I’m Pretty Sure
I’m pretty sure they were Asian,” my buddy Will was saying, squinting from the hilltop out over the remains of Monterrey.
Since we’d come into office we were still trying to decide if we were lucky or not. Looking out over where the city as we knew it used to be, you just wished there’d been some kind of super-adult who could’ve taken control and made things turn out different. As you can tell by the way Will and I were wishing for things like super-adults and such, the whole catastrophe was really turning us into dreamers.
As a big-time Mayor after our political coup de ville, I consider the important question ‘Why would anyone come to New Monterrey?’ Well, we're suddenly as international as Ellis island! I might say with a positive spin. Although it really feels more like long lost unfortunate cousins are contacting us for money, the Middle East and all kinds of Iraqi refugees with their noses crowded and pressed against the windows of our TV screens, their eyes asking for help. It's hard to know the boundaries of Monterrey anymore.
I could tell potential tourists this used to be Steinbeck country. What my buddy Will and I (I'm mayor, he's city council and the fire department and comptroller) are calling from now on 'Old Monterrey' was situated here on the edge of the bay, the national marine sanctuary that's home to Monterrey canyon. The canyon in the bay lets out to the Pacific, starting right off-shore, and it's so big you could give the Grand Canyon a bath in it.
You might as well understand outer space as understand how deep and vast that bay is. Most people around here live their whole life and never even take one good look at it. It's hard to swallow, it's bigger than the pictures your eyes take. I've tried my whole life, and only with practice can you look at the top-skin of this huge saltwater surface without your mind wandering off without you, letting your head turn back inland to human-sized scenery: Witness when you drive down the Coastal highway lining beaches that are mostly empty even on the weekend, but the parking lots of the shopping mall on the other side of the highway are full. For most people Poseidon and whales can't compare with One Whale of a Sale at Poseidon's Unfinished Furniture. As Mayor I suppose I should note that, and pass it on to Will (our Chamber of Commerce).
So, few really know the bay. It's like this wet alien world parked right outside of town. But I say, as the youngest mayor ever here, that it's part of the constituency.
The prevailing winds blow along the top of the water, and then that gets the current moving the same way. When that current hits the deep underwater canyon's rim, 400 feet below the surface, it forces the water up with all the little things that start the food chain: The micro-organisms that need light like grass, then the little baitfish and plankton eaters going through them like herds grazing on the plains, and they in turn bring fish bigger than them. And so on, like one of those Russian dolls, until the food chain continues right out of the water and even into the sky where the pelicans show up to dive-bomb for fish.
Back on land, neighboring us to the north and east is the Salinas Valley, also known as the "Salad Bowl," because it produces most of America's lettuce. Artichokes are grown around here. Garlic, cherries, pistachios, and strawberries too. So between the seafood and the Salad Bowl the area must have looked pretty tasty to our new immigrants. Will says they're Laotians. Anyway, he was pretty sure they were Asian.
But most agricultural types, including my 4H class, know, or have heard of the dangers, of introducing a species that doesn't naturally come to be there. It can set off a chain of events like you'd never expect. We learned in 4H that in Hawaii, mongooses were once brought in to kill rats overrunning the cane fields. But the mongoose preferred birds because the rats were nocturnal. So the mongoose, not suited for the graveyard shift, ended up wreaking havoc on the birds.
Or take the "Grey Blanket," for another example. In Australia there was this Englishman that imported and released 24 rabbits, just for hunting like he did back home. Anyone can understand that, right? Well, that was in 1859. Ten years later in an effort to control them, over 2,000,000 rabbits had been destroyed just on his property alone. Australia had rabbit problems!
But by God, nobody ever suspected what a can of worms would be opened, and then devoured, can and all, like by a goat, when these Laotians were brought in as cheap labor right off the boat.
First of all, the tragedy begins with a man around here known as Randolph Merriweather. He lived on this crusty old sailboat with a barnacle paintjob in the marina. And like most people who did that he was a real Darrell, which is Monterrey slang for derelict. And the greatest proof of this, is that he always pointed out other derelicts, which is a sure sign. "That guy's a real Darrell," he'd say, slamming someone who was practically his twin, "bad alcoholic, too." They all say this about each other.
