On Sunday, I walked into a Slab City, CA camp as the new guy in town for an introduction to the informal Mayor. Slab City is a popular winter haven for nomadic misfits set on the concrete slabs of General George Patton's training center for the WWII African invasion. In the early 1940s, Patton flew over where I met the Mayor and declared, "This is Hell! My boys are going to train here for the African campaign." Hence, the Chocolate Mt. Bombing Range, second largest in the world, sits spitting distance from where the Mayor, bearded and strumming a guitar, chatted. Helicopters fired machine guns at 300 rounds a minute, and 10000-pound bombs rocked the ground beneath us.
The Mayor suddenly eyed me carefully, and shouted, "Steve Keeley! I've been searching for you for decades!" He recounted how his father, a genius three-time loser, once loaned me his VW van while the dad installed a cruise control in my Leach van. The VW brakes failed at a MI RR crossing, and scooped up on the cowcatcher of a moving freight train! The van folded in half, and I sailed down the track clutching the steering wheel to keep from falling out the window under the locomotive 3' cookie-cutter wheels…another near death. The Mayor grabbed my hand and shook it, and now I'm a made guy in Hell.
I'm a strong believer in the Baby Bull theory where one adds a little at a time to become big and strong. A backpack filled with a pebble more a day makes an undefeatable hiker. Few think to apply the Baby Bull to their minds.
If you wish your child to become prodigiously wise before your eyes, feed his mind daily like a baby bull throughout his childhood. The two books I recommend reading a passage at each supper sitting are Ayn Rand's Lexicon, and Louis L'Amour's Trail of Memories. Each contains hundreds of short excerpts from their works that instruct as aphorisms.
The term Baby Bull derives from a theoretical baby who is introduced to a calf, and lifts it daily. As the calf grows, so does the child.
September 30, 2015 | Leave a Comment
There is no such thing as a bear market. Nor is a 10% decline more likely to be followed by declines than rises. The limited number of such moves in past makes it completely non-predictive even if there were some conditional moves following it that were different from the first. However, the moves at the close yesterday before the 23 pt rise today have the semblances of death throes.
if we have any experts on such besides the hobo vet, it would be good to hear their insights.
Bo Keely writes:
The pressed dinosaur image in the death throes article you linked to has a more probable explanation. I disagree with the paleontologists about the cause of death being agonizing and with the vet who diagnoses the cause as opisthotonus. It makes more sense that nearly every dinosaur skeleton, whatever the cause of death, is slowly weighted by accumulating layers of dirt, which press it into that position.
1. The common definition of a bear market is a 20% decline from its most recent high price. The common definition of the Loch Ness Monster is a cryptid that reputedly inhabits Loch Ness, a lake in the Scottish Highlands. Some will say that neither exist. I have the photos of both.
2. The necessary condition for a 20% decline is a 10% decline. Hence the probability of a 20% is infinitely higher after a 10% decline than before a 10% decline. Based on what I've read, the pundits are obsessing whether this is "2011 all over again" (whatever that means). I am trading with the view that the answer is more likely "no" than "yes". Whatever that means.
The movie Everest is riveting with displays of market risk. Without spoiling the summit, the history of Everest passes from 1953, when Edmund Hillary became the first up, to the present as four groups daily attempt the top.
Everest is the archetype on thousands of similar, though smaller, expeditions that set out daily around the world to reach natural wonders. I've been on a hundred of these: to waterfalls, peaks, wildlife fields, and elephant boneyards. Everywhere capitalism has invaded the guide business.
In the first hour of the movie it's difficult to hold still in the seat and not crawl into the plot to boost someone up a ladder, across a crevice, or hold the breath as oxygen dwindles near the summit. The competing agencies recruit, outbid, and sabotage each other to get clients up there first.
And then there's the celebration of cashing in at the top, and saying, I did it. Everest has brought market risk to the silver screen.
So you've decided to go vagabonding.
What you're doing is courageous, logical, and not that unusual these days.
The bottom line is you've decided to jump the fence of your backyard to explore what's beyond. I did this metaphorically and physically as an Idaho spud, and haven't turned an eye back.
For you, good things are ahead. In the 1990s it was just becoming popular for citizens to step outside their country or second nation borders to live. We travelers called their areas 'pockets of ex-pats' and they were small but established in a town or site in nearly every third & second world country.
Now, however, the movement is grander, with hundreds of these pockets around the world, and up to tens of thousands in each. Some I've visited or heard about first hand in the past few years are Saigon, large cities of India, Seoul, Bangkok, a number of Chinese cities, and many more.
The nuts and bolts of finding and selecting one is simple. Get a Lonely Planet guidebook (at any Barnes & Noble) for the country or region you wish to penetrate. Use the guide in plotting a rough itinerary & picking a places to stay–immediately you'll be hooked into the travelers' grapevine. This is because almost every travelers use Lonely Planet, thus end up using the same facilities. You'll be sitting in a hotel, hostel, cafe or bar with dozens of other travelers and tourists from a dozen countries speaking four languages (English dominates) and you simply listen or ask what you want to know– where should i go for this or that.
Nearly every traveler I meet these days is a 'digital nomad', except me with my muddy boots.
If you are targeting India, Bangkok or Buenos Aires, I can provide contacts.
Your exploratory trip should connect the dots of possibilities, staying only a couple days at each, and allowing for side trips to nearby pockets of ex-pats doing the same thing you want to do. It's a scouting trip for overview. In one month, with diligence, you can have composed, and visited, twenty strong potential sites. The next step is to pick the top three, and live at each for one month to get the feet wet. Then jump in.
if you decide not to jump in, you will have had a wonderful time.
Pitt T. Maner III writes:
In Central America, Nicaragua, is an interesting and beautiful country I have visited and lived where one can find the finest coffee, good cigars, and excellent rum, or live healthily and eat many exotic and delicious fruits (dragonfruit, nispero, papaya, nancite) and hike through the amazing cloud forests and waterfalls of dormant volcanos. The people are friendly and generally happy and positive.
I started playing board games about the same age I began a diary, at five, and so was dually pleased to review a new Web-based board game that lets aspiring writers trace their trajectory of what might happen out there if you try to become an author.
You roll the online die to start, and land on a progression of squares on an upward spiraling toward a best seller. I just landed on 'First book tour' that actually occurred forty years ago with The Complete Book of Racquetball. In looking ahead, after 25 published books, tomorrow I'll publish Hobo Moments: 30 Years in Pictures. With it, I'll roll the die for the 26th time and see what happens.
You may create and publish your own board game on whatever topic you wish. I created one once on Jogging, where the participants were required to run once around the block for each square advanced, and another on World Travel. The premise for nearly every board game is advancing around a string of squares, the number of jumps which is determined by the luck of the die or drawn card. If of a mathematical mind, you may calculate the odds and lay out the board from scratch; however, the underlying current usually uses the general formula of the classic game Sorry to determine the odds of advancement and time spent on the succession of spots.
There is no better way to advance in life than to play it like a board game.
September 23, 2015 | Leave a Comment
Proprioception is one's capacity to grasp the relative positions of neighboring parts of the body, and the strength and effort being employed in the movement.
I used monkey bars, then horsehair mats, a physical board game called Twister, and finally sports.
You may also employ musical instruments.
You may foretell your career by the childhood instrument. Piano players make better tennis players, drummers step automatically into a helicopter's pilot seat, guitar players make the best martial artists (viz. Elvis), and the most interesting is the vertical space of the saxophone as in reading Chinese.
Close your eyes as you play for greater awareness into proprioception. Shift your body weight, and multi-task with another instrument such as a mouth harp.
Once, as an experiment, I spent a week where every waking moment was in motion, even while reading and eating.
Practicing proprioception improves balance, coordination, strength, weight transfer, quickness, and rhythm. As skill improves, more stimuli are added to continue improvement. As you type a letter, you may multi-task by lifting one foot at a time, and nodding your head.
Proprioception is movement intelligence, and should be started at the youngest possible age to improve one's lot in life.
The strangest mating ritual furnished from the animal kingdom must be the octopus Argonaut with a detachable penis. It reminds me of how not to play the market, putting all your eggs in one basket and investing it in one place. The market will bear it, but it may be your last venture.
The male octopus has one arm longer than the others, known as a hectocotylus, which is used to transfer sperm to the female. The arm stores up the sperm, and when the male finds a mate, he inserts and detaches it while mating. The female will store the hectocotylus in her cavity, but unfortunately for the sea-faring investor, the male is only able to mate once. The female, however, is capable of mating several times over her lifespan. In fact, females have been found that have several hectocotylus in their cavity at the same time.
A thousand tomorrows may soon pass without you once having tried dog food. Pet food has come a long way since I cleaned kennels in Michigan and sneaked every of the six types I dished out to the dogs and cats. I see that in 2001 Ralston, Purina, and Alpo merged to produce a line of food that surpasses in flavor and nutrition anything that I've sampled previously. Honestly, it's better than most fast food and some cafes. The Filet Mignon cooked in savory juices is great on spaghetti. The Chicken Rotisserie beats Colonel Sanders because it's not too spicy. It's one thing to enjoy a hearty Roast Beef for dinner, but something in the gravy takes it to a whole new level. The Lamb and Rice may be preferred by those who fear carcinogens in beef and chicken. Like dogs, cats, and most people, my two kit foxes that I feed nightly would rather have gravy on their food. Budget shoppers will find the food affordable in 13-ounce cans selling for about $.70.
My first train ride from the Golden Spike in Ogden, UT to San Francisco made a pivot in my life. In the Feather River Canyon, CA, I jumped blindly into a boxcar with the two bad actors with short trousers on the outer borders of the photo. They glared at me like wolves for an hour, and began to move in. Suddenly, the train stopped, and the other two men in the center of the photo climbed in. The initial two were yegs [sometimes spelled "yeggs"], or outlaws of the road, apparently newly released from prison. The other two were bona fide hobos, and became my mentors, teaching me to survive on the rails by using a RR spike for protection, and catching pigeons to eat under bridges in a wicker basket. I jumped out in San Francisco, the first of about 300 freight rides.
Of the myriad kinds of risk, many people graduate to the coffin never having sampled any until the last breath. This is a shame because risk is inherent in our being as evolutionary products of the original thought.
There is financial risk, credit risk, survival risk with which I'm more familiar, market risk, business risk, sport risk, political risk, romantic risk, health risk, and any other event where the outcome has a value and a penalty with choices involved.
My rules for handling risk are:
· Gather as much information as possible before entering any risk.
· Get a toe wet first, if possible, before the final plunge.
· Risks alone are more valuable than when shoaled with others.
· During the peak moments of risk constantly evaluate and reevaluate.
· Always have a backup plan.
· Always have an exit.
· When in doubt, be bold.
Whatever your brand of risk, these guidelines will keep you afloat to take another, and another, through the discovery of self.
September 10, 2015 | Leave a Comment
Think Like a Grandmaster also applies to survival. My shingle as Catman Keeley is having lived nine lives. Nearly every disastrous event that I've experienced has three mathematical elements: Danger closing, fewer escape options as the clock ticks, and less time to consider them as the flag starts to drop.
Some personal examples are approaching men with knives, a ring of snapping dogs closing, a freight train accelerating with one hand hooked on a ladder, heatstroke under a desert sun while hiking toward water, hypothermia while stumbling toward a distant campfire, swimming fatigue in a rip tide, an approaching head-on collision, cerebral malaria knocking at the brain, encased in a swarm of stinging bees, altitude sickness on a peak, flames licking on a roof, lost on the Pantanal as the moon sets, human stampede as gunshots near, runaway raft filling with holes, sinking in quicksand, cannibals on a slippery riverbank, musical trees in a herd of rhinos, ax chopping through a hotel door, 13' alligators on a one-lane levee, and rising tide on a cliff sided Baja beach.
These makes me want to go out and test myself again.
Effective ways to train for survival in the wilds are board games for children, sports for teens, and business negotiation as adults. Therefore, everyone has a background to adventure.
One of the goals of a person's life, after the work day and reproduction are done, is to discover 'Who am I'?
Today I had a discussion with a computer science professor on the definition of self. My thesis is that we are walking computers housed in sentient bodies due to evolution. The sensations of the five senses, plus a few that probably haven't been discovered, are evolved to support the central nervous system computer. There is no other way, or we would not be here.
I supported the thesis as one of the oldest living persons to start studying computers. Fifty years ago, I won a science fair blue ribbon for a shoebox full of erector set parts and rolling marbles that solved equations as quickly as an abacus or slide ruler. A perk was a twice weekly class with three other ribbon winners, to a Jackson, MI IBM office full of refrigerator size computers that calculated data using a language called FORTRAN. That evolved into the other programs, and so did I.
It's hard to swallow that we are evolved machines encased in flesh in order to become better machines, but defining oneself is where self-improvement starts.
My life has consisted of plans, deadlines and goals and not quite enough time to reach them. From so many times with the head on the chopping block, I've learned to deal with stress. You get up in the morning and choose to be active. You do the things you can and give no thought to the things you can't help. Raise the bar. You pick action that covers stress like a blanket. If your mental stress takes physical symptoms such as twitches, seek a quieter environment and exercise. Nothing is quite as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Just stay active and make the right choices.
Today I hiked in the Sonoran desert sand for four waterless hours at 120F in dry air east of the Salton Sea with ten pound ankle weights around each foot.
I became overheated and dizzily jumped into a canal to revel in the cool blast. The forgotten ankle weights dragged me to the bottom as my life flashed before me. There were stabbings, illnesses, freight escapes, and lost times in the wilderness in a series that convinced me that the mind remembers quicker than awareness perceives.
I couldn’t crawl up the steep canal sides, and so powerfully frog kicked a minute to a rope for bathers, and pulled myself out to live another day.
If you pick a fight with a professional or an alpha everything moves in slow motion for him. After he defeats you, he can afford to be magnanimous and get you up, brush you off, and offer pointers for your next fight. I was an alpha in racquetball and paddleball for years and did the same thing. I made many friends by beating people and then giving them tips so they could do better against me next time to improve my game.
I recently reacquainted with a guy I used to spar with in wrestling named James Hydrick who was an alpha on the martial arts circuit and held a Guinness Record for breaking the most concrete with a single blow. His ring, street and prison fights are legend, numbering in the hundreds, and he lost twice on flukes. Many involved weapons and being outnumbered six to one. He would always get his opponent up after beating them, dust them off, offer tips, and become their friend.
In the same way, fighting in nature among animals is to establish a pecking order, particularly in choosing an alpha. If you pick a fight with an alpha, be prepared to fight to the death, or be brushed off and become a member of the pack.
July 28, 2015 | 1 Comment
Forever Stamps are used for currency in prisons and psychiatric hospitals where inmates and patients aren't allowed to have money. Not only is it a medium of exchange, it is a good store of value as stamps appreciate with the US Postal rates which historically have never declined.
The days of prisoners and patients being allowed to have two packs of cigarettes a week are long gone. In California and most other states there is a full ban on tobacco. Regardless, smokers get them and, per supply and demand, the price of tobacco in the facilities has risen astronomically, and can be even more expensive than dope.
When you think of prison economics the second thing that should come to mind after cigarettes is ‘mack' – small tins or pouches of preserved mackerel or tuna. Since 2004, mack has replaced ciggies for trading goods and services because they are small with a inestimable shelf life. Inmates and patients have built an entire economic structure around the oily fish.
Then, in 2007, Forever Stamps became the staple currency because they are smaller and last as long as cigarettes and mack, and they appreciate in value over time. They are non-denominational first class postage which means they can be used to mail first class letters no matter what the future postal rate. For example, in 2013 a Forever Stamp cost $.46 to mail a first class one-ounce letter, but today it costs $.49, which is an appreciation of about 7%.
One pack for a microwaved Mexican cuisine. Two macks for a haircut. Two books of Forever Stamps for a jug of bootleg wine. Forever Stamps are so popular that improvised black markets spontaneously emerge around them with inmates offering everything from handcrafts to clothes and televisions. There are 20 stamps per booklet which has a value of $10.00, and the booklets are generally not broken. That is, starched laundry is a book but never a book-and-half, and a bodyguard for a day may cost five books but stamps are never pulled.
Inmates and patients can procure postage stamps easily and legally by mail or in in-house exchanges for goods and services making them a de facto form of payment. In fact, postage stamps are considered legal tender in the United States. You should be able to go into Wal-Mart or any store and purchase any of these items offered in prisons and hospitals.
However, bill collection in the underworld is more grisly. If inmates don't get paid for goods, services or loans then criminal acts are going to follow. Contract hits over owing Forever Stamps occur daily.
There is an odd wrinkle called 'upping the value' of a booklet by offering a $7.00 item for two books of stamps that are worth $10.00. Yes, it cost the buyer $3.00 more but the thing was in demand with stamps in great supply. The seller may then turn around and put the stamps as money on his prison or hospital commissary account, or send the booklets home to be used as full value to send him more goods or stamps.
All of which means the prison or ward economy runs much like a commodities market: Money in a commissary account can’t be traded, but goods sold at the commissary can be. And since the amounts in circulation are tightly regulated, their value can far surpass their price in dollars. Store men — prison or psych businessmen who have amassed a fortune of stamps — often mail stamps to loved ones outside effectively converting their fortune into cash, reducing the number of stamps in play and thereby inflating the value of individual stamps.
In the corrections and hospital system, enterprising businessmen amass vast fortunes of strange juju. These eccentric fortunes cannot be deposited into traditional banks nor can their value be added on machines. Instead, they are hoarded in secret piggy banks like seat cushions and hollowed bedposts. One never knows when he will need an uncommon item not sold by the commissary such as clean urine (stored in condoms) for a drug test, and has to go to the bank to pay for it. In the joint, everything has a value and ingenuity is priceless.
And with that, we must study the improvised, underground economies of America’s vast prison and psychiatric systems. In traditional economies, money has three primary functions: as a medium of exchange, as a unit of account, and as a store of value. Forever Stamps are the underworld gold standard that citizens outside the walls might envy in some ways.
Discouragement is between you and your dreams. Imagine the ways you deal with it in life, business, sports, board games and romance, and then take a tip from deep in the desert. I've discovered after living here for two decades that desert rats, as they fondly call themselves, deal with the hardships or heat, privation, and loneliness in eight ways.
1. Books: This is a lifelong plunge.
2. Booze: So is this, so try the other seven first.
3. Exercise: This was my adaptation many years ago; the washes are my sidewalks.
4. Refrigerator People: Live with one hand on the door.
5. Hobby: For most, it's fixin' cars.
6. Estivation: Not found in some dictionaries, this is the desert form of hibernation.
7. TV: Hours of it.
8. Sex: Beats watching the cactus grow, or does it?
One of the first questions to ask a person to know them better is: "What do you do in your spare time?" The answer in the desert is always one of the above. And from that you will be discouraged or encouraged. Think of encouragement as a cheerleader that says, "Do it!, Don't give up!" until you reach your dreams.
With copper selling at $2.50 a pound, wire thefts have become increasingly popular. Last month in fashionable Chesapeake, VA my brother chased down two midnight strippers on his bicycle. Little desert towns around me now in southern California look like war zones with every fourth shanty or mobile home broken into, and stripped. At my own Sand Valley property wire robbers stripped the extension cords, dug up underground wires, and burned them to the precious 'green gold' in my backyard barbeque. The other day in Niland, CA I was house hunting and paused at the sheriff station to inquire about neighborhood safety. The radio blurted, 'Copper stripper in the act in the chartreuse house on Fifth Street.' The sheriff piped, 'Will you stand by?' and I replied, 'Yes'. But secretly I tailed him, turning into an alley behind the chartreuse home. I got out and looked for people or prints, as the officer yelled, 'Police' and banged through door after door inside. He exited, pistol in hand, and yelled, 'Freeze!.' 'I'm the house hunter!' I shouted. We trailed the robber down the alley, and because of the price of copper I've decided to buy a house elsewhere.
Pitt T. Maner III writes:
There is a nice reward for those helping to catch Cu thieves:
"With the theft of copper communications cable increasing in Southern California, Verizon is offering up to $10,000 to anyone who can provide the company with information that leads to the arrest of the perpetrators."
Strange events since the price of copper appears to be near a multi-year low…perhaps the cables are easier targets or the thieves have become more sophisticated in finding and exploiting them.
The metal scrappers at the largest bombing range in USA, the Chocolate Mt. Gunnery range adjacent to my property, keep a close watch on the London Metal Market, Dow, and Brass/Copper relationship in order to know when to hold or sell their precious metals. This week they're been especially vigilant while scavenging under the full moon on the bomb range.
Yesterday at sunset five quads forayed independently but in radio contact in case of breakdown, running out of gas, or pursuit by the military police or Border Patrol. There had been constant bombing for twelve hours that shook the ground we stood on and a perpetual rat-a-tats from jets and copters ejecting brass shells at over 60 per second at targets on the range. The range was littered with four-inch long shells worth a quarter. Each scrapper made two or three runs after sundown and returning with the last load before sunset with hundreds of shells per load. They pool the metal, and if the market price is right one pickup truck drives it to a San Diego recycle center that accepts military scrap. Each scrapper nets about $500 for a night's work.
They carried ice water, backpacks and milk crates for brass on their medium-size ATV's. They sleep all day, and are rising again this hour before sunset to run the range again, and again until the moon wanes later this week. The current price of brass is $1.60 a pound, so some of the men are holding, and others who need money are selling.
The metal market relationships are: When the Dow is up the price of metals is usually down. The London Metal Index is the primary guide to know when to hold or sell. When there's a war somewhere around the world, the price of aluminum jumps, and the scrappers start unscrewing the two-foot bomb fins from six-foot long 1000-lb. bombs that leave craters big enough to sit a small home into.
The first business book I read was Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich in which I learned to establish a master mind group to learn from. I always hired people who were smarter than me, and tried to keep control of the business. The second business book that shook me up was Ross Perot's In His Own Words during a 7.2 Richter earthquake in San Felipe, Baja Mexico that flung me off the earth as rocks tumbled down the arroyo walls and the nearby tide on Cortez receded 12 feet in three seconds. The third book I just finished is Perot's autobiography My Life: The Principles for Success.
In my life, as well as my life, the principles involved are really principles of life. Businesses need not be big to practice these standards. Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy that began fossilizing about twenty years ago with stricter government regulations. I urge you to beat the odds and establish your own business to get you to the heart of yourself.
My first capitalistic venture was a nickel-a-glass Kool Aid stand on the summer streets of Idaho Falls. I learned that a seasonal business is better than none at all. The second major business was Service Press Inc. out of a Michigan garage that came about when I published two books in one day. The lesson from that was don't overextend your budget based on your dreams. The third business in swap meets went surprisingly well. I had returned bone broke from two years of travel and, on walking into my old racquetball sponsor's warehouse, noticed a hill of racquets gathering dust. They were seconds, blems, demos and returns that the company boss let me have for a song to sell at the flea markets. The first weekend I took ten racquets to the San Diego Sports Arena swap meet and sold out in an hour to pay my hotel bill. The next week I took 100 racquetball, tennis and squash racquets that sold out the first day enabling me to buy a motorcycle with a sidecar to carry more. The third weekend in the first five minutes my competitor bought me out, and I had enough money to travel again. The fourth business was a slum landlord, which is a misnomer. My partner and I bought fixer-upper houses in well-groomed sections of Lansing, MI and fixed them up in learning the golden rule of real estate is location. I earned enough to buy more books, and travel. A few years ago, I established an executive hobo service that combined riding the rails with show business. Semi-annually I get a call from out of the blue from someone or the media wanting to ride the rails to gain perspective a la the prince and the pauper. When the kings of the offices meet the kings of the road, warm sparks fly and a good time is had.
