and when they have seen what they wanted to see, the resell their vehicle and move on with the rest of their life. Most of them are more into experiences than stuff. They are an odd combination of relaxed and purposeful.
The official rates of RV repair services are often in the neighborhood of $100/hour, but our neighbors in the park chipped in and helped for either free or absurdly discounted rates, like the time a retired Master Electrician worked for two hours on our issues, and his bill was $25.00. We learned a lot about neighborhood generosity and random acts of kindness.
High season at 55+ RV resort parks. Some residents are snowbirds who divide their time between two seasonal homes. Others live here permanently and continue to work into very old age. Some are permanent RVers, who move to new locations every few weeks or months. And a few have been retired for almost half a century!
Florida is often referred to as ‘God’s Waiting Room’ because there are so many seniors in the state. We arrived in offseason when there were maybe 150 residents in the park. Now at high season, the population of the park has swelled to about 1,000, mostly snowbirds. That’s a lot of old people. Living in a “55 and over” park is like being plunged into a laboratory petri dish to experience the life cycle of a paramecium in real time. It is a good place to learn how to be old. There are ten streets in the park, and in high season they are densely occupied. Every morning there are seniors power walking, or biking, and everyone waves. Almost no one discusses politics. The civility here is real, and not political correctness pretending to be manners. In six months here, I have yet to see anyone under the influence of either drugs or alcohol. If it happens, they hide it well. There are bands that perform, some better than others. One night I heard the worst off-key rendition of the country/western song Almost Persuaded. It almost brought tears to my eyes. They tried really hard. I have heard rumors that we have a local drug dealer, but if that’s true, he’s probably an octogenarian too. A few years ago there was purportedly a beautiful but mentally ill woman who had a penchant for going naked in the park, but we missed all that action.
I am somewhat of an imposter because I am a pretend-retiree. I will soon be 70 years old. My father died unexpectedly at 71 and my mother is 93 this year. For about ten years or so I considered myself to be late middle-aged. I don’t really know what comes after that–maybe early old age. Somewhere ahead is middle-old age, and then, if I live that long, very old age. This is the time in life when our past catches up with us, when we pay for our sins–too many steaks or too many bowls of ice cream, or too many hours in front of the TV. Or it could be emotional: too many grudges savored, too much alcohol consumed, or too many years living in a world of perceived scarcity rather than abundance.
I have met a few here who are angry or bitter or both; probably more disappointed with life and their choices than anything else. They are the ones who complain, usually rather loudly, or suffer from an exaggerated sense of class distinction they are at pains to point out to any within hearing distance. Yes, there are village politics, and there are rank and status-seeking even among volunteers. Feelings get hurt, and grudges are kept. Some as they age evince more hypochondria, increasingly anxious about the first sign of the approaching end of life. The happiest seem to be those most engaged with activities and interactions with others, or those who have found ways to safely satisfy their status and power needs, albeit at a small scale. There are cliques and queen-of-the-herd syndrome and petty power struggles. There are those bitter about their grown children, and those who are probably overinvolved in their children’s lives to the point of micro-managing them, and others who have no children and have never been married. There are those who fear the end, and those who are deeply grateful for the rich lives they have lived. And most of all, there are lots and lots here who are still living it to the fullest extent possible. They joke about being old but they don’t really believe it.
The shuffleboard courts, with the Fire Pit in the near distance, and the lake fountain in the far distance. The social amenities are endless for those with time to fill.
This then is our home base. I have switched from Original Medicare to a local Advantage Plan which will save me money and provide better service. I am so thrilled with the difference, I am starting a small business, obtaining a license to sell the product to seniors. We have made new friends, and are busier than ever, mostly with things and activities outside of the park. Although the games and sports available here in the park have their allure, I am not interested in pursuing a PhD in shuffleboard studies. Neither of us are interested in practicing old age, and we prefer the company of those who keep themselves physically and intellectually challenged. It is a good thing to be a little afraid, to keep an edge, to remain sharp. In the end, it’s not about the destination at all, nor is it about keeping score of where we’ve been. Most of life and its attendant memories were created between destinations, the plotting and pursuing new adventures. We are researching a second business model, selling discounted cruises. No matter what, soon it will be time to embark again, leave port, and embrace the unknown. It’s been a good year.
