Chillin at the Rancho Part 5 - The Final Chapter

So I am laying in bed today at about 3 P.M. taking what has become my daily siesta, when I hear what I thought was my fan going from low to high. Now power fluctuations are a common occurrence down here so I didn’t think much about it.

Then the sound gets louder and I think it must be a big truck outside passing by. The noise continues to get louder and louder so I decide to turn off my fan a little worried. No it’s not the fan about to explode.

Now it sounds like a Mack truck is about to drive right through my house. So I decide I better get up and investigate. So I go outside and it turns out it is pouring down rain. Nice! It seems like the last few times I have come to Nicaragua it has always been during the dry season. I think I need to reconsider that in the future. It is so beautiful and peaceful during the rainy season!

So I have to admit, I am seriously jonesing for an In and Out burger! And yes… I do want onions on that! Are you going to be eating this in your car? Uhhhh yeah…. In fact don’t even bother putting that stupid little wrapper on it because this burger ain’t even making it out of the parking lot!

So I will be heading back to the States in a few days. My trip down memory lane will be coming to a close…

After I finished the Peace Corps Mari and I were married in my backyard at my house in Nicaragua. We were married under giant palm fronds made into an arch. We were surrounded by Mango and avocado trees. Her father donated a pig and we had a rip roaring bbq and fiesta.




Soon all my fellow Peace Corps friends were off on their own adventures. Mitch and Jason traveled down to Peru and Machu Pichu. Others went to Costa Rica and other countries. Eventually we all made it back to the States.

Mari and I decided to travel back to San Diego by land. This would be one of several land trips we would make back and forth between San Diego and Nicaragua by land. When we finally arrived in San Diego we struggled. It took me a few months to get a job and we were really hitting the bottom of the barrel.

I mean we are talking counting our change to make ends meet. I would put on the monkey suit each day and go out hitting the pavement. Mari was begging me to work but I told her to just learn English. I am the provider, Grrrr, grrrr.

Finally I got my little corporate job. I would put on my monkey suit each day and I would head to my office Monday through Friday. Awesome, I’m the rat in the cage again. Come on man, really? This really can’t be happening again….

Hey I was making good money and we were able to move into a nice new apartment. We started buying shit! I mean hey this is what it’s all about right? Ummmm not so much! After about a year I was ready to slit my freakin wrists. I told Mari we needed to do something drastic or I was going to go off the rails on Ozzy’s Crazy Train.




So we decided we would save up and move back to Nicaragua. Nice! I had a plan! We started saving every penny we could. We scrimped and saved. No eating out. No buying clothes or any frivolous shit. We were leading a pauper’s life. We moved back in with my mom to save.

In the mean time I was having some serious issues with my job. We were a finance company. We would loan money to people to purchase houses, land and mobile homes. My job was to analyze the loans and see whether they were good risks.

Well I started telling my bosses no, this guy is a high risk… I mean shit he works at Taco Bell and you want to give him 150K. No way. We had sales guys that worked out in the field at Mobile Home Parks whose sole job was to have the people looking to buy the new mobile homes and the land to fund it through our company. They got a commission on the dollar amount funded. In fact everybody was operating on a commission structure on how much we funded. Well these sales agents would get pissed when you rejected a loan and they would ask to speak to a V.P.

Soon the V.P would come out of his office and say go ahead and fund the loan. What… did you hear what I said dude? Taco Bell! Well you sign off on that one big guy… not me.




Towards the end of each month there was a mad dash to meet our quota of funding x amount of loans… so basically anybody with a pulse that applied for a loan was getting approved. I knew this was a whole house of cards and I just wanted to get my money and get out!

So at the end of a year I had managed to save a whopping $14,000. This was my nest egg that I was going to use to live in Nicaragua for the rest of our lives. Now I had planned on starting a business when I reached Nicaragua so I was planning on supplementing my giant nest egg.

So I had previously purchased a burly ass 6.9 liter F250 Ford truck. Used of course! I then bought a cab over camper with a stove, bathroom, bed and a hot water shower. Oh yeah baby. We also bought a small box style trailer to haul the majority of our worldly possessions.

So I quit my job finished loading up and away we went. Goodbye U.S. Hello distant adventures! Our plan was to go down Baja and then ferry over to the mainland and camp out and surf and fish for a couple months! Yes… now I am really going to be living! Did I mention we had a yard sale before we left and I sold every last suit and tie I owned in the world? Yes baby here we go!

I later learned that my division of the company I worked at closed down about 6 months after I left. Several years later when the U.S. economy tanked there was my former company on the front page. They were the first major bank to close up shop.



Have you ever heard of a little company called Indy Mac? Well that was my company. I read recently how they are starting to round up several of the big wigs and charging them with a whole litany of crimes.

Ok comes on boys and girls… repeat after me… you know it’s coming… K-A-R-M-A.

So we get to the border of Mexico on the Sea of Cortez side and start to head into untold adventures when the I am motioned to pull over. They then begin to tell me that I can’t enter this border because I am a “transportista”. A transporter.

What? No, dude I am an American about ready to live out every person’s fantasy. What the fuck are you talking about?




Sorry they tell me but you need to go to the next border crossing east of here. But, dude, I want to go down Baja… I got my surfboards and my fishing pole. I’m ready to rock and roll.

“O.K. well what is all that shit in your trailer then he says?”

Well those are all my worldly possessions… in fact that is all the crap I could find at various swap meets and junk I had laying around in my garage. I also have about a 1,000 pounds of books that my wife told me I was an idiot to bring!

“Yeah Gringo… you are a transportista. Adios.”

O.K. no problem… just a minor hiccup in my major adventure. I will just go down the mainland of Mexico and hit all the beaches on the Pacific Coast. Time to pull out the map.




So we make it over to some border town in Arizona. We are once again about to drop into Mexico, when I am motioned to the side, AGAIN. Once again I am told I am a “transportista”. Once again I am told that I must go farther east to the next border crossing.

O.K. what the hell is this whole “transportista” thing? So I would continue to drive east and drop down to one border crossing after another and I would be told to keep going east.

Eventually we ended up in the most eastern part of Texas and there we saw semi after semi in long lines trying to enter Mexico. OK now I understand what they mean by transporter. So we get to the border and they tell us that yes indeed this is the border crossing but that I need to find an agent who needs to fill out a bunch of paper work in order to enter Mexico.




WTF? Shit I have been driving into Mexico since I had a license to drive at 16 and I don’t remember any of this shit. So we find an agent and he tells us it’s going to be $500 to process the paperwork. What? Are you kidding me? Come on bro I got 14K to last me the rest of my life and you want $500 to fill out some forms? Alright… $300 he says. AHHHH…. O.K. Make it $200 any you have a deal, I tell him. He says $250 and away we go. Man… we are still in the U.S. too!

“OK. What exactly do you have in your trailer” he asks me.

Oh man it’s really just a bunch of crap. I’ve got boxes of nails, screws, old crappy yard sale tools, and 1,000 pounds of books. “Well you have to list everything you have… each box” He says.

Now I had loaded up like 100 boxes of just random crap… junk. So now here I am in some sweaty Texas border town pulling out box upon box of random valueless crap. We opened each box and labeled what was in it. As we opened up each box even I was appalled at the amount of worthless crap I had brought. So we get it all packed back up and the guy comes back with a folder full of paperwork and then he slaps a giant label across my windshield that says TRANSPORTISTA.




I would later learn that this sign was like a giant blinking neon sign for every cop in every town in Mexico to pull me over and harass me and try to bribe me for money!

We crossed into Mexico and didn’t make it more than an hour into Mexico when we were pulled over. Papeles? Papers? Pasaporte? They would keep me for the longest time looking for any random thing to get a bribe. In the end they would say “Deme algo para las aguas”. Give me something to buy water. In other words give them some money or you are going to be here for awhile. I paid!

