Dowbrigade

Father´s Day 2004 finds the Dowbrigade once again seated in a seamy cyber-dive gazing out the open door at the sun-drenched central Plaza in the small andean town of Carhuaz, alongside the Rio Santa in the scenic Callejon de Huaylas, aka the “Switzerland of Peru”.

For the first time in several years we are together with our two sons, the total known prodgeny from this branch of the Dowbrigade family tree. Our older son has been down here about a year and a half, building an Eco-Hostal next to the river above town. His younger brother, unable or unwilling to get a job in the states or put up with our escalating pressure to get one, dropped out of community college and came down to help his brother by providing labor and security. In theory.

We have definitely been spending too much time in the Cyber. It is getting uncomfortably similar to being an alkie and hanging out in the neighborhood bar every day. Yesterday we ducked in for a quickie email at about 5 and didn´t come out until around 8.  It was dark, and we had accomplished less than nothing. We had lost several hours of work, ace writing, a poingient post gone forever, and we were pissed off.

It was a beautiful piece of writing; taut, melancholy, humorous, with some snappy dialog and multiple punch lines.  One of our better efforts, all modesty aside. We even managed to dig up a highly relevent graphic which could be inserted in the middle, no resizing necessary. When we finished our first draft, we thought to save it immediately, so as not to risk losing it as we added the source code to allign the graphic and correct the typos. As soon as we hit the “Create News Item” botton we knew we had shit the bed. Immediately, in a cruel demonstration of how fast the internet can be when it wants to, even in a benighted digital backwater like Carhuaz, up popped the “Invalid command - Error” screen. Some of you bloggers have probably guessed by now - we had forgotten to put anything in the “Title” field. And there was no way to get it back.  Composing directly in the blog itself via Manilla, these sins are cardinal and these errors fatal.

Extremely frustrated, we marched across the dark Plaza, bought the roast chicken we had promised the boys, and found a taxi to take us up the mountain where we vowed to recreate the lost post, if not word for word, then at least step by step and observation by observation.  Better than the original.

However, after arriving at the Hostal, and calming down over chicken and beer with our older son, we started to wonder if perhaps something in the content of the post had supernaturally intervened, or at least subconsciously caused us to abort the posting prematurely. We decided to wait until this morning to recreate the posting.  Lord knows we had plenty of other things on and off the computer to keep us busy.

Living in a simple adobe cabin, electricity but no heating, reminds us more and more of my years at Beaver Camp for Boys, in the Adorondaks mountains of northern New York State.  Especially in the mornings, as we huddle under the blankets, watching our breath mist frosty over the bed, delaying if possible the moment of truth until after the dazzling shafts of mountain sunlight had cleared the ridgetops and started warming the frigid air. However, this morning we awoke undaunted and determined to create our haunting and humorous post from the night before.

We had thought it over, and slept on it, and had concluded that there was nothing in the content of our posting which was illegal or even morally reprehensible.  Embarassing, maybe, for us and others, but that was part of why it worked. No risk, no gain. To work as writing, we believe, a posting must be honest, and revealing, and if occasionally raw and bloody, so be it. We decided to rewrite it as close to the original as possible, embarassement be damned.

The boys were still asleep.  On the lower porch of the main house was a rustic handmade wood and straw table and chairs, temporarily suspended in a pool of early moring sunlight. Carefully we set up our iBook, with its obligatory transformer (even though all Macs are rated between 100 and 250 volts, we had been told that the local current runs closer to 300, and could spike up even higher) and our newly purchased replacement power cord and secondary transformer on the table in the sun, plugging into a dangling extension cord hanging from the ceiling. What a perfect background for a blog post - sitting in the sunshine by the side of the river on a sleepy Sunday morning! Have at it!

We figured that after recreating our masterpiece we could burn it onto a CD, carry the CD down the mountain, and load it into one of the machines at the Cyber (at least ONE of these machines must have a CD drive, although we notice that the machine we are using AT THIS MOMENT doesn´t, having instead a strip of dirty copier paper folded and scotch taped over the drive bay), and then copy and paste it into the Dowbrigade News.