But for a Darrell, he sure could sail. He was salty. And I'll give credit where it's due, he knew a thing or two about how to survive a bad situation. He'd encountered more weather on the open ocean with less of a boat than most rich guys around here would have dared to motor in the lake. He'd used an AM transistor radio once to guide himself to Hawaii after losing his navigation equipment in a storm, rotating it until he got good reception, then setting course in the direction of a Motown classic, then Don Ho. And I'd heard the secondhand stories of people he'd met. Like people you don't meet anymore. The kind of people you only find out there in international waters, where there's nobody to say what about anything. I'm talking about something worse than Darrells. I'm talking about pirates. Real pirates that are still out there. Shake in your top-siders we're comin' aboard and everything.
As mayor, I'm telling you the straight truth about these pirates. They're not wearing eye patches and parrots or anything, but they live by the same code, and Randolph had a run in with them a time or two and lived to tell the tale, including one that had circulated about how he fought them off with a flare gun. But that's not as important to what happened here as these other guys he met, these Laotians, arranging a ride on his boat for them so they could come work for next to nothing. So, like the Englishman, it was Monterrey's number one Darrell that's been credited with introducing these guys to the landscape.
Me and Will ended up taking a Zodiac raft to pay a visit to Randolph's boat out in the harbor. True to the code of Darrells, he hadn't felt any responsibility about the Laotians, and was simply planning to move on now that there was no society for him to live on the fringe of. But before he did, we managed to ply him for the details. It took a couple of questions and a pint of the truth serum Darrells respond to. How did I buy it? I'm 21 I'm 21 I'm 21. . . I must have repeated that 5,000 times. By the time I walked into the mart I think I had a cane.
During their stay (he didn't know where they were now) Merriweather had actually hung around a good bit with these Laotians. But the thing was, after a while he started avoiding them, because even though he was a certified Monterrey derelict, Randolph was actually real kind to animals. Those were the main things he seemed to like to do, drink, and observe wildlife, and he wasn't the kind to torch a stand of trees just to flush out some pigs (unlike the Laotians). During our visit, Will had lifted his ship log, a diary of sorts, and that's how we came to learn about some of these things. A derelict thing to do, stealing, but like Will rationalized, when in Darrelland . . .
Back at our camp on the hill, the first entry I looked at, Randolph had written his description of a night he'd passed down by the train trestle that crosses the Salinas River. He'd just been sitting there on the bank drinking beer. That area of town always seemed to call the hobo types, and a lot of those guys, you never knew where they'd been or how much they knew. You'd see them on Highway 1 sometimes down in Big Sur. A haggard man alone walking along the edge of the desolate road, with their beard and a sack over their shoulder in the wind, or just a dirty sleeping bag. They didn't motion for a ride and you didn't offer. You'd pass them in your truck and just do some math in the rear view mirror, realizing they were miles and miles from anywhere but lonely and more windblown coast, although it was beautiful when the fog lifted. Then you'd start wondering about them.
Why were they walking on a remote edge of America? Why didn't they sit on a street corner in some busy town? There weren't even any dumpsters to eat out of out there in the sticks. The only explanation was that they weren't what you'd call bums, they were like pilgrims or something.
That's what started to bring him into focus for me and Will as we read his diary like bad little brothers. Reading about Randolph sitting there in the darkness, cross-legged next to the train cars with graffiti on them, leaning back against a rock wall patiently observing this small possum trundling along right up to him. He detailed how he had just assumed it would see him, and so kept waiting for it to change direction. Then he realized it must not have known he was there, because it was just about to climb in his lap, so he gave a little whistle to let him know, and the possum had done this cute little double take and finally changed direction.
Will and I looked up at one another. I thought Will looked pretty official underneath his red plastic fireman's hat with the battery-operated siren on top.