This would become such an occurring theme throughout Mexico that we finally gave up on our big adventurous surf and fish trip along the Pacific Coast of Mexico. We decided to make a beeline for Nicaragua. We were traveling the same route as all the rest of the Semi’s that worked their way down through Mexico and Central America.


Gas anyone?



These guys are some of the most hard core drivers in the world. They drive these big rigs in the most crazy hairball roads; skinny, narrow, potholed roads dealing with rain, fog, cops, etc…. I learned to respect these guys and they definitely helped me out a couple times when my truck acted up. They are all mechanics. American truck drivers would only last about 2 days driving these roads before they had a nervous breakdown!

I soon got into the mindset that I would just drive my ass off and we would get to Nicaragua as fast as humanly possible. I would begin my big adventure in Nicaragua instead! No problem… I can roll with the punches.




For the most part I got away with the occasional $1 or $2 bribe with the local cops and sheriffs. The Mexican military was a different story and when an 18 year old kid with an AK47 started yelling at me one night I was more than content to thrown him a $10 bill. Soon I would learn that whenever you saw small tin cans on either the side of the road with flames coming out of them… a military checkpoint was coming up. If at all possible it was time to pull over and sleep for the night!

One time some cop pulls me over and checks everything out and finally tells me that the lights on my trailer are too narrow. Too what? Are you kidding me? I lost it. Now if this whole rig is legal in the U.S. It sure as hell is legal in this shit-hole country. I mean you got guys driving in the middle of the night with no freaking headlights or tail lights and you are trying to give me a ticket!

Apparently that did not go over well with him… but a crisp 5 dollar bill did… and away we went again.

I would end up driving from about 5 a.m. to 10 P.M. for the next week. As we approached the border of Guatemala it started raining and raining and raining. It was coming down in buckets. We are talking torrential downpour. It rained so hard you could barely see more than 5-10 feet ahead of you as you drove. I soon began driving with my face almost completely plastered to the windshield! You could only drive 20-30 miles per hour.




Finally we reached the border of Guatemala and Mexico. They told us that the border was closed and that there was some major storm hitting Central America but especially Nicaragua. What? Now when I lived in Nicaragua, every time there was mention of some giant storm, it always turned out to be some storm in the Caribbean and when it hit the coast of Nicaragua it would turn into a tropical storm and dump lots of rain but nothing major… just perhaps a minor flood through a home that was located to close to a river..

So I tell the guy at the border that I am a diplomat and that I have to be in Nicaragua within 3 days. We go through some back and forth and eventually he pulls me to the side and tells me that if I come back early in the morning that he can get me through. So I do… and I end up giving the guy like $100 bucks or so and he hurries me to some guy who stamps my passport and then another guy gives me a customs clearance and away we go. Welcome to Guatemala.

Well I mange to take the wrong road and the next thing you know I am driving down a one way road in this little town. Shit. Remember I got my trailer and you can’t just turn around. The next thing you know I have half the town surrounding my truck jumping in the window… telling me to let them help me. So I get out of the truck unhook the trailer… mange to do like a 10 point turn and then I notice ½ the town is wheeling my trailer around. I thought that at any moment they were just going to wheel into somebody’s home. Wishful thinking.

I finally mange to get it hooked back up and now everybody is surrounding me asking me for money.

I tell them I have it in the truck and they let me get in and I manage to get the windows up as fast as I could. I threw out the last bit of Peso’s I had left from Mexico and I drove out of there fast with the town hot on my trail!

At one point I found myself driving up some crazy mountain in Guatemala. I had tried to make a short cut on my trip. My map showed me the quickest route from A to B but failed to point out that I would have to drive over the largest mountain in Guatemala.

So I am driving at night, it is raining and then the fog rolls in. I’m talking fog so thick you cannot see anything type fog. I could literally see about a foot in front of the hood of my truck. I was driving like 5 miles per hour scared out of my mind. All of a sudden a big rig blows his horns and comes barreling around the side of my truck….when he came around alongside me his powerful lights lit up the side of the road. I could see that the side of the road dropped straight down. A giant drop thousands of feet down and there was absolutely zero guard rails.

Apparently these truckers have some super human eye sight because one after another of these semi’s kept blowing by me. I kept driving along at 5 MPH. I would have gone even slower if it was possible. I finally made it up and down. My hands would barely open after the death grip I had on my steering wheel going over that godforsaken mountain.

It took most of the day to get through Guatemala and when we did get to the border of El Salvador they told us once again that the border is closed and that there is a huge storm pounding Nicaragua. Well I know this story and once again I go into bribe mode. This time they were not taking bribes and they said I needed to empty my trailer. So there I was for the next 2 hours emptying out a trailer full of crap. Did I mention the 1,000 pounds of books?

Eventually after opening about the 80th box of books and junk they seemed to realize that I had absolutely nothing of value to take from me. They told me to load my shit up and to go talk to their boss who just showed up. After some careful negotiations and another $50 bribe they stamped my passport and told me to move on. Welcome to El Salvador!

El Salvador is when we started noticing the roads were really messed up. I was sued to potholes and crappy roads but now we were seeing crater size holes in the freeway, giant boulders on the highway, detours around blown out bridges, etc… At times we would drive through muddy dirt roads and my camper would be rocking so hard from side to side that I thought it would fall off.

This is also about the time that my little trailer started having major issues. First the wheel wells caved in and started rubbing on the tires. What’s that burning rubber smell? Oh shit it’s the trailer. Then the tires blew out. Then the axel needed more support. I started spending a considerable amount of my time laying underneath that freaking trailer. Most times I had the pleasure of laying in a puddle of mud in the pouring down rain. Good times.


Whenyou have a flat... you better hope you see this:



We would get a support bracket welded in one town and barely make it to the next when we needed to get a new weld or tire or some other problem. The trailer had no suspension and tiny tires. Oh did I mention the 1,000 pounds of books my wife told me to leave behind?

We would eventually move almost all the boxes into our camper which left it basically unusable, and we basically dragged the camper the rest of the way.

When we reached the border of Honduras they told us absolutely not. You cannot pass! By now we had found out the storm was actually a Hurricane and it had a name. Hurricane Mitch was pummeling Nicaragua and Honduras and all the borders were closed.

Hey I am a diplomat and I need to be in Nicaragua in 2 days. That and a crisp $100 bill got me into Honduras. Hello Honduras. So we drive farther and farther into Honduras and we are so happy because we only need to cross one more border and we are in Nicaragua!

We finally come to a bridge that is just basically gone… disappeared. Now this is the bridge that leads to Nicaragua… gone. OK well we can head over to the capitol of Honduras and go over the border on that side. Uhhh No. It turns out that the bridge going to the capitol of Honduras, Tegucigalpa is gone too!

Ok by this time I am starting to rethink this whole new adventurous lifestyle I signed up for. Actually I was inventing new swear words that were a combination of English and Spanish. So Mari and I wander around the town and we finally see a lady in her doorway that has a very large yard. We tell her our calamity and ask if we could pay her to store out truck camper and trailer in her yard. She says yes and to not worry about paying her. We later found out that parts of her town had been buried in up to 10 feet of mud and several thousand people had lost their lives.

So we park the truck and Mari and I start hiking to Nicaragua. We basically would climb down a ladder to a river… cross the river in a boat that some guy had, then we would climb back up some makeshift ladder. Then we would move onto a portion of the Pan American Freeway and hitch or rent a ride for about a kilometer or two until the road literally came to an end due to the fact that a river had washed it away. We would then hike through mud until we came to the next section of freeway.

This is the way we worked our way through Honduras. We would sleep at random people’s homes and enterprising people would sell food along the route. This just shows you how resilient these people are. They made due with the situation.