“Whatever you do, DON’T touch the tapirs!” These were my strict instructions from the ranger. But how should you respond if the mommy tapir decides to lick your hand? (Notice the baby in the lower left corner. The mother wears a radio collar.) Corrientes province, Argentina.
Talia Zamboni, employee of Conservation Land Trust, who is also my guide, looks for a radio signal from the collar of a mommy and her baby tapir. Happily, she also knew the way back to the vehicle, because after a ten minute walk everything all looks hopelessly the same. Corrientes province, Argentina.
If you are new to this blog, my name is John Bechtel, and I am a retired business owner, and now I’m a writer. Why do I write? I don’t know if I know why. I just always have. In fifth grade for some reason it was decided that I would write the class play. In high school I was asked to be the Features Writer for the school newspaper. When I asked what a Features Writer writes about, I was told, whatever you want. In business, I wrote my own sales copy and a newsletter for decades, and I got published in many trade journals. Eventually I taught business communications at Fortune 500 and government conferences.
Writing or Marketing?
Four years ago, I attended a Travel Writer’s seminar in San Diego and made many friends. I thought I was going to be an old man in a very young crowd. I was wrong. There were lots of us who had traveled here and there, and thought why not get paid to write about it? Probably most of the attendees didn’t have the kind of writing background that I did, and there was lots of encouragement for them not to worry about that. Apparently the writing isn’t the most important ingredient in travel writing. What was the secret to success? Marketing–yourself.
With a few years of experience under my belt, I would have to agree with this advice. Over the years I had subscribed to many travel magazines, and I had more or less decided that people bought those magazines for the photos, and that there was a dull sameness to the text of the articles, sort of like formula romance novels. Later I was to learn about copywriting, which is the art of writing advertising content that doesn’t sound like advertising but really is. Somewhere in there, the infomercial was invented. It was sales copy masquerading as educational material. You could sometimes learn more from really good advertising copy than you could from an academic article. I now came to understand that travel writing was a prettified form of copywriting; it was sales copy with beautiful photos, and the product was tourism. We are not there to compete for the Nobel prize for literature, but to persuade people to spend their money to travel to specific places.
Travel writing as a refined, subtle, soft sales pitch
We don’t hear the word infomercial used much anymore, but there is more of it in practice than ever before. That probably has something to do with the new term “fake news”, which to me is really old news. Fake news is invented news or giving so much ideological spin to an event that reporting becomes rant. As a form of copywriting, travel writing is a brief and glossy upsell of a better lifestyle, with details of what to eat, where to stay, and what to do when you get to where everyone else either already is, or soon will be–ahead of you. Travel writing is about putting the best possible spin on the travel experience. It is different from reporting. Travel writing is a soft sales pitch. As a sort of backlash against a tendency to exaggerate in advertising copy for travel, we have witnessed the rise of agencies where travelers can rate every purchase experience. This is also part of the drive for credibility in media.
The battle for credibility
Everyone knows that to write an effective PR piece you have to make it sound more like news, because “news” supposedly has more credibility than advertising. Or at least it used to. Credibility is the gold standard of advertising, media, and politics; believability: can your message pass the snicker test? (not to mention a loud guffaw!) In all parts of our society, truth telling seems to be of lesser importance compared to the value of “influencing” others. So much so, that now “influencer” is a new career choice, and has found its way onto resumes and ad copy along with other buzzwords like sustainability, authentic travel experiences and bespoke tours. My idea of farm-to-table is simply finding a tomato that tastes and smells like a tomato. Farm-to-table is not a new concept, and it is practicable in some places and not in others. And I think that authentic travel is often the travel industry equivalent of a more meaningful one night stand. The idea is commendable: to close the gap between what the tourist experiences and the local lives. Our markets however want us to paint pictures of idyllic destinations of perfection and joy; and too much negativity (some would say reality) threatens sales. Exceptions to this rule might be cause-related writing, where the goal is to inspire activism to ameliorate some unfortunate situation. But for every “funeral”, we will write about a hundred “weddings”.
