Puente de La Paz II part 1

Here's story 3 in the continuing saga of my Panamanian experience. I'm skipping over a portion of the story, fast forwarding to the next deployment.

We had a mission to go to Costa Rica and help develop a region on the northern, or Caribbean coast. We were going to build roads and bridges, among other things. They had to have fancy Spanish names for the deployments, and they had gone to Costa Rica the previous year and called it Puente de la Paz (Bridge of Peace) and so they reached back deep in their imagination and called this one Puente de la Paz II.

We loaded all our equipment up in a ship and it went through the Panama Canal to the port of Limon, Costa Rica. There it was unloaded by the "advance party" whose job it was to move it from the port to the base camp, about 3 hours away. The fun began immediately. One of my "Concrete Mobiles" which is a fancy concrete truck, went off the road and rolled over. The rainy season was supposed to have finished before we deployed, but it had one last series of rainstorms that flooded the area. Our initial deployment became a disaster relief effort. We deployed with lots of helicopters and began by using them to rescue people that were stranded by the rising flood waters.

We came into Limon, the nearest big city, about an hour's drive away, north and west of our camp, a port city on the coast. You drove down the coast until you got to an area of beautiful black sand beaches. This is an area that a lot of Americans, hippies from the 60s mostly, came down here to settle. We turned inland and went through a banana plantation. This used to be a Dole banana plantation, but I don't think Dole owned it anymore by the time we got there. It took 10 to 15 minutes to fly over the plantation and about 30 or 40 minutes to drive through it. This place was huge. It had little cities with schools and soccer fields sprinkled throughout it. There was a series of overhead rails through the plantation, with swing bridges across the roads. People would walk out, pick big bunches of bananas, and hook them up on an upside down tree of hooks, that were supported by a big pulley at top. They pulled the big bunch of bunches along the overhead rails to central processing systems where the bunches were boxed and loaded on rail cars that shipped to the coast and loaded on boats. Bananas on a massive scale.

One day, I was taking a helicopter ride with about 12 to 15 other guys, and the pilot wanted to practice "nap of the earth" flying maneuvers. The aviation guys were attached to us in order to get training time anyway, so how they flew from point a to point b didn't matter as long as they got us there. Nap of the Earth flying was a combat maneuver where a helicopter can sneak up on an enemy and avoid surface to air missiles by flying fast and low and hugging the terrain. It's exhilarating. In this flight, we skirted the banana plantation and went to the coast. The pilot then used the beach line as a guide, trying to mirror the coastline at about 30' in the air (it was probably actually 60' or 80', but it felt like we would get our feet wet). I was on the right side of the helicopter, facing the ocean. When a helicopter turns, it tilts to the side. When you do extreme maneuvers, if you are sitting on the side you are looking up and down. So my flight was surf-sky, surf, sky-surf-sky, surf.... As we buzzed along at about 40 or 50 mph, we passed by a nudist beach. Of course, listening to the chatter on the radio did no good. I missed seeing the fly-by all the naked people.

Our base camp had some serious luxuries, we thought. It was right next to a river, and it was a small city. We had a water purification plant, showers, a store, sidewalks, and a "restaurant" (we called it the Mess Hall). We had some fairly nice latrines and something I had never seen before called "piss tubes". Imagine an 8" PVC pipe stuck into a pit full of gravel, surrounded by a chest high screen of white cloth. You stand there, taking a leak, and you can see everyone walking all around you. From a guy's standpoint, this is fantastic. I still remember watching SSG Gates one morning, with an apple in his mouth while he used the facilities. It was hilarious. I had a little Filipino Sergeant named SGT Corpuz that was about 5' 4" or so, and smart as a whip. They guy could do whatever he wanted with a large piece of equipment and did not lack in courage or initiative. He had this Filipino accent and a sarcastic and funny streak, so occasionally I would get an ear full of why everything was completely FU, and even though the news was bad, by then end of the story, I'd be laughing my ass off.