When we finally got to the border of Nicaragua there was nobody there. We just walked across the border and continued our hike through Nicaragua. We eventually made it to Mari’s parents’ house in Pueblo Nuevo.



There would be no electricity or running water for the next 2 months. We made do. We got water from wells and we listened to the radio with batteries.

Eventually the electricity was restored, water came back. After 2 months they had made enough detours to allow traffic to once again flow through Central America. We decided to return to Honduras for our truck and belongings.

So when we get to the border of Nicaragua and Honduras what does the Immigration asshole tell me? Hey you don’t have a stamp that allowed you to enter into Nicaragua and you need to pay a fine. Umm excuse me buddy…. There was nobody manning the border when I got here. Don’t you remember there was a little thing called Hurricane Mitch that just wiped out a giant portion of your country?

Well you still need to pay the fine he says. O.K. enough is enough. Listen up fucker, I happen to be an American Diplomat working in Nicaragua! Am I going to have to call the embassy and then have the embassy call your boss?

Welcome back to Honduras…

The lady who stored all our crap was so nice that we tried to give her some money. She wouldn’t take a dime. When we finally arrived back to the border of Nicaragua we were told that we would have to go back to Managua and process all the paperwork. WTF? Apparently the giant TRANSPORTISTA sticker printed on our windshield gave us away. So some random border guy hops in our truck and away we go.

I managed to convince the guy to let us stop at our house for the night and to let us unload all our crap including my…. Yes here it comes… my 1,000 pounds of books!

The following morning we drove down to Managua and we were forced to leave our truck in storage in order to process all the paperwork. They would eventually want $1200 in import fees for the truck and another $500 to import the trailer.

At one point I got so fed up with all the run around that I demanded to speak to the head guy in charge of the importation department. So they lead me into some room and there is the biggest asshole I ever met. He pours himself a big fat rum and coke and asks me what the hell I want. That conversation did not go well and I was lucky they didn’t raise the fees on me. I would eventually pay the $1200 for the truck and another couple hundred for storage fees and I finally drove out of there with my F250 and my camper. I made sure to spit on that bastard trailer that gave me so much grief as I drove by it.

Mari’s parents owned a strip of land on one of the roads leading out of town. The land slopes down along the road and then behind the property is a hill leading to a small river which turns into a pretty big river after heavy rains. Her parent’s home was on one side of this strip of land.

We were living in this adobe style home with her family at the time. The roof was made out of Spanish tiles and when it rained you would get a nice mist flowing on you. We also had a stinky outhouse. I would bring matches each time I went to try to mask the smell. It didn’t help. I definitely needed to make a change.

Each day I would walk past the top portion of their property that was full of weeds and bushes and I kept thinking that I might be able to build a house there. I finally asked Mari about it and I’m not sure what her response was but everybody else told me that the property was too skinny and too sloped to build a house. But each day I passed that slope I just kept wondering.

One day I grabbed a machete and went up to that slope of land and just started whacking down brush. I worked my ass off all day and barely made any progress. I didn’t even know how to use a machete. I remember people from the neighborhood staring at me as they passed by. I could just imagine what they were thinking… that crazy Gringo!

The next day I grabbed my machete and went out to work. Not long after, a couple of young neighbor kids come over with their own machetes and start helping out. Then a few more show up and then a few more. The next thing you know I have almost all the neighborhood kids whacking down shrubs and bushes. It only took about 2 days and we cleared that lot. I paid the kids with popsicles and they were thrilled.

After clearing the lot I saw that it was indeed on a pretty big slope but I knew it was doable. I hired some local neighborhood men to start leveling out the land. Soon my father in law got on board with the project and away we went.

I started going down to the river each day with my F250 picking out large river boulders that we would mix with cement for the foundation. We would also fill up the truck with sand. One day as some kids and I were scattered about the river picking up boulders, I see a sand colored Humvee drive by me. What?
Then I see another, and then another. Then desert colored semi’s and bulldozers began blowing by me. What the? I look on the side of one of the Humvees and see USMC.

Now remember I am in the middle of nowhere. First of all I am in Nicaragua. Second I am way up in the mountains of Nicaragua. Third I am in a small town in a very remote region of Nicaragua. Needless to say I was a little confused to see the United States Marine Corps and a parade of vehicles cruising down my road. UUUU RAH! I started yelling to the kids helping me, hey that’s my country!

The marines start parking around the river and I decided to go over to one of the parked Humvees and ask the guy inside what’s going on. I mean what the fuck… are we at war with Nicaragua and somebody forgot to tell me?

So I go up to some 18 year old looking kid and say, “Hey, what’s going on?”

Well the kid driving the Humvee looked as though he was about to have a heart attack. Apparently he was just as surprised to see me as I am to see him. He says to me, “Are you American?” I say, “yes.”

“Oh man… what are you doing here in the middle of nowhere?” he asks. “Dude, I live right up the street, I tell him.”

“Holy shit” he says. He would go onto tell me that they were down helping out the country because of all the destruction Hurricane Mitch had left in its wake. I looked around at all the other Marines and my first thought was how young they looked. They were kids!

The next thing you know I am surrounded by 18 year old Marines asking me a thousand questions about me and Nicaragua. The guys ended up giving me wire and all kinds of supplies. I asked them to come hang out with me at my house but they told me that they had gotten into a fight at a local bar and now they were all on lockdown staying at the local military base.




So for the next few weeks I got to see the USMC in action. They were fixing a 15 kilometer road leading out of my town. I would sit on my porch each day and watch them roll back and forth along my road. I later found out that there were thousands of Marines spread out all over the Northern part of Nicaragua working on the infrastructure.

One day as I was driving down the road that leads out of my pueblo I noticed a big USMC semi with a bulldozer hanging off the side. Apparently the bulldozer was too high and ran right into a giant Guanacaste branch. Turns out the tree won that battle. The marine convoy was backed up about a mile. Now every time I am leaving my little Pueblo and I pass that tree I think of the United States Marine Corps.

About two weeks later I was driving to the beach and I noticed a large group of marines spread out along a major bridge that they were repairing. I knew right away something was wrong by the expressions on the marines’ faces as I drove by. That’s when I saw a humvee flipped upside down resting at the bottom of a large embankment. As I looked closer I saw several marines carrying out a body bag.

Man, how sad. I always wondered how weird it would be for that marine’s family to think he died in a country he barely knew. But to die serving a humanitarian role holds a lot of weight in my book!





I know people talk a lot of shit about the U.S. Hell I am often times the guy with the biggest mouth. Yet there are times when our country gets it right. This was one of those times. We do help out a lot in this world believe it or not.

Every time you see a country with some major problem you will most likely see the U.S. right there in the mix helping out. When you see those sacks of rice and beans being stacked in some random country where some major disaster just took place….look at the label on the bag. It will almost always say USA.




We soon hired an uncle to start building the house. I still drove around and loaded up sand and stones and I would also drive 45 minutes 2-3 a week to buy cement and different building materials for the house. I would also go to the local brick maker and buy thousands of bricks at a time.

The guy building the house would not work unless I bought him a small bottle of rum each day. One day I was feeling especially generous and made the mistake of buying him 3 bottles of rum. That was the day that a small section of the brick house fell down. I soon learned to keep it to 1 to 2 bottles of rum and the guy would work his ass off and lay bricks in a perfect line. The house soon began to rise.

I wanted to jump in and work on the house so bad but what the hell did I know about laying bricks? Soon it was time to put on the roof. This is when several fights with my father in law began. He said we needed to do this. I said that. I want x amount of doors and windows and he said I could only have y. Work suddenly stopped on the house.

One day I decided to climb up on the roof and begin trying to build the roof myself.

Yes I had packed 1000 pounds of books but the only power tool I packed was a drill. I should mention that screws are pretty much unheard of down here.