The house dog, a beautiful but worthless wuss named “Wolfie” was curled up at our feet.  We felt like Papa Hemmingway. Wolfie was the fourth in a discouraging string of blue-eyed sled dogs our older son has had since he moved down here 18 months ago.  One ran away, one was posioned by the neighbors, one was sent to a distant farm due to his habit of attacking livestock, and then there was Wolfie. When we say Wolfie was worthless, we are referring to his value as a watch dog, always the first consideration in canine evaluation down here.  The dog doesn´t know how to bark, and on top of that is scared of strangers. On the rare occasions someone comes to the door, he slinks away to cower under his tree.

This is a problem, as we have been noticing things disappearing lately.  Even though we never leave the house completely empty, one of us or the maid is always here, somehow a wooden table and four chairs walked off. And a book/album full of younger son´s CDs, although there is still some hope in this department as said son` is capable of losing an elephant in in a gym locker.

(Timeout: some religious procession just paraded past the cuber. From where we are sitting we  can see it through the open door, its having stopped just here on the side of the plaza to pick up and regroup.  There are three shoulder-hoisted floats, with lots of flowers and statures of the Virgin in each one. They are being carried by pretty young women in typical Anedan garb, thick and bushy blue wool skirts, decorated with applice fabrics in red and gold, blue sweaters over white blouses, and intensely woven woolen shawls wrapped around their shoulders, for carrying babies or anthing else.  Accompanying the floats is a small village band of flutes, tamborines, and hand-held drums. In front of the floats are small girls with what look like gallon paint cans full of rose petals, which they are throwing in the air to fall beneath the feet of the paraders.  When they stop, as they have now, these girls pick up as many petals as they can, recycling. Such scenes are common high in the Andes, where the religous calendar is choked with Saint´s days, name days, and other obscure celebrations.)

At any rate, Wolfie has shown no prediliction to watch anything or even advise when mischeif is afoot.  In addition, he gets goofy fits at odd and unexpected times, when he starts whining, rearing on his hind legs, and jumping wildly about. Of course, just as we were about to start rewriting the post, one of these attacks struck the dumb dog.

As though shocked by a live wire, he suddenly jumped 4 feet in the air, and took off like a rocket for the front yard.  Unfortunately, his trajectory took him directly through the power cable for the iBook, which was yanked off the table top, spinnning wildly in the air like a white frisbee, only to land flat on the cobblestone floor. For a moment we stared in stunned silence.

Impossible.  Our preciouss! The love of our life! Our repository of all that is holy in wired society and modern culture! It seemed like a horrible dream, and we wanted desperately to wake up. Suddenly we felt our feet moving. We had gone into crisis mode, a quick shift into a behavioral program in which we are capable of quite detailed and difficult emergency action without any conscious thought, like for example when one of your kids has had an accident and needs immediate medical attention.

Quickly we ran to the fallen computer and raised it gently in our arms, carrying it like a wounded child to the bed. Surely nothing could have survived a tramatic, spinning crash like that.  Half of our mind refused to accept what had happened, and was still trying to awake from the nightmare.  Somewhere in the other half a calm voice was explaining, “Don´t worry about it.  You will be going back to the states in a week.  You are spending too much time with your computer anyway. Since you couldn´t put it away, it has been put away for you. Open your eyes. Everything happens for a reason.”

By some miracle, the laptop seems to still be functioning fine. We immediately abandoned the idea of using it to blog and buring the resulting posts on CD.  In fact, we became convinced that it was best that the lost post remain lost.  After all, it could be potentially embarassing not only to the Dowbrigade but to others, people who are dear to us and we have no desire to harm or even embarass. Surely there are many other, equally interesting things to post, like the newfound proliferation of white Toyota station wagons as taxis here in the mountains, or the emergence of three-wheeled 125 cc motorcylce taxis, both of which coast down the mountain road into town to save fuel, or the local scandal involving the Preist and the schoolteacher, or the difficulty of finding good help, or the visually obvious retreat of the ice cap, or the current state of the Hostal itself. Or this.

At any rate, once again we have been in the cyber, staring at a screen, for far too much of a beautiful day in the Andes.  One of our last days in the Andes for lord knows how long. If this wasn´t self-censorship, then it was divine intervention. At any rate that´s all we´ve got for now.  Who knows where there will be more? We´re outta here…..

At any rate