Our Company Commander was a Puerto Rican called CPT Font. The guy really did not belong in the Army, and certainly not in the Engineers. He didn't know what he was doing, and his idea of leadership was yelling louder. He had all these euphemisms, which, when translated literally to English made no sense whatsoever. I remember him saying something like "You gots to reach down, and grab your balls for this one." On March 15th, 1988, I was in a staff meeting on this deployment. We went around the table and everyone got to have their say. When my turn came, I said "Beware the Ides of March." The other Lieutenants and Chief laughed, just a little. CPT Font held me after the meeting and was just furious with me. I think he thought I was being disrespectful and making some kind veiled insult to him. I kept saying "It's from Shakespeare, it's the 15th of March." This didn't mean anything to him, and I couldn't figure out how to explain it. Had he really not ever heard that phrase before?

I remember my first trip over to the field Motor Pool, some half mile away, I saw a Coral Snake in the road. You can't miss something like that. I remembered the information on him, deadly venomous, but with chewing teeth, not piercing fangs. If you let him get a hold of you, he'd try to get between the webbing of your fingers and chew some poison into your skin. Over the course of the mission, we became very familiar with snakes.

The motor pool had a tiny road going out the back of it down to a nice stream. The soldiers would drive their vehicles into the stream and scrub all the mud off in it. We had a 20 ton crane in the platoon that was the biggest thing in the company. One day it rained really hard and we told everyone to stay in the motor pool and do maintenance on their vehicles. We had a guy named Greenwald that was one of the crane operators, and he decided to take the crane down to the river and wash it. He claimed that he thought that the river crossing was in the motor pool and all we told him to do was to stay in the motor pool. The reason for the restriction to the motor pool was that the rain had made the roads like axle grease -too slippery to drive on. After our concrete truck slid off the road on the way from the port to the base camp, I assumed that everyone knew the hazards of the wet clay. We were "grounded" because it was too dangerous to move any equipment anywhere. The 20 ton crane was cool. It had normal driving mode, and "crab" mode, and "circle" mode. Crab was when all wheels turned the same way and the crane would move sideways. Circle was when all the wheels turned to make the crane go in a tight circle. When Greenwald took the massive crane down the grease-slick tiny steep road, he didn't take long to lose control. As the crane started to slide, in a panic, Greenwald slapped the crane into Crab and it went straight for the side of the road, for the big drop-off down the side of the hill. The crane did indeed roll sideways down the hill, and the little glass operator's cab was crushed flat. For some reason, in the investigation afterwards, Greenwald insisted that he was inside of the cab. He insisted that he did not "abandon ship", but stayed with the crane in a valiant attempt to recover it from the slide. It was obvious this was not the case, and was not even possible. Anyone that had stayed in that cab would be a human pancake. The fact that he disobeyed orders and did something incredibly stupid weren't what Greenwald was embarrassed about, it was the thought that he was a chicken and jumped out of the cab before the crane rolled over that he could not confess. And that was the only smart thing he did that day.

You really got a hold on me

I have an old cat named Friendly that is getting to be a little crazy in her old age. She has this strange thing going on where it's as if she can't retract her claws. This is usually displayed when she wants some affection and doesn't feel she's getting it, but I discovered another instance lately. She has a "cat bed" that is a little square with a covered wagon-like hood over it, made of fabric, filled with cushioning, and lined with a sheep's skin/wool kind of liner. She loves to get into this little bed and does what my wife calls "pushy toes" where they knead with their front paws. I think this is a throwback to milking motions and is probably an indication of extreme contentment.

Recently, I started finding the little cat bed further and further away from her little corner by the heater vent where we keep it. I figure she's getting her claws stuck in it and dragging it across the floor before it comes loose.

I've often thought claws were cool. This totally violent and powerful feature that can go "snick" and disappear behind soft pads. You have to imagine what it would be like to have claws. There must be some kind of muscle where you think "claws out" and they stick out, and you think "claws in" and they come back in. I've never operated my own set of claws personally, but cats make it look pretty simple and natural. So how do you forget to be able to retract them? Is that a form of cat PTSD?

I was describing this to my wife and I realized something else about sinking your claws into something and not being able to let go. It's a lot like certain people when they get on an uncomfortable subject. We usually take a countertop corner, pencil or towel to dislodge our cat Friendly when she gets her claws into something and won't let go. I wish it was that easy in conversation.

Oh say you can't see

I was recently using the analogy of society as a body and I asserted that news organizations are the body's eyes. Information is channelled to the brain through the eyes, and information is channelled from the media out to society at large.