Here are some of the principles of what I've learned in business and life:
· Save your money, and when you can afford what you want, buy it.
· Don't disappoint the scruples of your parents or peers, or you will break their hearts.
· It may seem unthinkable that a six-year old can work, but you cannot start too early.
· Grow your business as you probably grew, a little at a time without overextending it.
· Conduct your business in the center field of ethical behavior.
· The incentive of working for yourself is the more seeds you sow the more crops you reap.
· Don't give up. In the past six months I've been attacked dozens of times by dogs and thugs in the Amazon, lost everything in a Miami office robbery, was defaulted on a large loan to a friend, lost my family, and lost most of what I owned in a desert home robbery. But I've written ten books in that time, and that paints a rosy picture.
With a lot of hard work, a master mind group, the good sense of persistence, and maybe a little luck, your potential for success is practically unlimited. Please don't limit my success by not letting me work harder than the next guy. Some people don't think they have much chance because they weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but using these principles you may succeed in small business and your life.
Here's one of the most useful things i tell my students: once an old man told me to pull out a sheet of paper and order the five things in life that are most important to me. Most people choose: money, family, job, security, sex. for me (Keeley) the list i made at age 25 yrs was: knowledge, experiences, health, travel. and helping others. I've reordered those throughout the years, but the list remains the same.
A patient walks into a doctor’s office for a diagnosis of whatever ails him. A time-consuming, costly battery of tests follows that comes up with a targeted diagnosis many hundreds of dollars and days later. However, in Latin America the doctor examines the patient, asks a few questions, and 15 minutes later has a short list of differential diagnoses. This is the two or three candidates for the cause. Then, one-by-one, corrections are made until the right one is found. It’s almost always the first or the second educated guess. This is Latin medicine, on-the-spot diagnosis and treatment that prevents costly, time consuming lab tests. I’ve been through it a hundred times for my zoology of past and healed problems. One doctor in Mexicali told me that he could practice in the USA, but prefers Mexico because of this protocol.
In 1978, I published in one day It's a Racquet and The Kill and Rekill Gang out of an unheated garage on a Michigan lake where the keys of an IBM Selectric froze when I breathed on them. Here however, the two books come from a Miami high-speed internet office where I've worked a month of daily double 7-hour shifts with a miner's lamp over the keyboard and sleep on the roof in the sun.
With these publications, I'll hit the trail to exercise something other than the fingers, and probably stumble on new adventures.
February 13, 2015 | 1 Comment
1949 Born a common man in Schenectady, NY.
1972 Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from MSU.
1973 First of seven Paddleball National Singles Titles.
1972-8 Top touring racquetball professional … Canadian National Champion … First clinic tour of Central and South America.
1974 Bicycled San Diego to Detroit, and Canada to Mexico.
1974-7 Featured in Sports Illustrated 'He Found His Racquet' and other publications.
1978 Owner of Service Press, small publisher of It's a Racquet and The Kill & Rekill Gang in one day.
1975-85 Author of six books and over 100 magazine articles on sports and travel.
1985 Taught sociology class 'Hobo Life in America' at Lansing community College, MI … Psych Technician Certificate from LCC … Worked in psych wards and old folks homes … Lived three months with 'psychic' James Hydrick.
1985-98 Traveled 95 countries of the world under a backpack.
1998 Commodities advisor on a solo 13-country tour made CNN News, Barron's, Wall Street Journal.
1995-9 Hiked the lengths of Florida, Colorado, Vermont and Baja.
1999-2006 Sub school teacher and college tutor in Blythe, CA … Conduct Executive Hobo trips throughout America.
2000-06 Homestead and living as a desert recluse in the Sonora while working on the One-Ton Autobiography of Catman Keeley. 2007-09 Adventure guide in southwest USA and Baja.
2007 First California substitute teacher fired for stopping a playground war … Hit the rails, and foreign travel.
2008-12 Become an itinerant expatriate writing from select Shangri-las including Iquitos, Peru, San Felipe, Baja and Lake Toba, Sumatra.
2008 Three month bus tour of Central America … Caught up in an armed Mexican marijuana smuggling mule train through Copper Canyon. 2009 Buy a seasonal retirement home in the Peruvian Amazon … Continued adventure posts at Daily Speculations, International Man, and Swans Commentary.
2010 Write a biography Kill Richard of an FBI agent who fled murdering CIA agents to San Felipe, Baja … Publish Keeley's Kures while detained by a Sumatra immigration mixup.
2011 Tour Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia … Hobo ride-along with London Times reporter Joe Wobey from Sacramento toward Britt National Hobo Convention written up in 'Twilight on the Rails' … Freight with Central American immigrants from Guatemala through Mexico to USA … Publish Executive Hobo: Riding the American Dream.
2012 Read my obituary, articles, embassy report, memorial service and Art Shay's 'The Legend of Bo Keeley Grows' … Faceoff with bear in scratch contest in NM mountains … Complete a two-month walking and dirt bike reconnoiter of Baja for the Baja 1000 Hiking Trail … Wikipedia 'Steven Bo Keeley' is top rated.
2013 Gilbert Keeley, father dies, and scrap the Chocolate Mt. Gunnery Range for fare to attend his funeral … Fourth attempt through the Darien Gap is foiled by Colombian rebels … 'Last Sail of El Gato' near death sailing from Panama to Cartagena … Three months hoboing Peru rivers in banana boats … Launch the first bilingual tourist newspaper The Amazon Times of Iquitos … Publish five books from Miami including Charlie Brumfield: King of Racquetball, Women Racquetball Pioneers, Basic English One-Page, The Longest Walk, and The Longest Walk Companion… 'Elvis and the Memphis Racquetball Mafia' is syndicated … Founder and curator of Facebook US Racquetball Museum with 5000 friends.
2014 Hobo ride-along with Mother Jones journalist Tim Murphy from Los Angeles via Texas to Chicago and profiled in Jan.
2015 'The Amazing, Possibly True Adventures of Catman Keeley' … Worst case of anemia with 50% normal hemoglobin in the history of Iquitos … Seven months in Peru publishing Stories from Iquitos, Greatest Photos Around the World, Chess and Sport, and Racquetball's Best: Pros Speak from the Box … Asked to a hold rare set of CIA medals by a Miami agent who commits suicide… Inducted into the NPA Paddleball Hall of Fame … Decline induction for the 15th straight year into the USAR Racquetball Hall of Fame.
2015 Publish from Miami Elvis's Humor: Girls, Guns & Guitars, Bill Schultz: Ringmaster of Sport, Book of Bo: Gems of My Life … scuttle a 825 page, 40-year in the making Advanced Racquetball from amazon.com and the public for 'inappropriate conduct' and quoting Atlas Shrugged … Consultant for documentary 'James Hydrick: Fifteen Minute Messiah' … Read stories to Runes 'Dusting and Sweeping' audio series for the William Buchanan Spoken Word Project … Return to the life of a wandering hermit.
More dynamic than Water for Elephants, more picturesque than Dr. Zhivago, and more accurate than My Left Foot, Emperor of the North gets my vote for the best movie of the 20th century.
Shack in railroad terms has evolved various meanings. The RR term is for switchmen, the guys who traveled trains to throw switches at the track junctions, or more broadly applied to any RR yardmen who work out of a 'shack' that you see at either end of every yard. This is where the workers get out of the weather, smoke cigarettes, and play cards and checkers. Sitting in a shack too long without getting out for fresh air is called shack fever.
I've been invited by itchy feet shackmen into their friendly shacks dozens of times on cross country runs. Typically, they're cramped shanties from coast to coast constructed of clapboard or concrete a little larger than a phone booth with a pot belly stove and wallpaper of manifests, Playboy centerfolds, and hangman. You shoot the breeze with the men, sometimes a woman, and they help you get on the next freight.
In the movie Emperor of the North Shack is the character of Ernest Borgnine who was born for the roll. He rides the locomotive or caboose as the conductor, who in the old days doubled as the RR bull, or security. He is challenged by A#1, aka Lee Marvin, who has an historical character and I've read a dozen of his autobiographies, such as The Snare of the Road.
Emperor of the North takes place in the Great Depression of the U.S., and the country is full of people who are unemployed and homeless. Shack apparently hates the hordes that try to ride his trains, and swears that no hobo will ride his train for free. Along comes A#1, cool and tall, and smoking cigarettes like a smokestack, and puts his life at stake to ride Shack's freight.
A-#1 is locked into a cattle car and sets fire to the hay in order to burn his way through the wooden slats. He succeeds and hurls himself off the car to make his getaway, as the train pulls into the yard with smoke curling up the lip of an infuriated Shack. Shack meets A-#1 in a bloody fight with chains, 2×4 boards, and an axe. A#1 uncouples the cars from the tender, the other bo's run interference for him, he throws switches, and employs all the other tricks of the trade still used today to get through on the fast mail train to its final destination in Portland. Portland, I know, is a rustic yard with shade pines on both sides, where you can cross under and catch a city bus for a quarter downtown to the Hobo District.
Driven to desperation by the economic depression of 1930s, the hundreds of hobos who cheer A#1 on, formed an American subculture hopping freights to get from place to place in search of jobs, handouts, or even to take it easy sometimes, as is still done today. Emperor of the North depicts a microcosm of this subculture set in Oregon, and actually used the Oregon, Pacific & Eastern RR which was taken up in the mid-1990s, like so many other tracks around the country, to recycle the steel road and make walking and bicycle paths.
In the world today, a half-century after the movie's making (1973), there are still shacks where the shackmen - brakemen, switchmen, and conductors - hang out, but no cabooses since the 1990's when they were were replaced at the end of the freights by FRED, that we hobos call the F__ing Rear End Device. It's a 12''-square red-blinking box that is an essential electronic caboose. If there's no FRED, that freight isn't going anywhere.
Now the companies have cut back the bulls to a skeleton crew, if any at all, in most yards in a financial strategy that makes it easier than ever to catch fast freights along the American gridiron. You have to see the movie to know the classic encounter between the railroad hobo and bull.
February 1, 2015 | Leave a Comment
In my hoboing days, when the Los Angeles cops knocked on my door at the Rainbow hotel down from the library, and barged in, cuffed and hauled me to the nut hatch… I thought to ask them in route, 'Why?'
The reason is I had paid a week in advance at the hotel and not left the room, having returned from world travel with a need to hole up. The manager had called the police, I believe, because the hotel was full and he wanted the room to collect double rent.
On skid row there are all sorts of tricks like this to generate income, and off skid row.
The hatch they stuck me in is considered LA's finest. After checking in, while refusing to sign the registry, I was labeled dangerous as a former professional athlete. The nurse gave me a Thorazine pill to swallow that I used sleight of hand to stick it in an apple. Otherwise I could have been stuck in that place for a decade of mandatory doping doing the 'Thorazine shuffle' up and down the halls like a bear in a zoo.
The California law requires that a new patient be observed during a '72 Hour Hold', and then is evaluated by a psychiatrist to see if the patient should be held for a further period of observation, or released. Fortunately, the evaluating shrink was a compassionate, intelligent zookeeper. He knew that, as in County Jails, the government pays a stipend for the initial three days an inmate is held, and after that it's his duty to shoo the client out to make room for the next money maker.
The evaluating psychiatrist asked me to prove my wild claim that I was a veterinarian, and I told him his wife's poodle's gestation period was 63 days. Then he said, 'If you were me, would you let yourself out?' I answered by requesting a couple of dollar bills from his wallet, and quickly memorized the serial numbers, returned the bills, and rattled off the 20 digits. He signed the release, and pointed me to the checkout counter.
Now it was another double rent situation, because the clerk tried to get me to pay for three days lodging, that couldn't be enforced because I hadn't signed their register.
I escaped on a technicality, and, instead of returning to settle the score with the Rainbow Hotel manager, I got out of town on a freight train and slept in the woods.
So-called psychic James Hydrick was different from your run-of-mill overnight swindlers. He was born poor in the Deep South, chained to a tree as a child, fed dog food, but a spark kept him striving to find his real self. As a teen, he was shuttled from orphanages to foster homes, only to run away again and again, chased by the hounds. He escaped to Hollywood, in search of a cinematic dream, where tryouts for parts didn't develop. He modeled, took part time jobs, and earned a black belt in karate. By his early twenties, his timing was exquisite and body like an oak when he ran afoul of the law.
He robbed a van, fenced the merchandise, got caught, and thrown in the LA county Jail that is the bowels of hell with 2000 screaming inmates. (I know because I once landed there myself on a trumped up jaywalking ticket.) He became, according to the County Jail shrink I talked to, the King of the inmates. He decked the Black Gorillas gang leader in the shower room for soliciting homosexual favors and, with a bounty on his head, was thrown into a 15' cube solitary cell on the lowest level. The LA County Jail is normally a transit facility, however he was a special protective case, and spent two years there in solitary, where he spent thousands of hours working out and learning how to move objects without touching them.
On trips to the Big House shrink he stole and stuck pins and paperclips under his skin as lock picks, that eventually were found on x-rays but not surgically removed because of the cost to the County. He developed a close relationship with the Catholic monk while in solitary who, upon Hydrick's release, understood that the ex-con needed to be sent far away, and chose Salt Lake as his new home during probation. He was quartered with a hulking retired marine officer and staunch Mormon business executive and his family to live with under control.
I met Hydrick one day in 1980 in Salt Lake where I was doing a racquetball camp. I noticed a lone figure in the gym taking five running steps, jumping, inverting in mid-air, and touching a basketball rim 10' off the floor with one foot. We adjourned to a desk where, without touching, he moved pencils, papers and other small objects from a distance of up to 5'. I smelled a story. We became apartment mates for six months, as he started a dojo and local tour of his stunts, and I wrote and photographed them. (Some of my photos would appear uncredited in martial art and online magazines.) Soon sport and psychic apprentices from around the country arrived at the dojo doorsteps to learn Hydrick's 'powers'.
From 1980-1 he appeared on That's Incredible, What's My Line, and the Danny Korem Show. Then I was in the wind, and he was reported moving pyramids in Egypt with a new host of devotees. The next thing I knew he was picked up on an outstanding warrant when a policeman recognized him on a 1989 Sally Jessy Raphael episode. He has been incarcerated to this day, except for one short respite last year, at the Coalinga State Hospital Maximum Security Hospital for the violent mentally disturbed that opened its door for the first time, as if for Hydrick, in 2005. James is not mentally disturbed, just misunderstood from the aforementioned childhood trauma. He used to take knives and swords and strike within an inch of my body, without touching the skin, when we sparred.
My family was worried about my getting taken into the Hydrick cult and sent a deprogrammer to Salt Lake to rescue. After a short discussion, I was convinced he was off his rocker, but acquiesced out of respect to my family, and ducked out of Hydrick's life.
To pick up on details, I went to LA and traded racquetball lessons with four turnkeys at the County Jail for an introduction to the psychiatric staff. They vouched that Hydrick had been the King of the LA County Jail and showed me radiographs of a half-dozen metal objects under his skin. I met and buddied with the Catholic Chaplin to a dozen monasteries throughout the Southwest.
According to Hydrick's transcript, the deputies in the County Jail were frightened of him, thought him possessed. The Chaplin taught him to read and write, and gave him a Bible. To pass time in a timeless place, Hydrick proselytized, converting up to twenty inmates a day like a prophet. He opened the Bible and commanded, 'Hold the Bible. Father, in the name of Jesus Christ make these pages move. And the pages would flutter and turn.'
Hydrick's telekinetic powers were common magician tricks mastered to a high art in solitaire, plus one that was never discussed. I believe he could blow out the tear ducts on the medial side of each eye, small openings that drain tears into the nasal passage. I found in a 1950s Ripley's Believe it or Not a reference to a 19th century Englishman who blew out candles 'through his eyes' from 6' away.
He was released from Coalinga on probation for a few months in 2014, and was reported as having taken a day-to-day room in the San Diego Gaslamp Quarter. No address was given, but there is only one, where I used to stay while doing the Sports Arena Swap Meet. I visited the Golden West hotel on 4th Avenue where they told me he had left, and is reported back in Coalinga.
The lesson is to keep your eyes open when you dabble in the esoteric.
Atlas Shrugged was the biggest, most beautiful book and for ten years has been my standard. That's how long it took to write Advanced Racquetball, the sequel to my best selling Complete Book of Racquetball that promised, forty years ago, this sequel. It's 825 pages and covers every aspect of the game from sneaker to frontal lobes for Open to Pro players.
It was a labor of love for 1000 hours in an Amazon sweat box cyber for 11 hours a day, seven days a week for the last three months, on top of a previous thousand or so hours writing earlier sections. There are over 400 photos including sequential strokes and serves. Personal interviews with 90% of the 30 most recent world champions. A full appendectomy.
I decided to scuttle the title, and shrug like Atlas, due to the incompetence of the undeserving racquetball community. They are also a verbal rather than print page readers. My goal was accomplished in writing the book and listing it at Amazon.com. One other set of Miami eyes who has read the single copy in existence said, 'It's very good, but too long for the racquetball mentality.' I'll give the single copy, like Diogenes, to the first deserving player I meet. I withhold it from the public and if you want to know why read Atlas Shrugged.
January 30, 2015 | 1 Comment
'Mr. Keeley, rush to the to the SED room! The students are throwing chairs at the teacher!'
Weekly, at Blythe, CA High School through the 2000s, a frantic version of this blast over the school intercom for all to hear summoning me to put out another fire in the Severely Emotionally Disturbed classroom at the back of the campus between the 4-H pens of pigs, goats and cows and the broad irrigation canal.
Once there, in the spartan SED room, the small group of eight edgy youngsters told how they had browbeat or attacked the sub fleeing the doorway at that second. I would answer, 'Everyone in Sand Valley where I live, and everyone throughout my travels, flies off the handle once in a while. The trick is to identify the cause and correct it. It's the same process as fixing a racquet stroke, where I was a champion.'
Fortunately, as in racquetball where I flung my cover onto the court and was ahead 3-0 before the first serve, my reputation preceded me into this classroom. Sometimes I think the students rioted to summon me, as prison inmates stage food fights to break routine. The kids brightened to reveal the bizarre reasons for their misbehavior that had caused their banishment to this awkward class.
First, I told them, 'We aren't going to use the term SED around here. Labels create identities. You guys are as normal as me and my neighbors in Sand Valley. Next, the goal is to mainstream you back into the normal classes. Third, if you're in here at your parent's order to create a portfolio of being whacky in order to get on welfare for the rest of your lives, think again. There's a long line of students wishing to replace you in this class. Fourth, my methods are unorthodox but effective. I'm not a schooled psychologist, but if you do your work, I'll reward each daily lesson with a related story from the road.'
Their excuses were miserably true. Some were rising with the roosters at 5 am without breakfast to ride a bus for an hour from an outlying farm to the school, and arrived irritated. Or, their parents drank and hit them the night before. A couple were worried about being accosted after school, and showed secreted 10" drill bits slid into their book spines. One albino had unrecognized photophobia. Another was dyslexic. Another painted his fingernails purple and talked with a lisp for attention. These were the campus hard luck cases lumped into one classroom, their last chance before expulsion, and I was their last hope.
When you have someone over a barrel like this, life is actually pretty easy. I dimmed the harsh fluorescent lights, and we did jumping jacks, sit-ups and pushups for twenty minutes. Then I turned down the thermostat to cool the room, a la public airplanes to calm the passengers. I opened the day's assignment from the permanent SED teacher, the gorgeous lady I'll call Ms. Libda, who often was away at business meetings, and so her duty fell on me. She was talented, caring, a former Navy medic, cop, and prison turnkey.
After their work was done, and the adventure story reward, I wrote up a detailed report on what had taken place and the progress of each student in mirror writing. Mirror writing reads from right to left, and early on in my subbing career the principal had called me into his office to explain why many of the students, especially the athletes, were seen reading their texts upside down. He had a boxing picture of himself on the wall from his youth, and I threw a mock left hook at his jaw, while justifying that if he had read print flowing right-to-left then his eyes would be quicker to have caught the jab, as well as the next butterfly, car or ball. My after class reports to the Ms. Libda were a hit, and one day she addressed me, 'The students like you, and so do I. I see you as a male version of myself.' We commenced dating and she, in a mothering way, often slept in late after calling the school for a sub, so I could get a call on the same phone to report for work.
The goals were met with success, the students stopped clawing wallpaper off the walls, were cordial to the visiting sheriff, no more suicide attempts, and the primary object to mainstream the students back into their ordinary classrooms.
The most valuable lesson I imparted to my xenophobic students was on Small Town, America. 'That's normal as she goes in Small Town, America'. Their explanation for everything is, 'We been here a hundred years, and we been doing things this way a hundred years.' Hence the state motto, 'Be part of a group, take and give orders, obey.' The solution, students, is to proceed with patience through your youth, and then strike out to new horizons. You can always take the beaten path back to Blythe.
Ms. Libda finally took a job elsewhere, and I was hired by Riverside County to replace her full time. There was a huge boost in salary to $40,000 with full medical. I began anonymously donating 15% of my salary back to student lunches, good books, pupil doctor bills, and chessboards for the library.
I had a great idea from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in which the patient McMurray masquerading as a psychiatrist takes the other patients on outings from the hospital. Securing permission from the principal, who was now my pal from the boxing lesson, I took the SED classes on educational outings to the city library, prison, bowling alley, and for nature walks along the irrigation ditch that blocked their graduation into the real world.
In the coming months, my classroom door was revolving like a barroom on a Saturday night with new students arriving as soon as the former were mainstreamed. Soon the backlist ran out, and the class dwindled to three students.
One day, after being the full-time SED teacher for about six months, I was called during class by the Riverside school administration. The director politely informed, 'I see you have mainstreamed nearly all of your students back into their regular classrooms. Congratulations. We are letting you go.'
I laughed, cleaning the desk. I had worked myself out of a job!
The lesson is don't be a square peg in a round hole without expecting consequence. Heed your inner calling, but be prepared to move on. I hit the trail to world adventure to have more stories to tell to a succeeding class.
January 14, 2015 | 1 Comment
You may read a guidebook, or just as well judge a people in a new land by their dogs. In rainforest Iquitos, five years ago, all the dogs were friendly, and so were all of the 700,000 citizens I encountered during multiple visits from 1999 through five years ago, 2010. As the new decade swung in computers arrived, and provided a model for thought that was non-existent 'PC'. Affluence followed the ability to think starting about four years ago, in 2011, and now the dogs, people and their wallets are fat.
I was never once barked at nor accosted in the pre-computer era, but tomorrow I return to the US as if from a war. My legs are riddled with dog bites from virtually daily attacks for seven months, and the human assaults have been bi-weekly. Why not go to the police, you ask? Before 2010, there were effectively no police in Iquitos except for a handful of pretty señoritas in white uniforms who stood like marble statues in the plazas. Now there are thousands of police on motorcycles, in the first cars to arrive in the city, and walking the beats. The police step in when someone asks, and the case is decided on the street according to which arguer bribes the highest. Law enforcement is an auction, and because I am wealthier than most it has saved many hard times and my passport once. However, a dozen other times the police have stood chuckling while snapping dogs ringed me, without stepping in because the sport is greater pleasure.
