There are different alcohols brewed, grown and developed from particular regions of the world like vodka from Poland and Russia, tequila from Mexico, whiskey and burbon from Kentucky and Tennessee, Carribean Rum, Scotch from Scotland, fine French wines or Malbecs from Argentina´s Mendoza country. The night before last had Fernet, which is Argentina´s liquor. It is mixed with coka-cola and tastes like medicine. It is similar to Yeagermeister, but is different. It does taste like DayQuil or NyQuil and will cause adverse affects if taken in large doses or even two glasses followed by beer and produces the feeling of your heart pumping in your brain just like any sugary alcoholic drink will do. I don´t want to sound like an alcoholic becuase I am not, but I do like to try new things. Any type of medicine is good for you up to certain point, but is lethal if taken to excess. Moderation is key, but even moderation needs to be kept in check. The greek gods of Apollo (purity) and Dionysius (revelry) need to be awarded the ring in our lives to battle it out and but not allowing either one to rule too much or it will throw one out of balance. Quielmes is one of the local beers both found in stout and lager\pilsner form. Quielmes is named after a historic region found in the Tucuman province of northern Argentina. It is pre-hispanic settlement dating back to 800 B.C. and by the mid- 17th century had over 10,000 inhabitants. It is cool to have a beer named after something historical rather than Budweiser (But wiper). Another one is cerveza of the Andes and Isenbeck.
I was in bus station along the port outside of Buenos Aires and was people watching, which is a great pasttime. I could not help but notice how short Peruvians, Bolivians and Guatemalans are. Yeah, numerous friends have told me this multiple times, but to actually witness this first hand is different. They are seriously like pygmies. I can see why when the Spanish Conquistadors and Portugeuse first came to this region that they would have appeared as gods and giants. It is very fascinating, yet strange that the whole world over there is so many variations in the human genome, yet we are all the same with the drive to procreate, have dreams, hopes, desires and self-preservation. Many more commonalities than differences, but first let´s explore the differences. It all comes down on where one has lived, adapted and evolved over thousands of years. For example, the closer one lives to the equator their skin is darker to protect the body from UV rays and people who live further away have fairer skin. When you bring climate, weather (cause they are different), elevation, food types into the equation the genome gets jumbled and out comes pygmies with short, rotund bodies, short limbs and huge rib cages due to elevation and then you have giant 7 and 8 ft tall Africans with huge nasal passages in their snot lockers from the equatorial regions to breathe in oxygen and separate the heat and moisture from the air so it does not turn to water in the lungs and who adapted so see over the tall savannah grasses. Then you have Chinese and other Asians with squinty eyes to protect them from the sun´s rays because of elevation and nearing the equator. Then as you go further north not only is the gradient of skin color slowly changing, but so are the eyes and nasal passageways and height shrinking the further you go. The mountainous peoples of the world have huge lungs and rib cages to protect them, which allows them to breathe in more oxygen from the lack thereof, the higher you go up. Sure I have studied this is anthropology classes and I guess it is finally paying off thanks college debt, but it is all different when experiencing it first hand.
Another cultural difference between Argentina and the United States is that they think it is good luck to step in dog poop which happens a lot on the city sidewalks of B.A. because it is prevalent. But, what I don´t get is that it sucks to clean it off your shoes and I despise doing it and it stilll smells like dog shit and frankly my dear, it is.
I think every person in the world should be forced to world travel and maybe spend some time serving ones country through military or volunteering in Americorps or something because we would be less likely to send our kids off to war and get behind the war mongerers so quick to bang the war drums if our own kids were enlisted. I find it is a lot harder to go off and kill someone from another country when you have been in that country and met those people. That way we experience them and their cultural ways first hand and it starts to make sense. It is easy to dehumanize a culture and people when you don´t know them. When you get down to it, they are just like you and I.