Right wing bloviators are often fond of saying that the media has a liberal bias. They like to call it "The Mainstream Media". I've heard many statements about how the media has a agenda and they are trying to steer the country in the wrong direction. These are usually people that watch Fox News and O'Reilly and listen to Rush Limbaugh, so I shouldn't take it too seriously. I hear them saying that the media concentrates only on the negative things in Iraq and aren't showing all the good that's being done there. These are the same people that start saying "Remember 9/11, those terrorists are going to attack again any time now" when an election is in the works and their Republican champions need to be reelected.

I get tired of the simple and effective way that fearmongers and sensationalists can drag whole segments of society over to their way of thinking. In a recent This WNYC Radiolab broadcast, they reviewed the old War of the Worlds radio show. Many people were fooled by a newscast style dramatization of an Alien Invasion in 1938. What many people don't know is that it happened again in Quito Ecuador and Buffalo New York. The point they were trying to make was that people are susceptible to deception. They pointed out that the formula of the broadcast was the voice of a newscaster calmly describing some terror or catastrophe, similar to Edward R. Murrow's description of the Blitz in London during WWII. People like to hear from news authorities that things are dire, but they can explain it calmly. They also mentioned FDR's fireside chats as similar formula: things are bad, but we understand what's going on and we're under control.

Hype and hysteria are irresistible to the average person. The Radiolab broadcast showed how news organizations like to lead with some kind of horrible hype and hook you in so you'll watch the whole broadcast. "What are you feeding your children that can KILL them? Coming up soon after a word from our sponsor."

It wouldn't be so disturbing if people weren't so gullible. I get several emails a week that are forwards of some crisis or another that always proves to be a complete fabrication. My boss dropped an email on my desk with a caption "Interesting" scribbled on it about how much more taxes we were paying under Clinton. I Googled it and found it's source to the be blog "Thoughts of a Conservative Christian". In the piece, the author sites a taxpayer.org or some such organization that gave him the numbers. Two seconds later, I'm on that site and interestingly, its cover page is dedicated to debunking the piece that led me to them. Does nobody check any facts any more? People especially like to hear about things that reinforce what they already believe, and they react with horror and anger at anything they don't already believe. Look at Creationists reaction to Evolution or many people's reaction to Climate Change science.

And they usually say it about the news organizations that are out there actually gathering information, checking facts, and presenting valid news. "Why do you have to focus on all the bad things?" they might ask. Because there are bad things happening, and the first step to prevent or fix the bad things that happen is to look the problem over without flinching. To say that news is biased and must be controlled, censored or repudiated is a real dangerous step. This is like saying you want to cut out your own eyes or put on blinders and try to navigate in the world. The solution isn't to shoot the messenger, but to track down the real problems and try to solve them.

What's the Plan

Often in life, we are obsessed with planning everything in detail. We plan meals, vacations, sales quotas, home redecorating, retirement, budgets, parties, dates, what car we are going to buy, what we are going to say, and what we are going to wear. There's something uniquely human about our desire to plan everything.

It occurred to me that all this desire to think about the future course of things comes to a grinding halt in one conspicuous area. Thoughts of our impending doom. We don't want to think about our bodies failing or how we might die. We spend a considerable amount of time avoiding thinking about it. We spend a furious amount of time planning for everything else that comes between now and then.

It occurred to me that if we spent just a little bit of time thinking about our own mortality when making all our other plans, we might eat healthier, exercise more, and treat our friends and family with a little more love and respect. This doesn't always happen. Many of the people in the hospital or just in poor health today ate, drank, or smoked their way into that condition without much thought about where they were headed. People take the easy path of doing what pleases them, indulging in their vices and expend as little effort exerting themselves as possible. Not everyone, but most people. The planning is all about the things they love or want to do and not about how they are going to finish their life.

But we also plan for what happens after that. It's called religion. I think many people think about religion in a negligent manner. They look at it as a country club membership. They'll pay their dues by going to church when they can and contributing what they can. They'll say they believe and try to live a pious life, when it occurs to them. They may not have any real control over what happens after they die, but they will plan and act as if they do.

Sometimes, I wonder if people are really just fooling themselves. How do they know they're signed up for the right religion and doing the right things to get into heaven? What if they die and instead of the pearly gates, Zeus spends eternity berating them for not offering enough animal sacrifices? There was a South Park episode where a bunch of people died all at once and they were being sorted out in heaven, and someone in the crowd shouts out "Who was right? What is the one true religion?" and God or St. Peter says, "The correct answer is.... Mormons." You can hear people in the crowd going "What!? No way!"