The travel writer’s dilemma: travel writing as a sustainable way to earn a living
Which brings me in a very roundabout way to the travel writer’s dilemma. The goal of the travel writer is to obtain a commitment by an editor to publish an article you intend to write after you visit a place, and then to use that assignment to persuade the destination managers or local business people to gift you free lodging, meals, and entrances to events and attractions. You often begin at the bottom, writing for free for websites or whatever you can find, and you graduate up to $25, $50, and $75 dollar assignments. You experience extreme giddiness when you start receiving $150 fees. Without the freebies, there’s no way you could break even financially on very modest assignments. Probably very few travel writers keep careful records of income and expenses, and even if they do, it is very unlikely they attach an appropriate dollar value for an hour of their time, or they fail to keep track of ALL of the time they invest in a travel assignment, research, and writing time. This is typical of a business start-up in any industry. If founders kept track of their time, they would be better off flipping burgers. That is the difference between passion and a job. The travel writer’s dilemma, then, is every business founder’s dilemma–how to turn their passion into a sustainable (which means profitable) business. Sometimes profit is viewed as a bad word, but that is nonsense. Profit is nothing more than the cost of doing business tomorrow. If you are running a lemonade stand and you don’t have enough money to buy more lemons at the end of the day, your lemonade stand is out of business.
Most travel writers, as far as I can tell, are passionate about what they do. This is partly because travel writing continues to be glamorized, and the announcement at a cocktail party that you are a travel writer inevitably carries a unique cachet with it. This, combined with the universal appeal of traveling itself creates an oversupply of travel writers, which depresses the prices their work might otherwise command. There are rafts of online magazines that do not pay for content. Those trying to earn a living from the craft may intellectualize their financial dilemma by emphasizing the monetary value of their comps. But those comps are a non-cash form of reducing expenses they would otherwise have had to pay out of pocket. Comps are not spendable, savable, or investable. They are expenses of the travel writer’s business that a third party paid in exchange for anticipated benefits–tourist traffic stimulated by the travel writer’s words.
For many travel writers therefore, this profession is about traveling to places they could not otherwise afford to visit, and after comped expenses and revenue from publications, they are happy to have broken even on the cost of the trip, or managed to take the trip at a fraction of its normal cost.
Don’t romanticize comped amenities: A new bed is not always a better bed
By the time I got my new identity as a travel writer, I had already traveled to dozens of countries, and I wasn’t always impressed with a new bed. I enjoyed indigenous food and upscale cuisines and I have also spent a week on the toilet from some misadventures. In the long run, I often prefer my own cooking to some very expensive restaurants I have tried. It is a human frailty, IMO, to value something highly because some crowd somewhere seems willing to pay outrageous prices for it.
If you are going to write about a place for a magazine, your article has to conform to the requirements and tastes of that magazine’s editors, advertisers, and readers, and you also need to say nice things about the destination, those people who gifted you free stays and services. If a destination or PR firm accords you the holy grail of the industry, i.e. free airline tickets, you need to bring a dowry with you of publications with high circulation figures. And you need to say really, really nice things about your benefactors.
Yes, we all will probably experience some adventures that we would have missed out on if it were not for our travel writing, and that is part of the reward of our profession. But it is a mistake to be overawed by comped amenities, because it can cloud our business judgment. And it is our good business judgment that will facilitate our rising above survival level as a writer. Only then does our travel writing business become sustainable.
Influencing the influencers
The destination representatives seek to influence our evaluation of their attractions. We write articles that our publishers and editors hope will influence their readers to visit certain places. And there is an entire industry dedicated to determining if our recommendations have been exaggerated or are overly subjective. Have the poor, misled tourists who ventured forth found the sunsets at the destination not quite as beautiful, the cuisine not quite as mouth-watering, and the cocktails not quite as robust as they had been led to believe? So large, financially secure publishing firms in the industry whose names we don’t need to mention, loudly proclaim their virtue by advertising their standards of high integrity–that they will not grant assignments to travel writers who accept gratuities or comps from destination representatives. Their influencers will not be influenced! Whether or not this improves the integrity of the reporting to me is a dubious claim at best, but what it does is raise entry barriers to newcomers to the travel writing industry. It protects those who have already arrived from competition by new arrivals. New arrivals have the option of self-funding their travel expenses, which means operating at a loss for months or years because most publications pay very little for their writing, rarely enough to break even on their expenses of getting there and getting around.
[Note to reader: I have purchased and read the book advertised below, and recommend it for very interesting highlights of life behind the editor’s desk, and what they have to say about us freelancers. Easy reading and informative. I loved the author’s list of the worst pitches he ever received!]
No professional credit for free writing!
