Antigua driving

19 March 2005

There is an intersection near the apartment. At this intersection there are no visible stop signs, and no indication as to which of the five converging lanes is a one-way thoroughfare. Cars come flying from all five points on the compass, following a logic which defies characterization, and decide, as if on impulse, whether to roar through the intersection, or stop, or slow down, or slam on brakes.

The rules, as I understand them, are as follows:

• Rights of tonnage do apply. If you are bigger, and care less about your vehicle, you own the road. Thus,
• Bus drivers have right-of-way over everyone. They care the least, and are the biggest, baddest, and most intensely decorated vehicles on the road. On the front of these monsters, you can read the slogans, including "Jesus is my Copilot". If so, he has his eyes closed, too, with his mouth forming a silent scream.
• Entering the intersection involves a blind turn for three directions of traffic. Rules one and two come into play at this point.
• Left-turns at this intersection freak your passengers out – the road coming in from the left is for incoming traffic only.
• Horns are to be used liberally. Greetings, warnings, anger, frustration, all expressed through Morse code cacophony. And, of course, real anger expresses itself with a tattoo of "shave and a haircut" – the most dreadful insult this side of Belgium.
• Stopped cars may be dead. Do not wait your turn.
• Slow cars must be passed. Especially if you drive a bus.
• If you get there first, the sidewalk is yours.
• Check with your copilot, then ignore oncoming traffic.
• Crossing guards wear uniforms to make them more visible. They are targets. Do not attempt to follow their instructions, for the arm windmill you see is not anything more than their attempt to regain balance after their last collision with a bus.

Successful navigation of the intersection leads you toward town. This "straight" path has two war-battered concrete barriers in the middle. These are not intended to stop traffic, merely to dissuade bus drivers. Passage through these concrete gates of hell gives my car 2" of berth on each side. I am not even close to the largest vehicle to pass through them. Many are five inches wider than my Blazer.

Driving through the intersection is an awful experience.

And walking it is worse. I visited Boston to visit my sister once. Pedestrians, she explained, are sacred. Much like the cow in India, no one seems to care that the pedestrian serves no real purpose, it is a protected creature. In New Orleans, this is not the case; pedestrians are viewed as an oddity to be tolerated, but accorded no special privileges. Like a squirrel, if one gets run over, there is no real sadness. It is, after all, just a pedestrian.

Antigua is different still. Adjacent to the intersection near my apartment is an inaptly named crosswalk. Crosshairs, is more like it. Vehicles avidly search and destroy pedestrians coming out of the social security office at the corner. The scene is part Asteroids, part Frogger.

The only vehicles that will occasionally cede right of way to a pedestrian are the kamikaze motorized tricycle rickshaw go-kart taxis, named tuk-tuks. These demonspawn and the 12-year-old kids that drive them are adept at avoiding everything, but are very small and lightweight, and can be shoved into a wall by a stiff breeze. It is hard to pass one without thinking of bumper-carring them into a wall.

I imagine that there might be some situation where I would consider riding in one. I am not positive, though.

Nevertheless, you will never see one that is not jammed with seven people. Groceries, the family chicken, all five kids, and Dad inside, with Mom and papoose hanging on to the door, one foot jammed as an umbilicus to keep her attached to the flying tuk-tuk.

The week was a pretty productive one on some fronts, less so on others. I worked my way through the washing of the second box of lithic material, and have turned in two grant proposals. Fingers crossed.

It took a couple of tries to submit the Sigma Xi, but it was completed. The concept is good, but I do not know whether it is fundable or not. SX doesn't like paying for lab time, and I am asking for money for sample prep; I can't say whether the distinction will impress them.

My first try at submission was typical. I went to the neighborhood internet café down the street, and instead of reading the flashdrive, it reformatted it. Which meant I lost my grant proposal text.

Fortunately, it was saved on the computer. I explained to the guy that it had erased my drive, and he said "Switch computers". I explained the situation again – switching computers would not help me at all - and said "I will return".

