Dowbrigade

Just lost another long post, the third one in a row over the last week.  Blame the lousy computers, wacky keyboards, exhaustion and perhaps a subconscious reluctance to enmesh ouself once again in the Blogging mindset.

The gist was that we are on the road again, heading back to the wired world, but it seems to be going against the current.  We have suffered from lost tickets, bus breakdowns, airport delays (today we spent 7 hours in the Lima airport waiting for a connecting flight which had been canceled by the FIRST SNOWSTORM IN CUZCO IN 20 YEARS.

Rather than risk losing this one we will send it out as is.  We look forward to blogging again from our trusty iMac in our homebase in Boston, starting Friday.  Which should also solve our spelling problem (what Shame for an English teacher!), which has so upset some of our readers. We appologize, and can’t wait to share the risque details of our truly epic voyage.

Despite the eye-opening reboot that leaving the belly of the beast for a while inevitably provides, the sweet assurance that some places will never change their essence, at least during our short lifetimes, and will always offer a haven from the madness of expansion capitalism, and inspite of the ingrained allure of life on the road, the staggering beauty of untamed nature and the viscerial variety of a vibrant third-world culture, there comes a time in every trip when one is ready to come home.

That time has come for the Dowbrigade, and none too soon. we are worn down and worked up.  We have done things and seen things never before experienced, and revisited many warm memories, people and places. We have made new friends and reencountered old ones. We are ready. On Sunday we start on our way back, on Thursday we will be in Boston, and Friday, a week from today we will meet the group of foreign lawyers who we will guide through an intricate introduction to the American legal system over the next six weeks.

This will inevitably involve a change in the nature of the Dowbrigade News during the coming weeks.  These rambling personal screeds will disappear, although we have enough random writings and digital photos on our iBook to spice up the old blog for months to come. Pithy comments, strange photos and scandalous exposes will reappear, and as we reestablish contact with our network of highly placed informants, some blockbuster stories are sure to surface. In addition, every summer the Dowbrigade News becomes something of a law blog when the foreign lawyers arrive. It should be fun. Stay tuned.

As often seems to happen, the Dowbrigade has gotten himself embroiled in a hot third-world political situation.  After dodging strikes and marches in Ecuador, we now find ourself in the middle of one of the longest running and most vicious labor disputes in South American history – between the Federal Peruvian government and the SUTEP – the public school teacher

Father

Well, the day has finally arrived. One year since our first uncertain post, a year in which we have found our voice, made new friends and a few enemies (notably via the Moose story) and lost a few of our marbles and quite a bit of hair.

Whether it is a portent or a result of where we are physically, but we feel less pressure or even reason to post here, living the simple life high in the Peruvian Andes than at any time or from anyplace during our momentous first year. From where we are sitting, just on the far side of the wired – nonwired world interface, floating above the furtherest tendril of the electronic web which has penetrated down the highway and through the towns along the valley floor, we really see no pressing need to communicate or even really process what we are seeing and feeling.  Experiencing it is enough.

In part, perhaps, it is the realization that some things are beyond communication, that even attempting to communicate them will lead to more misunderstanding and false assumptions than to enlightenment. Some experiences, moments, truths cannot be translated, neither from one language to another nor from the experiential world to the static structure of language.

Oh, we are taking notes, and digital photographs, some of which will undoubtably filter down to the Dowbrigade News eventually. But we no longer feel the need to validate our existence through the Blogosphere, and this is probably all for the better.

For thinking back from this Olympian perch it is something of a madness or a sickness this compuslive blogging with which we were afflicted during long stretches of the year, the near physical addiction to digesting a few assorted scraps of the information overload we are exposed to on a daily basis, and spitting it back out, partially metabolized for our own amusement and enjoyment, and perhaps that of others.

It occurs to us now that this whole blogging phenomenon may be a defensive adaptive reaction to the unmanageable deluge of information, opinion, entertainment and advertising in which modern American culture is drowning. By grabbing a few random tendrils or bits of the mosaic, and making them somehow our own, branding them with an insight or previously unnoted association, we in some small symbolic take control of the slipstream, or at least create an illusion of control. Or perhaps marking our territory like digital dogs would be a more accurate analogy.

Thanks to all my readers. It has been a fantastic year. We have decided that the Dowbrigade will continue is some form for the forseeable future.

The following story, out of Tokio, which appeared yesterday in El Commercio of Lima, Peru (purchased on a birthday buying expedition to the highland city of Huaraz) piqued our curisiosity as it combines cleverness and stupidity, international crime, a clash of cultures and a simple twist of fate.

Peruvian Robber had an Enormous Stash in the Bank

by Mario Castro, corespondent

TOKIO – Having an oversized bank account is what gave away Peruvian Akio Masao Kanashiro Higa, 32, who was arrested by the Japanese police for allegedly paricipating in six assaults on armored cars, supermarkets and Pachinko parlors over the past year and a half, during which he and his accomplices stole more than a million dollars in cash.

The origins of Democracy are steeped in the mead beer and wine of ancient Greece, and its modern appearance in England is equally associated with beer, ale and stout drinking and pub-centric political organizing.  From the French toasting their breifly glorious and gloriously breif revolution to our Founding Fathers plotting sedition in Boston Bars, to modern Russian elections greased with Vodka poll chasers, alchohol has been used throughout the ages to get out the vote, get through election day, celebrate victory and weep with defeat.