Have you ever tried to saw a 2x4 with a hand saw? O.K. now take away soft pine and imagine some tropical hardwood… and throw in the fact that a 2x4 down here is really a 3x5! Needless to say it was not going well.

After watching the pathetic gringo for 2 days trying to work on the house… I think my father in law felt sorry for me and we resolved our differences and work continued on the house with me once again in charge of buying and transporting supplies and the true builder in charge of building.

So the house was nearing completion. We only needed to lay cement for the floor and have the local carpenter make us doors and windows when Mari comes to me and tells me that she wants to go back to the States. WTF? Queue record screeching now!

Now I know things are not working out as we expected, I tell her but things are going to turn around. Now if you are any sort of mathematician you can deduce that our funds were quickly being depleted. I mean paying all the bribes the import fees the construction and material on the house.

But we still had about $4,000 left and I knew I could start making some money if I could just get the fucking house built. Apparently Mari didn’t have the same sort of confidence.




So after thinking about it for several days I finally tell her that I would be willing to go back to the states on one condition. I will never again work in an office or wear a monkey suit! She agreed and shortly after we returned by bus all the way back to San Diego!

We would eventually send money down to finish the house. Her father lives in the house year round. I stay here on my visits down to Nicaragua. I must say it is a pretty nice house. Not all fancy like some houses down here. But it serves all my needs when I travel down…. By plane!

When we arrived in San Diego, Mari immediately got a job cleaning houses. I went to Bartending School. Mari was working for a cleaning agency where she basically did all the work cleaning houses but she would have to give 40% of the profits to the agency. I didn’t like the math on that setup so I told her that I would find her customers on the side and she could keep 100% of those profits.

So I started running ads and answering the phone and getting her side jobs on the weekend. Apparently I was pretty good on my marketing because she soon became so busy that I began helping her out each weekend. Eventually things were going so well we decided she should quit her agency and we should just go at it ourselves.

We did just that and let me tell you we were scared out of our wits. Basically from day one on our own we started working our asses off. We would take any job. You could call us at any hour and we would answer the phone and we would never say no! We would work from the first light of morning until 10 that night if we had the jobs. We usually did!




I remember we were renting out a garage in Santee and it was summer. It was so hot and miserable. We would wash our rags out in the sink at the end of each day and string them up in the summer heat.

In the morning we would fold those rags up and away we went….sometimes cleaning 5-6 houses each day just Mari and me. We had some little red piece of shit car that would barely make it up and over the 52. The car went so slow that we would have to pull onto the shoulder when going up the hill to avoid the cars honking and cussing us out to move out of their way.

We worked our asses off for the next year. I remember snooty Scripps Ranch ladies standing over my head as I scrubbed their kitchen floor on my knees sweating all over the place. They would point out all the places I had missed.

At one point I remember thinking, “What in the hell has happened to me?” I was no longer waiving that business degree above my head like a torch guiding my way. No I was down on my hands and knees scrubbing the shit out of some rich person’s floor!

I would continue to do that for the next year until we became so busy that it literally became impossible to answer the phone every five minutes and scrub toilets at the same time.

That’s when we opened our first office and began hiring our first employees and it just grew from there.


I have had a great time back in my adopted country but it is time to get back to my first country and once again put the backpack away… actually my rolling luggage. It seems as though I have been down here forever! 3 weeks down here is like 3 months!




I still have the same adventurous spirit I always have had. However, I also love being with my kids and coaching sports and being a part of my community. Hopefully I can find a way to balance both aspects of my life.

It was funny that after returning from the Peace Corps I met many people that told me that they had thought about joining the Peace Corps or knew of people that were in the Peace Corps. But I never met anybody that had actually been in the Peace Corps.

After searching for several months Mari and I found a house that we wanted to purchase in a community that seemed perfect to raise our kids. We moved in and we met our neighbors who lived 2 doors down. They had kids the exact same age as ours. I later discovered that they too were in the Peace Corps. Funny how life plays out….

So now my blog must come to an end, this is my final night Chiilin’ at the Rancho. I have been trying to think of some way to end this final blog from Nicaragua. You know busting out something really profound and meaningful. I mean if you are going to do something, do it right, right? I mean why fuck around…? Nobody likes an amateur! So let me go once again back to one of my final journal entries before leaving the Peace Corps.

Peace Corps Journal 1998

Nicaragua

Thus comes the end of an adventurous voyage. I’ve crossed the waters of azure blue, and dipped my head in its vibrant hue. Sullen and shaken I thus emerged, dripping with tears my emptiness purged. Lost, confused yet gentle the hand, cast all aside, like a statue I stand. Pure of mind and fresh of soul, I venture on as tears stain my brow. Baptized in the mar of old, crested upon my chest the stories unfold. Cuerpo de paz, cuerpo de paz… sooner than said, a flash blinds the night, darkness apparent, a bird begins his flight. Carry on carry on, winged doves of peace, now my friend your journeys await. The gentle light will never cease. Directions clash, thunders crash, the sounds crash upon my ears, stumbling on, embrace thy fears. Ships cast shadows in the dull moonlight, shhh…. quiet a bird begins his flight. Once said of time, thus be true, yet carry on, embrace all that is you. The ocean pacific I have traversed… from the tip of Costa Rica to the point of Potosi, across the plains of Boaco and through the mountains of Esteli. Up Mombacho down the Boca de Infierno, through the coffee fields of Matagalpa, to the bottom of Laguna Apoyo From Selva Negra to El Suce’s trepid town, I’ve seen the breadth of Nicaragua and to it I am bound. Aahh Nicaragua to you I send my blessings of peace, please never bend or scare to the capitalist torch and those who shall take away your treasures and leave you solemn and bare. Take strength in the knowledge that your toils are not in vain, heed not what your neighbors dangle, for it shall only cost you pain. Thus comes the end of an adventurous voyage. Yet bleak the message but with power comes light, we have come to share our common plight. For it is with love that I say to you, Nicaragua your beauty is true. A treasure trove of loot I now do leave, all packed away such love I do believe. Yet all I take is within my heart, I do not steal yet now I part. With a part of your country thus buried in my soul, and a piece of my own I leave as my toll. An equal exchange of love untold, a love unsoiled, a love so bold. And now I depart whiter my wings, I thank you now for the song I sing. Thus comes the end of an adventurous voyage, the ship does part in the dull moonlight, shh, quiet a dove takes flight.

So now my passage comes to an end. My blog is done. I sip the last remnants of my rum and coke. I will soon hop on that plane back to the U.S. I will no longer chill out at the Rancho!

I will soon be home with my kids and little league baseball, the beach, Chuck e Cheese, birthday parties, soccer, cub scouts, golf, daisies, picking up and dropping off at school….and all the other crazy adventures that come with being a father in the U.S.

These may not be the craziest adventures that I have ever been through. But I will tell you one thing, these are the adventures that bring a never ending smile to my face. These are adventures that keep my sanity and keep me forever moving forward in this convoluted world I call my own. These are now the adventures that matter the most in the world to me….

I still don’t own a monkey suit and I would be hard pressed to even find a tie. Yeah, Priorities and goals change…. Sometimes we need to settle in and be content with where we are.

One day my son and daughter will come to me and tell me they want to break away. They will tell me they want to spread their wings and fly. They will tell me that the world they live is trying to constrain them. They will tell me that they are ready for new adventures...

This is the day I will break out my machete and bust the chains that have been holding them to my side. This is the day that they will begin writing their own epic journey of life. I will embrace them with all my might and then I will send them on their way. Someday after they have flown far and wide I hope they will return by my side. Hopefully, they will ask me to join them on their next adventure. Then I will dust off my backpack and away we will go!