I'm not an atheist. I'm of the belief that we don't know, can't know, and won't get to know what happens after we die until we die. Anything can happen. We could simply stop existing, nothing that was us may continue at all. It's hard to imagine, hard to believe, because it seems like such an insult, but it could happen. We could get recycled, reincarnated and reborn (what if it's no guarantee that you'll be human?). We could have something else entirely happen that we don't even have a frame of reference to understand. We could have any one of the religions in the world's story be the one and only thing that happens, or we could have each person's individual belief come to pass for that person. I kind of like the idea that your own personal force of will and belief will manifest itself - makes you feel powerful to imagine that's true.

To me, we don't get to know what's on the other side of life. It's a lot like a singularity, the universe, the big bang. They call it a singularity because there's no way of knowing what happens on the other side of that point in time. Some physicists believe that the universe may be like an enormous single stroke engine. It could be continuously expanding, collapsing, and being reborn in an endless cycle. To not know something isn't necessarily a bad thing. Often it's a good starting point for knowledge. I like to listen to everyone's idea of what they think the answer to this question is. I think often they just believe what they want to believe, what gives them comfort. What gives me comfort is to keep an open mind and wait and find out when it happens to me.

And to eat well and exercise enough. I would like to plan a little for the physical demise.

Temporal Binocular vision

My wife was telling me about something that she read in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. The assertion was that Middle-easterners are focused on history and Americans are focused on the future. My wife believes \that history should play a part in the decisions we make, and that those decisions are for what will happen in the future.

I thought about what she said about history and future, east and west, Muslim and Christian. I believe that Science Fiction has always appealed to me because it is a way of hoping for a better future (and sometimes showing a worse future to avoid). I think in some ways, it is my theology.

The problem is that either option, a person that only looks to the past, or a person that only looks to the future is like someone with only one eye. Using both eyes, you have binocular vision and you can focus on something and take in it's depth (actually, you have depth perception with binocular vision, so the analogy comes close).

New technology is a double edged sword. If you charge toward the future with a new innovation you have to keep in mind the effects. If you do not have a good idea of what happened up to now, or what usually happens when someone makes a similar change, you can have unintended consequences. Ignoring the past can cause problems, either with the technology itself or with society's resistance to change.

Only through being grounded in the past can you learn from it and move confidently into the future. This isn't just introducing technology, but in politics and diplomacy, too. Look at Iraq for instance. If we paid the slightest attention to Viet Nam, we would have known that it was not going to be easy, but instead, we just looked at securing oil for now. Sometimes politics are short sighted.

The problem with many people that are focusing on the future is that they are focusing on the future of next month or next year, and not 5, 10, 50, or 100 years from now. In a way, it's not even fair to say that they are looking toward the future, they are looking toward their immediate short term needs. This country used to do things like buy the Louisiana purchase because they knew there would be a time when it would make sense to control all the land between the seas, this during a time when a trip of 100 miles could be a week long ordeal, and there wasn't even a way to get across the country yet. That's foresight and vision. What we do now that passes for thinking about the future is the equivalent of wondering what's for lunch.

We're getting a little better with science in analyzing long term impacts of current decisions. Climate change science is helping to focus scientific thinking in this respect. Evolution, Geology, and Astrophysics all teach us to think about things in the long term. In science, it's easier to predict things. Certain principles can be studied and replicated, most fields of study have similar patterns that can be expected.

This vein of thought when focused on politics is not very satisfying. Politicians are not rewarded for looking at the long view. The current news cycle is the predominant focus, and the 2 year election cycle prevents anyone from thinking beyond the immediate future. True leaders had a sense of the length of history and their place in it. Many people do not realize that Abraham Lincoln was horribly unpopular in his time, but his steadfast focus on mending the Union saw him through some terrible times and kept him working through all the setbacks until he succeeded. Now he is considered the best President we have ever had. John Kennedy put us on the moon, in a time scale that was beyond what he could have hoped to still be President, if he had lived and been re-elected. We need this kind of leadership today when we look at the way we will use energy and what we will do with our nation's debt in the future. Because one thing is for sure about the future, stick around long enough, and it will come to pass.