In just the latest example of the inseparability of these two twin freedoms (the freedom to choose your government and your freedom to be completely ossified while doing so), the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (full disclosure: long ago and far away, the Dowbrigade used to work for this rag as a copy boy) has exposed an ingenious plan to induce the youth of today to register to vote.

That’s the plan at today’s East End Festival. Monroe County Democrats have teamed up with High Falls Brewery to offer two free 2-ounce beers to those who register to vote at the festival.

Then the new voter can go into a real voting booth and pick the brew they liked the most. The promotion is called “Register Your Taste.”

Wow! They get to go into a real voting booth, and vote for their favorite beer.  Not only does this stunt combine voting and drinking, but it also functions as marketing, market research and voter eduction! What an example of American ingenuity!

from the Democrat and Chronicle

Down in town, checking out another of the new cybers, which have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain since the last time we were in the town of Carhuaz, Peru a year and a half ago. Unlike Banos, Ecuador, which we have visited at least once a year since we discovered it, 32 years ago, our time in Carhuaz has been interrupted and rejoined during several intensive stretches.

We first came here in 1979, before  marrying the Peruvian Princess we met in Cuzco. It was, in fact, she who brought us up here in the first place. The Princess had been living in Europe, for one long interlude in Geneva as the kept mistress of a Swiss banker until she was arrested and deported for stealing a Raggedy Ann type doll from a toy store, a traumtic incident she would never fully recount, only allude to.

When she arrived back in Peru she discovered that her closest rabble-rousing Lima girlfriend had hitched her wagon to a dissolute, alchoholic washout from the New Age movement, who had inherited several million from his Italo-Peruvian family, and was trying to drink it away while escaping from cruel civilization high in the mountains. At that time Carhuaz, and indeed the entire Callejon de Huaylas valley in which it is situated, was becoming quite popular with back-to-nature counter-culture refuges, especially from Europe.  The land was cheap, and fantastically fertile – anything will grow. Inventive adobe and white plaster hobbit-hole style hippy houses began sprouting out of the incredibly lush mountainsides, and the Princess, with the Dowbrigade in tow, settled in for an extended summer as a high energy interloper, gate crashing the sustainable and decidedly non-western world of indigenous Americans high in the Cordillera.

As an anthropologist the Dowbrigade was simultaneously exhilerated to finally be living with the Indians, not dropping in to take a couple of months worth of notes and write up an enthnographical paper or tract, but actually living as a (marginally) accepted part of the community, and aghast at the almost complete lack of understanding on the part of the Princess as to exactly what she was experiencing, the cultural and human significance of this alternate version of the world we were privaledged to participate in.

To her, it was more like an extended stay at an Indian-themed summer camp, practicing crafts, cooking over a wood stove, growing our own vegetables. She hung out with an irresolute gang of mestizo wastrels down in the town, who because of the Spanish component of their racial heritage felt (and were treated) as being somehow “superior” to the Indians. This superiority translated mostly into a conviction that the world owed them a living, and that therefore they needn

We are posting today from the StarNet Internet outpost in the tiny town of Carhuaz, in the Andean valley known as the “Callejon de Huaylas”, in highland Peru. We are here to visit our sons, who are here because it is such a stunning display of natural and cultural beauty that 28 years ago we bought an undeveloped piece of land alongside a rushing mountain river, a 20-minute walk up the road out of town, into the higher reaches of the range.

And there are people up there. Hundreds of thousands of them in tiny villages and towns, no decent roads, or truck paths even, just trails, cargo by mule or donkey. Up there, just below the treeline, or even between the treeline and the snowline, people live pretty much like the have for thousands of years, simultaneously abandoned by and disdainful of the current regeime of Incas or Spaniards or “Peruvians” parading in the capital.

But the village of Carhuaz is right smackdab on the interface between the wired world and one of the few populated regions, together with certain isolated tributaries of the Amazon River system, nomadic tribes in the Sahara desert, the Himalayas and some pockets of sub-sahara Africa, are the last remaining areas which are not on the Grid. Have not yet been penetrated, for economic, cultural or political reasons, but the ubiquitous tendrils of the wired world.

In Carhuaz the TV’s get four channels.  Where we were here last year there was one publicly available computer on line in town, on a table in a corner of an animal feed store on the main drag.  Now there are two additional, multi-station cybers. There is phone service, a video rental place and three pharmacies.

Above town, where our kids are building, there is electricity, and municpal water.  Their TV only gets one channel (by some perverse twist, TNT, in Spanish until 10 pm and then in English), and although there is no conventional phone service, (a group of neighbors are trying to collect the $400 the phone company is asking to extend the phone lines that high out of town), the cell phone works fine off of a recently installed relay tower. If Carhauz is the interface, then our kids are the outermost epidermis of the electronic body of the wired world. One of the final cells.

Up the road into the mountains is another world. And it is decidedly not wired. Up there the old gods still reign, there are no phones, no TV signals reach, there is no Internet. People survive, somehow, whithout Slashdot! Not just the pace and accoutrements of life are different, but the whole texture of perception is different. Someone like the Dowbrigade, who has mostly studied these people in books, and microfiche dissertations, with but a few brief excursions, episodes, research visits to his credit, can hardly conceive of, let alone understand.

But we are happy here, on the Interface, observing a very slow-moving, almost balletic, but no less inextorable clash of cultures. The nature all around us is astounding, and its fruits fill our pantry. We will try to post a closer look at the actual lives of the crew soon.