Mari and I in Lago Atitlan, Guatemala

Chilling at the Rancho Part 4

There is a cool breeze blowing tonight at the Rancho. I have a week left and then it is back to reality. Wherever I look I see green, a giant green sea. The bushes, the banana trees fluttering in the wind, the palm trees swaying in the breeze, the mountains in the distant all collide to form a massive green collage.

The man at the table behind me is giving a young boy a lesson in the philosophies of life. He is telling him that the world is more than the small town he lives in. He tells him that he needs to get out and explore. Good advice. No, this is great advice.

In fact this just reinforces the whole theme that I have been pursuing since my arrival down here in the land of lush, green and verdant surroundings.

I pull on my headphones and drift away… the beach boys are working their magic. Kokomo…..

After my 2 day stint at the local hospital for Dengue Fever, I felt like a new man. The doctors told me I needed to rest and take it easy. They told me my body was exhausted and depleted and needed time to heal. But I felt so good. The following weekend my fellow Nica 6 buddies all went to a small coastal town called Rivas for some sort of training.




That night we all decided to let loose and drink and celebrate. I’m not sure if somebody spiked our rum or what but that night our whole group, and I do mean our WHOLE group got stinking drunk. That’s right silly drunk right in the main Central Park of Rivas. We were running around screaming, dancing and laughing for hours. I think we kept that whole town up for most of the night.

At some point everybody started throwing up. People began passing out in the streets and on park benches. It was getting ugly. Most of us managed to stumble or crawl back to our hotel rooms. Some had to be carried.

I somehow ended up sleeping on the cement floor. The booze mixed with my body being depleted of energy was not a good mix. I ended up sleeping with head on my arm for most of the night. Now normally when you sleep you toss and turn throughout the night and your blood circulates. Now when you just had Dengue Fever the week before and the next week you suck down a bottle of rum… well you just basically pass out and don’t move.

So the next day I awake and my hand and arm is throbbing in pain. The next 2 days the pain got progressively worse and the movement in my hand became progressively limited. It got to the point that I could not move my hand at all. I was freaked out.

Eventually I could not take the pain any longer and I had to go visit my friend the bitch nurse. After checking me out she tells me I need to go see a doctor but it looks as though I have partial paralysis from cutting off the circulation to the veins leading to my hand for an extended period. She also tells me that some people call this the drunk-man disease. Oh great. I blamed everything on my Dengue Fever and she didn’t pursue it.

I would have to wear a brace on my hand and go to physical therapy for the next 3 months. After about a month I started getting feeling in the hand and was actually able to partially lift my hand. I would eventually get full movement back but even to this take it still feels tingly from my arm down to my thumb and forefinger.



Soon after this little fiasco the majority of our Peace Corps group was forced to come into the Peace Corps office and take some alcoholism quiz. They had random questions. How many drinks do you drink a week? When is the last time you drank? On and on the questions went. Well, I’m no idiot, I lied my ass off. Shit from my quiz you would have thought I only drank on my birthday!

My buddy Jason, the one I said earlier was so smart. Well this genius decides to tell the truth. Um yeah, I drank last night. I drink about 10 beers per occasion. I drink several times a week, I drink alone… etc… etc….

Jason ended up going to a series of classes on alcoholism after acing that test! Smart! Now he lives in Nappa Valley, rather ironic, huh?

Local market...



Belts?

¨

So, I found some old journals that I kept when I lived here in Nicaragua. Most of it is very convoluted and hard to make any sense out of. I will share a small portion of the madness.

Now these are true “Ramblings!” Man I was a lost soul back then!

Peace Corps Journal June 1995:

Well it’s my last night in Masaya. I’ll be heading for Managua for a week and then onto Esteli for 2 years. I’m drinking cheap port wine and listening to Bob. I’m very happy I’m leaving. The family experience was a disaster. I was unfortunate with my family. They did not treat me well – but, I blame it all on the father! He is a jerk… Fuck him! I bought them a radio/cassette player today as a going away present. They didn’t, actually “he” didn’t like it! Fuck him! I feel cheated and sad. I feel as though I should have been treated better by my adopted Nicaraguan family.

Poor me…perhaps it’s the port talking or the fact that I only have one more day in Masaya- I really couldn’t tell you….

It’s hot yet the mosquitoes have given up on me- perhaps they just terrorize you until you get deathly ill from their bite – then they give mercy.

Man, I am way down here. I am way the hell down here! It seems as though once again I am balancing precariously on the bottom rung.

Monimbo- what is that? A Hood! I live in a hood. I live in shitsville. Nicaragua is a land of culture. A culture that is pure and known. A land where the door is always open to embrace the stranger, yet a land of poverty. Yet as the poverty diminishes; the curious eyes open and the thirst for knowledge is apparent. I view Nicaragua through A Gringo’s eyes….

I sit now idle. I ponder upon the slope; the arch in the rose that slants in my front yard. It reaches toward the sun. It stretches its stem to embrace the powerful star.

Reggae pulses its message through me. Well everything is alright. As I drink from the bottle of disappearance. May I cease to be? May the raindrops weep their tears upon my veil of being? Wash me away with the tide, only to emerge fresher, stronger, newer?

Flashing, slowness, dark shadows. Life lingers in the balance. Yes, I can come down. Or rather up. Such pointless depression. Depression brought on by my lack of will power. I must come up. I am wallowing in a state of futility. I wonder what my body is thinking at this point. I’m sure it is not too enthused. Yet the bloody shadows of intoxication outweigh all the steady neon lights casting shadows upon my bloodshot eyes. It seems as though the visions are good. I could be fading into the sunset yet the drift is slow and peaceful. I seek balance. I need to cleanse my body. I need purity. Can I find a steady plane? All I see are bleak futures, rising tides, heavy waves and pure confusion. I am at a loss.

The ice cream man...



It seems as though music and booze were a steady theme throughout my Peace Corps experience!

So after I departed my plush digs down by the river I moved up into the main part of the city. Well on the outskirts. This house was a real shithole! The toilet was located about 20 yards up a little hill from my house outside in the elements. The shower was also located outside and there was no roof. It was just a small 3 foot by 3 foot cement floor surrounded by 4 walls. There was a water hose for a shower head.

When it rained the patio at my house would flood. You would have to spread 2x4’s around the lakes in order to get to the shower or toilet. The kitchen was just an outdoor area with a roof.



One day after an especially hard rain I decided to take a shower. So there a am holding my hose above my head and trying to wash my hair at the same time which is not an easy feat when I feel something on my foot. I start to freak out and at the same time I’m trying to hose the shampoo out of my eyes and see what the hell it was.

I finally manage to peak at my foot and what do I see but the biggest freaking toad I had ever seen in my life sitting on my foot. I start screaming and run out of my shower. Now Maribell happened to be over that day visiting and here I am running around naked jumping through the freaking lakes in my patio screaming like a banshee! It’s a wonder she ever married me.

So I’m yelling at Mari but I don’t know the work for toad or even from in Spanish so she has no idea what the hell is going on. I finally drag Mari over to the shower balancing oh so steadily on the 2x4’s which are the bridge to my shower and I open up the shower curtain and show Mari the toad and the next thing you know she is screaming and running around my mini-lakes.

Turns out I’m with one of the few girls in Nicaragua that are also deathly afraid of slimy animals with warts! I ended up getting a broom and prodded him to jump out of my house and to perhaps go visit my neighbor. Ah, the neighbor……



Now my next door neighbor had a dog that barked nonstop. I’m talking day and night. Down here the people do not trip on a dog barking for hours at a time! It doesn’t even faze them. No animal control here either. They had the dog tied up on a leash about a foot long and he never moved. He just sat there all day in his shit and piss barking away. Hey you would be barking too!

The house behind me had a giant parrot that screamed, squawked and talked all day. I would scream in English and also in my broken Spanish to shut the dog and bird up. So now you got the dog barking, the bird screaming and the Gringo cussing as loud as we all could.