But the whole way Randolph described that interaction with the baby possum in his diary, the very fact that he did jot something like that down, was making me think of him a little differently He had kept a lot of data like this about the wildlife he observed, records of seeing all kinds of small tragedies and glories: What time the sooty shearwaters were feeding, the dark flock of a thousand seabirds circling above a school of fish, shadow herding them for one another in their cooperative way, taking turns feeding then moving to the outside of their airborne lasso; Otters using their paws to worry bubbles into their fur for buoyancy and then anchoring themselves by rolling in the floating kelp vines to sleep. The day to day life of pelicans. The rare sightings as well as the usual. Big and small, sea mammals as well as city nature. And so here we were on this hill, overlooking the terrain maybe like Steinbeck would have, just a seal's bark away from the seashore, about to conclude reading from Randolph's diary the best description of the last days of Old Monterrey, standing over its remains like a funeral. Will, head of the New Monterrey Historical Society, was in charge of reading. He hit the light on his hat and I settled in to understand:
Randolph Merriweather's diary
Jan. 15
I've been experimenting with using electricity to draw stone from seawater.
The key is a natural chemical compound found in the ocean called calcium carbonate. By running low voltages of direct electrical current through a piece of wood, or metal, calcium carbonate minerals that are naturally dissolved in seawater are attracted to the structure and become solidified. While this can be structural alone, at the same time coral can grow on the structure 500 percent faster, due to the high availability of calcium carbonate it requires.
I hope this will be a revolutionary business with great implications! We will just repair wooden docks by reinforcing them with calcium carbonate, for starters. Then, hulls of boats can be made to have a smooth lining exterior like the inside of an oyster shell. Eventually, we will repair damaged coral reef—the rain forests of the ocean—and grow new reef to stop shoreline erosion. My Laotians, as the townspeople have come to call them, are going to help me with this.
If I can find them . . . I'm told a maid found the remains of a lamb they'd slaughtered in their room, and they were kicked out of the hotel I had them in. Tomorrow I will continue to search for them. I hope I'm not too late.
Jan. 19
After asking questions around town and generally casting about for signs of the Laotians, I gave up and spent the evening observing kabatic air flow down in the Big Sur region past Point Lobos. I suppose I'm more interested in wildlife and nature than humanity. I guess I'm officially the type of old poop who feeds the ducks now.
After sundown, when the mountainsides begin to cool, there are two drainages in the area valleys, canyons, gulches, and ravines. One is constant: the rivers, creeks, and otherwise water runoff. The second, above the first, is an invisible drainage flowing on top of the water. These air currents are caused by their cooling and sinking without the sun's heat that earlier in the day made them rise. When the air cools it comes sinking and tumbling down the hills into the valleys, taking the same paths of least resistance towards the sea the water does.
Along one steep incline where the Little Sur river ran fast, I hopped out to the middle on stones where the wind, in this case kabatic air, was almost a torrent, and only above the creek. I stayed as long as I could, chuckling along with the water at this great discovery, and didn't want to leave even when my fingers and toes were beginning to numb, and Lord knows I've had problems with that.
What I call the kabatic effect is in a way the respiratory system of the earth, and if sailors traded on these winds, so did I sail the world tonight, finding a perfect place where I could listen to and feel the earth's breathing in and out. But still I was lonely, wishing I could speak this language with someone else.
Feb. 17
The Laotians were sighted a few days ago wading as a grim team into the man made lake (a bird sanctuary) at the center of town, clearing out the migratory birds with their fence like seine nets. Then spotted again dragging their catch down the street back to their motel (they're gone now, another bad maid situation). Like an army of ants or plague of locusts, they'd gone to the sanctuary on successive days, wading into the pond for the honking Canadian geese first, then going back for all the fish, who went quieter.
I wonder about this case of cultural relativity. What's the difference between me and these Laotians with their garbage disposal stomachs?
Forms of cultural relativity can be seen in attitudes about natural resources. So far, on the grander scale, history has sometimes shown that you need to deplete your resources to know (and be in a position) to conserve them. i.e. America benefited from clearing its land, then turns around and points out that the underdeveloped countries with rainforest or "exotic" wildlife, shouldn't. In America's historical climb to stability, we used to clear off wildlife that didn't fit into the American dream; killing bears, mountain lions, wolves. The animals that scared people or killed livestock.
During that same time, wild animals were thriving, relatively speaking, in Africa, India and other less developed countries. Now, America can afford enlightenment and is in the preserving role, while these other countries, still hesitantly following the frontier American model to industrialization, are depleting their wild neighbors through habitat loss, poaching on the black market, and fear, in the case of such animals as India's tigers. Or even on a less dramatic scale, when nature proves to be a pest, witness the bird shit on my deck, and the mosquitoes (slap slap).