Recently, while working on my Distribution List, which is the list of magazines that I might want to write for, I read the website of one online magazine start-up that positively gushed about distinguishing themselves by their high standards of editorial integrity by rigidly enforced standards of no comps for their contributors. They of course, only paid expenses for a few select staff writers, and freelancers were on their own. If they accepted a comp, they were disqualified by the magazine as contributors. For the record, a comp is an expense of travel that is not paid by the publication or the writer, but paid or absorbed with OPM–other people’s money, usually merchants who hope to benefit from the “free publicity.”
I wrote to this online publication, quite out of curiosity, and said I imagine that with their strict moral standards, they undoubtedly pay better than average so as not to take commercial advantage of the writer struggling to survive while meeting their standards. The publication did not respond to my inquiry, but further research revealed that they relied on unpaid writers. I wonder if they are aware that some prestigious writers associations, such as SATW (Society of American Travel Writers) lists as their #1 criteria for membership:
“Work published without payment — either of a traditional monetary fee or a proven revenue stream — will not be considered.“
For aspiring writers, the message is clear: you cannot run a successful business (which is what your travel writing is) by giving away your product. Non-paying publications are only valuable if in addition to a byline they provide high circulation figures that can help you up to the next rung. Or if they will go out of their way to help you get the comps that ease your financial burden. Other than that, they will use you as a free contributor as long as you are willing to play their game. And their paeans to integrity are very self-serving. Make a list of which outlets pay and which ones don’t, and start reducing the non-paying list and growing the paying list.
Maybe the writing is important, after all.
And in spite of what you hear that the writing isn’t that important, work really, really hard at the quality of your writing. We don’t need to be Hemingway, but don’t hit that Send button until you have read your entire piece aloud to yourself or someone else. Use software tools like Grammarly to catch your errors. And if you lack self-confidence, read some of the published travel articles and notice the mistakes that got past the writers and the editors. Notice the overuse of cliched adjectives. Make lists of them. Count them. You can do better, if you want to. My point is that there are enough good editors and sloppy writers out there, that if you are willing to work harder, you will find your place in the publishing world.
Trading our words for tourist dollars
You have probably figured out by now that we as travel writers trade our words for tourist dollars. We need good negotiating skills. And we need to earn a reputation for deserving top tier pay based on the quality of our work. The right answers for each one of us may not lie in the path traveled by everyone else. IMO, it is a mistake to place much value in how many articles you have published, except perhaps for self-promotion. There will always be someone who has had more published than you have. Let it go, or it can discourage you. You do not know how many of those published stories were for free, and how many were for very low dollar amounts. You do not know what social connections were used to achieve their goals, and you do not know how many stories were a result of their own vacations. You do not know what kind of hours they put in, something you may not be able to do in your own circumstances. Learn from everyone, but do not compare yourself to others. You will never know the whole story.
Focus on qualitative issues, such as, is my business profitable, using real numbers? Does it put money in my pocket or take money out of my pocket? Is it a business or an expensive hobby? Is it sustainable? Does it help me feel good about myself? Yes, there are many satisfiers to being a travel writer, but running up personal debt or going broke is hardly one of them.
I came to this remote village of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini hoping for a base of operations to explore the far northeast of Argentina, a region with almost two million acres of wetland (I called it swamp), dense rain forests (I called it jungle), and dozens of abandoned indigenous settlements of the original Guarani indigenous people, many of which have been reclaimed by the jungle (I called them ruins). Others are UNESCO heritage sites.
Why this village? Because I responded to an ad for free lodging in exchange for teaching English to about 15 of their kids. I agreed to a five month stay, and I would teach about three hours a day, five days a week. No textbooks, no plan, a chalkboard that refused chalk, and no internet to speak of. But nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared me for the kids. I beg of you, please don’t leave this post until you have watched the video at the bottom. The kids’ ages ranged from six to eleven years old. It was hard to understand the spoken English of even the most advanced among them, and some of the younger ones didn’t even know the alphabet in their own Spanish language. And I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. I was expecting to create some memories; some occasional natural beauty, as well as mosquitoes, heat, torrential rain, lots of mud–but never something that touched my heart like this!
Paula, one of my students learning English, at a party in Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, Argentina. Paula is a happy girl from a loving family. She is shy, and very, very determined. In preparation for filming her as part of the year’s graduation, she insisted on extra practice sessions, and walked across the village by herself for her lessons. She spoke no English at the beginning, and sometimes we communicated by me drawing pictures. Without internet, I couldn’t even use Google Translate. But I could see in her eyes she desperately wanted to learn.