I finally went to the neighbor and told them they had to do something about the dog. They did… they moved it from one side of the yard to the other….

I had visions of how I was going to poison the dog. I would wrap rat poisoning in a pile of hamburger and throw it over the wall… After plotting for several weeks, I finally concluded that the Peace Corps may frown on my killing dogs and birds and gave up on my plotting.

One day I’m chilling at my house with my new schoolteacher friend (yes she actually hung around) making dinner for her and a friend when I hear a knock on the door. I answer the door and there is this pathetic looking tall blonde kid looking at me hunched over.

“Are you Kevin?” he asks.
“Yes I say”…
“Hi I am Robb. I am the new volunteer living in Esteli. I just got here today but I am feeling sick.”
“Dude come on in” I say.
“No, I’m just going to go to my hotel room” and with that Robb took off.

Well… whatever I thought. I wasn’t all that cool about sharing my city with another American anyway. This was my city! I was the King of Esteli. Ok not really, but I liked to think I was.

So WAY too early the next morning, I hear somebody banging on the door again. I managed to crawl out of bed and open the door and there is that same blonde asshole… what was his name again?



“You have to help me he says” I am really sick. I mean really sick. Oh great this is all I need. My hangover wasn’t helping matters. So, I call the Peace Corps and they put me in contact with my favorite person… the bitch nurse.

No, she hadn’t been fired yet. After her last lapse in judgment when she almost killed me, she decides she better take ill Peace Corps volunteers a little more seriously.

She tells me she is going to send an ambulance from the capitol of Managua up to Esteli.

O.K. I tell her, I really like your whole new outlook and sense of urgency when somebody is deathly ill, HOWEVER, It is a 3 hour drive to get to Esteli from Managua and another 3 hour drive back. Not really the best plan. So I told her I would get him on a bus and go with him down to Managua and we could be there in 3 hours instead.

So I loaded him up in the bus and away we went. Remember I am still reeking of booze and barely able to function as it is! About ½ way to Managua, Robb tells me he has to ralph. SO I go up to the bus driver and beg him to pull over. He does and about 100 people had the unexpected pleasure of watching poor Robb bent over yakking his brains out for 5 minutes on the side of the Pan American Highway.

Robb finally manages to gain some control over his stomach and away we go again. Robb is now bent over in his chair looking like he may pass out or die at any moment. Now in Nicaragua they pack the shit out of busses. When all the seats are taken, people stand in the aisles or even ride on top of the bus.

Anyways, there is this big fat guy standing up in the aisle next to Robb eating some type of food covered with cabbage and carrots and every time he opens his big fat mouth and shovels food in, he also spills the cabbage, carrots and whatever else he was eating all over Robb’s head.

So me being the brave protector of the new Peace Corps Volunteer, I tell the guy to watch out in my somewhat improving Spanish. The guy just looks at me as if I am a nut. He shovels some more food into his mouth and a big pile of food falls on Robb’s head. Now Robb barely even knows what is going on at this point but hey…. he was under my protection now and I wasn’t going to have it.

So I get really pissed off and I start going off on the guy even throwing in a few of the nice new Spanish swear words I had learned.

Well fat boy just looks over at me, grunts and pulls up his shirt revealing a rather large pistol tucked around his big fat belly. Uhhhh…. not good.

Well… let’s just say I shut my mouth really quick. In fact I didn’t say another word the rest of that trip to Managua. I did manage to keep myself occupied by picking bits of food, cabbage and carrots out of Robb’s head.

When we finally arrived in Managua I loaded Robb into a cab and away we went to my favorite place in Nicaragua, the Bautista Hospital. We rush Robb into the emergency room and talk to the doctor. Well, it turns out Robb had Dengue Fever too!

After Robb got situated in his room, I told him to have fun with the sponge baths and away I went back to my little city. Robb and I would later become good friends.





About a month after that crazy day I packed up all my worldly possessions which conveniently fit within 1 large duffel bag. I said goodbye to my good friends… the parrot and the dog. I then hopped on my bike and rode to my new house. I am almost positive that as I pedaled away that day I heard that parrot scream in perfect English, “Shut the fuck up!”

Robb, my new roommate, and I cracked a beer and toasted each other that night. We had broken one of the Peace Corps rules by becoming roommates. We didn’t care! Hell we realized that by pooling our money we could now afford to get cable and a phone! Of course it would take 6 months for the bastards to process the work order… but we were happy as clams!

Peace Corps Journal 1995

A man upon the cusp of existence! Tell me, tell me, tell me. So this is the story I write. I am just a boy living the Peace Corps experience. A boy lost amid the foliage of Nicaragua. A young man hidden among the mountains of Esteli, Nicaragua. And still now, tomorrow will be a new day. With each passing day comes yet another. A day to release the chemicals and emerge stronger than the day before. Rise up, rise up he says. WITHOUT the ocean my task looms heavy. I endeavor to overcome the obstacles placed before me. Some days are harder than others. But in reality I only want to emerge clean and new. I want to embrace my manhood. I no longer wish to run yet only to stand erect and sigh, yes, I am a man. I no longer wish to run from but rather to.

God give me the strength to echo my name w dignity. I am as big as my heart permits, nothing more or less. Let me devour all that I know about being a man, let me cast aside all my weaknesses and let me be….Oh let me be.

For only then can I look into the mirror and find beauty. So let that be my final passage.

To live within the maze to search for the unseen door, leads the mind to seize upon confusion, while the heart continues to roar. Yet your dreams flutter in the sky, awaiting your capture, continuing to fly. Hope strings you along, patiently singing its enduring song. Structured silence, destined gloom? Oblivious to all, questions assumed. Revel in your tranquility never foresee an end, laughter unveils the pain as the mind continues to transcend. The light shines bright on the isle of dreams gods sparkle in their golden streams. Yet learn from Homer avoid all luring song, for here dreams die, making life unbearably long. Your answer will grow clear on the isle of fears. Erasing the pain suppressing all fears. Look to the sky; here is where dreams are found, our bodies may be mortal but our souls know no bounds. The answers grow clear on the isle of tears, erasing all pain suppressing all fears. I forever dream, dreams that have no measure. I must find the island to discover the hidden treasure.

Life actually settled down tremendously after I moved in with Robb. He got a girlfriend, I had my girlfriend. We eventually got our cable T.V. hooked up. Life was moving along nicely.

I guess the next major obstacle I had was with my counterpart and my job. Most Peace Corps volunteers are hooked up with a Nicaraguan counterpart that is supposedly a work partner and I had hoped a person that would help me fit in with the culture. I ended up with some alcoholic asshole on a power trip named Bismark.

Yeah… that’s right, just like the ship! Bismark and I got off on the wrong foot and we never did forge any type of relationship. He was the manager of the Savings and Loans Cooperative I worked at and he thought he was the shit!



At first he viewed me as a token American that would make his Savings and Loans cooperative look good to the associates. He later viewed me as a threat when I pointed out why the cooperative was losing a shitload of money every month and what he needed to do to get it straightened out.

You see the cooperatives receive funding from different countries that are trying to help developing countries. That money is then “supposedly” lent to small companies to grow and thrive.

Peace Corps Journal 1995

Well the manager and the accountant of the Savings and Loan Cooperative I work at just had a major blowout in front of me. They apparently lost some applications for government loans. They keep asking me if I have them. As if I really want or need them. It’s really stupid and petty, but it seems as though the manager is an asshole and on some sort of power trip. Give a man a little power and he wields it like the staff of Merlin. Latin America is definitely a backwards caveman world, small men with big dreams of grandeur. Perhaps they realize that it is all rather pointless and they revert back to primordial days.