The children offer to kill them, and the going rate is $2 for a small dog or $4 for a large one. I have only put a bounty on two dogs: a rotten Rottweiler and a nasty large golden lab that attack me daily. The canines' method is to ring and wait for an opening, or to lay in wait and bite from behind. If one stands up to one or a band of two or four legged attackers, they wilt. However, this has left my one set of clothes (on a rainforest island of small, strong people like the dwarves in the Hobbit and nothing fits my American frame) in tatters after multiple repairs, and the socks have lost their toes, and the shoes are a laugh.
The faculty to think and an ability to buy nice things came too fast for the Peruvians. Nearly overnight, they became as cartoonish as a Bugs Bunny film, as indulgent as Golding's Lord of the Flies, and their seemingly rabid bands of dogs are the leading indicator.
However, there are still dogs that follow me like the Pied Piper for kibble I let drop from a hole in my knapsack, two señoritas have named their newborns after me, and I didn't even sleep with them, and kids dangle 5' rattlesnakes from 12' cane poles they have used to kill the serpents to keep my path safe.
"The Amazing, Possibly True Adventures of Catman Keeley and his Corporate Hoboes: on the road with the former veterinarian, ex raquetball champ, and freight hopping adventurer who shows adventurers how the other half lives"
Do you have any thoughts on sports streaks? The article below I ghost wrote. My feeling on streaks must be mathematical that they almost always occur in 1. a small field of players/teams, and 2. in a weak field of player/teams. A large field of talented players is stable and produces a frequent change of champions. Therefore, when one sees sports streaks it's usually in minor sports or when it's bear times for that game.
Top 10 Streaks
By Brett Elkins and Jim Spittle
They call them the Streaks!
These are the ten players with the Greatest Streaks in Racquetball History.
#10 Robert Sostre and partner Freddy Ramirez team up for 12 consecutive undefeated years in all Pro/Open 1-Wall New York tournaments from 1997-2009 which includes the events that are considered by most to be the Pro Championships of One-Wall.
#9 Lynn Adams ranks the World #1 or #2 every pro season between 1980 and 1991. With six women's Pro National Singles titles (1982, 1983, 1985-1988) and Player of the Year eight times (1982–88, 1990).
#8 Paola Longoria whose consecutive LPRT pro tour win streak ended after 142 consecutive pro singles LPRT match wins over 3 and 1/2 years. During this time, she lost only 18 games in those matches (best of five games). And her international streak still remains intact where she hasn't lost in any major world competition since the 2011 Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico.
#7 Peggy Steding goes undefeated for almost two years in 1973 and 1974 winning the IRA National Singles and Doubles Championships both years, as well as every other tournament she entered. Rarely did an opponent score ten points in a twenty-one point games against this enduring Texan Racquetball Pioneer.
#6 Charlie Brumfield and Steve Serot go undefeated in doubles from 1973 to 1978. Brum and Serot won the 1973 IRA National Doubles, the 1974 National Invitational Doubles, the 1976 NRC Pro National Doubles, the 1977 IRA/IPRO National Doubles, and the 1978 IRA/IPRO National Doubles titles without dropping a match.
#5 Charlie Brumfield wins twenty consecutive tournaments in 1972 and 1973 including the 1972 IRA National Singles, the 1972 National Invitational Doubles with Dr. Bud Muehleisen, the 1973 IRA Nationals Singles, the 1973 IRA National Doubles with Steve Serot, and the 1973 National Invitational Doubles with Dr. Bud Muehleisen.
#4 Cliff Swain is at the top echelon of the pro game for twenty years … winning his first two pro stops in 1985 and his last two in 2004. In between, Swain won another seventy events and finished six seasons ranked #1 in the World, and five seasons at #2.
#3 Brian Hawkes rules the Outdoor courts winning twenty National Singles Titles over three decades in truly dominant fashion.
#2 Marty Hogan goes undefeated for over a year from October 1978 to December 1979 while playing three versions of the game. Hogan wins the Pro Nationals, The Outdoor Nationals, and The Paddleball Nationals in one year for the sports only Triple Crown during the most competitive and deepest draws in pro racquetball history.
#1 Kane goes undefeated for almost three years winning 137 consecutive matches and rarely losing a game. King Kane dominated the sport at the highest level like no other.
Richard Owen writes:
Great list and analysis from Bo. On a slightly different tack there's also people like Usain Bolt, who runs in a very deep and talented field. Same with Pete Sampras, Gary Kasparov, Lance Armstrong, etc. I guess "weak" could be defined in a relative sense, but that would makes me wonder if the only reason they have a streak is because they are the only ones good enough to have a streak. So technological advantage? Usain's height, the Finns' invention of interval training, Armstrong's doping. But wait, most of Armstrong's competitors were probably doping in that era too… How to explain? There seems to be an aspect of ever changing cycles in sport too. Everyone does endurance, so you do HIIT, you win. Everyone copies, etc.
December 24, 2014 | Leave a Comment
I was sitting this morning with my back against a vine lined wall eating rice and a hard-boiled egg, and looking around the streets of Iquitos thinking what a cartoon it has turned into in five years. Five years ago, a computer revolution created the first consciousness in this river locked rainforest port. The prior citizens had no inkling of space or time and existed in the present. The computers provided a model for thinking, which everyone quickly absorbed, so now the people can think and to a degree analyze.
Concurrently – and who's to say if the egg or chicken came first – an economic boom from gold, ayahuasca tourism, and improved conditions, has changed the city landscape. Five years ago, there were no motorcycles, and now there are tens of thousands. Now the citizens wear western clothes instead of rags. Tourists find the girls don't chase them as far for favors.
The origin of consciousness and the tide of money has come too fast and turned the town into a cartoon. The citizens have ballooned in weight, without stop signs there are continual motorbike crashes at intersections, the money has bought plastic junk for Christmas presents, and aguardiente, which is the local cane alcohol, flows in the streets like the adjacent Rio Amazon.
It's like living in a bubble, and the closest sensation is a psych ward. When i got certified as a psych tech and began working the bins, i found the psychology/psychiatry industry is the saddest, most perilous form of capitalism on earth. It's the only place where one's consciousness may be obliterated by idiots overnight. Keep those pills close to your gums and don't swallow.
A dwarfish man walked up full of aguardiente and holiday cheer. I smiled back, but he continued to stand with his large feet nearly on mine. After a minute, I waved him along with a spoon and he reached out to grab and shake my hand. This is custom: a friendly local grasps and pumps a tourist's hand…and won't let go. The grasp of a jungle born and bred Amazonian is stronger than the Olympic champion wrestlers I've known. Then this man started waving his oversize palm in my face. I replied casually, 'If you don't continue down the sidewalk, I am going to rise and push you.' He edged in, hovered his hand over my plate and the hard-boiled egg rolled down the sidewalk instead.
I grabbed his wrist rising simultaneously and twisted his arm behind his back. It requires two hands to pin it against his spine because their muscles are so strong the arm springs back. I wrapped him up like a Noel gift and marched him down the sidewalk toward a police substation. We ducked under a street vendor tarp knocking our heads on pots and pans before the man twisted his face around to mine and pleaded, 'Anything but the police!' for they would beat him. His body tautened in fear and the pinned arm popped out flinging me into the vine wall, as four swat team policemen hemmed us in.
'I was eating breakfast,' I explained, pointing to the squashed egg under my right shoe, 'and he wouldn't leave me alone. But it's Christmas, and everything is peaceful now.' They pushed him down the sidewalk, and that was his Christmas present.
As a vet, I saw many animals who appeared to be healthy and suddenly 'kicked the bucket', and could only think that they were unaware of their illnesses which abetted the immune response… until it was too late. Having put dozens of animals down by injection, and held them caringly through the last gasp, the thought in their eyes isn't death but happiness and trust. I believe animals, especially younger ones and ones that haven't witnessed the death of peers, have no inkling of death. The animals died in my arms, and in the zoo or the wilds, thinking they were going to sleep. The same with disease, as they are dying until the illness reaches a point to incapacitate them physically, they will carry themselves well with a smile on their faces. We're all animals, some smarter than others, and in my case I can acknowledge complete death but decades ago chose to turn a blind eye to the misinformed conventions of treatment of illnesses.
Most maladies are best treated by exercise rather than lounging in bed watching wide screen and texting until they pass. This approach has saved me thousands of hours in recovery from hundreds of times being down but not out, however it has worked the other way in at least three cases. I passed out once with malaria at the feet of a roaring lion. I collapsed while running on a San Diego beach with the second worst case of mononucleosis in the county history. And six months ago, I had the worst case of chronic anemia with half the normal hematocrit in the history of Iquitos, Peru.
Music blared from a deserted French cantina on the Iquitos wharf as a handful of dogs surrounded me. They were like emaciated wolves smelling the chicken-to-go in my knapsack. A big white lunged for my waist that I socked in the jaw with a left hook. He alighted on his feet yelping and the rest bolted. But this was no ordinary pack. As the mongrels fled, an opportunist thug smashed the crown of my head from behind. Amazon wood is softer and the plank glanced off a round spot, as I wheeled. The little man was dumbstruck, as I grabbed his thick wrist in a wrestling hold, and twisted. A Peruvian in pain speaks the truth. This one snapped, 'Don't molest the dogs, my friends.' His intent was to rob me because there is no free wood and his cudgel was in hand. I twisted again, tugging him along, exclaiming, 'We're going to the police; drop the club.' It hit the street with a thud and he cried, 'My mother will spank me!' I yoked him into the lamplight and saw he was only a ragged urchin. 'Do you like dogs?' I asked. 'I live like one,' he replied. It is hard to find a dog lover these days, and so I let him go, knowing the next night he would protect me.
Strategy: A Smorgasbord
The right strategy must come to mind in the worst scenario – losing, tired, hometown ref, and nowhere else to turn but inside.
1. Always change a losing game; never change a winning game.
2. Always have a plan going into a match, and a backup plan.
3. Always have a surprise to pull out all the stops.
4. Reconnoiter your opponent before the match for his strengths and weaknesses.
5. Have a general strategy against all power players, and another against all control players.
6. Analyze every match – how would you play it differently next time.
7. Keep a log of your strategies, and of the opponents.
8. Always have a customized strategy against each opponent, if possible.
9. Call a timeout whenever you skip two straight shots, or the opponent runs three straight points.
10. Keep a coach in the crowd for a second opinion.
11. Have an offensive second serve, such as the jam or Z.
12. Save your upset serve, for example a crack ace, for game winning points.
13. Have a no-fail strategy that kicks in in the worst case scenario.
14. Define your strengths and weaknesses between tournaments, and drill the latter.
15. Set a goal, and time increments to achieve it.
16. Resist the norm – The way to the top is almost always a way no one else has tried.
17. Don't share your personal original strategies during your competitive career.
18. Find one edge against an opponent, or the field, and repeat it over and over.
19. Make your backhand as strong as your forehand.
20. Know the counters to all your strategies.
21. If an opponent throws something at you during a match that you can't handle, hit the same at him next point to know how to respond.
22. Use a slow game pace against a rabbit, and a fast pace against a sloth.
23. Always volley the ball when possible.
24. Always take the most aggressive shot possible during a rally.
25. Be able to hit five perfect consecutive ceiling balls as a fallback.
26. Match your physical attributes with your strategies, for example condition, age, grace. Elephant tusks cannot grow out of a dog's mouth.
27. Pick an overall strategy that is fun to play.
28. Strategy evolves on the sweaty hardwood, not in ivory towers, so think as you play practice matches.
29. Agree with your practice partner to pause after each game to dissect each other's play.
30. Ask every instructor or pro you meet for his best secret strategy.
31. Ask better players to critique your strategies.
32. The best place to glean strategic tidbits is by watching good players, or at a pro stop.
33. Unclutter the Clutter. Stop the mechanism. Have a sure-fire mantra or method to calm down instantly.
34. Develop a 'Muehleisen's Rheostat' at will of being able to crank up or down your intensity of play by 10%.
35. Fight first and save thoughts of victory for later.
36. The highest form of generalship is to conquer the gamesman by a stratagem.
37. At the beginner level a defensive strategy wins, but at an advanced level the most offensive strategy always wins.
38. Have one strategy for a slow ball and another for a fast ball.
39. The best general strategy is serve and shoot.
40. Go to the ceiling if the rival runs a string of points.
41. Go for the jugular with aces and cracks when you have momentum.
42. The shot to practice the most is the kill, because it's the only stepping stone.
43. The serve to practice the most is the drive, as it's the most forceful in an aggressive game.
44. Save your best strategy for the ripest time - pick the flower when it is ready to be picked.
45. When you go up to the mountain often, you will eventually encounter the tiger, so be ready.
46. During a reconnoiter find a tiny edge. A tiny is the best soldier that quickly becomes an army.
47. Strategy is about setting yourself apart from the competition: it's a matter of being different at what you do.
48. Always have a backup service strategy.
49. The greatest tactic is to be able to execute at the worst times.
50. To win by strategy is no less the role of a general.
51. Practice the weakest link in the chain of each of your last performances.
52. Have a short term goal and a long term goal at all times.
53. Use glass to your advantage with serves and shot selection.
54. Shot selection is the most common trait of a win, and flaw of a lose.
55. Have pre-designed strategies for every game style.
56. The greatest strategy is to commit no mental or physical errors in a match.
57. If you're losing a match, is it because your strategy is failing or because of faulty execution of strategy?
58. Use a new strategy a hundred times in practice before taking it to a tournament.
59. When in doubt grab the bull by the horns.
60. Nothing is more beautiful in sport than a well-conceived plan that's executed flawlessly against a superior opponent for a win.
61. Study strategy over the years to achieve the spirit of the warrior.
Victor Niederhoffer writes:
Good for any activity one thinks.
1. The first rule is always practice against someone your equal or better. Try never to break it.
2. The second rule is to handicap yourself if there is no equal. Some methods are:
a) A point spot, or the opponent having to reach 15 before you get 100 points.
b) Time odds, as in chess, where you may never stop moving even between points and receiving service.
c) An implement disadvantage such as using a wood paddle against the racquet which automatically lowers the player one division.
3. For stamina, play simultaneous where one of a string of players enters the court after each point. If there are five players on the opposing 'team' you will get one-fifth their rest.
4. Play opposite handed - It's surprising what you'll learn about your correct hand game, and the handicap opens a new league of competitor until you are their champion.
5. Resistance training is the best method for any racquet, where resistance is weight. Add a few ounces of speaker wire braided around the frame, or wear ankle weights, or a weight vest with increasing increments of 5-40 pounds.
Perhaps my greater contributions to racquetball were off the court during the golden era: blonde afro, customized van, beach running, headphones, Doberman pinchers, reading paperbacks, 10-speed bikes, and scuba.
Once I started it lit a light in the Leach racquetball stable. Charlie Drake's beach garage was full of scuba gear for players to borrow. He, Steve Serot and I took scuba lessons together from a guy named Froggy. In our first lesson in the deep end of a swimming pool we were required to wear weight belts and tread water for 5 minutes, and then allow ourselves to sink to the bottom of the 12' pool where only a single tank of air was waiting.
Serot and I were buddies for this drill, and he being a land mammal was in oxygen debt. I let him take the first grab of oxygen, but he was purple even in the water, and wouldn't give up the mouthpiece. Had I surfaced for air I would have failed the test and certification. Finally, I wrestled the mouthpiece from him and got a gulp of air.
In the second lesson the next day we were required to clear a swim mask full of water. The technique is to tilt the head back and lift the mask a quarter-inch from the face and expel through the nose to displace the water. This is done underwater. Serot kept lifting the mask 6 inches from his face and trying to expel the entire swimming pool. All's well that ends well, and we all got certified and went on a diving trip to Catalina Island where I was confronted 60' underwater by a black bullet that I thought was an attacking shark, and pulled my 6'' diving knife. But when it stopped and peered in my facemask it was a sea lion that let me pet its nose. It did a summersault, wiggled its whiskers, and zoomed off.
While walking through 25' tall grass in the jungle, I was put in mind of Sisyphus. I prefer a dry definition of work such as physics offers of a change in vertical distance, however Greek mythology offers an artful description. Sisyphus was punished for deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action.
There are four types of Sisyphus work that I am familiar with, despite never having deceived anyone.
1. Digging a hole and filling it in. This was popular in poorly planned Michigan construction. Another example is the vet school instruction to spay Toms, and after the abdominal incision finding nothing to pull out. This type of activity is characterized by your work creating more.
2. Raking leaves in autumn. This is activity with immediate replacement of what was removed. It's worthless except for the workout.
3. Weeding a garden. The replacement item returns at a constant rate over time.
4. Shoveling snow. It is difficult to forecast when the work will be available again.
As for the jungle grass, the best is coming out again into the sunshine.
One beauty of chess is that it crosses all barriers. Financier George Soros called me Hobo one sunny afternoon at his Southampton home where we split chess games, each winning with white. I discovered he had studied philosophy, and that philosophers quickly adjourn to hermetic strategies across the board.
Chess engraved on the brain doesn't seem to leave. This is especially true after one practices chess in sports during motion. The only flaw of the greatest board game in history is that the board doesn't have feet.
My jogging partner Bob Baldori and I invented aerobic chess on a Michigan track one day with a point man running a few steps ahead wearing a T-shirt magic-marked on the back with a chessboard and pieces in the starting position. This made it easier to visualize the moves as we ran four miles, and the FIDE should silkscreen these shirts for physical fitness.
However, the grandmasters might require silk screened tuxedos for befitting parties. The last one I played against in a speculator's Connecticut home was Arthur Bisguier who with white gave rook odds and gazed between speed moves out the window as if reading a comic book while telling me his life story.
He defeated a young Bobby Fischer and later served as second to Fischer at many international events. He won three US Open Chess Championships (1950, 1956, 1959), and played multiple-game blindfold exhibitions. He was taught chess at the age of four by his father, a mathematician, and kindly never practiced multiplication tables during our match. He thought it terrible, and was pleasantly merciless, that I had disgraced my father while reading funny books in beating him at chess.
After the match, Arthur dropped me off at an Appalachian trailhead near his home, and I took chess onto the trail in hiking the 500-mile Vermont trail, 500-mile Florida trail, 500-mile Colorado trail through the Rockies, the Pacific Crest trail for 1000 miles along the Sierras, the 1000-mile length of Baja, 1000 miles through the Amazon rainforest, and the length of Death Valley. I never would have survived without the lessons from chess.
I started paddleball at Michigan State University, switched to handball, and then when rumors of a professional tour and the first racquet arrived in 1970 at MSU, racquetball was the only game.
I had never hit a single anything before enrolling at Michigan State. The first time I walked into the Intramural Building a pivotal mentor swayed me. I heard the crack of ball on wood and looked down into those concrete pits and saw a purple ball– my specialty– any kind of ball, really. They had zoomed at me in the past in all sizes and shapes on house lawns, corner lots, the streets or parks.
The player down on the Challenge Court wore sunglasses under the bright ceiling lights. He carried a dozen purple balls around and around the court in a motorcycle helmet. Leaning in and watching, someone in the gallery complimented that he was Al Moradian, blinded by his own brilliance, the perennial campus champion. After watching him drop-and-hit, drop-and-hit for a few months, and with quite a bit of practice, one year later I stepped into his tennis shoes as the perennial paddleball champion.
The reason is I earned a backhand that Al didn't own. After watching him on the challenge court, I rented from the sports cage a flimsy plastic paddle that flexed like a flyswatter… and practiced. Paddleball suited me because one could sequester in a downstairs court for hours and hit balls, and the shots came back without chasing them off the four walls. Moreover, I discovered that the amount of initial practice directly related to improvement, and flattened out but was effectual. My theory of sports is to practice the weakness, not the strength, and to let the field try to secret their imperfections with various strategies.
Beside practice, the backhand arrived for two other reasons. I took class notes in longhand, as computers were nonexistent, and the flow of the pen across the page from left to right was cross-training. And, I became arm strong and ambidextrous from rectal palpations of hundreds of cows to determine their states of estrus.
I became the Intramural champion at paddleball, racquetball and handball, and in doubles in all three sports. They gave an official green MSU windbreaker for every championship, and in a couple of years I had a closetful. The year after racquetball arrived, the house I was living in burned down and the jackets melted. This was fortunate because studies in Veterinary school were getting tough, and because I never wore jackets even in winter, but bartered them for dates with the Michigan farm girls. Now with a backhand, books, and no girls, my grades and game improved.
After graduation, I took a west turn out of university for the west coast and became one of the first pro players, and the first with racquet and apparel contracts. I simultaneously entered and won satellite pro events right-handed and open division left-handed.
The primary reason was a backhand that became the Golden Era of Racquetball's best, according to the fans and magazines. It enabled me, whereas it was the flaw of nearly every player at universities and YMCA's across the country, and, because of racquetball, at private clubs in the court club boom.
From a lifetime in various sports, there have always been four stages to test any new act for the proven repertoire.
1. Does the new thing work in solo drill?
2. Does it weather practice games?
3. Does it withstand great fatigue?
4. Does it carry through tournament stress?
Thus, any new thing to be added to your sports show is not proven until it wins a tournament. At that point, you may relax and continue to use it to success.
Only about 1 in 10 of my early new tricks withstood the rigors to become a sweet spot of my game. Sweet, because any simple new thing added to a standard act usually makes a dramatic change in performance.
Most of my survival techniques are self-taught on the spot. Once while hiking at 12k' in the Sierra Nevadas with winter coming on, I had to find a way to sleep at night without a sleeping pad. The frozen ground conducted my body heat into the earth and I couldn't fall asleep. After a few hours of trying various positions, I fell into a sleeping tripod in which the knees and right elbow were the only contact points, and of course the toes. Nearly all of the body weight was on the former three, and since the knees and elbow are calloused, little heat was lost and I slept comfortably for many nights before coming out to civilization. I later learned that tripod sleeping is standard among nomad Tibetans who also use the right elbow as one may turn the head away from the heart.
I remembered that today in the hot Amazon on a vast crisp-dried floodplain carpeted with one species of dark green leafed one foot plants that absorbs heat. I was sleepy from earlier drinking river water, and there was no shade. The ground was so hot it burnt my skin through the clothes. The solution was the tripod sleeping and I awoke an hour later able to continue to shade and the river.
The photo of the ice cream salesman has a story behind it. When I took the pic I thought the universal 'hands up' gesture odd until reflection on where I had just come from. Tinga Maria, Peru, on the Amazon River far from civilization doesn't see many gringos, so when I arrived it was as though I was a king. The steamer would have a couple hour layover, so I asked a three-wheel taxi to take me to meet a girl. Any girl, for it had been a long journey. He dropped me at the entrance of a 10' concrete walled enclosure. The door was closed, but the ice cream salesman was near. He explained that since the sun was only half past noon to sundown, the bordello didn't open for a few hours, however the inner guard knew his knock. He tapped a code on the large wooden door, the guard opened, the salesman explained the situation, and I was ushered in. Few working girls had arrived, but a handful were sleeping in their individual rooms lining the inner perimeter of the compound. The salesman pounded on one door, it cracked open, and a girl strong armed me through into a small cubical lit by a single candle. There was romance and conversation as I discovered she was a good student in business at the university and was doing this to pay for her tuition. Later, I paid her $4, and before leaving reached to shake her hand. She giggled shyly and held up a stub in the candlelight amputated at the elbow. She, like many others, had been a farmer and bitten on the hand by a venomous snake, and choose to cut off the arm in the field rather than die. The ice cream salesman was waiting outside the compound, and I thanked him and paid a dollar for this photo, and hence the hands up.