All the friction, chaos, unpredictability that pesters life is what paints the world with all of its beauty. Too emphasize the after life and have a place germ-free and secured by angels is to deny life and frankly I thought Jesus was about abundance of life and living it fully here and now. Not once does he talk about it coming later.
Yesterday before I left The Art Factory Hostel I met Sean from New Zealand who is a surfer and has been traveling for the past ten months. He started in B.A. then went up through Bolivia, Columbia to Panama and then to Cuba and back down to Uraguay and leaving in a few days. Super cool dude. We got along great.
Last night I rode a first class, bus that far exeeeds transportation system in U.S. like Greyhound or Amtrak, plenty of leg room, seats recline way back, super cushy seats, free meals , which I wish I would have realized before bringing food. Movies and air conditioning were also included in the price.
Riding through the Argentina´s countryside it was uncanny how much it resembles the Mid-west with tree-lined, square plotted, flat field lands carved for agriculture and I could definitely see this from the plane days before. I woke up this morning to look out the window and be greeted by the highest and longest snow-crested mountain range in the western hemisphere, The Andes. It feels good to back closer to the mountains and feels more like home.
Also met a guy named Brian from Indiana area who is going to volunteer just south of Buenos Aires and in the north-eastern part of Patagonia, in an area known as the Pampas region with the famous Guachos (the Argentine cowboys). He will work at an estancia building a fences and herding cattle the old school way. I told him he will have the time of his life doing that. If my original plans fall through I might see if I can do that, nothing like sweat and shedding a little blood with red, hot blisters bubbling forth from one´s palms helps to make friends more quickly through hard physical labor.
I find it interesting that I normally sleep 8-10 hours a day and that ends up being a third of ons life. I notice sleeping a lot less that my mind is more clear and remember my dreams so much more and that I have so much more time in the day to follow my bliss through adventure and writing about it.
First of all,to travel is to leave the comfort zone of family, friends, work and a sense of place,´locality of origin, and especially to know one deeply like I think I do in Montana, like knowing many of the plants and some of their uses, some birds by sight and call, animals by tracks, scat, dens, techniques of killing prey species, but to leave all of that behind to see and experience a different side of the world, learn a new language, make more friends, share a laugh and smile, food or a beer is a very fortunate thing indeed.
At the same time it is easy to fall into comfort zones even while traveling, the comfort and security of a hostel (the vibes, the people, the location, the connections, knowledge of the plants and birds. At the same time to even step out of that shell of comfort and shed that skin is also a kind of metamorphosis. It takes a certain willingness and drive with a level of deep faith, trust, hope, and drive to want to grow and shed and build new ideas and meet new people. It is a perfectly normal human condition to want security, but to take a step out into the unknown and face the deep abyss within ourselves makes one face the demons of fear and conquer them and then realize they are actually angels releasing us from those unforeseen fears. It is a really powerful feeling of ecstasy to realize you, me or one can do it. One can land on their feet if they just take a leap not seeing the landing in the dark. The level of faith and trust one must take when traveling internationally gives one a level of self-confidence in oneself that you might not normally get. In a sense it is like a Zelda game and you have to find different things to advance to the next level.
The very essence of travel is to move from one physical location to another, but it is just as much an internal journey through the layers of our own hearts and peeling back the layers of our minds that keep them opening up to the full range of what is possible and severing the cords and breaking down the walls that separate us from each other. Trusting the quiet voice of intuition found in our hearts or guts and listening to our instincts and allowing the little mustard seed in our souls to grow and see the light, allowing it to guide us deeper into ourselves and deeper into the world. This mustard seed is a kind of compass allowing the universal lovers or brothers and sisters of Fate and Destiny to do what they may with our life.
A Bev Dolittle rendition that I drew reflecting the natural spirits all around us. There are ten faces coming out of the landscape.