My young students learning to dance at a party. Laughter, learning, and mischief all part of the celebration of life. Ali, on the right, foreground; Bauty on the right, background; Marco deep background, striped shirt.
We had a classroom, in an old adobe house under a giant tree. The ceiling fans stopped turning when the electric went out, which happened frequently.
Alexa getting her work checked, inside the one-room schoolhouse. (There was an adjacent room, where guests occasionally spent the night). Marco, to the far right, always did his best work with his head on the table.
At the end of the school year I videotaped a final oral exam that I held with each of them, one by one. I wanted their parents to see and hear what their kids had learned. Each of the kids had to read aloud a paragraph in English, and then without looking down at their paper, they were asked to answer my questions to demonstrate if they had understood what they had just read into the camera. They were nervous. They had never done this before. Sometimes I would throw in an unscripted question to see how they would handle it. And one or two of them got inspired and tried a little improvising of their own. Editorial warning: This may be good for your heart! (Video editing provided by famous bird photographer Roberto Ares).
At the party in the photos above, I played their videos on my laptop for their parents to see. A sizable group of parents gathered around behind the laptop, spellbound. I saw smiles and tears of joy and pride in their eyes. It was amazing to watch the results of effort and reward for the kids, as their sense of self esteem grew. For some it was a self-reinforcing cycle, leading away from uncertainty and fear, and towards confidence and joy. With all of them, I realized there was so little that I knew about their young lives, and all of the factors contributing to the development of their character. I decided quite early on that I was only a guide and cheerleader, and they provided the effort. I learned a lot by just watching them, even at play. This is Aricelli, and you will see both her and her brother, Francisco, on the video.
(A brief note: During his part of the video Joaquin keeps looking up and off camera, and I ask him what he is looking at. His answer, in Spanish, was cockroach. He had spotted a giant cockroach up on the wall and couldn’t take his eyes off of it. When I stopped filming him, he jumped out of his chair, commandeered a party of three. They grabbed brooms and went after the cockroach. Two minutes later it was dead on the floor, mission accomplished!)
This early morning photo was taken about an hour after we arrived at the farm.
Jose and Marco picked me up in their pick-up at 4:05 a.m. Jose greeted me with Hola! and Marco said ‘Hi John.’ Marco is 11 years old and he is my student. Jose is his father. After the brief greetings, they continued talking in Spanish. Jose is from partial Guarani stock, and grew up on an estancia, or Argentine ranch. His formal education ended at about 8th grade. He is congenial, with a ready smile, and often a hug. He understands a lot of English but rarely speaks it. At 43 years of age he is still a fit and handsome gaucho.
This is Jose, Marco’s father and mentor. Jose got his education in a one-room schoolhouse. Book learning was a luxury and took a distant second place to practical matters of survival.
As a student, Marco spent most of his class time with his head on the desk, acting as if he was asleep, and he would intentionally scribble his answers illegibly to an exercise, making it impossible to determine what his answer was, or whether it was correct. If I marked one of his answers wrong, he would invariably claim I had merely misread his writing. He was an exhibitionist, and loved to jump out of his seat to act out his responses to any questions. Fun loving, perhaps, but still a kid. Today I saw a side of him I had not experienced before.
We stopped to pick up another gaucho, whose face I couldn’t make out in the darkness of the back seat. Just outside the village, the car stopped, and Jose and Marco switched places. Marco, my boyish, mischievous, and bored student, carefully adjusted the rear view mirrors and we headed down the rutted country road with his head barely visible above the back of his seat. I idly wondered how long it would take the authorities to identify my mangled body and contact my next of kin. So this was how it all was going to end.
We stopped a few more times to pick up some more ranch hands, who sat in the back of the pick-up, bouncing around and hanging on to whatever was available as we recklessly zipped along at 35 miles per hour. It occurred to me that Marco and his dad had switched places outside the village to avoid problems with the village police. Even then I think their risk was small, since the village seemed to have no crime, and no one had any idea how the two local cops amused themselves while on the clock. The streets are dirt, and there are no traffic signals or signs. Not even any street signs.