I first heard it at an LAX airport strike that had thousands of asking passengers scurrying desk to desk to escape the hive. The strike was an honorable test, not the horror everyone thought. Among them, an athletic man in a tailored suit patiently glided, to avoid the long lines, from employee to employee, to inquire of the carriers to NYC. At first, I thought he was following me until he asked, 'Are you following me?' Whenever I encounter a person who of my habit steps out from the crowd, I am surely charmed.
He was a Wall Street trader with a sports car, doll wife, spoke Japanese… and was about to pivot in life. We ended up traveling together on one of the last flights from the airport and, on arrival at Kennedy, he agreed to accompany me to a friend's trading room. He bowed at the neck only on introduction to the president, and murmured, 'Charmed, I'm sure.' Then he went on to prove his capacity for trading and Japanese in conversation, and that indeed he had had a tryout as halfback for the NY Jets on the traders' field.
He had returned to his NY glory to pull the plug – quit the job, divorce the wife, sold the car, and gave up football in order to return to the west coast to write his version of the great American novel. A month later, he was caught and imprisoned for bank robbery of the San Diego Wells Fargo when the police followed a trail of witness fingers out the bank door, checked the trash bins en route, and pulled out his discarded sailor disguise and, of course, traced the DNA from the false beard to nab him. The charmer spent the next few years in prison playing football and writing.
Charmed, I'm sure is used in either formal or street introductions with nearly opposite meanings. Among the well-heeled it's a warm greeting used in ceremonial introductions. Among the down-at-the-heels by one individual to another the meaning is that they don't trust you entirely yet, and if you screw up once, there's no chance of getting anything out of the deal.
As the years rolled by, and I jumped from fashionable sidewalks to the gutter, and back again, I've tuned into occasions that deserve the term. In sparring with a karate instructor for policemen, he suddenly stopped after what I thought was a missed kick and asked, 'Would you like to see that again?' I laughed thinking the kick had missed, but on looking down his toe marks over my heart covered my white T-shirt. Charmed, I'm sure, he slapped my face while my chin was down.
My first girlfriend stopped after the first five minutes of my first sex to explain, 'No, it goes there. Charmed, I'm sure.
In racquetball at a St. Louis pro stop, I wound up to take a backhand off the back wall and hit a killshot 40' away on the front wall. As I executed the shot, my opponent Ben Colton stood hands on hips in front court without attempting to cover the ball. 'This is for the money,' I scolded, 'Play ball!' He replied that it was his only opportunity to study my famous backup up close, and that it was worth losing the point because the ball would roll off anyhow. He was better than he thought, and lost the game by one point.
Yesterday, an Australian nipper dog bit me in midstride on the shoe instep from behind. It was such an expert move that I stood for moments in awe, and then understood it had dry gulched me, and would do it again. So I squirt mace in its teeth. In the same manner, once hiking the Pacific Crest Trail I nearly picked up a 10-inch long baby green Mojave rattlesnake because it was so perfectly colored and buzzed its tail pleasantly. And then was jolted to realize I was charmed, I'm sure.
In daily encounters you will see the foam head on a glass of beer, and take that instant to ask, am I charmed, I'm sure?
I’m not a fighter or a lover but these happen to be two of the four methods used in handling at least 100 street fights over the years. 90% of them have occurred in third world countries, but the techniques are as effective on the Bombay waterfront as NY Harlem. These are the four primary reactions available to normal citizens who go about their days and are suddenly confronted.
FIGHT – The general reaction to fight requires knowing how to or, at least, facing a weaker opponent (unlikely). The first rule of street fights is to grab an equalizer, a stick, bottle or rock. Don’t bluff a fight without expecting to be called on it.
To illustrate, a month ago after a night snack a man stepped under a lamplight and began screaming obscenities at me. Normally I would walk away from this, especially since there was no robbery attempt, however there were children nearby and it would have set a poor example. So, I handed my ankle weights and backpack to the kids, and stalked the man out the light who backpedaled and stumbled into a heap. It was as if a wind blew. Two weeks later, I was assaulted with a ring-neck tackle by a stevedore and had to fight on the street of Iquitos. Luckily, he fell into a familiar wrestling move and was beaten.
FLEE – The best practice is to have the fleetest feet around the world, assuming no guns are involved. It doesn’t matter how many thugs there are, if you can sidestep or outrun them it’s usually the best practice.The other afternoon on exiting a house of soiled doves, I was then surrounded by four young men with theft on their mind. I pulled off the end of my thumb with sleight of hand, and walked out the astonished circle. A few nights ago on exiting the cinema, two dirty men popped out an alcove as if from a movie in heavy jackets with hands in their pockets on a 95F evening. I sidestepped them into the street where they didn’t follow. It’s always a good idea at night to walk away from sidewalk alcoves and into streetlights.
TALK – 80% of my confrontations end after a few words. Most solo thugs dread conversation with a grammatician.
Yesterday I was attacked by three youths brandishing sticks on the Rio Amazon beach, and simply growled at them, ‘You don’t want to do that,’ and they left. The night before, a man with a butterknife closed in as I entered my hostel, and I stuck my hand in my pocket and stood steadily at arm´s length and replied, ‘Are you ready?’ It was a gamble he didn’t risk knowing what, if anything, was in my pocket. (In this case, Mace.) A single question had prevailed.
HOPE – Most victims stand mute and shocked when accosted by a thug. This is what every mugger bets on, so if you can have mentally rehearsed and kick into one of the foregoing three methods –Fight, Flee, or Talk - your chances of escaping unscathed with your wallet are high.
I’ve acquiesced a few times when ‘outgunned and outnumbered’. In one instance in Venezuela two men thrust warning jabs with machetes in my ribs and legs, and I just asked them to leave me bus fare. Another time, in a boxcar I let two tattooed men rob me of little as they motioned toward the open boxcar door of the 40mph train that the option was to jump. After they took my billfold, I gave them cucumber & tomato sandwiches and we became more friendly. They gave back my shoes that had my bankroll under the insoles.
My personal methods in fights are the same as animal surgery, to begin with the most conservative and escalate to the most extreme. One knows in a sentence if talking is going to work, probably not. I never use hope. I flee 2 of 3 times even if I think I can overwhelm the opponent because fighting is dangerous in high numbers. However, on every third situation I hold ground and fend off or attack in order to maintain a mental and muscle memory for the struggle.
You don’t have to be Captain America to have a straight backbone. One of the best things you or your youngster can do is to take a martial art class to gain confidence. The best are wrestling and Aikido. In any case, the four fighting methods of Fight, Flee, Talk, or Hope are the same. And, as my old wrestling coach used to say, mentally rehearse the move a hundred times before you try it on the mat, and then a thousand times on the mat before you take it to a tournament. A fight is just another day at a tournament.
The Shipibo are an indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest who live in the 21st century while keeping one foot in the past millennia. Many traditions are still practiced such as ayahuasca shamanism, and the females in their colorful decorative clothing singing old songs are popular shamans at the Iquitos lodges.
Your body is a planet. So where is the ego?
90% of the cells within us are not ours but microbes. Likely in the Amazon the figure is closer to 99%. The rest of the lives in you are seen with a light microscope: the human skin is not a desert but covered with microbes, many others thrive within our mouth, dental streptococcus, the nose is a rainforest, the intestines an oases, mites nestle in the eyelashes, a few of the fleet host athlete's feet fungus, viruses loiter inside nerves, the lawn you mow on your head is enjoyed by flea or lice, and the strangest are the hoboesque pieces of DNA that infected ancient humans and still make up about 8 percent of our genome.
Even the body cells such as leucocytes, sperm, eggs, heart muscle, autonomic neurons, and photoreceptor cone cells of the eye may be classified as harmonious bugs.
Do microbes have consciousnesses? Certainly, though they are rudimentary, more like what we evolved from before stepping out of the trees onto solid earth.
The human eye without a microscope can only see objects larger than one-tenth of a millimeter long. Given the right conditions, you might be able to see a human egg. Gazing down at those tiny objects, you stand on the edge of a world of creatures invisible to the naked eye. Inside this strange land microbes live their tiny day to day lives – wake up, eat, communicate, move, and respond.
Over the billions of years on this planet these microbes have adapted to fit their environments. They are remarkably diverse organisms living in fresh and salt water, on land, in the air, and on or inside other organisms. As you read the microbes march, there are mutualisms, parasitisms, battle lines are being drawn, and help is on the way from every direction.
No wonder we have collective unconsciousness.
Living with all these microbes in people is easy if you maintain health, a positive attitude, keep busy, strive a little each day, and opt to be kind.
The last census shows about 100 trillion inside you. We are composed of multiple individuals many of whom alertly believe they are selves. This is why I could never understand conceit. It's nice to stick in the pocket the theory that each is an individual, however my definition of self includes the legions I'm made of.
Is so hard to grasp that you are the ringmaster of a circus?
The self is especially as distinct from the world and other selves. It is the conscious that most immediately controls thought and behavior, and is most in touch with external reality. However, I believe myself is composed of micro-selves that must be dealt with by logic, whip, barter and trial-and-error.
This flies in the face of the psychological definition of self, religious and political views, however if you invest in a microscope and look, it must be admitted that…
The next time you pull on your shoes realize you are a walking ecosystem.
Capitalism lessons are costing me a quarter a day.
One week ago, a little boy with a hangdog expression sat next to his father lemonade vendor wishing he had something to do. He was sorting leaves on his knees to sizes to pass time. I bought a lemonade, and asked the child the cost for a leaf. 'A quarter,' he countered brightly, as his father looked on amused.
The following day he was waiting, though the time of my walk varies by three hours. He had created a vendor's table from a 3' plank on the ground with a wider assortment of leaves. I bought another for 25 cents.
This is out on a jungle path where pigs wallow, hens with 27 chicks cluck, everyone has bare feet, sleeping dogs lie, no electric, ice or running water, a body eats on six-bits a day, fingernails and lawns are cut by machete, a piece of material has value, and there are no beggars.
The third day, three vendors with three boards offering new varieties. I bought one shaped like a maple leaf from a new kid, claiming I couldn't afford more.
The fourth day a strange thing happened. There were five venders between the age of 6-9 years, and one was a girl who was scrubbing her leaves with a brush and water. I bought a clean one.
The fifth day, the vendors had learned to balance the planks like trays on their palms and carry them aside me until I bought one. The sixth day repeated, as the market seemed saturated with kids and innovations.
Today, after I bought a freshly scrubbed mango leaf, a señora rushed up and whispered in my ear, 'You know the leaves are worthless. It's just a child's game.'
'Nonsense,' I answered. The child's game is capitalism. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? They may become the most successful vendors in the village with the capitalistic habits that work is rewarded, the best product sells, wait patiently and the customer arrives, curiosity, innovation, a healthy balance of intellectual and emotional quotient, an even-keeled mind, split-second decision making, the ability to handle uncertainty, loss and success, adaptability, and there are no prerequisites.
I find surprising things unbelievable until I can find a mechanism to explain them. In this case, my idea is that people who must be surrounded by noise to think are always above a steady state. They must run their thinking mechanism 24/7 (including dreaming at night) or lose consciousness. Hence their minds have 'forgotten' how to return to silence, and I fear this carries into death. The proof in chess is Bobby Fischer who hated to play noisy chess, while most of his opponents played better with it, as he beat them.
The metaphor in nature is the strangling fig tree that supports the host tree until the former dies and falls, leaving just the fig. Many studies also show that people, at least in the US, are unable to be alone with their thoughts. They freak out without their phones, tvs, radios, computers, etc to constantly distract themselves. So they never have the time to process what they already know about stuff and happiness. All the while being bombarded by the opposite message, that stuff does bring happiness, from the media that they can't turn off.
While the Dow climbed 16 points today, an old man pulled out a wood stool, as he has at 9am for thirty years, hoisted a handcrafted umbrella, stuck a two-foot plank on his lap, and gestured to the first customer. I stepped forward with a pair of jogging shoes to resole, and as he worked explained that in USA it's cheaper to buy a new pair than to get these underhauled. A barefoot señora holding a pair of sandals clicked her tongue, and stuck a finger in a rip in my shirt as I read today's news. The cobbler finished my repair in thirty minutes, and offered the shirt off his back – my size – which was a bargain since it saved me a trip down to crime infested Belen for a used one. The señora quickly sewed the rip in my shirt, as the man fixed her sandals. Then she conjured a shirt out her purse like a rabbit, and handed it to the cobbler for the repaired sandals. I paid $3 for the shoe repair, $2 for the shirt, and the señora offered a massage at her room across the street. It cost $4, and I walked out lightly on new shoes with a newspaper under my arm that the cobbler had thrown in to sweeten the one stop shopping.
The further from civilization the odder the adventure, and the most distant town from any civilization in the world is Iquitos, Peru. A trio of adventures, like vitamins, in the past three days include:
Three days ago, on my walk around Progresso Island on the other side of the Rio Amazon, I heard a whistle that was unlike any bird sounded in a hundred walks during the previous five years. A barefoot man in a policeman shirt waved me down along the jungle path. He ordered, 'Halt!' and I replied, 'What for?' and continued walking as he followed blowing. My rule is never stand with a policeman without a witness. I know about 400 of the 500 poor inhabitants on this Island,, and stopped in 100 meters in the shade under the thatched hut of a señora whose children I teach English. She vouched for me as an eccentric exercising tourist, as I advanced. The whistle blew in five minutes in my ear, and I ducked into the house of a family whom I buy warm sodas from on hotter days. They introduced the shoeless man as the island Mayor, who visits every few months, and so I gave him a chance to talk. 'There are some bad fellows on the Island to beware of,' he warned, to which I scoffed, 'I know all the people and none is bad, and YOU are the only person who has molested me. I may run against you in the reelection.' Without batting an eye, the Mayor smiled, pumped my hand, and raised my arm shouting, El Americano!' He just wanted the citizens to see him as important.
Yesterday, in the city of Iquitos, I flagged down a policeman wearing a white shirt and white holster from his motorcycle. 'Will you help me?' I asked, and he listened patiently in the bustling Mercado Modelo as I described how a few days earlier a señora vendor had sprinted from behind her pile of oranges and beaten me on the chest with her fists, and it was too high to reach, so she had whacked me repeatedly with a broomstick. She had shortchanged me the day before, so I had taken a pitcher with an inch of orange juice to search for a policeman. Not finding one, I was now returning the pitcher, and asked the officer to accompany me for protection. When we reached the orange juice stand minutes later, the señora started out with the broom again, caught the policeman's eye, and retreated behind the oranges. The Tourist Police are a specific body of the National Police trained to protect, serve and orient the tourists. He asked for her side of the story, but when she omitted the assault, it was her word against mine. I produced a typed Spanish copy of exactly what had occurred. She shrank behind the pile of oranges, and he asked if I wanted to make a denunciation, which is a shameful thing to happen in Peru. I declined, saying I just wanted to be able to pass safely through the market, and he gave me his calling card to ensure it.
The third thing happened late last night. I rarely dream, and have no memory of a single one in over a year. However, I've been chased by many dogs recently that must have been working on my unconscious. I woke up in the middle of the night in the act of kicking a snarling dog, and kicked hard the concrete wall next to my bed. My big toe is broken.
No big deal, and today will be another adventure.
I'm making plans to go into my own business after next year's travels. Specifically, a more turnkey business that will give me free time. Like a corner store.
If you had $100k to $300k in cash… what business would you get into? The goal is something that is stable, not subject to trends or fads and that operates itself as much as possible.
I think the approach should be to pick the location, and then the type of business. I learned this from swap meets.
Next, make it something you would do for free, or nearly so, like as a hobby.
Invest VERY little initially–get the tiniest toe wet because the rest can follow. This is another definition of business patience. If the type of business is unique and can't be copied, all the better. If it may be franchised down the line, the better still. The choice of business should be something nearly everyone wants that nearly no one else may supply. (If others might imitate, then plan to get in quick, get out quick with a profit, and a smile).
Whatever the business, it seems bright on day one; and whatever the profit, it will grow dull on day 1000. So, don't put much into inventory and be sure you can step out on a 24 hour notice.
Never take a free drink or any freebie from anyone.
90% of us get up each morning and go to work. It's the same down here in the Amazon except work is closer to the earth and water. On my morning walk I encountered a Senora laying fishnets in a lagoon, and paused to ask how long it would take for a catch. 'Return in seven hours,' she replied. I did, as she was yanking fish caught by the gills and fins from the 25 meter net line, on soda bottle floats, laid close to shore and nearly touching the muddy bottom of the lagoon. Her husband was off weeding their acre yucca garden on higher ground.
She carried only one equipment aside the net, a 10 gallon basket that the day's catch filled with fifty fish of 7-22" length from about ten species. The largest looked like a tiger with fins that she said was doomed for ceviche, a Peruvian recipe for raw fish marinated in citrus juice where the juice coagulates the fish proteins, effectively cooking it.
I wanted to follow it to the supper table. She tossed the gulping fish into the basket, saying it had been a good day, and I helped lug it a kilometer to the dime motorized canoe taxi that departs hourly for a ten minute putt to the Modelo Market of Iquitos. Then we took turns balancing the 40 lb. basket on our heads up 100 steps to the marketplace to look for a spot.
Another fish vendor invited the senora adjacent onto the sidewalk, eyeing the catch that wouldn't compete with her own while drawing more customers, and my companion threw a rice sack to claim a sidewalk square. The market bustles in late afternoon selling everything under the sun. She started cutting off the sharp dorsal fin of each fish that picks the customers' hands as they smell and fondle them for freshness, but we had been followed by anxious buyers wanting first grabs, and a couple sales were made before the rice sack and blood hit the pavement. Then sales were brisk for ten minutes, until the excitement of the new 'fish' on the block dissolved, and she happily jingled the change in her apron. The big ceviche fish went for $8, the nearly two-dimensional spineless Palmetto delicacy for $4, and the remainder at $1-2 each.
She will sell the batch over the next two days, at a lesser price tomorrow since it won't be put on ice overnight, and on the third day will sell them for peanuts to the salty fish vendor down the sidewalk who'll slice, salt and sell them for the next two weeks. Her take for the batch is about $50 which is a windfall.
I got so hungry watching the direct marketing that I went out for a fish dinner, now knowing that they're marked up 20% by the street table merchants and 200% by the finer restaurants.
The introduction of a new cultural trait may take generations in a society before it takes hold. The variables include the necessity of the trait, the size and degree of interaction of the population, geophysical barriers, and susceptibility.
As an experiment, three months ago I made the first wave of greeting on a one-mile diameter island in the Amazon River. There are four little pueblos of about 200 inhabitants each living on stilted huts that I passed by or under during my daily hikes. Apparently, it was the first time any had seen a hand wave, for all of every age to the last person stared back with puzzled looks. They included farmers, a few dirt floor businessmen, schoolchildren, and entire families at the rate of about fifty people a day.
For the first month of daily hikes, there was zero response and I was like a cloud passing by. Then I began assisting the wave with a hearty 'Buenos dais´, and the recipients all replied, 'Buenos dais´, without a wave. However, in about another month the first wave returned from some children who appeared like puppies discovering their tails for the first time, and not knowing what to make of them while they wiggled.
The waves propagated exponentially by imitation of seeing others until three months into the experiment nearly every person I waved to – without the verbal greeting – waved back. Now the island is flooded with them. Do they wave to each other? – I haven´t seen it. However, today 25 out of the 30 people I waved at responded in same, and about a third of them initiated the gesture.
The conclusion is a cultural trait has been instilled in three months. I imagine it will be passed to future generations and last for as long as the happy people do.
Today at 1pm on the Iquitos skid road a señora returned change with a bottled water, warning, 'It's Sunday and the streets are crawling with thieves who are brave from booze while the police are on holiday.'
I walked out the store and immediately a body piled onto my back with an iron arm around my throat like a noose. I rolled with the tackle and Texas necktie to keep my neck from snapping. We fell in a heap to the ground, and his face was behind my ear hyperventilating beer exhaust. In that moment I knew without seeing that he was about 5'6'', 160 lbs., a stevedore, clean, no aftershave, and stupid.
I owe my father's childhood training in judo and wrestling to react the instant I was touched. We were on the ground where I gain strength like Antaeus, and knew an escape from the headlock. It's to simultaneous tuck the chin and jam the heel of the hand up against the elbow of the lock. I know the nerve I hit well from double tennis elbow. His forearm lifted from my throat like a drawbridge.
We scrambled at once to our feet, and he fled. I couldn't follow with ankle weights and a broken toe. I cleaned the blood with bottled water and walked on into the daylight.
The Cinema of Iquitos at one minute's walk along Calle Arica from the church corner of Plaza de Armas has deep roots that reach back to the rubber boom. With the arrival of foreigners, along with the evolution of the United States cinema in Hollywood, the Cinema in Iquitos showed its first film in 1900. It was show in the famous Casa de Fierro, the House of Steel now catty-corner from the present day theater, with an Edison machine. The projector used a carbide lamp that required the constant movement of the operator.
Due to the prominence of cinema in Iquitos, pioneers of filmmaking produced here including Antonio Wong Rengifo, Werner Herzog, Armando Godoy, and Dorian Moris. They prolonged the cinematic presence in the city that built today's theater where last night I viewed the horrid 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes'. Although the movie could better have been acted by apes and chimpanzees, today's Iquitos Cinema meets American standards.
With a few flaws. The pluses in reviewing this theater begin with the four large screen theaters, with comfortable seating and effective air conditioning. You walk in with a bushel of popcorn and it could be Manhattan. The negatives are the interruption of the joy of the better films by cell calls, a continual flash of phone text screen among the audience, and the viewers – many of whose initial view of the world outside Iquitos is the silver screen (English Subtitles) - laugh, ooh & aah, or scream in terror at exactly the opposite moments that an American audience will. The string of films I've watched testing my sanity over the past fifteen years are new action thrillers and demonic massacres. Going to the Iquitos Cinema is like a trip deep into deep Amazonia with inexhaustible eye-witness quivers, except it's not a five meter anaconda but the person's legs in the seat behind that drape your shoulders if you slouch invisibly.
The staff is very friendly, and the owner diplomatic, but all are equally ineffective in enforcing their own rules about feet on chairs and use of cellphones. The food is excellent, but pricey upwards of USA fees for drinks and snacks. The place is a din from a game arcade that one must pass through to buy tickets. I've shelled out increasing prices since 1999 that started at 3 Soles (about a buck) and last night ran 10 Soles. The films are supposed to freshen each Thursday, but the likelihood is that a popular film, such as the present 'Transformers' will be held over for a month. There are about five daily showings of the normal venue of four different films, but arrive before the posted start time or the ticket seller will claim the seats are filled until you issue a bribe.
Through the Rubber Boom and its inevitable regress, on rolls the cinema. The crisis hit Iquitos hard and had its effect on the industry, but the play of Charlie Chaplin and new films did not stop. A movie theater in any city of the world is an economic indicator, and in Iquitos more so as even in depressed times it shows that a person will put a fantasy in front of his face before bread on the table.
Birds of a feather flock together includes people and dogs. Today a young Utah tourist, part of a new American wave to strike paydirt at the ayahuasca mecca of the world in Iquitos, Peru, was surrounded by four grimy youths flashing knives at his breast and throat. The scene was at Gang Corner where I've been attacked on each seven previous nights at the same hour. My assaults have not been by uprights, but by dogs dressed in the local people's clothes, with snapping canines in the yellow lamplights. The Salt Lake man had just stepped out the tenth annual International Shaman's Conference at a ritzy hotel at 11pm and walked a hundred steps to Gang Corner, on the fashionable Rio Amazon malecon, when the knives flashed. The waterfront Belen youths surrounded and demanded his knapsack, knowing it contained the tourist's valuables of camera, laptop and maybe a few dollars. They would be surprised to discover the victim's U.S. passport.