Marh. 4?
drunbk!
aahilkji7.
Laatotions? where oh where. . . calcium carvonate@!
March 17
No sign of the Laotians, though their handiwork is everywhere.
I wonder again after the futility of searching for them why they're my business, my concern at all. Then I remember the main thing is the beginning. Nobody does anything to determine where they show up on this earth. A person could just as easily be born in a generally privileged and free country like America, as an AIDS baby in Africa. No one has a hand in where they show up. This is why, ultimately, Africa is an American's business, and America is an African's business. Why everyone is everyone's responsibility, and consciousness is shared. I must find the Laotians.
March 26
9 days later. No sign of them. What I've started with "The Laotians" is now out of my control. It's time to change, to go with the flow. It's that time of year.
Anyone who knows water knows a thermocline. The seasonal turning over of two layers of water, one colder than the other. In between the two, at that time of trading places, is a median temperature, a solution of both combined.
It's a brown world in this way, season meets season, east meets west, and brown isn't just a color as much as it is a shade of truth about the world. The in-between that arbiter nature always proposes.
Merriweather's diary ends there. Thank you Will for that reading. So that was two weeks ago now, the last diary entry, and inspired by Randolph of all people (who's long gone for that matter) Will and I have implemented The New Monterrey Brown Program of Understanding.
From our spot on the hill here we're back observing the Laotians working in the fields where the old owners have stopped showing their face, presumably the work being beneath them.
Will, acting as super-ambassador, has been talking to them, and they're teaching us to, what they call, habla espanol. They're mostly some alright folk, hardworking too, salty in their way, and not as gross on the food thing as some of the stories circulating about them around here. They've got their Darrells, but don't we all?
When you watch them from the hilltop distance of our camp, in the bright shining sun working the dirt, they look almost like beetles. Respect the beetle, tiger. Respect the tiger, beetle. As the youngest mayor ever in our county, I've decided New Monterrey has a place for their kind. Come one come all, small and furry, winged, or on two legs, to this new and better empire.
I’m pretty sure they were Asian,” my buddy Will was saying, squinting from the hilltop out over the remains of Monterrey.
Since we’d come into office we were still trying to decide if we were lucky or not. Looking out over where the city as we knew it used to be, you just wished there’d been some kind of super-adult who could’ve taken control and made things turn out different. As you can tell by the way Will and I were wishing for things like super-adults and such, the whole catastrophe was really turning us into dreamers.
As a big-time Mayor after our political coup de ville, I consider the important question ‘Why would anyone come to New Monterrey?’ Well, we're suddenly as international as Ellis island! I might say with a positive spin. Although it really feels more like long lost unfortunate cousins are contacting us for money, the Middle East and all kinds of Iraqi refugees with their noses crowded and pressed against the windows of our TV screens, their eyes asking for help. It's hard to know the boundaries of Monterrey anymore.
I could tell potential tourists this used to be Steinbeck country. What my buddy Will and I (I'm mayor, he's city council and the fire department and comptroller) are calling from now on 'Old Monterrey' was situated here on the edge of the bay, the national marine sanctuary that's home to Monterrey canyon. The canyon in the bay lets out to the Pacific, starting right off-shore, and it's so big you could give the Grand Canyon a bath in it.
You might as well understand outer space as understand how deep and vast that bay is. Most people around here live their whole life and never even take one good look at it. It's hard to swallow, it's bigger than the pictures your eyes take. I've tried my whole life, and only with practice can you look at the top-skin of this huge saltwater surface without your mind wandering off without you, letting your head turn back inland to human-sized scenery: Witness when you drive down the Coastal highway lining beaches that are mostly empty even on the weekend, but the parking lots of the shopping mall on the other side of the highway are full. For most people Poseidon and whales can't compare with One Whale of a Sale at Poseidon's Unfinished Furniture. As Mayor I suppose I should note that, and pass it on to Will (our Chamber of Commerce).
So, few really know the bay. It's like this wet alien world parked right outside of town. But I say, as the youngest mayor ever here, that it's part of the constituency.