We got to the farm at about 4:50 a.m. Besides Jose and Marco, there were five other gauchos with their boots, chaps, and debonair hats. They had more stuff hanging from their belts than a telephone line staffer. One on horseback rounded up half a dozen horses and backed them into a corner of the corral, where one by one, the gauchos outfitted their mounts.
One of the gauchos selects his horse for the day.
Before dawn’s first light they rode off in all directions to find the cattle. Marco rode beside his father.
Marco, all dressed up for action. Marco’s father was, and still is a gaucho, and Marco often shadows his father like any good apprentice.
Adobe houses are an example of vernacular architecture, meaning housing that wasn’t actually designed by an architect at all, but was built from natural materials found in abundance locally by workers with no formal education in the building arts. These days we don’t call it primitive architecture out of respect for the intelligence required to adapt and use what you have.
There is irony in the fact that modern architects frequently borrow ideas from the vernacular, or local constructions, incorporating the latest modern technology when creating the traditional “look” of the end product. And so it is that in Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, where architectural design is frequently on display, the village building codes require that only local building materials be used with traditional methods, thereby assuring that no well-heeled investors come in and build gaudy McMansions that clearly do not blend with the landscape and look of the village.
So buildings are only allowed to be one story high, and local blocks or adobe may be used for the walls, and the roofs can only be made of the corrugated metal in evidence everywhere. All of this is good for the villagers, most of whom could not get financing for anything ostentatious. The more elaborate projects do employ architects, but simple and inexpensive homes are often built with adobe, or houses made with mud, boards, and wire by the men, women, and children who will live in them. They build as they have time, and there are no mortgages to pay. In this manner, and over time, someone with the usual plot of land can add dwellings, one at a time, until they have a motel (posada) finished. The education begins early and everyone uses whatever they have handy, beginning of course, with the ubiquitous mud and espartillo grass.
The new apprentices were enthusiastic as they piled into the transport. The 4WD vehicle should get us through the marshy fields and ant hill city to meet the two local experts, who are bringing the bags of flexible grass that is so essential to the project.
Apparently the shortcut to the construction site is through this field of ant hills. Since the ants would drown if they dug down into the marsh, they build colonies above ground and these colonies are remarkably equidistant from each other. Humans can’t seem to live that close together without killing each other, but the ants seem to manage it. I am unaware of any ant wars.
These two men are the grass gatherers, which they cut and bring in large bundles on their backs to the construction site.
In the remote village of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini and the roads leading into it, there are few rules that I am aware of. Humans and animals share the same spaces and seem to accommodate each other’s idiosyncrasies. No one knows whether the normal traffic pattern should be driving on the left or the right side of the road. It all depends on the depth of the mud and the ruts. There is a really big farm tractor with a winch that routinely extracts cars that get in over their head, so to speak. On the 120 kilometer dirt and sand washboard road leading into the village from the town of Mercedes, the drivers of cars, vans, buses, and trucks all drive wherever they think they will find the smoothest section of road. I haven’t quite figured this out, because going south we drive on the left side of the road and going north we drive on the left side of the road, which means we prefer the “wrong” side of the road no matter which way we are going. It also means that going in either direction the drivers prefer the side of the road they were avoiding at all costs when they were headed the other way, if you get what I am trying to say here. If I spoke better Spanish I would ask them about this. When a vehicle approaches from the other direction everyone seems to play a very polite game of “chicken” with warm smiles and hand waving all around.
RUSH HOUR. If you’re checking your rear view mirror, these two are pulling up on you fast. They are known for hogging intersections and road rage. I saw one of them kick a dog, except the dog was faster and got out of the way. As you can see, the filly is tailgating at high speed.
CAUTION: DUCK CROSSING. Not maintaining minimum speed and approaching traffic.
RAPID TRANSIT. Juvenile, joyriding, probably without a license.
PASSING IN A NO PASSING ZONE. Reckless driving. The horse’s back legs can do some serious damage to that bike. Never mind the driver. (Avoid night driving if you have cataracts.)
SLOW DRIVING IN THE PASSING LANE. Blocking oncoming traffic.
ROAD RAGE. No idea what’s going on here. Avoid eye contact and keep moving. It might get ugly.
Kids learning self-confidence and self-esteem, the most valuable languages in the world.