Why hadn't I been robbed at the same corner at the same time by the same two-legs gang? Perhaps the snapping circle of dogs each night dissuaded them, but more likely they knew the exact hour the Shaman's conference dismissed and lay in wait for the first unsuspecting tourist. Having a passport stolen presents a Catch-22 of needing to prove one's identity to a U.S. Consulate, and coughing up a hundred bucks without credit cards that usually accompany the theft, as well as paying for two weeks hotel in wait (unless a harsh expedite fee is paid). Since the nearest embassy is in Lima, the Salt Lake man went to the airport today in hopes of boarding without identification, and then 'throwing his feet' in Lima on the Consulate's doorstep. Fat chance.
This poor man's misfortune was my stroke of luck, and I took the tip to the police station. I must find an equalizer. This is because I must walk past Dog Corner nightly from the last day's activity here at the Cyber internet to my hotel. The sycophantic policemen urged me to take matters into my own hands by purchasing a $20 mace spray that shoots a 15' stream like a squirtgun that will 'stop a charging beast'. They instructed to aim for the chest, not into the wind much like a urination, and the spray will splatter and dispense temporarily blinding and inducing respiratory distress. The recipe is tear gas and peppermint. Then, they smiled, bring the predators turned prey to the cop shop and they'd beat them for a song. So, I got the mace.
An equalizer is required whenever a smaller person faces a larger, or armed, or group of thugs. During twenty years of world travel I have never carried a weapon for two primary reasons: it ups the blood ante of any altercation, and it cancels the mental rehearsal of the manly art of self-defense. My former equalizers have been fast shoes and quicker hands, with a swifter tongue. However, now I required something more concrete at Gang Corner. The ordinary doorstop on skidrow hotels is a baseball bat, in Manhattan the world squash champ used to jog through Central Park at midnight brandishing a squash racket, I would prefer an oversized modern racquetball racquet for the lighter swing weight, on the rails the standard is a 7" railroad spike, but now the answer was protective spray. I can take it in checked luggage to USA where it's also legal, yet in California the net weight must not exceed 2.5 ounces. A squirt reaches twice as far as an arm and knife.
The reason for my concern is that if I get stabbed it would be more hapless than the Salt Lake tourist. The protocol is that the foreigner is taken to a hospital, he is patched, but not allowed to stay if he cannot afford the bill, and on leaving is met by the immigration police to check documents and explain why a tourist can't afford a hospital stay. I couldn't pay it because of a defaulted loan before this trip to a former acquaintance. The mace is an insurance policy tonight, as I venture out to Gang Corner.
Ralph Vince writes:
Weapons & Women….
I like the idea of a mace-style spray like that. First off, regardless of whatever anyone thinks they are capable of in terms of defending themselves, one thing is for certain, when there is more than one assailant
– and absolutely when there are more than two — you need a weapon (personally, I carry at least two anywhere, depending on the local laws as well as the context. A genteel dinner party is different than a late-night, city walk. Everyone should carry at least two, non-redundant weapons).
One of the main concern with any weapon is its range. A rifle ught be good at 100 yards or longer, a handgun from 40 feet on in. A knife, only out to about arms length (but deadly in that range). Some weapons have to be swung (bats, tire irons, batons, etc.) meaning they have to be moved in a plane
– get outside that plane and you're safe, and the plane is almost always primarily vertical or horizontal, and with a very finite range. Not only is the far extent of that plane finite, in close it is of no use. So an aluminum bat might look very imposing, but sternum-to-sternum, it's quite useless as well. The sooner you can get sternum-to-sternum, or out of the plane of that thing, the sooner you can stuff them with it or be high-tailing it away (In fact, any of these swinging-style weapons are a poor choice becuse they are plane-restricted, have a finite range in both directions, have to be chambered, etc. They do not hide well, and you can usually be quite certain any loogan carrying such a weapon has only THAT weapon. When you see the guy on walk with the golf club to fend of a loose dog, you can be quite certain he is, for all intents-and-purposes, unarmed).
Spray, is like a gun the the sense that it's range is beyond the reach of your assailants arms and legs, and works sternum-to-sternum, and hides well. It's a nice weapon provided you have something else you can get to from any practically any position.(I onceu asked a postman, with sun-cragged skin from too many years of Florida delivery, if he ever had to defend himself against vicious dogs with the can of mace at his side. He mentioned how it works well against bees in the mailbox, and vicious dogs but that you "Gotta get it right in their eyes." Maybe spraying the chest works with people but I'm not so sure about dogs!)
As we get a little older, even though we may think otherwise, we ar arme a LOT slower than a young person, andwith far less wind than a young person. The best young person fighter can perhaps take on two at once — someone older, beyond more than one assailant, you absolutely must have a weapon to have a chance. In other words, when you know you are going to be accosted by more than one person, make up your mind that they are going to be needing an ambulance here. It's SO much easier when you really WANT to hurt someone in those situations.
The most important thing to remember when being confronted by more than one assailant is that nobody really wants to be harmed. You want to plant in their mind that there's a chance things may not go right. Put some doubt in their mind that they may not get away without harm. The only reason people do bad things is they think they're going to get away with it and not be harmed. So how do you do this? They are reading your body language. They are checking you out to see if you can defend yourself — specifically, to see if you're tuned in to what is happening and if there's a reasonable chance you might hurt them.
So don't look to intimidate, and don't get all huffy & puffy. Make eye contact (You are not making eye contact, per se, but rather looking at their sternum. Solid eye contact is a challenge and you are not in as good a position to "see," specifically their lead foot which will always, ALWAYS move at you when the go to grab or strike you) with your potential enemies, in a non-emotional manner.
Marion's remark is very wise. Just as I take the incandescent light for granted and the flush toilet, so too do Western women very often (because we are accustomed to) take their individual safety for granted in an historical context. We have come to assume that is how things are when in fact, this is reltively new in human existence, and hasn't yet reached many parts of the world. When you're with a woman in a bad situation, bad people are MORE likely to come after you (a woman with you is akin to your being a wounded animal in the wild — it is viewd as an impediment to your being able to effectively defend yourself). You have to be more prepared, more ready to hurt people who are a threat in those situations.
A woman who is armed has at least a chance of inflicting harm and getting away if unaccompanied. The best situation, is to be accompanied and armed as well — Bo's idea of mace is a great weapon in the battery of weapons someone ought to have.
Marion Dreyfus writes:
When I was traveling solo in Peru, I frequently chafed at having to stay in after dark if I did not have a bunch of fellows to go out with, since I never usually call it a day until it is very very late, especially when I am a-traveling. One time high in the hills, I asked a few men I vaguely knew if they would accompany me out for a late look around the town. All were tired and did not want to risk a strange place at night.
One woman thought us silly, trying to find compadres for the walk. An attractive 20-something, she took her backpack on her back and left for her own town investigation. She returned in an hour, a wreck, crying hysterically, her clothes a mess, her hair disarrayed, dirty and unconsolable: She had been accosted by 3 or 4 men, her backpack was taken, her passport and all her money was gone, and she was fortunate she kicked up enough of a fight not to be raped. She spent the next days desperately trying to get her passport replaced, not doing anything else in Peru.
I was glad that I had not ventured out alone that night. Later in the week, I rose very early and flagged a small cab, directing him to go further up the mountain. I wanted to check on a statue that someone had pointed out to me, one he said had been given by muslims to the town in gratitude for something or other in the early 1940s. We went to the statue, 6 am, as the sun was rising, and I studied the plaque at the foot of the statue, though it revealed little that was of use to me. I reboarded the same taxi and returned to the hotel/inn, before most people had even risen for breakfast.
But traveling in such places, if I am not with several men, I do not venture out. All well and good to be a tough and adventure-seeking female, but the rest of the world does not necessarily appreciate our independence: They read a female alone as an opportunity for free money, free unbidden sex, and free harassment fun. Or worse.
One of the reasons I canceled my trip alone to Yemen, where women have simply disappeared if they did not travel in a dense group.
Subtract 200 from 2014, add a little steam, and you're thrown into present day Amazonia. Today I spoke during a 50-cent canoe taxi ride from Iquitos city shore to shore of Prospero Island about life on an amazon farm that is an American success story. Prospero Island is two miles in diameter – half as big six months ago – at 4 steamy degrees south of the equator. The Isle has a natural irrigation system from the dripping rainforest and an inimitable fertilization system with a seasonal 35 feet vertical drop in water level. Hence, we would land twenty minutes later on the Island when it is nearly its smallest, and richest, for the 500 farmers.
Aboard the 30' pecapeca (motorized canoe) taxi, I spoke with Señora Verde, and penetrated her chocolate eyes, because I always liked gardening. I slept as an infant in a hand-paw dug flowerbed depression with a Basset like it was a cradle, once as a tyke my mother told me if I kept digging in the potato patch I'd reach China and I tried till eight feet, as a teen weeded the neighbors' shrubbery for free, in university only Farmhouse Fraternity rushed me, and I actually ended up living now in a 10' hole in the ground (with a trailer pushed in) like a savvy mammal of the Sonora desert. I would not say I found God, nor would I admit missing him.
By the time our canoe taxi reached the outlying island, I knew enough to tell you how to become an Amazon farmer. It begins with a machete. When John Denver sang that 'Life on the farm is kinda lay back…' he was daydreaming. In the Amazon, the machete replaces the shovel; a wheelbarrow in lieu of tractor; and canoe to market in place of a truck. The overhead amounts to the cost of the seeds. When it comes time to fertilize, following three annual crops, the river rises ten vertical meters, laps over the land and covers the family's two hectares (five acres) with one meter of water. Five months later, the water blanket evaporates, leaving an inch or so of rich black deposit from the Amazon River. The food quality down here in the jungle tropics is due to the soil, and water, from days of travel and hundreds of miles upriver at the base of the Andes Range, and its snow melt. It's a fascinating balance.
Ayn Rand, who loved a good farmer in Anthem, wrote 'The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles.' This better describes the four Verde children with brushed hair, sun dried clothes, and river polished shoes, rather than the muddy shore the taxi bumped in the traditional Amazon docking to hit and stick. Señora Verde boasted rising, 'I made the children with my husband to work the farm, because that's what life is about.' The kids, three boys, a youngest sister, and all aged 4-10, beamed until the calluses on their hands and feet nearly popped.
The leading strategy of American farming, and worldwide, is crop rotation or changing plants in succession on the same land to preserve the productive capacity of the soil. For example, the rich, clay loam of the Black Hills of South Dakota resembles the banks around us on the Rio Amazon where it's slippery to hike but if you fall the mouthful of dirt tastes okay. The primary crop in the Black Hills is corn, which is especially demanding for soil nutrients, and not everything does well after an encore of corn. Although corn taxes the soil, if potatoes follow, they leave it fairly unhindered. Potatoes and squash, being both big leafy plants, back-to-back serve as cleaning crops to reduce weed pressure, in preparation for beans in the next rotation. Beans are fantastic nitrogen fixers, which prepare the earth for corn again. They are called the 'Four Brothers'; they sustain each other.
However, this earth chess isn't played down on the Amazon farms. Señora Verde plants corn, then corn, and a third crop of corn. The initial yield's the biggest (10¨ long x 2¨ diameter), the sweetest, and most plentiful. The second crop is still good, and the third poorer. Then rises the Amazon River during the five month 'fertilization season' when the soil is totally refreshed. And it's organic.
Millions of families throughout the Amazon sit in their huts like frogs throughout the five month high water, and this has made them a patient, verbal society. As the water rises from the snowmelt from December through April the island diameter shrinks 50%, which in land area is like turning a XL pizza into a small. Up comes the river slapping at the ladders to the hut platforms on 8' stilts. The kids no longer walk to school, which is also raised on 8' pilings, but canoe there. For the past two years, the water change has been 40 vertical feet and flowing into their living rooms, so they smile and paddle in the front door to the supper table, or bed, where belongings are heaped for a couple months until the ebb. Virtually everyone on the island admits to an amphibian's insight, and enjoys the dry season more.
There are two types of farms on the Isle: group owned, which is shared, and individual or family owned. She prefers their independent farm in trying to explain an individuality that when her corn is ripe today, mine may be tomorrow, but she doesn't want to labor both days for us. She teaches her children not to depend upon the debt nor gratitude of others. Sow, the family labors alone. And so, the ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
Now, the old family farm of the Verdes is popping up the cash crop and the children have corn kernels in place of missing teeth in their smiles. They say still they enjoy the taste of it after pulling hundreds of thousands of ears in their short lifetimes. Harvest is the most joyful part of farming around the globe, but in the Amazon it's achieved differently. The corn is plucked and stuck into rice bags the size of pillow cases that, when full, weigh about 20 pounds each. These are loaded from the field into a wheelbarrow and carted a quarter-mile to the family motorized canoe, which carries the harvest two miles across the strait to the Iquitos Mercado Productores. This rambling shoreside market reminds me of the first supermarket that supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. Until then, where was all the food? It was in gardens, homes, local fields, and forests, cellars and pantries, and on the tables. Now, with markets, one may specialize in something outside agriculture, while remembering the most important product is produce. Each Verde crop of approximately 1000 sacks sells for $5 each, so thrice yearly the family nets $5,000 for a royal total, almost pure profit, of $15,000 per annum.
The Señora grins that theirs is the richest, because they are the hardest working, family on the Isle. Then she admits that she toils during the hot, dry season that she may afford to make more babies during the stilted high water who will grow into workers. They spend the profit on clothes, school books, and an extended family. None of the other families work as hard as the Verdes, she claims, and right now her husband is weeding in the field with the sole farm tool, a 3' machete, while many of the rest are drinking the local aguardiente alcohol. She describes farming as a progression of hope, and with two index fingers rising in parallel points at a direct proportion between how hard one works and the standard of living. Many of the other families jump out of Aesop's Fable of the Grasshopper and Ants who sing through the planting season, and watch their ribs stick further and further out during the high water, as opposed to fewer Ant families like the Verdes who never want.
A farm is a manipulative creation. The maker is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has breaks, but has no end. Things must be done now and not later. The threat the farm gets on you, that keeps you running from furrow to furrow, is this: do it now.
It's time to get you a pair of overalls.
Pecking order is a hierarchical system of social organization that originally referred to the dominance in chickens, like those that run the yards at my Sand Valley neighbors. Power in chickens is asserted by various behaviors, including pecking, but in other animals by tooth and claw, while humans use lingo, gloves, shivs, and money.
The ultimate function of a pecking order, as reported from the ivory towers, is to increase the individual or inclusive fitness of the animals involved in its formation. Closer to the truth, in the wilds, fighting to acquire resources such as food, water and mates is expensive in terms of energy and the risk of injury, and by developing a pecking order animals determine which individuals get priority access to resources, particularly when they are limited.
The order isn't as neat as a deck of cards, graceful as a statistical curve, exacting as a Marine roster, or accurate as a mafia hit system, however it's seen in every walk of life.
Today, while walking the jungle trail around the Island of Iquitos on crutches, I fell upon two men sparring their roosters 'with the gloves on'. Each bird wore ping pong balls on the razor spurs, and a 6" segment of plastic tube that ran from the top to bottom beaks, thus dulling every strike. The animals fought bitterly without blood in an instinct for pecking order for three five minute rounds – the equivalent of about eight rounds of professional boxing – before being put to rest in the shade of a stilted hut. They looked like scuba chickens with regulators and floats, reminding me of when I was chicken to enter the oceanic job market that would include stints as a gardener, babysitter, construction, factory, shop, playground supervisor, cleaning kennels, veterinarian, hobo guide, landlord, author, publisher, teacher, security, professional athlete, coach, technical analyst, psych tech, old folks counselor, and swap meets.
'Money is the way we keep score at work,' told a one-lunged semi-pro quarterback and swap meet mogul. This is the attitude I've carried into each job, and that there must be more to work than money. You should consider jobs that you would do without a love for money, and let that score be secondary. This is possible in America, but less so among the masses of billions around the world. However, once you make enough money to buy the necessities and are able to focus on the luxuries, then the 'Pecking order of Finance' comes into play. This defines the capital structure of an entrepreneur or company, and how it makes financial decisions. The basic idea is that businesses will tend to take the course of least resistance in seeking their financial sources, taking first from the sources that are most readily available, and then steadily moving to sources that may be more difficult to utilize.
If you have ever watched a Peruvian crowd observe a weakened bird pecked to death in the wilds, or a dog among a pack, fish in a feeding frenzy, or cannibals around the spit in the Upper Amazon, it quickly becomes evident that they think differently than the reader. Why are they mesmerized? It's a death rehearsal for each observer, and he leaves the scene as if rising from a psychiatrist's couch and greatly relieved that the burdens of his life will end so effortlessly.
And, I clomped from the rooster fight with gloves, leaving stabs in the mud like dropped coconuts, to circle the island. I'm working out to recover from the worst case of anemia in jungle history, and yesterday was a bit dizzy in the steamy humidity and fell bruising a knee. The rental crutches should be pitched tomorrow to resume the normal mend. I hipped past the 800 lb. grandest pig of the island that grunted at the new look, and by a giant turkey that surpasses Guinness Book of Records for the biggest tom at 86 pounds that charged me like a Rottweiler with wings puffing its breast feathers and fanning its tail. But a 'Rule of Thumb' of pecking order is that if one individual sees the other is larger, faster, or more determined, he will back off. Previously, I hadn't had this problem with the animals, and believe they sensed a weakness.
Near the end of the two-mile perimeter hike the trail is trimmed to widen to enter a fifty shanty town on whose fringe a pack of about 15 dogs attacked me like buzzards after intestines. They were of innumerable breeds and varying size, barking 'Gringo!' Two wooden canines flashed unexpectedly and caught two of the curs in the chops, that sent the rest of them off yelping, as is the gang way.
The establishment of the dominance hierarchy reduces conflict and is a sort of account. I was the top chicken on the island today, and shall get the royal treatment tomorrow.
I feel like a Spanish conquistador on a small scale. My past vanquishes from seven trips to Peru include malaria, elephantitis, amoebic dysentery, hepatitis, and last year three fly larva with sprouting wings crawled beneath the skin looking for a way out. Once any disease is identified, the treatment is straightforward and efficacious, as with these. Each ailment, if one is able to study and feel it in progress, is an honor with a merit badge of antibodies or sash of resistance. I was ready for the next exotic disease.
However, I got blindsided yesterday with the diagnosis of chronic anemia from a worm infestation I had pined for since veterinary school out yonder in the Michigan countryside on call at the barnyards (our offices). There the extracurricular dogs, wasted and grown so thin they were shadows of dogs, except with hanging pot bellies, were dosed with worm medicine before we went on to the big jobs of treating the cows and horses. I grew fascinated with intestinal parasites but had no idea that the chronic anemia the suckers caused could nearly kill a person.
Anemia is a decrease in the number of red blood cells or less than the normal quantity of hemoglobin in the blood. Hemoglobin is a main part of red blood cells and binds oxygen. If you have too few red blood cells, or your hemoglobin is low, the cells in your body will not get enough oxygen. Breathing is like drawing air out of a paper bag. The name is derived from Ancient Greek ἀναιμία anaimia, meaning 'bloodlessness'. Because hemoglobin (found inside RBCs) carries oxygen from the lungs to the capillaries to every cell of the body, anemia leads to hypoxia (lack of oxygen) with varying degrees of anemia fostering a wide range of clinical consequences. Anemia is the most common blood condition in the U.S. affecting about 3.5 million Americans, while the 2014 issue of Blood magazine for medical practitioners reported that the global anemia prevalence in 2010 was 33% or 2.3 billion people.
Chronic is a condition that persists and has been present for at least three months. I'm certain my anemia was contracted nine months ago In Peru when I was unable for one month to escape the delivery boat of a demented captain far up the Rio Tigre and ate and hobnobbed with a string of villagers where hookworms are indigenous and zoonotic among their runt animals that made my earlier Michigan barnyard dogs and cats look like champions of show.
In collecting evidence on a medical subject there are three fronts: observation of the client, his history (more difficult for animal patients), and laboratory reports. My Peruvian doctor said I was as white as a ghost, and then began the history. A physician who takes a good history and a patient who gives one nearly always and quickly solve any mystery that we call illness. I learned the first rule is to take the history chronologically, and the pieces of the puzzle fall together into a diagnosis before the mercury is shaken down into the thermometer. Then he gasped as my lab reports popped up on his computer monitor. 'You'll be a very sick man if you're alive one month from now without treatment.'
My hemoglobin is 6.3 gm/dl while the adult male's normal range is 14-18 gm/dl. In the laboratory test hemoglobin (Hb) is measured as total hemoglobin and the result is expressed as the amount of hemoglobin in grams (gm) per deciliter (dl) of whole blood, a deciliter being 100 milliliters. My hematocrit by volume is 22% whereas the norm in males is 40-50%. Hematocrit is the ratio of red blood cells expressed as a percentage by volume of the blood. It can be said that I'm existing on less than half the oxygen of what the normal reader is.
The lab report supports my suspicion for the past two months that I am hypoxic; however I thought it due to a heart or lung condition and estimated the reduction of available oxygen at 30%. Unless you have been there, it is hard to explain how a desert dweller develops a skin like a coyote nose that detects water at a distance, and how an athlete who has jogged eight miles a day for twenty years owns a palpable cellular sensation for the presence, or absence, of oxygen. The three symptoms for the past two months have been dizziness, fatigue, and shortness of breath. To climb a flight of stairs has created the same oxygen debt as fifteen minutes of wind sprints with the similar inclination to keel over. Twice I've lost consciousness during uphill walks with the faint echo of the inspirational lyrics from The Impossible Dream, 'To try when your arms are too weary…to reach the unreachable star'.
I could never have imagined that a legion of vampire worms could cause such hypoxia to deprive an adequate oxygen supply and cause a near death experience. There have been a half-dozen instances when I felt I could 'will' myself to die as the old folks in homes that I used to do volunteer work at claimed was possible, and in Indian circles. It's a floating, paradoxical REM sleep. A person may die when, scientifically speaking, he ought to have lived if he is in an almost heaven. Yet, each time as consciousness drained like a liquid from lack oxygen in the brain, a spark ignited alertness perhaps due to old timers urgings such as 'This ain't a dress rehearsal, Sonny', and 'Get out and milk life dry.'
My nemesis is Uncinaria, a large family of hookworms that infects man and dogs, with frequent zoonotic transmission between them. These hookworms are present throughout the world, and especially in warmer climates. In the United States, hookworms are found everywhere and commonly along the East. Worldwide, zoonotic hookworms are found in tropical and subtropical regions where the parasite is better able to survive in the tropical conditions. Their mecca is the Amazon where they grow three times as large as anywhere else in the world to 1.5 inches.
These nematodes are slender beasts with bent heads like a hook for leverage of a hammer claw and a mouth with cutting plates and an inner single pair of teeth to bury deep in the intestinal mucosa to gnaw through the walls to the capillaries. All hookworms suck blood, and the Amazon variety are capable of removing 0.2mls of blood per worm, per 24 hour period. They are in competition with themselves for space and blood along the walls like bickering tenants in a skid row hotel, or old revolvers in newly opened mining districts so that when they do want RBCs, they want them badly. Dogs have been known to carry thousands of worms in their intestines, and I suppose given the chronic anemia that I may harbor as many.