The prevailing winds blow along the top of the water, and then that gets the current moving the same way. When that current hits the deep underwater canyon's rim, 400 feet below the surface, it forces the water up with all the little things that start the food chain: The micro-organisms that need light like grass, then the little baitfish and plankton eaters going through them like herds grazing on the plains, and they in turn bring fish bigger than them. And so on, like one of those Russian dolls, until the food chain continues right out of the water and even into the sky where the pelicans show up to dive-bomb for fish.
Back on land, neighboring us to the north and east is the Salinas Valley, also known as the "Salad Bowl," because it produces most of America's lettuce. Artichokes are grown around here. Garlic, cherries, pistachios, and strawberries too. So between the seafood and the Salad Bowl the area must have looked pretty tasty to our new immigrants. Will says they're Laotians. Anyway, he was pretty sure they were Asian.
But most agricultural types, including my 4H class, know, or have heard of the dangers, of introducing a species that doesn't naturally come to be there. It can set off a chain of events like you'd never expect. We learned in 4H that in Hawaii, mongooses were once brought in to kill rats overrunning the cane fields. But the mongoose preferred birds because the rats were nocturnal. So the mongoose, not suited for the graveyard shift, ended up wreaking havoc on the birds.
Or take the "Grey Blanket," for another example. In Australia there was this Englishman that imported and released 24 rabbits, just for hunting like he did back home. Anyone can understand that, right? Well, that was in 1859. Ten years later in an effort to control them, over 2,000,000 rabbits had been destroyed just on his property alone. Australia had rabbit problems!
But by God, nobody ever suspected what a can of worms would be opened, and then devoured, can and all, like by a goat, when these Laotians were brought in as cheap labor right off the boat.
First of all, the tragedy begins with a man around here known as Randolph Merriweather. He lived on this crusty old sailboat with a barnacle paintjob in the marina. And like most people who did that he was a real Darrell, which is Monterrey slang for derelict. And the greatest proof of this, is that he always pointed out other derelicts, which is a sure sign. "That guy's a real Darrell," he'd say, slamming someone who was practically his twin, "bad alcoholic, too." They all say this about each other.
But for a Darrell, he sure could sail. He was salty. And I'll give credit where it's due, he knew a thing or two about how to survive a bad situation. He'd encountered more weather on the open ocean with less of a boat than most rich guys around here would have dared to motor in the lake. He'd used an AM transistor radio once to guide himself to Hawaii after losing his navigation equipment in a storm, rotating it until he got good reception, then setting course in the direction of a Motown classic, then Don Ho. And I'd heard the secondhand stories of people he'd met. Like people you don't meet anymore. The kind of people you only find out there in international waters, where there's nobody to say what about anything. I'm talking about something worse than Darrells. I'm talking about pirates. Real pirates that are still out there. Shake in your top-siders we're comin' aboard and everything.
As mayor, I'm telling you the straight truth about these pirates. They're not wearing eye patches and parrots or anything, but they live by the same code, and Randolph had a run in with them a time or two and lived to tell the tale, including one that had circulated about how he fought them off with a flare gun. But that's not as important to what happened here as these other guys he met, these Laotians, arranging a ride on his boat for them so they could come work for next to nothing. So, like the Englishman, it was Monterrey's number one Darrell that's been credited with introducing these guys to the landscape.
Me and Will ended up taking a Zodiac raft to pay a visit to Randolph's boat out in the harbor. True to the code of Darrells, he hadn't felt any responsibility about the Laotians, and was simply planning to move on now that there was no society for him to live on the fringe of. But before he did, we managed to ply him for the details. It took a couple of questions and a pint of the truth serum Darrells respond to. How did I buy it? I'm 21 I'm 21 I'm 21. . . I must have repeated that 5,000 times. By the time I walked into the mart I think I had a cane.
During their stay (he didn't know where they were now) Merriweather had actually hung around a good bit with these Laotians. But the thing was, after a while he started avoiding them, because even though he was a certified Monterrey derelict, Randolph was actually real kind to animals. Those were the main things he seemed to like to do, drink, and observe wildlife, and he wasn't the kind to torch a stand of trees just to flush out some pigs (unlike the Laotians). During our visit, Will had lifted his ship log, a diary of sorts, and that's how we came to learn about some of these things. A derelict thing to do, stealing, but like Will rationalized, when in Darrelland . . .