And promptly didn't.

Reloaded the file to the flashdrive and went to a different, more reliable café. Once I started up the process, I realized that I had saved the grant number that I needed to access the file on the flashdrive (recently erased), and I had no printed copy. So I had no access to the proposal I had already started, and I wasn't sure that the letters of recommendation would be directed to my new grant if they came from Will and Kit for the previous grant. So I even had to re-request letters of recommendation. Note to self – make sure that everything is backed up and that there is a hard copy of EVERYTHING.

Lithics washing was a quick process. One of the archaeologists, Yovany, was unable to throw anything away. So his lots of chert are huge. I washed two huge bags of chert and there were only a couple of dozen artifacts – the rest were unmodified cobbles. A few good things come out of it – I get to see the true assortment of building materials, I don't have to worry that he missed something, and I get to see what the variability in chert is, without worrying that the knappers only brought the good stuff up from the arroyo.

One evening I went out to work on my knapping (I have to knap my own tools from local chert for my experiments), and immediately drew an audience. One guy started asking questions about the antlers, how much did they cost, etc. I put a price on it, but only in passing. Suddenly he wanted to sell me some. We talked for a while and he asked me if I knew where this black stuff came from. I said, "That is obsidian. It comes from volcanoes."

"Not so." He replied. "When it rains, the lightning comes down and hits the ground next to a tree, and you can find it there at the base of the tree. Now this," he said, picking up a nodule of chert, "This comes from a volcano."

"Oh". What else could I say? (This wisdom was later confirmed by another, unsolicited comment from another observer. What do I know?)

He eventually went inside and the kids that had joined us stayed to watch the free show. I talked to them while knapping; they loved the fact that they could cut cardboard with the flakes I made. One looked over at my leprous arm and asked in alarm "What is wrong with your arm?"

I looked down to see what he was talking about. Brand new pink skin peeked out from under the burnt outer layer, like chicken al carbon. I proceeded to explain about sunburn. The younger one (7yo) asked the older (12) if he would get burned, too.

I interrupted, "No, that is just a gringo thing."

"Why don't I burn?"

"Because your skin is dark, not light like gringos. But even if the skin looks different, we aren't really that different, are we?"

He thought about it for a moment, but remained unconvinced.

I said "Really, what is the difference between you and me?" I expected a litany of you talk funny, you are pale, you are rich, whatever.

He looked up at me and said without batting an eyelash, "You're tall."

How easy it is to forget what is important to little kids.

I experienced my first earthquake Thursday morning. I was making myself a breakfast of quesadilla and tea, and noted that the dishes were rattling. I honestly thought nothing of it, just mentally attributed it to a heavy truck going through the neighborhood. Matt came in about 5 seconds later. "Did you feel that?" He grinned. "It always wakes me up, and I try to figure out whether that one is just a prelude to a big one."

I tried to recall feeling anything, and still can't recall anything specific. Other than the plates rattling. But Ingrid was also up, and happily pointed to the creaky shelves on which we have loaded about three tons of artifacts, and said "Still standing!" I was pretty excited, but underwhelmed, by my first real earthquake. Trucks in New Orleans shake the house more than that. Ingrid pointed out later, though, that I would become more attuned to them – there have been a couple dozen since I arrived.

Yesterday was a tough day. I got my shower, but that was the last of the water for the day. Apparently, water shortages are not unusual, and people who live in wealthy neighborhoods have large water tanks atop the house to assuage the problem. We do not live in an affluent neighborhood, and we ran out of water (it reappeared magically 14 hours later). Fortunately, I had already washed more than enough lithics to start work, and spent the day deciding whether a little damage on the edge of this cobble was enough to call it artifactual, or whether it should go in the cobble bag.

After ten hours of that, Matt and I went to the internet café to check email and get virus update for my laptop. On the way there, we stopped and admired a carpeta being made. Part Mardi Gras, part palm Sunday, people make elaborate carpets for the processions, or andas, involving grass, grain, and sometimes sand. They take pre-made
templates of decorative motifs cut out of masonite, fill them with dyed sand, and remove the template to leave a design on the street.

