Dowbrigade

On
the move again. After a rewarding and productive two weeks in Ecuador,
we are on our way to Peru, where our ungrateful,
irresponsible firstborn son will NOT be waiting at the airport, as
promised, due to what he lamely claims is a rare "paying customer" (at
his Eco-tourism hotel high in the mountains) but which we,
with the jaundiced eye of a war-worn parent suspect was a drunken bout
of Baccheal boisterousness. But we are getting ahead of ourself.

Yesterday, a long hard ride from Manta, our beach
hideout and future retirement resort, to Guayaquil, the figurative
armpit of the Pacific coast of South America, a big, dirty industrial
and commercial city which, contrary to the prevailing opinion on the
Gringo trail, we have always found to be a fascinating cauldron of
human pathos and arrested development. There is always something
interesting going on in Guayaquil, if you can find it and stay out
of trouble in the process.

Years ago, when we were young and irresponsible,
before we had discovered the secret paradise of Manta, we hung out
in the generically named beach town of Playas, a much grubbier and
funkier fishing village cum working class beach town about 90 minutes
from Guayaquil. From there, we would regularly venture back into the
big city for entertainment, drugs, newspapers, real food and the kind
of
adventures young American beat/hippie travelers can easily fall into
in any of the seamy, crime-infested third world cities scattered around
the torrid and temperate zones near the equatorial divide.

Now, thanks to our having married a severe Ecuadorian
accountant, the lovely Norma Yvonne, we stay with middle class families
in fashionable "urbanizations", eat at the finest restaurants, and
are forced to wear clothes, most of the time.

Yesterday’s bus trip was made much more difficult due
to the assortment of physical ailments we have accumulated as we bounced
around on this pre-season tour. Unfortunately for our athletic aspirations,
as soon as we arrived at the Umina Tennis Club in Manta, we developed
the worst case of tennis elbow in our 40 years as a catgut hacker, which
a local sawbones instantly diagnosed as "tendonitis agudo". It got to
the point that every time we tried to serve, our eyes would fill with
stars, then tears, and as a result we lost every match we tried to play,
except one against a 75-year-old career diplomat with one eye and an
artificial knee. But we slogged on. As every over-the-hill athlete knows,
losing doesn’t matter, as long as you manage to get down a bet against
yourself.

Now, finally forced off the court by travel commitments,
our right (racket) arm feels
like
it’s
going
to
fall off, and the constant pain, from shoulder to wrist, keeps us awake
at night, at least when our medication wears off.  Luckily, powerful
narcotic painkillers are easy to get ahold of in this neck of the woods.

On top of that, and our world-class first degree sunburn,
now rapidly evolving into the peeling phase so that we leave behind us
a tell tali trail of DNA detritus of skin shards like a molting snake,
we have developed a severe case of that voyager’s bane, Pizarro’s revenge.
In a vain attempt to ameleorate the suffocating equatorial heat (regularly
hitting 39 or 40 degrees Celsius, which we hesitate to even translate
into Farenheight), we have been taking an average of 8 or 9 showers a
day, and downing an equal number of bottles of supposedly purified drinking
water. A few days ago, we noticed that one of the bottles we purchased
at some corner store or ambulatory dispenser, had a strange, stanky smell
and taste. Well, water is water, we figured, and a little weird water
never hurt anybody. Little did we know.

Luckily, we abandoned that bottle after drinking about
a third.  Had we finished it off, we would undoubtedly have
required hospitalization.  As it is, we have spent the past two
days running constantly to the nearest toilet, emitting liters of anal
liquid, like brackish brown, malarial moisture out of a high-pressure
police hose at some street demonstration in a Bangladesh slum. leaving
us feeling like the life has been sucked out of us by a demonic vampire
bat.

Adding insult to injury, we went to our favorite Manta
pharmacy for a chemical cork, and by mistake purchased Lotrial instead
of Lomotil. Only later did we vaguely remember that Lotrial was not for
diarrhea, but rather a medicine we used to take for high blood pressure.
We think. We hope, as it would be an unpleasant surprise to discover,
in mid flight, that it was instead intended for constipation, or insomnia,
or incontinence.

Meanwhile, the buzz on the street, the story everyone
is talking about, is the macabre death watch over poor Terry Schiavo
and her tubular twin, the Pope. These stories are front page news in
every city we have visited, and people argue endlessly about the medical,
moral and financial issues it brings to the fore. It is easy to understand
this obsession, as everyone wonders if they are seeing a prequel of their
own eventual demise. Are we looking forward to a future of vast antiseptic
farms of Pod People, hooked up to a nest of tubes, wires and medical
apparatus,
sustained by science in a nebulous purgatory between life
and death?

It touches a deep fear in all of us, fear of a sort
of geriatric Matrix, or a nightmare from which we cannot awake. It is
a scenario bound to be repeated with increasing frequency, around the
globe, modern medicine run amok, soulless scientific life support. These
are certainly questions to which the Dowbrigade has no answers, other
than to know that in our case being abandoned with our dog and iBook
on a desolate ice floe in the Arctic would be preferable to the 15 years
of slow torture that poor woman has been put through.

But enough thoughts of death and depression. We have
to pack our bags and get ready to head back to the airport for the flight
to Lima. Despite his previous promises of filial fealty, number one son
will not be awaiting us with a fatty in Jorge Chavez airport, named after
Peru’s most famous aviator, the first man to fly over the Andes.  The
fact that he crashed and died before landing his plane is now looked
at with a sort of tragic nobility, and is in many ways emblematic of
the doomed cost of glory hanging over this Andean nation, once
the seat of the greatest empire the western hemisphere has ever known.
At least until the emergence of the current American Empire girding the
globe.  Who can predict the cost of that hubric glory, other than
a sneaking suspicion that we too will have to crash and burn at some
lonely crossroad in the misty, unseen future.

So we will have to wait until tomorrow to see Joey,
and will try our best to suppress our disappointment in unkept promises
and dissolute delay.  Life is too short to linger on recriminations
and resentment. Instead we will do our best to enjoy every minute of
the time we can spend together. In a week, we will be back in Boston,
and it will all seem like a dream, the raw material for our sustaining
memories, and fodder for a few good blog posts.