The Uncinaria were positively identified yesterday in a microscope slide report at an Iquitos clinic that was tardy relative to the other results which had provided a clean bill of health. The lab report didn't quantify the infestation beyond 'heavy', and was supported by a greatly elevated eosinophil count of 27% (eosinophils usual account for less than 7% of circulating leukocytes) which makes it a textbook case of parasitosis, according to my Peruvian doctor who has seen several as severe.
The patient has two sleeves, one containing a diagnosis and the other a therapy. The diagnostic lab is my favorite area to place the first sleeve, and in vet school I worked six illuminating months as a budding medical Sherlock Holmes, as we all were, diagnosing diseases by a battery of tests – blood, fecal and a few others. The laboratory spun with tubes and slid with slides like a rock concert. The medical lab is the bastion of the fight against disease where the etiology of each is identified by the tests. Sometimes the lab reports weigh as much as the emaciated patients, so much the better. Reading them is exactly like perusing an Ellery Queen mystery such as The French Powder or The Dutch Shoe mystery and solving for the crime before the last page is turned. (By the way, Ellery Queen is both a fictional character and pseudonym used by two cousins from New York.) The laboratory is a palace of probability that few pathogens can sneak by undetected, and once fingered they stand little chance of survival.
'This is Good Medicine!' I cheered the doctor, on the way out the door, and he understood that modern medicine had diagnosed and would conquer another microscopic army that had tried too hard to infest a human body. If more smartly evolved, the worms would have allowed me to remain asymptomatic while sucking me dry instead of my plan to load for bear to kill them and then taking the advice of the oldsters to suck life dry.
Hippocrates advised, 'The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.' That is exactly what this seasoned tropical doctor did, and I walked out his office on lighter feet. He was a general physician, and It must be understood that no one can be a good physician who does not perform surgical operations. There is as great a difference between a physician and surgeon as between a mechanic who has learned from texts and one who has lifted hoods and had his hands in the muck. Never settle for a doctor or specialist who is not also a surgeon. Even in middle age he seems astonished at being paid for doing something as enjoyable as solving daily medical mysteries and curing. Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is a love of humanity.
The doctor proposes that my severe condition, which he's seen in villagers that have a 20% incidence of hookworms, requires no blood transfusion. In the USA, in contrast, a severe anemia is defined as hemoglobin of 8.0 or less with symptoms present and is considered life threatening and prompt treatment is required. In U.S. my case would probably be met with a blood transfusion, which currently is controversial with a circulating slogan 'Anemic patients should know they have the right to speak up for a transfusion.' However, I've seen thousands of potbellied people and pups around the world looking more bedraggled than I, and don't worry a bit about the diagnosis. The anemia is a blessing, but a change, and requires a moment in the thick of the crisis to check the flow and redirect the focus.
After the diagnosis comes the treatment, as he penned two prescriptions in striking calligraphy: Albendazole and Confer. The former is a broad-spectrum anti-helminthic for roundworms, hookworms, threadworm, whipworm, pinworm, flukes, and other parasites that works by killing the worms straight out from the blood. It doesn't taste badly to me and I suspect something is added to intoxicate the toothy heisters. This really is war, with my life at stake, and theirs. Despite their sophisticated mouthparts, and a nervous system that may also deliver an almost heavenly state of consciousness, these bloodsuckers have no excretory organs and no circulatory system, that is neither a heart nor blood vessels.
I'm not a pill Frankenstein tampering with nature, but there are many bull's-eye synthetic and natural medicines that are literal miracles that I will take, and otherwise would be dead a few times over if having lived in the time of Tarzan a century ago. Albendazole is an efficacious one. It is commonly prescribed worldwide, and particularly in USA for zoonotic infections. It's on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, a tally of the most important medications needed in a basic health system. In 2013, GlaxoSmithKline, the principal international marketer of the drug, donated 763 million Albendazole tablets for the treatment and prevention of parasitic infections in developing countries such as Peru, bringing the total to over 4 billion tablets donated since 1998. Closer to home, since 2010, and for understandable reason, the U.S. price of Albendazole has increased by 4000% to over US$100 per 200-mg tablet. Disease is the biggest money maker in our economy. I paid 20 cents a tablet yesterday for my two-tab a day supply for one week totaling about $3.
In addition, I filled a prescription for an oral iron supplement called Confer. Unlike salt licks, you may not find the nearest igneous outcrop and expect to lick usable iron. Because iron is the principal component of hemoglobin, consuming a supplement and iron-rich foods will raise your hemoglobin levels. Dietary iron must be attached to either animal meat or plant tissue to be absorbed by our intestines, and the supplement probably contains both. I've also started eating iron rich seafood, red meat, and leafy green vegetables. The doctor assures that my 6.3 hematocrit will increase two units per month so that in four months I'll reach the low norm, a triumph as complete as Operation Detachment in the Battle of Iwo Jima.
But I also have my own ideas about disease recovery to cure. Walking is first rate medicine and is my first thought to accelerate the doctor's prescriptions. Healing is a biological process and there are few ailments that do not respond immediately and expansively to the increased circulation of a vigorous walk. Walk in increasing increments with escalating weight to let the clean air blow the cobwebs from your body.
In the aftermath, there's money in the bank to cover the cost of the trip to Peru and lots of salads and seafood. The medical expenses totaled $US200. In the USA it would have cost twenty times that, with additional superfluous tests and requisite specialists, and taken weeks instead of two days. One well-trained physician of the highest type will do more for a patient than ten specialists because everything medical within the body is interrelated and cannot be separated.
A Darwinian view of medicine makes disease more meaningful. Diseases arise ultimately from past natural selection. It's a continual war within one's lifetime, and over the centuries, of the forces of pathogens vs. the soldiers of the immune system. They evolve after each skirmish, and then counter-evolve like in Mad magazine's wordless black comic strip 'Spy vs. Spy'. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering in itself is a useful defense After all, nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Nature didn't find the perfect place to hide the little assassins in my gut; but rather the Uncinaria developed through epochs of struggle and earned their position. Now they have revealed themselves and will die. Perhaps a few during the Albendazole fusillade – one in 10,000 - will adapt, survive, and reproduce resistant pathogens. Such is life.
Through hard traveling and having contracted and beaten a string of diseases that remain like untied knots the emotions have been, 'I love you. I hate you. I like you. I think you're a loser. I think you're wonderful. I don't want to be with you. I want to be with you. You should have believed me.' Health and disease, unlike what you may have been taught in middle school Health Science 101, are the same thing – vital actions intended to preserve, maintain and protect the body. There is no more reason for celebrating health than disease. After vet school my body became like an aquarium to me and I always carry a fishing pole to catch and squeeze every ounce of information I can out of each condition. I´ve had and recovered from nearly 33% of the ailments listed in the physician´s bible called the Merck Manual only to conclude that life is so short to learn so long a craft as disease cure.
In a subsequent medical text of alternative cures that I wrote, a certain pleasure is revealed that came from nudging the ill layman in the direction of terror, and bringing him back safely and happily and licking his wound. It´s too bad, but given the conventional medical wisdom that's the sort of paradigm shift required to accept like a Third Worlder that disease is a normal course of life. We don´t have to get as sick nor as often in the First World, but our attitude can become saner by accepting rather than fleeing in dread from the knock of unfavorable conditions at the door.
If you 'listen' to your body and intuition, they'll guide you well through sickness and into better conquering forthcoming illnesses and old age. You´ll gain wisdom about anatomy, physiology, biology and the mind. There are countless ways to develop the listening skills such as sports, dancing or drumming, but most of all by awareness through disease, while keeping a journal. Read about it in texts. It's more interesting to examine an ailment in onset, flow, and remission than it is gazing at virus Facebook.
The public bladder about medicine is that one must see a specialist and get a battery of tests when actually as much and almost instantly for free can be gleaned from recovered peers at an online chat forum for specific ailments. Such a well-chosen anthology of case histories is a complete dispensary, as well as studying the progress of one´s own conditions. Always pick a physician who is older, seasoned, a surgeon, preferable a sports medicine practitioner, and lord help you if he is busy. The profits will follow a good physician to the grave, but he is more difficult to find nowadays in USA, and all the more reason to seek professional treatment at a fraction the cost in other countries. Perhaps this is the only solution to whip the ill American health care system back to health.
As for Global Anemia, already the dead worms are evacuating, and I say, 'I tried to tell you. You said you didn't care, remember?' Today we fight. Tomorrow we fight. The day after, we fight. And this disease plans on whipping us, but if we have paid close enough attention they had better bring a sack lunch for the extra innings.
Victor Niederhoffer writes:
A rather heroic friend I have.
Marion Dreyfus writes:
One of the most useful posts I have read. I am sending it to a friend who has been battling Pneumonia contracted while she was in Paris, and had collapsed lungs and hypoxia when she was admitted to Roosevelt for a week. Thanks for troubling to write all this down, Bo. She is now completing her regimen of O2, and can begin to ambulate again like a regular person again.
Bo Keely writes:
In any respiratory distress the first line of defense is a simple technique few doctors will prescribe. One must have lived in the North where pipes freeze to think of it. It´s loosely wrapping a towel or scarf around the neck & knotting it while sleeping all the night. This heats the air going down the trachea and into all parts of resp system. It cuts healing time by half and prevention is about the same 50%. Tested and proven by Michiganers. The other thing she should do that even the best doctors may not suggest is during recovery, when able, she should be walking or bicycling to keep things moving inside the body which promotes healing.
June 27, 2014 | Leave a Comment
I went to Puerto Maldonado, Peru in the Amazon to evaluate Haitians traffic into Brazil and was stymied by a planned gas crisis.
I'm sitting in a 30' riverboat at the town's ghost port fishing information about the Haitians from the captain, a tour guide, lovely senorita in a halter top, and an observant five-month Tamarin Pocket Monkey (Saguinus fuscicollis) that resembles a squirrel with a human head and a golden mane of a lion. The keen boy is one pound of Olympic gymnast with a prehensile tail, and quickly opens my hardcover of L. Ron Hubbard's worthy The Problems of Work to chapter one and hides between the pages. I tweak its tail, and he makes a face before diving into a subsequent chapter, and so on through the book. The little wiggle is ADD from sipping the guide's soda and captain's beer, as well as eating anything sweet you hand it. Finally, he exits the book and scampers to perch on the captain's shoulder as he describes the human smuggling.
"Ha!" exclaims the skipper, as the others nod in agreement. "Don't believe what you read about the Haitians. There is zero in Puerto Maldonado, however for the past three years about fifty of the nice people go in transit daily through town and for 200km as the parrot flies to the frontier. It started when the earth shook…" In 2010, the catastrophic earthquake that crippled Haiti's economy sent a tsunami of refugees flying into Quito, Ecuador, a country known for its lax immigration policies, where daily they board buses and pass along National Geographic's Highway of Dreams up over the 15,000´ Andes, through rainforest Puerto Maldonado, and three hours more by coyote vans (to the tune of $1000 per refugee) to the border. Once in Brazil, the immigrants are welcomed to plenty of farm and town menial labor. The situation is a model of the daily flux of Latin illegals into USA. Last month the BBC said an estimated 5,600 immigrants have arrived in Brazil since 2011, however the articles I had read claimed tens of thousands have arrived with Brazil as the popular choice as Latin America's largest economy.
Human smuggling has captivated me ever since I gave water five years ago to six comatose illegal Mexicans who had collapsed in the shade of my California trailer sucking barrel cactus for moisture after being abandoned on the adjacent Chocolate Mountain Bombing Range and wandering for two days in an 110F inferno and explosions. In years to come, I would bust the wind atop Mexican freight trains with hundreds of illegal Central Americans traveling through Mexico to the Promised Land USA. Americans know what changes the illegals have wrought in the Land of Liberty, and I expect to find in Puerto Maldonado even greater ones. US media coverage has portrayed the border town as overrun with thousands of refugees and, if true, the divergent gene pool of tall, dark, gregarious Haitians would in quick generations forever alter the Peruvian body frame, mindset, and jungle instinct.
A yellow canary walks out the senorita's cleavage, and flutters to post on my foot. She grabs the bird onto her lap and raises eyebrows at me, as if it has been trained to fetch.
Just then, a five-gallon container of gas arrives, and as the captain reaches for his wallet, he explodes, "The town has gas fever!" The guide explains, as the skipper decants the jug, "Puerto Maldonado is the only town in Peru that is on gas ration. The national government has declared our pueblo of 138,000 the largest consumer of petro in Peru, and a week ago issued ration cards. Each citizen is allowed five gallons per day, and the town economics has become complex." Five gallons is enough for a dweller who owns no vehicle, generator or trade, and yet other businesses would have come to a standstill had it not been for sharping gas. When one neighbor has no use for fuel, he fills his daily quota and sells it at a profit to another. For example, Puerto Maldonado is the starting point for visiting Peru's southeastern jungles of the Tambopata Reserve, or for departing to Brazil or Bolivia. However, the agencies are short to fuel their buses and boats, and so we have conversed for two steamy hours waiting for the jug. "Next week each ration card goes down to one gallon per day," moans the guide. "So today may be my last tour until the crisis is ironed out."
"The fuel is being siphoned into Brazil," explains the senorita, petting her bird. The monkey races along the roof. The price of gas is $5 per gallon in Peru; however, across the border in Brazil's remote rainforest it demands nearly double that. "Forget the Haitians; we're in a state controlled gas war for our life and liberty," they insist. Fists slam the rail. "The common denominator of the Haitians and gas smuggling," yells the captain over the motor, "Is the corrupt National Police." They take bribes at the border to 'look the other way' as thousands of Haitians and tens of thousands of gallons of petro pour into Brazil. I tell them I want to jump ship, which is now putting along the Madre de Dios, to go to the border to see firsthand. "Don´t worry," assures the tour guide."There will be time for that after you see the 20' black caimans and 6' giant otters at the Tambopata Reserve."
Tambopata National Reserve is a wildlife sanctuary in the Peruvian Amazon that brims with 165 species of trees, 103 species of mammals, 1300 of butterflies, 90 of amphibians, and 6500 of fish. From the first step into the reserve, my San Francisco Giant baseball cap is covered with butterflies that the guide theorizes is due to my flower shirt, as they alight on no one else. However, I smell like the only member who doesn't use cologne, perfume or aftershave. A 8" black tarantula, that the guide identifies as a Chicken Tarantula with a reputation for eating birds up to the size of domestic fowl, walks the opposite direction. When I put my hand down to let it cross, as with smaller species at my desert home, instead of crossing it goes around. Further on, we hop over a drive of black army ants a footprint wide and audible in their rustle. The yellow headed soldiers laboring under huge swinging mandibles are described in a short story that in my youth was first a terror and then a curious fascination. Leiningen vs. the Ants is set in the Brazil rainforest not far from here. The story centers on a scrappy plantation owner called Leningen who stubbornly refuses to abandon his plantation in the face of a seemingly unstoppable mass of army antes. My guide drops and picks up one by the abdomen, and asks, ´Would you like a demonstration of how the natives suture wounds?' Though there is no cut, I thrust a pinky with a joint crease that he lets the angry ant bite, and, urging through my spiked pain, 'Wait - the ant would rather lose its head than let go,' he deftly twists off the body as the remaining head neatly staples the crease, and it has been worth the price of admission.
At the end of the 90 minute hike through this mysterious land lays the principal attraction named Sandoval Lake which is an oxbow lake off the Madre de Dios. It was formed by a wide meander in the stream over the course of about 500 years that cut through the curve to abandon this mile-long crescent body of water. We paddle with two other tourists the circumference within a few feet of turtles, macaws, and two tribes of Squirrel and Howler monkeys, as fish jump aside the canoe. Philodendron epiphytes crown 30' palms dropping inch-thick roots to the water. When the guide identifies a dozen Cormorant cranes that sit as tamely on giant lilies as if this is Eden, I know I could revolution the fishing industry in the Amazon basin by introducing a technique I saw on Nature TV using trained Cormorants as 'lines'.
The aquatic bird of the family Phalacrocoracidae in the Amazon has purple plumage, about two feet tall, and the usual long neck and body, with a hookbeak and throat pouch for holding fish. In China and Japan, Cormorant are famous for fishing on shallow rivers. Cormorant fishing is also an old tradition in Greece, England and France. To control the birds, the fishermen tie a cord neckerchief near the base of the bird's throat that prevents them from swallowing larger fish, which are held in their throats, while smaller fish go down the hatch. The fisherman paddles a canoe, much as we do now, except with a dozen Cormorants standing like tenpins, and when the fishing territory is reached the fisherman commands his fleet with a wave of the hand into the water where they dive and bring up fish. They are free to swim away but do not, instead returning to the canoe, the fisherman reaches down their throats and pulls out the larger fish, and rewards them with smaller ones. He may gauge the size of the day's catch by the tightness of the neckties.
The strategy is not unlike the border I plan to visit tomorrow where the Peru Immigration and National Police make the human and gas smugglers cough up big bribes. Early the next morning, I board a hired car in Puerto Maldonado for the three hour ride with six others at the exurbanite price of $15 since the chauffeur has paid through the nose for scavenged gas. The national newspaper La Republica on the car dash confirms what I saw earlier that for the last three days drivers in the capital city have lined the streets with their vehicles waving ration cards, yelling for trades as if were a commodes pit, and wait and muscle in to buy miniscule amounts of fuel. The newspaper reports that of the 32 gas stations normally operating in town, only four are open and selling fuel. Vehicle movement along the jungle fringed highway is sparse and has slowed to a crawl due to the gas shortage. The driver doesn't question that I want to see the frontier town of Inapari, flanking both countries, and return the same day. However, when we arrive at the crossing that normally allows people to mingle within the town limit for 24 hours without officially exiting one or entering the other country, a lanky Peruvian National Policeman in the regular gold on black uniform yokes me into the small wooden immigration office.
I'm ordered to a hard bench with a clear view out the door of the primitive crossing where a six-man force of National Policemen fleeces one after another Brazil bound 30' wood trucks with blue drums of gas piled in back. Brazil doesn't need the wood, of course, but requires the lower price fuel at the expense of Puerto Maldonado where garbage is piling in the streets because there is no fuel to send out the trucks for collection. The scene is as was described to me in the tour boat and by townspeople. Because the truck drivers are foreigners they are spared the ration cards and are free to buy as much fuel as desired. Each of trucks carries nearly a full tank of gas plus three 55-gallon drums for a total of about 200 gallons at a profit on the other side of $3 a gallon for a total per trip of $600. This is a fortune in the Amazon basin, enough for a man to start a family and new life. The locals say the planned gas crisis is not resolved because the National Police who are tied to the national government are taking a profit.
A quirk is that Brazil is the world's second largest producer of ethanol fuel. Together, Brazil and the United States lead in the industrial production of ethanol fuel, for nearly 90% of the world´s production. Brazil has the world´s first sustainable biofuel economy and is the leader. The reason is millions of sprawling fields of sugarcane ethanol which is the most successful alternative fuel anywhere to date. In 2010, the U.S. EPA designated Brazilian sugarcane ethanol as the most advanced biofuel due to its 61% reduction of total life cycle greenhouse gas emissions, including direct and indirect emissions. However, Brazil needs the base petro to add their ethanol to, and it´s being siphoned from Puerto Maldonado.
The leapfrog story of my pursuit of human and gas smuggling at the Peru–Brazil frontier ends surprisingly in a little bedroom off the hard bench. The National Policeman sees me staring through the window at the palmed bribes taken by his men, and utters, 'This border is like the Mexico–US border. Do you know what I mean?'
'Now I understand. I live thirty miles north of that border and have crossed hundreds of times. It is corrupt, with bribes taken for human and goods trafficking. Is that what you're saying?' It's the first time I've seen a Peruvian National Policeman shake in his boots.
'Go to the bedroom!´ he demands, and scuffs after. He motions me to sit on a bunk, one of two double-deckers jammed into the space where another corpulent National Policeman snores exhaling beer fumes. He starts awake, arises, approaches with a leer, and they strip search me, investigating every detail except for where the sun doesn´t shine. I must account for everything including where I got each coin in my pocket – in change at a café, grocery store… ´Aha!' shouts one, pulling my room key. ´Where did you get this?´ Meanwhile, through the bunkhouse window, a van of Haitians pauses at the crossing, the driver shakes hands with the National Policeman who smiles and looks away, and the load passes into Brazil where they´ll likely work the sugarcane fields.
The National Policeman flicks through my passport searching for the week old visa entry stamp at the Lima airport. He riffles more slowly a second time, and then a third in exasperation bending each of the 52 pages of my new mint US passport. I would blame him for adding one year's wear in two minutes, except the document is a travesty of the US government. Since 2007, the State department has issued only biometric passports, which include RFID chips, and each page having a historic background print in blue of Americana scenes including the Mayflower, covered wagon, steam train, the Liberty Bell, Statue of Liberty, Mt. Rushmore, and so on through the now rumpled deck that is my passport. They are beautiful engravings but to accept a normal blue ink visa stamp on a blue background is like trying to read this black ink on a gray background. Finally, the official finds the nearly invisible visa stamp, grunts, and orders me out the building and back on the road again.
June 26, 2014 | Leave a Comment
There are Silverback gorillas in Uganda that I remember well from an encounter 15 years ago with a 500 lb. male and his harem of four females. I was told by my guide, armed with only a machete and fast feet, to avoid gazing into the eyes of the gorillas. That strategy has always seemed dumb to me with bears, big cats, hoodlums, and so forth, and so from five steps away I peered without animosity at the Silverback. He stood on hind legs with no shoulders to speak of and gazed back with yellow eyes as if it were a board game and he wanted to trade his harem for mine, four English lasses. The guide behind me got nervous, and started to thump his chest to show dominance as the gorilla pounded thunder out of his, and then ran up a branchless 20-meter palm and showered coconuts down on us. The trade was never made or the gene pool or Africa might have taken a turn.
Below us stretches the Colton yard of San Bernardino. The Pepper Street Bridge shakes like a California earthquake as a mile-long Dirty Face snakes under and east from the Pacific to who knows where. That's one attraction of hoboing.
We wheel and watch the red-blinking FRED at the end of the train disappear about midnight on May 30, 2014. 'The only sure thing about freight hopping is you know where you are, and not where you're going,' I advise 22 year-old MoJo, the strapping son of two journalists who is the political writer for the Mother Jones Washington DC branch. He fancies to get that far the hobo way, but there are no promises.
'The lights seem brighter than my previous time through three years ago, and the tracks twice as busy, with three times as much graffiti, and more colorful,' I wonder aloud. Below us, on the bridge embankment under a willow tree, four tramps including one female boisterously celebrate Horace Greeley's 'Go West, Young Man' and the hobo California dream where one may pick breakfast off an orange tree and sleep under the stars at night.
Anxious to jump into a boxcar, rock-and-roll, and see what lays ahead, we trundle past the bos and into some Eucalyptus. Within fifty paces huff and puff three sets of locomotives heading up under the Pepper Street Bridge. We may choose: A mixed freight with three engines, an Intermodal container train with four locomotives, or a 'Dog' of assorted cars with two rust bucket engines that would side considerable and ditch us 'out on the farm'.
We approach, the blast and clank of the yard cloaking out steps on ballast and the smell of diesel and oil camouflaging our nervous body odor from the RR police, or Bull. The ladder of a freight reaches to three feet above uneven right-of-way and we climb aboard a silver hopper down on its springs with cement for a softer ride and having the trimmings of a front and back 5'x8' porch with a portal of shoulder width that enters a hobo 'hotel room' in the superstructure of the car. MoJo crawls in to try it for size as much as to stay out of sight, as the crunch of ballast under heavy boot drops closer and closer.