The design we stopped to admire was a multi-colored sand carpeta, complete with swans and floral designs. Amazing attention to detail, awesome artistic endeavor, and intentionally ephemeral. It is intended to be walked on by the people in the procession.

While we were in the café, it started to storm heavily, and the anda came by. Dozens of very wet, very unhappy-looking ten-year-old girls walked by, carrying an impossibly heavy float. I kept looking to see if the adults walking with the procession were helping with the load, but they were simply there to stabilize.

Matt and I walked around the corner to grab a beer from the local biergarten – an authentic German beer hall – and started to order some food to go with it. I ran back and got Ingrid – we had talked about eating dinner out – and had to stiff-arm my way through the procession. I got a look at more of it, and in addition to the sodden 10-year-olds, there was a smaller float for wet six-year old girls and a tiny one for drenched four-year-olds. By the time the four year olds passed the biergarten they were all crying from the discomfort of miles spent carrying the float.

Finally waded through enough of the crowd, got Ingrid, and walked back to find a beer waiting for me. We ate some wonderful pretzels, sauerkraut, and sausages, and drank beer. Not a bad way to spend the evening.

Now we just have to survive Holy Week. Today was nothing but fireworks going off every thirty seconds all day. And I am told that it gets worse. Fireworks are pretty much non-stop here during non-celebratory weeks; I can only imagine what the next week is going to be like. The village where we are doing our fieldwork, I am told, has gone from having the preferred palmetto thatch roofs to shingle, 5-V, and tile, all in the past twenty years. Thatch is better – everyone says so. And it has the weight of millennia of history behind it. They simply couldn't keep fireworks from landing on roofs and burning the thatch. And there was no way of stopping the setting off of fireworks. Reminiscent of New Orleans – bad things happen when you drink and drive, so, oh, I don't know, let's just take away all the cars.

That much change. In twenty years.

Have a blessed, and quiet, Holy Week.

From the land where men are strong

Women are good-looking,
And all pedestrians are bruised at the thigh....

Salesmen

29 March 2005

The Guatemalan equivalent to the telemarketer is the door-to-door salesman. I am convinced that if I wait long enough, everything will eventually come to my door. None of the salesmen are offensive. Some are inexplicable, some just bizarre, and some just out and out funny. This morning, a man rings the doorbell and offers Ingrid an ironing board. A door-to-door ironing board salesman. I wonder what the demand for those is, and just how often he makes a sale.

Also this morning, a truck drives up with a loudspeaker blasting some guy's voice, shredding the nice quiet of the morning. Problem is, there is not a word of the noise that is intelligible. There are no real consonants, just long quadripthongs: "IIIIOOOOAAAAOOOp," the speaker says. "IIIIAAAAAAAAOOOEEEEOOOOp."

Apparently, translated from Universal Unintelligible into Spanish and then to English, that means "Get your fresh pineapples, straight from my garden to your door!" The truck was filled with beautiful pineapples.

The flower vendor comes by on Mondays. The tortilla lady is a regular fixture in the neighborhood. The bread truck comes by every afternoon. Another loudspeaker truck came by announcing announced something, and a bunch of dog owners ran out, dogs in tow, to get a shot for their dogs. Yet another loudspeaker places a single consonant in the middle of the message: "G." "IIIAAAAGAAAAA!" does not translate, but it is, apparently, the propane vendor.

The colmo, however, was a guy who was a door-to-door buyer. He knocked on the door and offered to buy empty perfume bottles, and showed her a price list for how much he would pay for each kind of bottle. What a racket – buying empty bottles of Chanel No.5 and refilling with Eau de Antigua! Ingrid said she didn't have any to sell. I fully expect him to come back, now that he knows she doesn't have any. That is what free enterprise is all about – making a market and/or demand for what you have to sell. I also found a woman who sells brass doorknockers and other brass pieces in the neutral ground in front of the market. I went to talk to her, and she also had a gold Guatemalan coin from 1860, a couple of silver Guatemalan pesos from 1863, and a piece of eight, that she admitted was fake. There were also pieces of obsidian, including an artifact – a prismatic blade made of obsidian. And then there were the pieces of jade.