The school in our little village of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini has no textbooks, no workbooks, no internet, and a painted sheet of composition board that is resistant to chalk. There are three instruction books, one for each of three grades, but there are no copies of the pages because the printer cartridges for the printer cost too much to use for anything but essential business. So every activity and exercise used in teaching has to be written out on the “blackboard” and then copied by each of the students in their notebooks, much as medieval copyists did before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. So at least half of all teaching time is spent copying. You could call this a dreadful waste, except the kids are always learning, even when you were sure they weren’t.
There’s about 15 kids who are learning English as a second language. Some of them are not yet old enough to learn how to write in their mother tongue of Spanish. They all speak English at different levels of proficiency. Their worst English is better than my Spanish. Their brains are like hungry sponges and they learn without trying, as long as it looks and feels like fun.
Learning the basics of entrepreneurship from a vegetable stand
Last week we studied some basics of business and entrepreneurship. The parents of most of these kids are entrepreneurs, although I don’t think anyone ever told them that. They just do what they do. It’s called survival. This is a village of about 1,000 people confined in an area about ten blocks by nine block square at the end of the world. The village is completely isolated, with only two terrible dirt roads leading in or out of the village. It’s hours to the next place. Virtually everything is trucked in from outside the village. Everyone in the village in one way or another is part of the support system for tourism, and the big attraction; indeed the only attraction, are the birds. Everyone comes to see the incredible birds. And a few other things like caimans and rheas and of course the capybaras, big, fat, overgrown rodents that sort of look like giant groundhogs.
So about one out of every five houses is a tiny country store selling a few vegetables or meats or pasta or bread or cerveza (Argentine beer). When there are no tourists they seem to sell to each other in the village. There are no banks and no ATM machines. To the best of my knowledge there is only one bar in the village, but it must open after I go to bed, because I rarely see it open. The electric, which is brought into the village from over 120 kilometers of soggy wetlands is erratic and goes out about every other day, for a few minutes or a few hours. It was on one of these dreary, rainy days, when we were sitting in the semi-dark one-room school with no lights and a chalkboard that was not cooperating, and I was wondering what to do with these kids who had way too much energy for the situation.
Technically, it’s not murder–at least not yet. The victim is an aging beauty, a former home-coming queen, well past the first bloom of youth, but one of the rare ones that acquires in grace and stateliness more than what they lose in freshness and energy. You’ve heard about people poisoned with arsenic so slowly that the possibility of murder is never discovered. They just seem to wither and die of natural causes. The process of dying is so slow no one suspects the truth of what happened. This is worse; what’s going on outside the front door of this schoolhouse is death by slow suffocation. Silent, deadly, unbelievably stealthy. It must be what it is like to be eaten alive by an anaconda. I read that the green anaconda, the big one, the largest snake in the world, always puts the head of its victim in its mouth first, so that the kicking and struggling legs don’t get in the way of progress. The anaconda can unhinge its mouth so that it can open it wide enough to ingest victims many times wider than its own girth. That’s what’s been happening here. The strangler is youthful and energetic, a friend of the family, you might say. And the victim has no concept of danger. It doesn’t suspect. This is like a preying mantis that mates and then kills its lover. An embrace, a light touch on the shoulder that ends in death by strangulation; not as in a sudden snap of the neck but in slow motion, one frame at a time. It’s creepy. To have the life force squeezed out of you so slowly no one notices, no one rushes to the rescue. They walk right by you, barely noticing that you don’t look your usual self. The victim keeps presenting herself in public as if all is well, but just looks a little more piqued than usual. There’s no cry for help, no dramatic terminal event.
At least the anaconda hunts because it’s hungry. But this–this is evil.
It’s happening here, in this bucolic schoolyard:
The scene of the crime: in front of the schoolhouse Eco Taller Timbo, in the village of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, Corrientes province, Argentina.
A Tale of Two Trees
I am of course talking about two trees, one well known, the ceibo, the national tree/flower of Argentina. An aging queen. This is the ceibo in full flower.
The Ceibo tree, and national flower of Argentina with carmine red flowers. Gorgeous, isn’t she? She’s also called the Cry Baby Tree. Turns out she’s got good reason.
The Legend of the Ceibo
The ceibo has inspired tangos, poetry, and folklore music as a symbol of courage and strength in the face of adversity. Once there was an indigenous woman named Anahi, who lived on the shores of the Parana River (pronounced pah-ra-NAH). If you know anything at all about the local history here, a lot of very bad things happened on the shores of the Parana. Anahi was small and not particularly pretty; however she was forgiven her defects when she opened her mouth to sing and her mellifluous voice filled the summer nights with melodies about her tribe, their gods, and land.