'Gentlemen!' booms a baritone, as a yard worker grins up at us. 'You'll need this wherever you're bound.' He passes up a twelve pack of RR bottled water normally reserved for the engineers that you must not lose faith in humanity anywhere.
'This train is due to leave right after we get the F—king Rear End Device fixed, so lay low, good luck, and I never talked to you.'
In minutes, the orderly process of a train departing a RR yard begins with the hiss of the Westinghouse brake line filling with air, an eerie electrical click in the same direction to test the connection, and, finally, highball! - two long blasts of the locomotive horn, with a staccato beat of couples stretching to our car, and the train leaps off the track for a second.
We clear the Pepper Bridge and in three hundred yards roll over with a clank of Americana the Colton Crossing. Located directly south of Interstate 10, this great steel frog determines the fate of every train tramp who's ever caught out San Bernardino full of juice and hope. The junction is one of the most historic and busiest in the USA where the south-north BNSF rail strikes the west-east Union Pacific. It was the 1882 scene of a bloody war between the lines, but tonight moonlight peacefully streaks the rail as our BNSF train nudges north over the clatter-clatter of the joints and into the star-spangled night.
The juxtaposition of Executives and Kings of the Road along the rails in American history is spectacular. Andrew Jackson was the first president on B&O in 1833 to ride the Iron Horse. President-elect Abraham Lincoln rode his famous Inaugural Train Journey in the winter of 1861 on NY Central trains from Springfield, Illinois in a trip that was considered full of potential dangers. Several Southern States had already withdrawn from the Union, and assassination attempts were possible. For these reasons, the train schedule was tightly controlled with stops as short as possible to coincide with service requirements of fuel and water for the steam locomotive from his hometown to the inauguration in Washington D.C. In Philadelphia Lincoln for first time learned of a plot on his life when his train was scheduled to pass through Baltimore. A hobo cloak and dagger train of events followed. Lincoln opted to smuggle aboard with the famous detective, Allan Pinkerton, through Baltimore and safely into Washington on a separate train that no one else knew about. While Pinkerton stood guard on the porch of the last train car all night Lincoln stayed just inside the last car in a lower booth, and was safely delivered disguised into Washington in the early morning for the Inauguration.
Harry Truman in Plain Speaking makes no bones about his hobo roots:
I was eighteen years old, and I'd just finished high school and knew I wasn't going to get to go to West Point. So I took this job as a timekeeper for Santa Fe RR)… There were about a hundred hoboes in each camp, and I got very well acquainted with them. My job was to keep tabs on them, to keep track of how much time they put in, and then I'd write out their paychecks for them. And they weren't bad fellows… Not in any way. Most of them had backgrounds that caused them to be hoboes. It was one of the best experiences that I ever had because that was when I began to understand who the underdog was and what he thought about the people who were the high hats. They felt just like I did about them. Some of those hoboes had better educations than the president of Ha-vud University.
Meanwhile, rolling over the California salt flats, I explain to the Mother Jones political reporter that the principal tie between Executives and Kings of the road is their grass-is-greener view of the American Dream: The Executives whom I take out want the freedom of independent travel. The tattered Kings I ride with want money and power. There should be a Prince and Pauper Company to please both.
The palm skyline of greater Barstow, California fills the horizon at sunrise. Our hopper is parcel of BNSF Railway, the second-largest railroad network in North America, second only to the great Union Pacific RR. BNSF has three transcontinental routes for high-speed links between the western and eastern United States, and we are riding the only southern link from the Pacific to the Mississippi River. It is safely said BNSF trains travel more rail miles and hobos than any other North American railroad. With a system of 24,000 miles of track, especially in the west, it hauls various commodities, most notably coal and grain, as well as intermodal (container and truck van) freight. The locomotive color is orange, black and dashes of yellow.
The BNSF Barstow employs over 1000 workers and is a traditional hobo bottleneck. An unseasoned hobo is doomed to aimlessly walk and duck about the yard until he's ticketed for misdemeanor trespassing. I expect many spottings, but not to be collared. The Barstow yard is a major hub for transportation with a 'hump' for classification. Hobos speak of going 'over the hump' in Barstow in order to reach Los Angeles and the Bay area because except for through trains all of the incoming cars are re-sorted here. MoJo nearly jumps out of his overalls at the first crash of a car that has been backed up onto the 20' crest and the couple 'cut loose' so it becomes a 'silent roller' that rolls by gravity for up to a half mile from the hump track onto any of 48 classification tacks. We call this 'shuffling the deck' and it's better to watch than be in a car crashing at 8mph into its brethren string of cars. I was once thrown 15' in such a shuffle and wish never to repeat the experience. Once the cars are sorted into destination strings, locomotives are attached and on they move across America.
Barstow is also the first crew change point on the BNSF for northeast bound trains. Crew change towns are as important to hobos as the old time water tanks where steam engines (that yielded to diesel-electric in the 50s) took on water and hobos. Now train riders board and debark at the crew change divisions that take place 'on the fly' where the crew literally steps on a slow-moving freight as the previous one steps off – and hobos must do the same – or more likely it takes five to twenty minutes to change. And yet, our locomotives a half-mile to the front 'dynamite' releasing a blast of compressed air that is heard for miles, and signifies the train has probably terminated and is going to break up. A yard worker on a quad confirms this, tells us to lie low because the yard is 'hot' with security, and advises us to take a tunnel under the bowl of sorting tracks to the north side yard and look for units heading up eastbound. I'm a cookbook of adventure knowing liberties are given, and taken at risk. Emerging from the far side of the 100-yard cool tunnel another yard worker in a pickup spots us and lifts the mike of his radio.
Hoboing is game theory and the stage is the freight yard. A game consists of freedoms, barriers and purposes. The freedom is the open road, the barriers are the strings of cars, watchful towers, deadly silent rollers, and the sweat in your eye that may lead to a misstep. However, primary among these is the necessity in a game to have an opponent or enemy. There must be a continuum of problems which there are in a freight yard, and to have sufficient individuality to cope with them which is given. Now the game begins.
The Barstow yard is three miles long and a half-mile wide with the typical configuration throughout the USA of two main lines (with traffic in opposite directions) feeding into either end, usually under a highway bridge, that quickly fan into a wide swath of some fifty tracks that are littered with strings of some 500 freight cars on hold, fueling locomotives, yard locomotives pushing segments of trains around, the yardmaster tower, outbuildings, and stacks of RR ties and miscellaneous equipment. Barstow is a hobo blockade to most because it is HOT with a high security presence. Our primary opponent is the Bull, or Cinder Dick.
Oddly, in these days of tightened security since 911, it's still as easy to jump a freight train as it is a jet plane. The railroads in the financial squeeze have farmed the Bull duties out to private security firms which send a young man in a starched uniform driving about the yard in a white truck looking for inclusion and tuned to the radio for tips from yard workers and the towers. MoJo and I had just completed climbing over the 13th string of cars to get to the other side of the yard when that white truck stops ten feet away with only a set of gondola wheels separating our legs from his. I hunker down to peer between the 3' metal wheels and gaze into the eyes of a fresh, crew-cut young man in white with a silver star staring back and grinning. I guffaw, arise to heels, walk around the wheels, and introduce myself.
'Just trying to catch an eastbound and not touching anything.'
'I've been getting reports on you guys all over the yard all day. What's up?'
'Did you ever climb over 13 strings of cars? It takes five minutes per track and it's hot so we welcome you.'
MoJo pipes, 'We know there's an Amtrak at 9:54pm, if that's any help.'
'Just follow the caged center rail for another mile to get to the Amtrak station, and there will be eastbound freights as you walk leaving on both sides of the cage.'
'Thank you,' I settle, and we quickly walk away. The truck backs along the other side of the string of cars following our progress for five minutes, and then leaves. 'What a surprise!' I suggest. 'A sympathetic security who has clued us on how to catch out.'
We hike to the unstaffed Amtrak station and guzzle icy liquids for thirty minutes in the Harvey House Railroad Museum. Fred Harvey's Harvey Houses are a household name among hobos and Amtrak passengers throughout the west. An innovative restaurateur, Fred Harvey created the first restaurant chain in the US and developed the Harvey House lunch rooms, souvenir shops, and hotels that served passengers on the western gridiron of the early otherwise 'wild' west. The Harvey family continued to run the business until 1965, and now with the closing of most of the depots, many like this one in Barstow have been converted to Amtrak stations and museums. I pop a cold soda and gaze over a collection of dated RR nails of which I have a complete hand-collected set from 1901 to present.
Then we retrace along the perimeter fence for a mile until finding a 'hole'. There is always a break in the fence behind a bush where other hobos have pried it open for yard access, and we scoot under like squirrels to secret in pines to study the busy eastside tracks. Within minutes, two trains roll up, and then a third. The only obstacle is the caged center rail, a dual 4' high chain link fence that protects the workers from the high speed passenger train, and that MoJo takes with a bound as I boost myself standing on a pack. We board a mixed freight for the shade of a lumber car, and catnap on plywood until a nightmare strikes. The train begins to move the opposite direct of our intent, so I shout, 'Your pack - Throw it w-a-y out.' He does, and, 'Now you!' The freight is rattling 5mph and a little faster than an escalator and we haven't had a chance for the lesson on how to disembark on the fly. Rather than step down the ladder, MoJo leaps from the car lip 6' above the ballast and arches as high as a basketball rim before dropping like a sandbag. He alights in an absorbing tumble albeit in the opposite direction of the train, and dusts himself off as I yell, 'Watch me!' and simply step to the bottom rung of the ladder and then another 2' down to the moving ground. 'That's one kitten toward the life of a Catman,' I tell him, and he smiles like one.
The smile drops as the container train on the adjacent rail jolts in the correct direction, and as I move for the ladder express, 'That's how fast things happen in a freight yard.' We board because it's a priority train bound for distant places. Container cars are the 30-40' metal boxes mounted on flatcars that haul merchandise intra-country or overseas. There's usually a narrow well in which to sit at the ends of the container on the flatcar, and it's advisable to take the rear one to avoid a shifting load in an emergency stop. Double-stacks are containers mounted two-high on a flatcar, and our ride taken in a hurry was sounding two long whistle blasts for imminent departure. These are called intermodal trains because the containers are shunted from rail to truck to ship. Intermodal transport is the current wave of transport with 7 of 10 ten trains that we've seen being containers and piggybacks, whereas five years ago it was a third that many.
In our rush to board we selected the front porch of a container flatcar to avoid the scorching sun. This means that if the train emergency stops (happens once every cross country trip) the riders may be thrown forward and off the car. A fast moving train with 100+ cars that emergency brakes takes about a mile-and-half to stop. I was hit in a VW van once by a 20mp freight and carried on the cowcatcher for a quarter-mile down the rail before it halted and I let go the steering wheel and fell through the window. On mean, a train emergency stops every ten hobo travel days usually due to an animal, person or car in the track, or an uncoupled brake hose. I've remained safety conscious of emergency stops, and insist that MoJo and I, with one hand each, grasp a 2" vertical bar on the container door for eight straight hours until Needles, Ca.
This is not just any container train but a pure JB Hunt 'unit' train. JB Hunt, a Fortune 500 company, since 1961 has been one of the leaders in Intermodal transportation with 12,000 company trucks as well as independent drivers, and 47,000 trailers and containers, with contracts with all the major rail carriers. Let's take a typical unit container train. It consists of 130 cars, each car is about 60 feet long, and it's pulled/pushed by four 65-foot long locomotives. The cars are 7800 feet, the locomotives add 240 feet, for a total of 8040 feet.
Loaded freight cars are designed to weigh close to the same when full, 125 to 145 tons, makes no difference if it is fuel, coal, barley, a container, or scrap iron. A typical modern train runs three units on the point and one pusher at the rear. I would say a good average for a train these days is a mile-and-half and speeding 65mph. 'Intense,' coos MoJo, and I recall my basketball coach drilling, 'You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.'
Our JB Hunt train parallels Interstate 40 for an hour and outraces every vehicle on the road. This stretch from Barstow to Needles twins the famous old west Mojave Road that is now a dirt trail that I walked in one week once, running out of water but sucking it from barrel cactus. The JB Hunt boxes surprisingly have only a thin plastic seal and easily could be broken into, unlike the heavy lock on my container home in the California Sonora that's refurbished with a loft, waterbed, office and library.
Approaching midnight, we roll with still clenched grips into Needles, California. This whistle stop oasis located 100 miles north of my Sand Valley digs often boasts on national weather reports the hottest place in the country, and in the comic strip Peanuts, whose creator Charles Schultz lived in Needles as a boy, Snoopy's brother Spike lived in the desert near where we finally release the vertical bars and heave stiffly over the side. Spike frequently heads to Needles to partake the town's nightlife, which I agree is primarily howling with the coyotes. 'I don't want to be stuck here,' I explain, 'But we must change cars.' We board a few cars aft on the rear porch of a flatcar with a double-stack just as the brakes click, the line hisses, and the freight whooshes into the night. It has taken less than five minutes to change crew. Now we stretch out and sleep while crossing the Colorado River and beyond, for there is no better siesta than on a freight that rocks like a cradle where nothing can disturb you until the next crew change.
We surf the rail out of California and into Winslow, Arizona, with the Eagles Standing on the Corner Statue that is a catchout point for hobos with a catchy line to their song Take it Easy… 'Such a fine sight to see'…' and then the crossing bells clank for the thousandth time and the train pushes on. MoJo admits to quitting coffee for the trip and is well into a full beard. He asks about my shoulder tattoo of a mouse with a smile and teardrop in one eye to which I justify that on the road when you're smiling you'll soon be crying, and when you're crying you'll soon be smiling.
This is our state on striking Belen, New Mexico. Most hobos ride the rails in confusion. They get on a train sober with a bottle of wine or whiskey, and drink it down in the first two hours of the ride so they'll be sober again to debark at the next division town. They pause in one of these junction jungles to clean up, perhaps to work a temp job, panhandle, or visit friends. As long as their stomachs are full and they remain on the move they're happy. However, the boxcar tourists I ride with travel with purpose: to see the nation, to get from one place to another, or to learn of themselves. I believe that to live fully one must have, in addition to a means of support and something to do, a higher purpose. This resolve, to be a goal at all, must have counter-purposes or purposes which prevent it from occurring. There must be individualities which oppose the purpose because if one lacks these it is nearly certain he will invent them.
We 'plastic people', as the grimy traditional hobos call us for our cards and perhaps appearance, are abetted in our travels by three tools of the trade that most conventional bos will never know about but would give the gold in their teeth to own. The first is the Rand McNally Handy Railroad Atlas of the RR 'interstates' or main rails. I also carry system maps for Amtrak and Greyhound in 'poor man's laminations' of clear sealing tape. But the trump is the Crew Change Guide. Otherwise, you'd face as a green bo entering the rail system a great many pieces of paper whirling about a room that would be confusing until you picked out the one piece of paper by which everything else is in motion. This is the Guide that has replaced the hundreds of sheets of notes and yard sketches that I made on my initial runs in the 80s.
The Guide is shrouded in mystery that I now can clear. The author was a folk hero named Train Doc whom I met at a Dunsmuir RR festival in the 80s. He is a Vietnam vet who became a New England nurse's aide while spending all his free time freight hopping and recording details about the thousands of yards: where to catch out, jungles, supply stores, where the units 'head up', fences, and bulls. Since train hopping is technically illegal, he titled the guide From Birmingham to Wendover: Alternative Travel Guide to Cool Camping Places so that if a law official discovers the text it won't incriminate the rider. The Guide lists no author but in the 80s everyone knew and Train Doc confirmed to me that he wrote it to help others in searching out the freedoms of the open road. Train Doc is an Ed 'Lilywhite' Norton look and talk alike if you remember Jackie Gleason's TV Honeymooners. I tell people the Crew Change Guide is the most laboriously researched book in English literature and the most helpful in a narrow topic range.
Now adrift in the middle of New Mexico, MoJo studies his IPhone Googlemap and Yelp (whenever near an Interstate or bridge) as I compare his data with the Crew Change Guide. My compass is deflected by the metal car and rail to point forever east and is useless. We jump down in late afternoon in Belen, a railroad community that exists because of BNSF, located on I-25 thirty miles south of Albuquerque. The omniscient Guide and IPhone concur that there are a Valero gas station and Blake's Burger a half-mile through a weed patch and west on Reinken Ave, and so we hoof it.
Hobos own their own Golden Rule in the form of an Ethical Code that was created by Tourist Union #63 at the 1889 National Hobo Convention in St. Louis, Missouri. Sandwiched between Rule #1 ('Decide your own life, don't let another person run or rule you.') and later laws on yard and jungle conduct, tenets #2-10 deal with town behavior, as follows:
2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3. Don't take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation,
4. Always try to find work, even if temporary.
5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals.
7. When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out.
8. Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
In keeping, we wash up at the Valero one at a time, and then gulp great draughts of Gatorade, milk, and juice without burping. A kind lady hands me a bottled water and newspaper, and then returns fifteen minutes later with burgers and fries for my partner and me. A young Hispanic with gang tattoos presses $2 into my hand that I pass to the Valero girl clerk for feeling bad that she overheard me quip that it is odd for someone in a railroad town to never have heard of Amtrak.
Start, charge, and stop. Wait. Start, charge and stop. A repeating cycle of action that MoJo calls 'intensity interrupted by nothingness' is the hobo way. After the long lope back into the Belen yard we face catching out. Each RR yard demands about an hour of taxing multi-tasking in finding and boarding a car, the iron steed breaks the gate, and now we will look at another eight hours of countryside roll by like National Geographic except with the elements of sun, wind, insects and odors. We have chosen a piggyback to ride from Belen. The Piggyback is a flatcar that carries semi-truck trailers. One leans against the big tires and views 270-degrees of flowing scenery from under the trailer belly albeit a few dangling brake cables. The piggyback doors are sealed flimsily like containers and so bulls frown on pig riders, causing hobos to secret between the rear wheels. I've also ridden side-saddle like an old west Indian shielded outside the tires through hot yards. I used to say, things blow around and away on 'pigs', so everything should be roped down. I no longer say that because this is my first ride on a pig with wind blinders that have come into vogue in the past couple of years. The blinders stretch from nearly the tires to the front prong to block the breeze, still allow a view around and under, and screen prying eyes from the outside. A piggyback train such as this is a priority, third only to Amtrak and container trains, that I favor all in accordance with the seagoing adage to admire a small ship, but put your freight in a large one because the larger the load, the faster the voyage and the greater the profit.
Across the Rio Grande flies the blundered pig into the night.
Ft. Worth!' announces MoJo, glancing up from his glowing IPhone, as though neither ever sleeps. This is the BNSF headquarters with spokes east, west, north and south, but we conjecture this train of truck trailers is northbound along the dense Southern Transcon. The Southern Transcon is the main line of the BNSF between Southern California and Chicago. It was completed in its current right-of-way by 1908, and now serves as a mostly double-tracked Intermodal corridor. The route is one of the most heavily trafficked in the western US with an average daily of over 100 trains with each averaging one to 1.5 miles in length, like ours.
It's a fast five minute crew change in Ft. Worth as we hold fast with beef jerky and Gatorade. The 'hobo diet' while stuck on rolling stock day after day is one of the most effective with the fewest hunger pangs because there is so much to watch. Quick in and quick out is the way I like a yard, and before the train picks up speed it glides by the tremendous WalMart distribution facility beneath the setting sun. WalMart, a few months ago, announced the opening of a new online fulfillment center that the train wheels slowly by so that I have time to study the lot. I thought WalMart was big but this nearly 1 million square-foot facility proves it's huge. With 4,100 stores within five miles of two-thirds of the US population, WalMart gains a significant advantage over Amazon.com by positioning this online distribution building in the center of its empire. I estimate 500 parked or rolling company semi-trucks in the building lot before our train whisks us out of sight. Yogi Berra said, 'When you get to a fork in the road, take it,' and we did that.
It's deliciously incongruous how one may pack for the hob life or for the WalMart life. The WalMart life is supported by millions of homes cluttered with items of want and need in a ratio of about 10:1. On the other hand, we have packed streamline to move quickly cross-county like hobo chameleons resembling, as the need arises, the yard workers in freight yards and normal citizens in stopover cities. Our ostensible school daypacks weigh about 30 pounds (sans liquids) and contain little more than earplugs, electronic handhelds including a set of walkie-talkies, credit cards, a hundred dollars in the inseams, flashlight, compass, day's supply of food (beef jerky and trail mix), toothbrush, pen and pad, paperback, 20' length of rope, tarp, and windbreaker. A compressible 40F sleeping bag is toted inside at the top, and the pack is soft to squeeze under fences and into cubby holes, without loose straps to catch on passing machinery. The key to our disguise is a pair of overalls – he has coveralls and I a pair of bib-overalls - that protect our citizen clothes beneath and walk easily into any RR yard.
We set our course on the ocean of rails to the north. I warn, freight riding in the east is far different from the west with more towns swamped on one another, single tracks, more sidings, and fenced yards with higher security, but, after all, we will see industrial America through the back door. Magnificent! Up through the Texas Panhandle, as MoJo calls out the towns from his IPhone Googlemap, 'Amarillo… Oklahoma City… Wichita!' yells MoJo as if it's a tornado. He's enthused. The metaphors of trains are many. Life is a string of beads, and a train of moods, and as we pass through them they color and enlighten if only we can see our goals.
Kansas stretches on like a mat of grass occasionally rolled into lumps and crisscrossed by a gridiron. This is the heartland of America. In east central Kansas the rail becomes single and our train goes 'in the hole' on sidetracks frequently to allow higher priority intermodals to pass from the same or opposite directions. Our rate is suddenly cut in half to an average 30mph for the next 24 hours. Hundreds of single-horn toots blare day and night at clanging crossings. BNSF serves over 1,500 grain elevators located mostly in the Midwest with Kansas among the leaders. Had we chosen a mixed freight through this grainland the chances of being 'ditched' beside one of these towering silos and having to walk the rail for hours to civilization would have risen.
Train whistles are used to communicate with other railroad workers on a train or in the yard, as well as with the savvy townspeople. Different combinations of long and short whistles – like a Morse code - each has its own meaning. They are used to pass instructions, as a safety signal, and to warn of impending movements of a train. Despite the advent of modern radio communication, we endure many of these whistle signals hourly. A succession of short sounds is used when an emergency exists, or if persons or livestock are on the track. It sounded when a Northwest train I was on once braked for a blow-up dinosaur placed in the rail by a tramp who wanted to board from his favorite fishing spot in the Rockies. The most common signal is one short as the train is approaching a public grade crossing. Highball we've identified as two long blasts, and three shorts while the train is stopped means backup – which notifies the hobo to get off or be ditched.
Kansas City!' is the morning call, to which I frown at the ambiguity until he murmurs, 'Kansas'. I stiffen to an exclamation point. KC, KC is a RR nexus that throws spaghetti tracks out N, S, E, and W. A hobo nightmare. I make lighting compilations in about seven theaters of possibilities as the train bowls past the four story bright red 'Kansas City Southern' barn sign and into the BNSF Argentine Yard. We peak under the blinders barely daring to breathe least they flap. This BNSF classification yard is the largest with 780-acres on the on the system. I see an intermodal hub center, a hump with 60 sorting tracks yonder down the rails, a car repair shop, a large diesel shop, several other outbuildings, the main tower with a cyclopean 360-degree glass, and beneath it dozens of scurrying yard workers in and out of vehicles. I'm reminded of the book 70,000 to 1.