Well I found some jade. My last entry ended with our hero having a good meal in the German bar and restaurant. What I didn't share in last week's entry was that on the way there, I spotted, in the cobblestone street, a cobble of beautiful greenstone. I went back the next morning, and tried to pry it out of the street – with my good knife. In an odd combination of not wanting to break my good knife and not wanting the sidewalk-sweeping shopkeeper across the street to come over and investigate, I decided to postpone my mining activities for a less-heavily trafficked time. Which, for those of you who are not familiar with my schedule, comes naturally when I wake up in the morning. Usually around 5:00 a.m.

So the scene is set. I grab the archaeologist's trusty Marshalltown™ trowel, and head out before breakfast to abscond with a street cobble. Turns out that they are cemented in place. Fortunately, the cement bond at the base is pretty weak, and it pops out within 20 minutes of when I started. It would have been sooner, if I had been able to work steadily at its removal. But due to the surreptitious nature of the task (and questionable legality – is it illegal to steal a street cobble? Machelle? Oregon?) I decided to play the part of "Gringo Asleep Beside the Road" (a non-speaking role) every time someone would pass.

But when I brought it home and cleaned it up, I have a large cobble of really lovely greenstone. I suppose it is serpentine – true jade is found in another highland Guatemala location, not near Antigua – but serpentine was also used in the same way that jade was.

Of course, that has made me keep my eyes peeled for more. And though there are some more, few of them have good color, and they are spread far and wide across the city. A few more recon missions through the city, and I'll have enough for my replica experiments on jade.

Tuesday afternoon, I had driven back from the internet café, leaving Matt there to do some more emailing. When he got in, he told me to go back and check my email. Again. Between when I left and he left, the director of the National Science Foundation emailed him to say that, based on his reviewer letters, Matt was going to be recommended for
funding through NSF. All of it. A proposal that had only been submitted 2 weeks before. I have never heard of anyone ever getting it pushed through that quickly. Just amazing.

And I ran to check my email. Nothing. And every day since, also nothing. I even emailed Will at one point, and he must have heard the panic in my tone. Matt and I submitted at the same time, and even though I know the process by which grant recipients are chosen, I got to feeling concerned that I still hadn't heard. I asked Will if I should be concerned, or whether, as I already knew, the reviewers had simply not returned the reviews yet. After all, the web site says to allow six months, and the archaeology division turns it around in less than three. Will wrote me while he was on vacation to talk me off the ledge. It worked. I am still anxious to hear, especially now that I know it is possible to hear results so quickly, but the panic is subsided.

Holy Week was interesting. From the descriptions I had heard, I thought that people would be jamming the streets, and the whole of the highlands would empty as throngs packed the narrow cobblestone streets, with endless fireworks being set off. But the reality was quite different.

One firework incident did get to me. I was working on the lithics one morning, and my laptop informed me that I needed to plug in the computer to avoid losing my work. Which was fine, but it was plugged in. After checking all the connections, I unplugged it and went to plug it back in. The moment the connection was made, fireworks went off right outside my window. Five seconds into the assault, my brain started sending frantic messages to the hand: "JUST FIREWORKS! JUST FIREWORKS!" The hand, of course, knowing that the brain had no idea what was going on, continued to twitch in the death throes of non-electrical electrocution. And is twitching still.

But the majority of the week was calm. On Palm Sunday, after Mass, I walked with the crowd of people to follow the procession down the street. It was pretty moving. Ingrid, my roommate, spotted me in the crowd, and we walked down to another crowded intersection to see the procession pass by. Years of New Orleans Mardi Gras have made me feel more comfortable in a jostling crowd, and this was not a particularly bad one. In the middle of the wait, Ingrid started talking to one of the brightly dressed Maya ladies. She turned to me and said that the woman had caught a man with his hand in Ingrid's purse. But she had seen it and scared him away.