Back at our camp on the hill, the first entry I looked at, Randolph had written his description of a night he'd passed down by the train trestle that crosses the Salinas River. He'd just been sitting there on the bank drinking beer. That area of town always seemed to call the hobo types, and a lot of those guys, you never knew where they'd been or how much they knew. You'd see them on Highway 1 sometimes down in Big Sur. A haggard man alone walking along the edge of the desolate road, with their beard and a sack over their shoulder in the wind, or just a dirty sleeping bag. They didn't motion for a ride and you didn't offer. You'd pass them in your truck and just do some math in the rear view mirror, realizing they were miles and miles from anywhere but lonely and more windblown coast, although it was beautiful when the fog lifted. Then you'd start wondering about them.
Why were they walking on a remote edge of America? Why didn't they sit on a street corner in some busy town? There weren't even any dumpsters to eat out of out there in the sticks. The only explanation was that they weren't what you'd call bums, they were like pilgrims or something.
That's what started to bring him into focus for me and Will as we read his diary like bad little brothers. Reading about Randolph sitting there in the darkness, cross-legged next to the train cars with graffiti on them, leaning back against a rock wall patiently observing this small possum trundling along right up to him. He detailed how he had just assumed it would see him, and so kept waiting for it to change direction. Then he realized it must not have known he was there, because it was just about to climb in his lap, so he gave a little whistle to let him know, and the possum had done this cute little double take and finally changed direction.
Will and I looked up at one another. I thought Will looked pretty official underneath his red plastic fireman's hat with the battery-operated siren on top.
But the whole way Randolph described that interaction with the baby possum in his diary, the very fact that he did jot something like that down, was making me think of him a little differently He had kept a lot of data like this about the wildlife he observed, records of seeing all kinds of small tragedies and glories: What time the sooty shearwaters were feeding, the dark flock of a thousand seabirds circling above a school of fish, shadow herding them for one another in their cooperative way, taking turns feeding then moving to the outside of their airborne lasso; Otters using their paws to worry bubbles into their fur for buoyancy and then anchoring themselves by rolling in the floating kelp vines to sleep. The day to day life of pelicans. The rare sightings as well as the usual. Big and small, sea mammals as well as city nature. And so here we were on this hill, overlooking the terrain maybe like Steinbeck would have, just a seal's bark away from the seashore, about to conclude reading from Randolph's diary the best description of the last days of Old Monterrey, standing over its remains like a funeral. Will, head of the New Monterrey Historical Society, was in charge of reading. He hit the light on his hat and I settled in to understand:
Randolph Merriweather's diary
Jan. 15
I've been experimenting with using electricity to draw stone from seawater.
The key is a natural chemical compound found in the ocean called calcium carbonate. By running low voltages of direct electrical current through a piece of wood, or metal, calcium carbonate minerals that are naturally dissolved in seawater are attracted to the structure and become solidified. While this can be structural alone, at the same time coral can grow on the structure 500 percent faster, due to the high availability of calcium carbonate it requires.
I hope this will be a revolutionary business with great implications! We will just repair wooden docks by reinforcing them with calcium carbonate, for starters. Then, hulls of boats can be made to have a smooth lining exterior like the inside of an oyster shell. Eventually, we will repair damaged coral reef—the rain forests of the ocean—and grow new reef to stop shoreline erosion. My Laotians, as the townspeople have come to call them, are going to help me with this.
If I can find them . . . I'm told a maid found the remains of a lamb they'd slaughtered in their room, and they were kicked out of the hotel I had them in. Tomorrow I will continue to search for them. I hope I'm not too late.
Jan. 19
After asking questions around town and generally casting about for signs of the Laotians, I gave up and spent the evening observing kabatic air flow down in the Big Sur region past Point Lobos. I suppose I'm more interested in wildlife and nature than humanity. I guess I'm officially the type of old poop who feeds the ducks now.
After sundown, when the mountainsides begin to cool, there are two drainages in the area valleys, canyons, gulches, and ravines. One is constant: the rivers, creeks, and otherwise water runoff. The second, above the first, is an invisible drainage flowing on top of the water. These air currents are caused by their cooling and sinking without the sun's heat that earlier in the day made them rise. When the air cools it comes sinking and tumbling down the hills into the valleys, taking the same paths of least resistance towards the sea the water does.