All the powers of super heroes, gods and goddesses are not outside ourselves, but are the very things inside of ourselves that reveal our humantiy and teach us to feel deeper and laugh louder and more often. We don´t need more gods or goddesses or idols to put on an invisible shelf in the sky, but we need each other like sister and brother. We created this mess that the world now faces and by god we are going to be the ones to find resolutions to fix it. Some super hero is not going to come save us. As the great singer\songwriter Greg Brown sings, ¨It is a messed up world and love it anyway.¨ In another line he sings, ¨Life is thump-ripe mellon, so sweet, yet such a mess.¨ Life with all its twists and turns, ups and downs is the only one we will ever have and we are to live it and live it abundantly. The whole idea of life and humanity as fallen and cursed is an archaic form of pure and silly rediculousness and unnecessary Christian guilt is something to be shooken off like fleas from a dog. It is not healthy to live like we got to win gods love. I have sat plenty of times in the waiting room of life just sitting patiently for LIFE to come knocking upon the door. Well, it never came. I just sat and sat until my bum grew tired and my skin grew hard as iron and my breath smelled like kerosene like Townes Van Zandt wrote and sung first and Willie Nelson made popular.
Another drawing of mine that is a Bev Dolittle rendition representing the circle of life that is not yet completed and won´t be for quite sometime.
Sorry about the rant, but then again I am not. An artist job is nudge, push, provoke and transcend the everyday common knowledge and mis-information the media fills us with. I am not trying to preach because the moment I do I become my worst enemy. This is more of a public testimony of a recorded memoir and journey of self-discovery and the realizations that come along the way.
In a book I read last year by the travel writer for National Geographic and various others, Doug Chadwick wrote a book called, ¨The Wolverine Way¨, he describes the way of the wolverine as, ¨To go high and hard and not back down from anything and not to deal in half-truths.¨ I have in the last decade of my life or so tried to live by this. Wolverines are constantly on the move, running thirty miles a day and climb mountains like it is noone´s business.
Last winter, I volunteered on a wolverine project in Glacier National Park and we cross-countried skiied into the backcountry carrying deer front quarters on our backs and then cut down ten foot posts to bolt the deer leg too. We also screwed 10-12 gun cleaning wire-mesh brushes up at the top of the post and to snag hair from the world´s largest weasel as it would climb to the top to get to the leg. We captured a lot of hair for sending into to a DNA lab for testing, but did not see any.
Needless to say, back in 2004, summer in the high country in Glacier, Lyndsay Lomair and I had the fortunate opporunity of watching the sunset and we heard a deep ´woof´, followed by an eerie screaming screech that left the hair on the back of my neck standing straight up and then another woof´´. This was going on right in front of us as the last moments of dusk was changing to night. We decided to head back down to the cabin. The next day I told my crew about it and my friend Vin and I climbed up to this spot to watch the sunset and look to see if we could see anything. We sat for awhile and then were about to give up when a wolverine came loping around the corner down the trail right towards us. I was sitting closer to the wolverine and Vin was on my left, and I knew that he had never seen one. For some odd reason instincts took over and I took off sprinting after it and he followed. Luckily, it turned around and slid in its tracks and ran off the other direction. I knew if it ran it would allow a great viewing area around the corner, which it did. It could have easily torn our faces right off and ate both of us for dinner. The next day I heard from someone who worked in that area that they found a dead mountain goat and dragged it off trail. Well, a wolverine is only a 35 lb animal and is completely fearless and can scare a 1000 lb. griz off of kills. So I put two and two together and realized the woofing sound was a griz and the screaming, blood curtling call was a wolverine and they were discussing whose meal it was going to be.
I don´t mean to go off on a tangent, but I do, I want to leave the reader with two quotes. The first one I wrote this fall, ¨Fearlessly follow your dreams because if you reveal the slightest doubt or fear, your dreams will forever run from you because they will see you are not worthy of attaining them.¨ The other one comes from High Country News article called Author Faux Files about Cody Cortez, ¨The way of the artist is incredibly hard, but you have to cowboy up.¨
(Also would appreciate if people would sign in to the right. You don´t have to change your email address, use the one you have. It is quite simple.)
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