A couple of minutes later she realized that her camera was missing. His hand had gone through the hole he had cut in the bottom of her bag. But he had not gotten the wallet or, more importantly, Matt's Nicorette we had picked up for him. The camera was a ph,d model (push here, dummy) and was not worth much, but it is still a weird feeling to be robbed. She was amazingly philosophical about it.

We wandered back to the house and put in a good afternoon of work. Unlike New Orleans, which completely shuts down for Mardi Gras, Antigua didn't change much. There were more people, and hotels were booked, but even on Good Friday, shops were open and people were working, with a few exceptions.

We waited until late morning on Good Friday to go out. There were processions that began at 3:00 am. We worked until we smelled the incense through the window, and walked out to join the party. Mostly, it was more of the same, with alfombras of pine needles or sawdust (not sand, as I thought) decorated with numerous motifs. The processions were interesting; the teenage girls carrying the float was still poignant, but perhaps not as shocking the seventeenth time as it was the first. It was interesting to note, however, that the Virgin float (she always follows the Jesus float) depicted her has having a sword stuck through her chest, from above the shoulder almost straight down.

We went to the square for the crucifixion scene. I was under the impression that they put a person up on the cross. Not so. Between the two thieves they raised the carved wooden statue of Jesus.

Meanwhile, Ingrid and I ate our way across the square. We stopped first for some ceviche, a wonderful concoction that some of you are familiar with, made of some combination of uncooked seafood and a lime salsa - the lime actually cooks the seafood. Those of you who have had it know – it is wonderful. But it is also food typical for the beachfront – the fishermen bring raw materials in, the cooks add lime, tomato, cilantro onion and pepper, and you sit overlooking the beach. Matt and I have been daring each other to try highland ceviche – our form of Guatemalan roulette, since Antigua is not anywhere near a beach. Ingrid and I got some from a vendor on the square, and it was actually quite good: a delightful blend of shrimp, shark, and salsa. Two odd things about it – one was that the shrimp and shark were stored on ice, the other was the presence of Salsa Ingles (Worchestershire sauce) in the finished product. The salsa ingles was actually OK – it provided a nice salty touch to the tartness of the lime. But the shark on ice thing meant that it was prepared in lime elsewhere and then put on ice, then replaced in lime for the ceviche.

Odd production, but I suppose it keeps lime from sloshing all over the truck on the drive from the coast to the highlands. And it was quite tasty. And I haven't had a need for the antibiotics yet, so it must have been OK.

After the ceviche, we still had time to kill before the hoisting of the Christ. So we walked around until we found a girl carrying a tray of 15 or so individual ice cream cones. It was pretty warm, and we decided that ice cream would be just the sort of treat we wanted.

Followed her back to her home base, and got the cones from the man with the cart.
Ice cream carts are everywhere. And all of them have infernal little bells that get rung incessantly. After this vendor gave the girl refills for her tray, he turned to us. We had to ask what flavor it was – I have never seen ice cream quite that shade of yellow.

Vanilla. Who knew that vanilla came in day-glo yellow? No flavor to speak of, but fun nevertheless. After the ice cream was gone, it occurred to me that the ice cream the girl was carrying around did not melt while she made her sales. 80° and more, and the dang things were not melting. I guess it makes a difference how much lard you put in the mix.

The amazing thing along the parade routes, as in the neighborhoods, is the vendors. They are interspersed among the crowds, no big deal. But between the last anda and the sweepers (who remind me of the Rocky and Bullwinkle parade where the guy is sweeping up afterwards) is a parade of vendors. Right behind the Virgin are guys with candies on poles, cotton candy, sunglasses, balloons, water, cokes, ice cream, Spongebob Squarepants puppets, they have it all. There was even a guy carrying three nets filled with hand-painted kickballs.