Along one steep incline where the Little Sur river ran fast, I hopped out to the middle on stones where the wind, in this case kabatic air, was almost a torrent, and only above the creek. I stayed as long as I could, chuckling along with the water at this great discovery, and didn't want to leave even when my fingers and toes were beginning to numb, and Lord knows I've had problems with that.
What I call the kabatic effect is in a way the respiratory system of the earth, and if sailors traded on these winds, so did I sail the world tonight, finding a perfect place where I could listen to and feel the earth's breathing in and out. But still I was lonely, wishing I could speak this language with someone else.
Feb. 17
The Laotians were sighted a few days ago wading as a grim team into the man made lake (a bird sanctuary) at the center of town, clearing out the migratory birds with their fence like seine nets. Then spotted again dragging their catch down the street back to their motel (they're gone now, another bad maid situation). Like an army of ants or plague of locusts, they'd gone to the sanctuary on successive days, wading into the pond for the honking Canadian geese first, then going back for all the fish, who went quieter.
I wonder about this case of cultural relativity. What's the difference between me and these Laotians with their garbage disposal stomachs?
Forms of cultural relativity can be seen in attitudes about natural resources. So far, on the grander scale, history has sometimes shown that you need to deplete your resources to know (and be in a position) to conserve them. i.e. America benefited from clearing its land, then turns around and points out that the underdeveloped countries with rainforest or "exotic" wildlife, shouldn't. In America's historical climb to stability, we used to clear off wildlife that didn't fit into the American dream; killing bears, mountain lions, wolves. The animals that scared people or killed livestock.
During that same time, wild animals were thriving, relatively speaking, in Africa, India and other less developed countries. Now, America can afford enlightenment and is in the preserving role, while these other countries, still hesitantly following the frontier American model to industrialization, are depleting their wild neighbors through habitat loss, poaching on the black market, and fear, in the case of such animals as India's tigers. Or even on a less dramatic scale, when nature proves to be a pest, witness the bird shit on my deck, and the mosquitoes (slap slap).
Marh. 4?
drunbk!
aahilkji7.
Laatotions? where oh where. . . calcium carvonate@!
March 17
No sign of the Laotians, though their handiwork is everywhere.
I wonder again after the futility of searching for them why they're my business, my concern at all. Then I remember the main thing is the beginning. Nobody does anything to determine where they show up on this earth. A person could just as easily be born in a generally privileged and free country like America, as an AIDS baby in Africa. No one has a hand in where they show up. This is why, ultimately, Africa is an American's business, and America is an African's business. Why everyone is everyone's responsibility, and consciousness is shared. I must find the Laotians.
March 26
9 days later. No sign of them. What I've started with "The Laotians" is now out of my control. It's time to change, to go with the flow. It's that time of year.
Anyone who knows water knows a thermocline. The seasonal turning over of two layers of water, one colder than the other. In between the two, at that time of trading places, is a median temperature, a solution of both combined.
It's a brown world in this way, season meets season, east meets west, and brown isn't just a color as much as it is a shade of truth about the world. The in-between that arbiter nature always proposes.
Merriweather's diary ends there. Thank you Will for that reading. So that was two weeks ago now, the last diary entry, and inspired by Randolph of all people (who's long gone for that matter) Will and I have implemented The New Monterrey Brown Program of Understanding.
From our spot on the hill here we're back observing the Laotians working in the fields where the old owners have stopped showing their face, presumably the work being beneath them.
Will, acting as super-ambassador, has been talking to them, and they're teaching us to, what they call, habla espanol. They're mostly some alright folk, hardworking too, salty in their way, and not as gross on the food thing as some of the stories circulating about them around here. They've got their Darrells, but don't we all?
When you watch them from the hilltop distance of our camp, in the bright shining sun working the dirt, they look almost like beetles. Respect the beetle, tiger. Respect the tiger, beetle. As the youngest mayor ever in our county, I've decided New Monterrey has a place for their kind. Come one come all, small and furry, winged, or on two legs, to this new and better empire.