I know little, yet I observe much. I seem to be causing a riff in this pathetic little cooperative I work in. I tried to be a team player and they pushed me away. They don’t want me to help them. I can’t turn to my Peace Corps director because they will look at this as a problem I created. Another of the many ways the Peace Corps refuses to back us up. I really just want to go and drink 6 beers, right now! That’s all I want to do. Sad! But no, I’ll just go home, eat and then finish my book. Sad!

As I mentioned, the money the Cooperative receives from other countries is supposed to go to small companies as loans so that they can grow their businesses. When the small businesses repay their loans that money is then available to more small companies eventually creating a prosperous micro-economic benefit for the whole town. You know; the whole trickle down methodology.

Well, what I soon learned was that the money was being channeled to, not only friends of the directors, but the directors themselves. They would make themselves loans with little or no intentions of ever paying the money back. Even my good buddy Bismark had some fat loans! The default rate was something astronomical like 40%. However, when they ran out of money they would just get another large donation from some organization or country that really didn’t quite understand the system.

After several attempts to modernize the cooperative by computerizing their system it became abundantly clear that these guys did not want my help. Soon I found myself living a charade. I would show up to work at the office each day and sit around and do nothing. That’s right, I would just sit around and read a book each day.

After a few weeks of this, I realized that I no longer wanted to participate in this bullshit charade and I told my Peace Corps director that I was done with that place. I told him I was not going to work there anymore and that if he wanted to boot me out of the Peace Corps than that was up to him but that I would no longer pretend to work at some stupid job. I had done that for many years in the states and did not come all this way to live a lie!



Peace Corps Journal 1996

Well I really don’t have a person to whom I’m writing so I will just write. Today I will soon learn my fate for the next year and 1/2. Either I will leave the Peace Corps or I will be working independently. Either way, something has to change. I cannot go on like this anymore. I’m always stressed out! I’ve worked too hard in my life to feel constricted like this. I need to unleash and become more free to expand and grow. Anyways, life is life and I expect that all I can do is to be truthful and honest, well for the most part! What do people expect? To be silent and endure something, a situation which is intolerable? I think not! And so, I push the line. I’m trying to help and make a difference. Yet the people here are unwilling to bend or change. Yet they are willing to take and unleash their stupidity and unkindness. And so we have arrived at my day of judgment for the next 1 ½ years. And so I search for an internal light to spark my way and guide the lost boy. Yet my vision is clear, my body is strong and my spirit is rejuvenated. So bring it on baby!

I later talked to my Peace Corps Program Director. He happened to be one of the few Peace Corps Directors that was an actual Nicaraguan. Not only that. But he was from the laid back Caribbean side of Nicaragua. He told me, “Kevin… just do whatever you want.”

I told him I would teach English and work with small businesses. He just said, “Whatever.”



From that point forward I was basically on my own in Nicaragua for the next year and half. No set job, no obligations, just pure freedom. Oh yeah baby!

Before I left the Cooperative I did manage to hook them up with another organization that was funded by the AID, American International Development… basically the money arm of the U.S. in developing countries. They began taking over control of the cooperative little by little. Many years later I was driving down the main drag of Esteli and saw the cooperative on the same street as all the major banks in the city.

I went into the cooperative which now looked just like a bank and asked about Bismark. Well Bismark was out! Apparently he had sunk just like the ship! AHHHH Karma once again rears its head!

Hell, almost instantaneously after my Peace Corps program director told me I was on my own I started travelling. I first started travelling locally to visit my fellow Nica 6 Peace Corps Volunteers spread out all over Nicaragua.

Down here each town has a party celebrating a Patron Saint. Each town has a different patron saint… so you do the math. All I knew was that there was a LOT of parties to attend. Now who am I to turn town a party?

By this point most of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers in Nica 6 had basically abandoned their jobs as well! So, my buddies and I began travelling from town to town to the local party. Now these were some major big parties by the way. The whole town comes out and gets down.

The parties go something like this: Break out multiple bottles of Rum and Guaro (moonshine). Next grease up a pig and let him go…. Let’s see who can get him! Grease down a chicken and nail him to somebody’s front door. O.K., Now, everybody get on a horse and ride around the block and see who can be the first one to rip him off the door.

Next how bout we grease up a pole and see who can get to the top…. Nice. Lots of grease involved in these parties.

Alright how about we cut off a couple bulls’ penis… let them dry in the sun for several days and then use them in epic drunken sword battle reenactments from the 1800’s. But let’s really wail on each other until we start bleeding. Hey now this is a party! You thought toga parties were fun?

The finale of these weekend long parties usually entailed a makeshift bullring, a bunch of extremely drunk Nicaraguans, several bulls and some extreme drunken chaos.
Now in our case you could add to that drunken mayhem, several drunken Americans running around that same bullring. Yes, bulls running directly at us with their pointy sharp horns. We would leap up on the wooden rails at the last second as the bulls charged close by us. Good times for sure!

Juice?






Soon I began going on trips throughout Central America. At one point I even traveled 6 hours in several busses and crossed the border into Honduras just to get a burger from McDonalds!

Peace Corps Journal 1996 some beach in Guatemala

Life!

So, here I am. Yeah! The surf is looking plush – no board! The call for today- fish! The lefts are peeling. And so here I sit, a man, about to embark on a bottle of Guatemala’s finest! And so I drink, oblivious to the reality which lies beyond. My tent is pitched, my mind is cloudy. Zeppelin rings through the mind! And so it goes; or so I go, down into the depths of the bottle. A soiree into no-man’s land.

How nice, he says. Love is in the air. How putrid and fetish those salt water breezes. Air conditioning, oh that treasured gift. Soon my body will be pure; clean and hard. Janis Joplin unleashes her pain through my ears. Oh baby I hear you. I do, I do. The weight lies heavy upon us all. The syrup gently rolls down my throat. Oh so sweet. Bye bye, baby bye bye.

Money? I have little.
Wisdom? Not much.
Desire? Oh plenty.
And thus, I write on with a mad desire to pursue knowledge.

Freedom of mind, of pen, freedom of expression unto the glorious paper. Oh how so, oh how truly, truly so. The purity, the beauty, the flow, oh how sweet the ink. Oh, I flow, kids, children lurk heavy on my mind! To give unconditionally. Ahh, such sweet, sweet words. Love is divine.

That of which we seek. Unspoken words, hidden thoughts. Yet the sweet slumber lays further ahead of my existence. For now, I am content upon this paper, I etch my name, my being, my presence. I am heard and with such a sweet ring, the bell of eternal longing.

Shhhh…. Silence! Can’t you hear???? Ah, and the bell tolls. The direction of her bliss knows no boundaries. And thus, she sounds, the inevitability of it all is such sweet song. The ice of ages melts and becomes only what she was. The water that traces through her body is upon us, coursing as she may, searching to release her purity.

One thing you have to love about Nicaragua is that it can rain basically at any time and at any moment. Hang your clothes out to dry on a sunny day… and bam, downpour. I’m chillin’ at the Rancho just switching over to Rum and Coke and the skies just opened up. I guess I should have known by the subtle breezes I felt earlier. These are usually the tell tale signs! Hey, cut me some slack I have only been down here for two weeks and I am a little out of touch. Oh man… the thunder just pounded down around me! It is raining so hard that the rain is coming through my little rancho roof and dropping on my head!

O.K. No worries… Just need to move over to the next seat where the rain hasn’t managed to find a hole to penetrate the Spanish tile roof. And we are talking real Spanish tiles! Made out of dirt and cow shit and fired in a brick oven! Really.

It is coming down pretty hard. Fortunately I have managed to save my computer, my rum and the last ashes of my mom. O.K. don’t say morbid! That is wrong. She would be laughing her ass off right now and actually truth be told she is actually sealed in an air tight ziplock baggie at the moment. So she is probably the driest one out of us all!