When the conquistadors came a-conquering, they took Anahi and others from the tribe as prisoner. When her guard fell asleep, Anahi seized the opportunity for escape. The guard woke up and Anahi stabbed him in the ensuing struggle. She was condemned to be burned at the stake as punishment for his death. The night of her sentence Anahi was tied to a tree and a fire was lit. As the flames roared higher, Anahi began to sing about her land and tribe.
The next morning the soldiers were astonished to find a flaming ceibo tree in full bloom where Anahi’s ashes should have been.
It had been raining for days. Successive waves of storms rolled over and through us, lightning alternating between turning nighttime into day with sheets of light and sudden bolts cleaving the sky into halves for nanoseconds before engulfing us in darkness again. Incessant rolling thunder rattled the panes and the nerves as everything that breathed ran for cover. The sky played mind games with our heads as the gray clouds broke up in bright promise and then reformed darker than ever. As another soggy night descended upon us, the posadas of the village looked every bit the outposts of civilization that they were.
As the downpours continued day after night, the manicured lawns became ponds and lakes. Even the most raucous birds grew quiet.
The special native mud became deeper and more treacherous than ever, sucking at your boots and slowing your pace as the rain pelted harder. Running for cover was impossible for those caught unawares. At least one tourist that ventured out that week, beguiled by a break in the rain, fell and broke a bone in the mud streets. On one occasion I saw a handful of bored and determined tourists leave the safety of their posada, only to turn back in frustration after taking less than a dozen steps.
The Ibera Wetlands, and the Ibera Lagoon, the second largest pristine wild paradise left in the world.
I am in Mesopotamia. No, not that Mesopotamia. Not the location of the ancient Babylonian empire and the modern state of Iraq in the Middle East. In another time and place I would have put that Mesopotamia high on my bucket list because the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were one of the cradles of civilization and history holds special fascination for me. Unfortunately wars and conflict of the last twenty years have been very effective in obliterating not only the present lives of that Mesopotamia’s inhabitants and their culture, but in many of its areas, travelers are beheaded for the unforgivable offense of intruding on their world.
The Mesopotamia where I now find myself in the far northeast of Argentina was originally populated by tribes that found their way here from another, less well known cradle of civilization known as the Amazon basin. They spoke variations and dialects of a language called Guarani. Other tribes from the Amazon basin migrated westward to the mountains and highlands of the Andes, and which in many parts of South America are today collectively referred to as the Quechua cultures.
The Guarani however migrated gradually southward through what is today Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. This long preceded the arrival of the Jesuit missionaries and the Spanish conquistadors. Many of these Amazonian tribes also did a lot of beheading, and we know this because archeologists have discovered large caches of shrunken heads, with the skulls and other contents removed, and stuffed with various materials. A quaint custom indeed, and one of technology’s first experiments with miniaturization. So the victors shrank heads, and the losers ran for cover. No one knows for sure why the Guarani were moving south through the continent, but it’s pretty likely they were running from someone. One recent and authoritative source says head shrinking is still taking place in some remote parts of the Amazon.
This story began in the Amazon basin
There is far more known about the highland, Andean cultures in South America because the artifacts of their civilization were often made of stone, found everywhere in great abundance. Buildings and tools made of stone, left undisturbed, such as in burial tombs, last for thousands of years. However the forebears of the Andean peoples lived in the jungles, rainforests, wetlands and swamps of the huge Amazon basin, and the jungle reclaimed most vestiges of those who once lived there. It is only in the last twenty years that evidence is surfacing of vast Amazonian civilizations with causeways, roads, and irrigation canals that stretched for hundreds of miles, and which radiocarbon dating is placing thousands of years before the Egyptian pharaohs.
Now let’s fast forward to August, 2017 when a certain enterprising (or delusional) travel and culture writer named John Bechtel decided to backpack around eight regions of Argentina in the hopes of creating a comprehensive English-language survey of the history and cultures of the country. The sojourn begins with an introduction to an intellectual who is retiring this year as the director of the Argentine version of Junior Achievement, well known everywhere in the U.S. for introducing young people to the possibilities of entrepreneurship and to real entrepreneurs, people who have successfully built businesses.
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