MoJo seems daunted. 'I want out.'
'I've allotted one week away from the political swamp for this trip and this is the fifth day. I have to think about returning to Washington DC.' I see his point, but the timing is poor. The highlight of the Argentine yard is it's hemmed like a prison - has been for miles - by a 8' cyclone fence topped with razor wire.
We visually sweep each side of our flatcar and see nothing but rows and miles of hundreds of other strings of cars, buildings, and an army of workers corralled by the cyclone fence. The crew change will be on a dime here, and we choose to hang tight and look for a break in the fence while rolling. But first, there's a light jar toward the rear as half our train is cut loose, leaving us a half-mile long with four snorting engines. A lone white van stenciled Renzenberger pulls aside the lead unit, and the outgoing crew climbs in as the incoming crew exits and mans the locomotive. Operating a fleet of thousands of such vehicles thought the nation, Renzenberger is the recognized leader in providing crew transportation to and from their call motels. Hobos use them also, and I've hitched rides twice right to the waiting locomotives.
Even as I chuckle in reflection, the hoses snake with turgor, brakes click, here comes the drumbeat, and the car bolts forward with our necks jerking like Jack-in-the-boxes. Nonetheless, we survey the fenceline on both sides for breaks to escape. There are some, and the train does pause, twice in the five miles between KC, KC and KC, MO, and yet I won't let the reporter depart. Both sides of the sewn track between the two KC's are seedy industrial and residential wasteland where those colorful rail riding hobos have been replaced by the bag lady, welfare sponges, gang bangers, and stew bums. We cling to the safety of the flatcar knowing the fence prevents them from getting to us. 'That's ok,' MoJo resigns.
Trapped, I've never been on a faster freight. Four locomotives roar with a half-mile load streaking at 70mph up and down roly-poly Missouri. In a bucking wind we pull our sleeping bags up to our chins falling into an uneasy slumber on a hard crazed vibrating bed. Crack! Crash! The freight is suffused in alternating light and darkness. We've driven into a near tornado and the wind blinders flap wildly dumping buckets of water into the sleeping bags. The metal floor drops to 40F, and MoJo vows dryly though chattering teeth, 'This is the test.'
The best strategy is to fold into a G note and meditate on sunrise until passing out. There's always a morning after. It sounds like something from a Woody Guthrie song, but it's true, This land was made for you and me. One comfort of hoboing that takes some getting used to is if you don't know where you're going you can't get lost. But we've come very far. People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, the waves of the sea, at the long rivers, and the compasses of the ocean, under the circular motion of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering who am I that is often discovered on the rails. This is what I hope for MoJo. We've been riveted to the rails for 3000 miles in six straight days from LA via Texas to Chicago, a speed and distance record without a layover for me.
'Chicago!' Situated in a broad valley 17 miles southwest of Chi-town, the Willow Springs Intermodal Yard stretches two miles, yet with about 20 tracks is only one-third of a mile wide. Our flatcar sits smack between two highway bridges that we study around the blinders of the piggyback like Kilroys. Nearby, a 40' truck trailer like ours is being lifted into the air and placed squarely on a nearby railroad flatcar. Another giant crane is removing piggies from a flatcar to a road. The nearly absurd thought arises that an intermodal hobo could remain on board in a hammock lashed under the piggyback and be conveyed up and off the flatcar to the road, a semi hooks on, and he continues to hobo the Interstates sheltered by the wind blinders for as long as one could endure the tire tossed pebbles and dead skunks.
Willow Springs is BNSF's second-busiest intermodal yard, performing about a million lifts a year. Its key customer is United Parcel Service whose mid-west facility located next door handles two million packages daily. Packages bound for UPS distribution facilities less than 400 miles away are trucked. Greater than 400 miles, there's a train ride in that trailer's future… And that's where BNSF comes in. It takes 10 percent of UPS's total domestic ground volume. Like a passenger train, the trailers aren't held until they're full. They depart at assigned pull times scheduled to meet train cutoff times. The packages are read on a conveyor belt three times en route to the proper piggy trailer. It's driven next door to the Intermodal yard, add one hobo if you wish, and it's off to a dozen major destinations.
At Willow Springs, 99 percent of the units handled are trailers rather than containers, and today there are about 3,000 look-alike trailers scattered across the terminal and five loading RR tracks all go where they're supposed to go, followed by computer. It seems the only thing not tracked by computer these days, not counting the GPS in MoJo's IPhone, is the hobo.
Freight riding falls somewhere between chess and war. In chess, there are the same problems and movements but if you lose you pull the pieces out the box and start again. In hoboing, you can get hurt or caught by the big, bad Bull, and it's illegal. But in war, the enemy is trying to shoot you. There are many life lessons from each, and on this trip we have learned much of the recent changes in the rail commerce. The train industry among all has been progressive in America. As a wise man never lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him, each year I go out on the rails to see innovations. If there is a recession underway in USA the railways refute it. In the past five years, there are twice as many trains, four times as many intermodals (containers and truck vans on flatcars), yard workers use quads instead of walking the lines, RR bulls have been replaced by private young security, and, attesting for the hobos, far more and colorful boxcar art reflecting more youthful train riders. One change in technology has brought about the greatest hobo evolution in history since steam yielded to diesel-electric in the 50s. It is the addition of wind blinders to semi-truck vans like the one we rode screened in wonderful privacy from KC to Chicago. These piggybacks have always been a favorite with a wide view and shade under the belly, however no more may security pick off bos rolling through yards. The blinders have made us hotshot hobos.
The reporter has gained a universal education from the rails. Have you ever seen a retired man who pined for his desk? MoJo would rather ride the trains to Washington DC, but there's no time. We hunker under the piggyback and don our 'goin' to town' clothes for the first time in nearly a week. For me, it's a blue pinstripe shirt under bib overalls and for him a clean black windbreaker. It always seems impossible until it's done. We hop down - take a minute to relocate our landlubber legs – and shy to the east side of the yard onto a dirt track that meanders as pleasantly as an old English lane through a woods bordering the Des Plaines River to the Willow Springs Bridge. We look like train tramps to train tramps, like yard workers to yard workers, and soon will blend in with regular citizens. A brakeman bathed in sunshine waves like a windmill thinking we are exiting crew, and we greet back. Once down the bridge embankment we walk two blocks north along Willow Springs Road to a Speedway station with a Subway shop. After a meal, a taxi whisks us for twenty minutes to Chicago Midway Airport where he jets to DC and I encounter former President Carter exiting the Miami bound plane I'm about to board. The Secret Service and FBI hardly take note of this hobo or could guess how I got here in the last six days.
I've been to some strange places on earth but when I landed in the LA county jail for jaywalking I thought this is the end. First, two hundred of us were jammed into a large room with one open toilet where the feces literally overflowed onto the floor. I sat on the floor near there so people wouldn't bother me. A guy went into convulsions nearby and they just let him twitch for 20 minutes before unlocking the door and bringing in a stretcher. Then we were herded in groups into a smaller room where they gassed us through the ventilation with chloroform as they threw our cage assignments onto the floor. For the next three days we were shuttled from cage to cage every three hours not knowing if it was day or night in the underground 2000 person facility. There was a baloney sandwich every 8 hours when they made us sit crotch to crotch but on a long bench to eat. The guards warned us that if any of us acted up the others should jump him. My last cell was the size of a small bedroom where I was the only white but we all stood because there was no room to do anything else as a loudspeaker crackled our court times.
I hadn't jaywalked and stopped traffic on the 2 am streets as the ticket said, so I planned a defense. Next I was daisy chained with a line of other inmates and marched through a dark tunnel and suddenly into a huge bright courtroom. The judge looked like Groucho Marx. "Well, gentlemen, I have good and bad news," he intoned. "the bad news is the jail is overcrowded; the good is that you are all going to be released with 'time served' if everyone pleads guilty." I looked around and knew these guys would shiv (stab, knife) me if I said otherwise, and we all answered guilty. Hours later they examined the Mickey Mouse tattoo on my left shoulder to make sure it was me, and I was released onto the streets of LA on July 4th.
Tim Melvin writes:
In the misspent days of yore I was a traveling door to door book salesman for several years. One of the drawbacks of this profession was being subject to arrest in various cities and towns that had some sort of ordinance against door to door sales. As a result I got to experience many of our nation's jails and lockups for a brief period of time. LA County is second only to Albuquerque for filthy and horrid conditions. For those keeping score Boulder Colorado was the best. I was there for a weekend and took a macrame class and caught up on my reading.
I was fascinated by this amazing video showing the extreme intelligence of Honey Badgers. The video shows the badger, Stoffell, outwitting his "owner" and escaping from his enclosures in about 10 different ingenious way.
The Hobo comments:
I had no idea honey badgers beat up on cobras. I've seen one badger near where I live and another while hiking in Mexico and they just lumber along like a champion wrestlers as if they own the world. I met Jane Goodall one year at the Bitish Embassy in Nairobi where she hooted at me like a monkey. But badgers are probably more interesting to everyone.
I found this and thought of the Hobo.
Churchill on Chaplin:
Even poverty wore a different face in America. It was not the bitter, grinding destitution Charlie had encountered in the London slums and which has now, thanks to the extension of social services, largely disappeared. In many cases it was a poverty deliberately chosen, rather than imposed from without.
Every cinema goer is familiar with the Chaplin tramps, but I wonder how many of them have reflected how characteristically American are these homeless wanderers. In the dwindling ranks of the English tramps one finds all sorts of people - from the varsity graduate whose career has ended in ruin and disgrace, to he half imbecile illiterate who has been unemployable since boyhood. But they all have one thing in common - they belong to the great army of the defeated. They still maintain the pretence of looking for work - but they do not expect to find it. They are spiritless and hopeless.
The American hobo of twenty-five years ago was of an entirely different type. Often he was not so much an outcast from society as a rebel against it. He could not settle down, either in a home or a job. He hated the routine of regular employment and loved the changes and chances of the road. Behind his wanderings was something of the old adventurous urge that sent the covered wagons lumbering across the prairie towards the sunset.
There were also upon the highways of America, in the old days of prosperity, many men who were not tramps at all in the ordinary sense of the term. They were traveling craftsmen, who would work in one place for a few weeks or months, and then move on to look for another job elsewhere. Even today, when work is no longer easy to secure, the American wanderer still refuses to acknowledge defeat.
That indomitable spirit is part of the make-up of the screen Charlie Chaplin. His portrayal of the underdog is definitely American rather than British. The English workingman has courage in plenty, but those whom prolonged unemployment has forced on the road are nowadays usually broken and despairing. The Chaplin tramp has a quality of defiance and disdain.
The hobo responds:
There is a better ground than choosing poverty or riches for us. That is the Prince & the Pauper condition that's available to nearly anyone reading this. Skid row is a vast experimental laboratory and nowhere else have I discovered & set limits than in those rows across America. An American hobo is defined as a worker who wanders from job to job. The USA allows this with grand territory and a thick network of railroads to enter it. England is cramped; USA is wide open. So it is that the hobos who today in spring are hitting the flatcars and boxcars by the thousands are rebels against tight living and a diurnal job. Almost all are forced by hunger to climb aboard Dirty Face but some of us do it for the adventure, and for self-discovery.
Charlie Chaplin, though British, is convincing as an spirited American tramp because he grew up in the poor district laboratory that I pass through by choice. Charlie's childhood in London was hemmed by poverty and hardship. His father absent and mother struggling financially, he was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine. It puts me in mind of my friend George Meegan who climbed a ship's mast on River Thames at a similar age, saw the horizon, and sailed at it for seven years on tramp steamers at sea. Then he jumped down and found his land legs in walking from Tierra del Fuego to the arctic circle via NYC. You cannot hide the backdrop of such talent on screen or in print. When Chaplin was 14 his mother was committed to a mental asylum. I've worked those also as another laboratory of experience, and old folks homes, jails, and even sold Nut Cracker Sweets on 57th street of Manhattan outside Niederhoffer, Cross & Co. after working a day upstairs as a technical analyst. To point, Chaplin toured as a tramp comedian before attracting notice and coming to America to become the premiere tramp. In his floppy footsteps followed Weary (Emmett Kelly) Willie and Happy (Red Skelton) Hobo. Emmet was literally born into a circus while Red beginning at age 10 was part of a traveling medicine show.
They had the spirit, all right, from experience & passed it on to their audiences. For the real deal on the skid rows read anything by Nels Anderson.
And so that brings me to today's choice after paying the IRS. I can use the leftovers to go on an African safari or a walk in Baja, Mexico. Life is a series of T-mazes, if one takes it seriously, and I think I'll take a walk.
anonymous asks the hobo:
Have you spent any time on Skid Row in Los Angeles?
The hobo responds:
LA was my first skid row. I checked into the Midnight mission and sat in a pew next to a black man with 6's tattooed across his knuckles as we listened to an ass-whopping sermon. That's where I 'fell in love' with mission preaching. Then we ate a hearty meal of meat loaf, potatoes & gravy. Then we lined up for bug check. What's that? I didn't know but everyone had to do it before getting a bed. The housekeep must have spotted me as a virgin tramp for I was called first to wind down the stairs into the bowel of the mission where a man I couldn't see waited with a blue light. He told me to drop my drawers and proceeded to shine the light to fluoresce pubic lice. 'Clean! Next!' he yelled. That night i was grateful for being dead tired from catching a freight into town the previous ones. The dorm room of fifty soon filled with snores & flatulence while gunshots outside on skid row shook the broken windows. The next day I caught a freight to the next skid road. That's a hellofa education.
Virtually every Appalachian Trail hiker ditches stuff in the first two weeks of walking. At the end of the first month he's learned to tell ounces difference in his backpack, and has trimmed the pack itself as much as possible. His guidebook is whittled, he has thrown away his water filter, jackets, extra clothes, and arrives at all I ever take on a distance hike: 6-8 lbs including the guidebook (pages torn out), one extra pair of sox, matches, a 1.5 lb sleeping bag, 1 pound biv sack, quart water bottle, GPS, compass, and the clothes and hat on the body.
By the time they reached me on the APT in Vermont that's about what their packs contained. There's about a 90% attrition rate from the start at Springer Mt, Geo to the finish at the Canadian border. I just did the length of Vermont & Maine to the Canadian border & nearly got run over in the fog in the road a few minutes from the border. I was shivering so hard in the October cold that wouldn't have felt it, but carried on past the road for a few minutes to a signed border post, turned around, walked another few hours on frozen feet and in the middle of the night found some locals outside a town burning pallets & fell asleep by the fire.
One would think that one would intuitively evolve to ultralight backpacking everywhere by everyone but the opposite was true. Until the early 90s, I found on trails that every one of hundreds I encountered used the method of carry as much as you can to connect the short supply/water points. These were generally 15 miles away, and 8 miles apart in the mountains where the packs for both weighed 40-60 lbs. They looked as tall as basketball nets.
People on the Pacific Crest & Appalachian trails ridiculed me in the early 90s for carrying no more than a fanny pack or day pack for long distances of months to walk faster and further to connect to more distant supply/water points. I was ostracized from groups while hiking & denied access to the shelters because no one believed I was a thorough hiker using a base weight 10 lbs. pack plus little water and food. I was walking as if on clouds 25-30 miles a day.
Then something happened in about '95. I started seeing hikers with lighter packs and read in a hiking journal about the new 'ultralight' concept of hiking. Now I was ostracized again for carrying a pack too heavy. The technique has evolved, and is, to carry an extremely light pack of 6-8 lbs. and to walk upward of 40 miles a day. Hiking is big business these days around USA and I'm waiting for them to expand across the border into Mexico and South America where I've become an 'ex-pat hiker' and pioneered trails including a continuation of the Pacific Crest from the border for 1300 miles through Baja to Cabo san Lucas.
I've been more than pleased with my new Kindle Fire HDx for books, documentaries and in general. It's nearly everything a traveler could want.
I bought 3 collapsible keyboards to test each and two are v. good. They're the size of a tiny paperback book but unfold to nearly full size keyboard and are remote. Easy fast typing. The two are about $30 Verbatum and Basic Bluetooth. The kindle itself is as fast as most computers for net and email, much faster than latin computers.
Also I bought a couple $20 solar chargers that are half the size of a cigarette box each, and a cigarette lighter charger. The whole system weights about 2 lb. and fits in a pocket. It can theoretically go hiking and if lost write memoirs. The documents are automatically stored on the internet 'cloud' at the first wireless contact as the corpse is lowered into the ground.
It also reads stories to me, and transcribes speech pretty well into a document. There are dozens of perks including the best, nearly instant live support by email, phone or chat that I've encountered since Home Depot. I get free shipping at amazon for weeks that has saved a hundred bucks on books & stuff in the past month. I've begun watching free full length movies & documentaries at night on either the kindle or computer. The kindle has been like falling into a heaven except they don't include a user's manual with the original device. U have to think enuf to go online for a free one just to learn how to turn it on.
Hi Bo, I have a friend doing some development around the downtown train tracks who would like to know the origin of the phrase "riding the rods." Can you enlighten him? Where are you these days? Coming to Memphis any time?
Bo Keely answers:
Riding the rods comes from the name given the Brake Rods which the hobos used to ride underneath the freight cars. a board called a 'ticket' was propped spanning two brake rods that each is like 1'' rebar running the length of the undercarriage. Train tramps rode their little Ticket to avoid detection by the RR bull. That was when steam trains were in vogue prior to late 50s & went more slowly. nonetheless it was a chancy ride because you had to stay awake or roll off between the wheels. I've ridden a ladder on the side of a freight for hours, caught there & tied myself on in case I lost my grip or napped, however I've never heard of modern hobos riding the rods because there are other safer places. Also, I've observed that the old brake rods hung lower beneath the belly of the pre-50s cars to allow more room to lie or sit on the board. A particularly nasty bull would stand on top a moving freight car he thought a hobo was riding the rods beneath the carriage of and drag a chain on the ground between the rails flipping up ballast rocks in the tramp's face. U might see examples of riding the rods in the classic Emperor of the North, Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory speaks of riding the rods.
I'm in Miami after a trip out west.
February 10, 2014 | Leave a Comment
I just published a new book on amazon. Feel free to buy and review.
George Meegan: The Longest Walk Companion by Steve "bo" Keeley
From the description on the site:
'Thirty years after The Longest Walk, a companion has come out! And where else to meet the intrepid biographer, Bo Keeley, than in the Peru, beside the Amazon, in outrageous Iquitos.' – So begins the most celebrated world walker of all time, George Meegan, in the Introduction to the Companion book to his famous The Longest Walk.
The Longest Walk Companion is as much autobiographical as biographical. It holds new tales, lists, sources, and pictures captioned by George. George Meegan holds eight Guinness World records for his walk of the entire Western Hemisphere from the southern tip of South America to the northernmost part of Alaska at Prudhoe Bay. The journey was of 19,019 miles from 1977-1983, and is documented in his book The Longest Walk. This Longest Walk Companion by George and Steve Keeley contains all new material.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- What kind of man leaves hearth and kin
· The Walk Itself - Highlights from the walk itself with photos
· Democracy Reaches the Kids - Original notes from the authors lifelong passion
· Letters and Papers - Dozens sent around the world on his favorite topics
· Articles & Coverage, Sources & Lists - Hundreds on Meegan courtesy of the computer age
· Records and Accolades - three pages of honors
· New Photos - Most never published and captioned by Meegan
· The only authorized biography of George Meegan - by adventurer and author Steve Keeley
GEORGE MEEGAN APPEARANCES:
· Larry King Live
· Today Show
· CBS Morning News
· Good Morning America
· 11 PM Show
· Stud's Terkal Radio
· The Joe Franklin Show
· Phil Donahue
· Hugh Downs
Victor writes to Bo:
What is your relation with the book The Longest Walk. It's very good. And the author has a nice character and adventurous spirit that reminds one of you.
See George Meegan's wikipedia. I wrote it.
George comes to NYC often and you and especially Aubrey would benefit from meeting him. However, he would need a place to stay for a couple days while visiting. His primary interest is children's education and has written Democracy Reaches the Kids that I may also self publish for him.
George and I met in Iquitos on the amazon river via a mutual friend as an introduction of 'walkers'. You're right, we're a bit like each other except he has a seafaring gait from like Ken Smith from 7 years at sea. He would be a strong speaker at Junta, and has spoken at the NYC Explorer's Club, Studs Terkle, Larry King Live, etc. and they all asked him back twice.
When I read his book & learned that it was out of print & that he wasn't making a penny on it, and that he had the copyright, we huddled & inserted some new front material, appendices, & pics. I just published a second book by him that went amazon.com yesterday The Longest Walk Companion authored by me.
After The Longest Walk trek and book, George faded from the American spotlight. He travels exactly as I do, on a shoestring, but pauses in one spot to live longer. He's been more or less on the road for an age. Read his wikipedia link above, and I'll send a note of introduction.
February 7, 2014 | 1 Comment
I hate satellite phones. For one thing, I like to be alone, for two, unreachable, and for three, untraceable. It isnt possible with a satellite phone or family. Explanation: two years ago I told my family that I was going to mexico and would return in a couple months. Two months later, I didn't get to a computer before returning directly to my desert digs. A month after, when I did finally get to a computer, I discovered I was 'dead'.
I also never knew I had so many friends. There were a dozen facebook posts, two dozen emails, a memorial was in the making, and a syndicated columnist wrote on 'the legend passing'. I notified everyone that 'the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated' - Mark Twain. What happened?
My brother had called in a missing person report, my sister-in-law had posted 'where is Keeley' on facebook, and someone had contacted the American Embassy in Mexico to send out a search party. The day after learning of my demise, I went across into Mexico again for a prescription and when I tried to return the US immigration declared I was not whom my passport purported I was. I was missing or dead. Nonetheless, they strip searched and detained me at the mexicali border, and then sent me to the sheriff's office to identify myself. Then i carried on with life.
no satellite phone for me,
A friend of Keely's writes:
Not sure if you'll like this, but check out this Camp Tramps, Loners and Hermits site about primitive wilderness skills. There's a series of articles about becoming a 'feral woodsman'. The writer includes stories of his encounters with interesting folks living in the bush. It's somewhat like rancho costa nada describing characters living in alternative ways like you or hippie jim or other sand valley residents. I like the pahrump guy in the trailer. if kingman doesn't work out (asthma) I will investigate pahrump. It reminded me of this Detroit guy off the grid in a trailer (you've prob seen it before).
Bo Keely writes:
'Camp tramps' is a fine term. It describes the people of Sand Valley except they paid $50 a month rent (toward purchase) to keep the authorities off their necks. There's nothing quite like having a plot of land that as long as you don't do anything 'wrong' you can order anyone off. It's like ownership of mind. The Sand Valley camp tramps like JR, the Tuks & I have shifted properties multiple times to find the 'right place'. The definition of a good neighbor in Sand Valley is one who never visits until there's an emergency.
I've found I've become a drifter. Why wait for the world to come to you when you can go get the world.
The next link about the Detroit guy in his trailer retreat reminds me that hobos were the vanguard of this fleedom to a little camp in a quiet place, usually on a river. They tow in a trailer, or built a shanty, and lived contentedly. Often it was by a RR track so that when they got bored they could get away.
Loners are certainly the most interesting. They have become 'themselves', completely inner directed. A loner never finds you; you stumble on a loner in any part of the world. The last one I remember was a gent on Trinidad in a jungle concealed hut who slept under a 1' wasps nest. I think he talked to me because I kept only one eye on the nest and the other on him.
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