O.K so let’s just go down this road now. As I mentioned previously my mom passed away recently. I brought part of her ashes down to Nicaragua on my trip and I have been spreading her around the different locations that I have journeyed to on my adventures.

Now I had planned to sprinkle some of her ashes in the cemetery that is located very close to my local Rancho Bar. That is why I have her along with me tonight. I’m not that fucked up… well maybe.

Anyways I do have to admit that I miss her! I think the hard parts are whenever something really good or really bad happens to me. I get that urge to pick up the phone and share my feelings with her. I then realize that I can’t. My mom was my sounding board. I would spit out anything I was feeling and I would get a reaction in return. From that reaction I would move forward. At times what I heard in return would piss me off and I would fume for days. Then I would realize that what my mom had said had validity.



I think at some point I already knew what my mom’s reaction would be to any situation I brought to her. I just needed validation. “This is right or this is wrong.”

No matter how much I pleaded and defended my case she would set me straight. I couldn’t bullshit her or win her over in an argument that didn’t have a pure cause. She would always call me out and set me straight.

No matter how cute, cunning, charismatic or persuasive I thought I was, she saw right through me. I wasn’t any of those things to her. I was just her son; plain and simple.

Eventually all I needed was her silence on a subject to confirm to me that I was wrong! No matter how much I continued to argue my point with her, I would only be met with her silence. I would eventually relent and tell her, O.K. Yes you’re right and that is wrong.

When I first brought Mari to the U.S. as my new bride I was nervous how my mom would react. My mom gave Mari a huge hug right off the bat. They had some weird conversation that I’m sure neither of them understood. Then my mom took my new wife shopping. She would not even let me go. What? You guys can’t even understand each other!



They didn’t go anywhere fancy. That wasn’t the point. They bought sandals and clothes and I don’t know what else. They went out for lunch. Mainly they bonded.

That was the whole point. Mari and my mom would become very close over the years. I later named my daughter after my mom, “Kristi”.

So now if I have the desire to carry her around in a ziplock baggie and spread her ashes haphazardly around Nicaragua…. So be it!!!!

Peace Corps Journal 1996

As I stretched my eyes to find some semblance of order in the ungrateful morning, I noticed the cobwebs draping throughout the corners of the room. I noticed a spider gradually ascending up the silly string he called his home. I began to wonder where the spider slept in this twisted puzzle of threads. I rolled over, closed my eye and the spider’s life was no longer relevant.

I woke again and was rather disturbed that this spider had disrupted 10 minutes of my sleep. My thoughts began to pursue the idea of grabbing a broom from the kitchen and ripping the webs of the spider from the walls.

As I plotted my revenge, another notion came to me. I pursued this by once again closing my eyes and beginning my journey into unconsciousness.

As I lay there motionless my mind began to flutter endlessly through a storm of love and hope. I found myself looking through a telescope. The telescope faced the sky yet the mystery of the heavens was far from apparent. I pondered the question of God. I pondered the question of death. Mostly, I pondered the question of life.

I squinted my eyes to see farther, yet I could still not see any answers. I screamed out, “What do you see?” the answers echoed back so silently I realized that in actuality the answer lied within the eye of the individual.

Each individual possessed his own telescope for which the heavens were visible. Perhaps their telescopes were bigger or smaller or perhaps their minds were bigger or smaller. I noticed a beautiful princess crying beside me.

“Why do you cry beautiful prince?” I asked.
“I cannot see anything through my telescope.” she said.
I glanced into her eyes.
“Well my princess, I see a merry go round, a circus, a beach, the bright sun and a shiny ring. “
She looked through the telescope once more and spoke.
“Sir, I still cannot see anything.”
I looked deeply into her eyes for the last time, removed the lens cap from the telescope and walked away, weeping.




Soon I will return to the states and once again continue my voyage. For now I listen to Led Zeppelin and pound against my keyboard. Another passage in my Peace Corps journal now:

Peace Corps Journal 1997

Questioning the future

Structured silence, destined doom. Oblivious to all, the question assumed. I revel in tranquility though I foresee the end. Laughter unveils the pain, yet the stars continue to transcend. Dreams flutter in the sky, awaiting their capture continuing to fly. Hope strings me along, patiently singing its enduring song. I beg my brother to take my hands, to calm the seas, and shine his light on the land. May the light shine bright on this island of dreams, where my goals are clear as they sparkle in golden streams. I clench my fist disregarding all stakes I look to the skies and my dream awakes.

Pictures and maps foretell the future. The future, the mystery that surrounds the mind. As the mind travels, the heart unleashes its power. The power travels to the soul enriching the nutrients of life and youth. We inhale the scent and thrust forward on a surging wave of hope. We strive for more never yielding to the dictates of others. We embrace those who share our dreams. Together we soar; we touch the clouds and continue our quest as one. In this, the eternal loop of life. In this, the adventures of innocence.

A habit a life a world to break, wrong paths, wrong people an enormous mistake. Looking at life directly in his eye, beneath the surface and asking him why. This is the reason we live and grow, to discover ourselves and to just let go. And so we travel down the winding path, trying to avoid the devil’s wrath.

Searching, searching to unhinge our soul, to find the emptiness and fill the hole.
Step by step we continue to walk, on unstable grounds while learning to talk. We open locked doors and step inside, only to learn that the world has lied. They take away our precious tools: our minds, our hearts they think we’re fools. Then they throw us in schools. These are the people that I laugh in their face, then I watch them walk on in a backwards endless pace. Then they try to teach us what we already knew, then they tell us we’re normal and tell us what to do. A habit, a life, a world to break wrong paths.

Slowly the day twists endlessly around. The start approaches the end. The end approaches the start. The stillness explodes within my mind. The inevitability of the pointless circle is evident. Transcripts of yesterday lie below. Above, everywhere,. The bird soars above, the clouds hide her beauty. Yet I feel the presence within. I touch the beauty with my thoughts. Yet the bird soars on. In search of what? Running from whom? On goes the walk. The clatter of the message pounds and echoes off the walls. And still the inevitability feeds the white petals of the yellow day. The mind wanders, the stillness engulfs. And what of the bluebird that sung the beauty of the wind. Where doth thou bluebird fly? So on goes the entrenchments of fluids to atone for the lack of solids. The solidarity of a feather lacks the substance of a song. Yet the reverse cries terror to all. The point? Objective. The thought? Subjective. The meaning? Reactive? On and on, circles prevail. The circle has no meaning. Much like the thought. Yet still the words continue. Confused to all, but sound within. I inhale the meaning, again and again! One more time.

I spy a temperate sky. I feel the sand seep through my toes. Barren existence engulfs my mind. I feel the crush of a wave and the mist from its power soothes my face. I see a new way of life and customs. A solidarity and freedom that lets me embrace mother earth. I see my roots growing intertwined beneath my feet, growing ever outward and then back. I see your face growing bright, the sun beating its power into your heart. I see your body becoming hard, becoming united with your mind. I see myself forming jewelry from the shells and twine that the earth has created. I see a peace, a harmony, a bonding of all earthen creatures. I spy an ancient civilization with great rulers and kingdoms. The ruins enable me to search higher and find truth. I see mystery and attainable answers in pyramids and ancient medicine. I feel respect for the ancient man, the shaman and all the knowledge and wisdom he allows me to receive. I feel my soul awakening glowing once again, giving me life as it did when I was born. These images thrust me forward on a wave of hope. I spy distant lands. I spy myself. I wish you would come with me!

So now it seems that my journey down memory lane must come to a close. Perhaps I have one final blog in me before my return to reality. However tonight’s blog comes to the end with the words of Zeppelin…..

Yes there are two paths you can go back but in the long run…. there’s still time to change the road you are on.

So I suppose the real question is, “Where does YOUR stairway lie?”