Now, you would think that kickballs would not be an ideal item to try and sell in a crowd setting. Beach balls, sure. Balloons, no problem. Sunglasses, cokes, food: yes, yes, and yes. But something you are supposed to kick? Hmm. Seems like a formula for disaster to me.

I sought one of the vendors out before the crucifixion scene to buy sunglasses. Bought a pair of scratched Nike sunglasses for 25Q (~$3) and sat down. It was the most expensive pair of sunglasses I have ever owned, pro-rated for use. Fifteen minutes later, I am walking out of a store and put on the glasses – SPRING! – the arm falls off in my hand. I found a safety pin in the street to put them back together (it didn't work) but never found that vendor again.

Another odd thing that I saw happened just before one of the processions came our way. It was still about 30 minutes out, but suddenly there was a horde of ice cream vendors all coming towards us at the same time. Ingrid looked over, and said "Do you think they
know something we don't?"

It really did look like rats leaving a sinking ship, or the animals fleeing in advance of an earthquake. All moving as fast as they could (which, given the crowd, was admittedly slow) and dinging their bells full blast. Still haven't figured out what they were fleeing.

After the processions went by, we grabbed more food. It was a bit like Jazz Fest in New Orleans in that regard – you do something, then eat. Do something else, eat something else. We bought a mixed grill – pork adobado, beef, two kinds of sausage, guacamole, salsa, handmade black corn tortillas and salad – all for less than I paid for my defunct sunglasses. All cooked on la plancha, with some grilled green onions for good measure.
I have some pictures that will be developed this week (disposable camera – keep your fingers crossed) of one entire procession, from the creation of the alfombra to the clean up afterwards.

At the hour that Christ died, all of the purple in the city turned to black. Flags and pennants all over were exchanged; robes of purple were turned inside out or exchanged. It was a pretty moving spectacle. The other thing that struck me was the hanging of Judas in effigy. There are a number of elements here that I don't pretend to understand, but basically effigies of Judas are hanged around the city, usually with a handwritten sign over his head. He is, I am told, a conflation of a number of different individuals, including San Simon, Judas, Maximon, and the ladino landowner.

After the excitement of Holy Week, its culmination at Easter was a bit of a let down. There were no processions, and everything seemed to be back to normal. The week then settled down to a pretty heavy work schedule, to make up for the time we took off to see the processions. Matt left yesterday for Utah to go to the national meetings for archaeology. He is giving two papers at the conference – one on soil classification, the other an overview of the site.

I, meanwhile, have been measuring my rocks. And dreaming of jade. I have a new target, as green as the one I picked up last week. The problem is its location on the busiest thoroughfare. That means that even at 5 a.m., every car, bicycle and pedestrian funnels into the city via this route. I am working up a plan that will pop it out without me having to hammer through all the concrete. I'll let you know how it works.

And then I'll have something that I can sell door-to-door. Excuse me, ma'am? Would you like to buy a piece of jade? How about a set of ginsu knives? It slices, it dices! Look at that tomato! I have to go now. There is a vendor at the door, and I have to go find out what I need.

Door-to-door salesmen in Guate.

6 April 2005

I hired the services of a door-to-door salesman on Sunday afternoon.

As I was coming home from the internet café, a guy named LuisArturodelaGarzaHernándezParaServirle (I am still trying to get used to the fact that "AtYourService is not really a last name) stopped me and asked, after looking down at my sad excuse for tennis shoes, if I maybe had any shoes at my house that needed shining. I said yes, but I was waiting on my paycheck. I claimed poverty, I claimed student status, I explained that some gringos are poor, I used every excuse in the book, but he shrugged it all off and told me the shoeshine, done on site, was 2Q. That is roughly 25 cents.

OK, for that, I can afford to have my shoes shined. So he followed me home, explaining the whole way why he was in need of the work. He is epileptic (see the scars on my head where I hit it when I have a fit?) and the meds cost 500Q for a pack of ten, and he has to take one of them twice a day. And his mom has polio. And he has no father. I grabbed my boots from my room and we sat out on the sidewalk - I knapped for a while, and he brought my shoes to a military polish. When he was done, he told me that fifty women would now throw themselves at me, because I had such shiny shoes. I said I was looking forward to that, but what was my wife going to say?

An old woman who was passing by looked at me with a twinkle, and said, "She knows. Wives can see everything and know it all." And then she was gone. I believe her.

Later in the day I was approached by a pen salesman. He was selling ballpoint pens (bearing such auspicious names as Vioxx, Fox and Associates Dental Group, and Smith and Karlowski Law Firm) for a small donation. He helped in a halfway house, where he was a counselor for gangbangers. An ex-drug user himself, he knew how important it was to get the boys off drugs. The donation helped the house, where the government couldn't. I have no idea whether it was true or not, but I gave him 5Q (for the story – I didn't take a pen) and wished him luck.

Begging here is an art form. There are Maya children who hang out by the teller machine and beg pesos from every gringo that goes in. Cute kids. They hang from arms and hug legs, swinging with reckless abandon if you stand still, which I did while waiting on Matt to emerge. One of the older ones was coaching the youngest on how to ask for food.

Without ever moving her mouth, the seven-year old ventriloquist said "Necesito comida (I need food)"

"Necesito comida" parroted the protégé, from her position draped around my leg.

"¿Me puede dar cinco pesos?"

The apprentice-in-miniature repeated the words. The seven-year old master never made eye contact with me, and the apprentice never stopped hugging my leg. I finally extricated myself from her grasp, and shook her hand. It had three quetzales in it, and she almost lost them when she shook my hand. Not the best technique for keeping your money, to my way of thinking.

But everyone has an angle. For many it is no angle, just the dreadful reality. I have been approached by a woman wearing gloves so she could scoot along the street – she had no legs. Others, however, have included able-bodied men with conjunctivitis, and even a bushy-haired gringo writer hippie. An ancient man came and rang my doorbell to ask for help. I gave him a few quetzals, and he went away. Women who beg tend to use the children to make more piteous their plight (sin hombre, they always say).

I feel odd saying "no" when comparatively I have so much, and when a few cents can make so much of a difference (try giving a nickel to a beggar in New Orleans). But I also have to pick and choose my charities, because I will be broke plenty soon enough. So I give when I have small change, and feel bad when I don't.

Saturday, Ingrid and I hiked up the hill behind the house (Matt was in Salt Lake City at the annual meetings for the Society for American Archaeology), and went up to the Plaza Santiago at the top. The climb was pretty tough and dusty, and we were both winded by the time we hit the summit. Then we followed the hill down, and we realized we were sitting on top of the Cerro de la Cruz, the most picturesque spot in the city. Spectacular view. We then picked our way back down a different way, serendipitously ending up right in our backyard. I think we'll probably take that route if we go again.

Cerro de la Cruz, however, is a pretty sketchy place, and bandidos frequent the area and pick off the unwary tourist. Literally – some have been killed for their wallets. We didn't realize that was where we were headed, or we would have bailed. But pretty, mercy, how pretty it was. I saw parts of the city I have not visited, and realized that I have unintentionally been avoiding certain streets while walking around town. I have since rectified that particular tendency, and widened my collection of streets.

Sunday's mass was nice, with extensive mention being made of the pope, and also, since it was the first Sunday after Easter, it was the day for visiting the shut-ins; dozens of men in uncomfortable-looking black suits milled about in front of the church until the priest came out. Then they all loaded up in a couple of cars. Fifteen minutes later, a car with loudspeakers drove by our apartment, a woman singing loudly (and not terribly well) from inside the car, magnified a thousand times through the loudspeaker, and projected across the neighborhood. In front of the car was a station wagon, the roof of which was fitted with an altar on which was perched a statue of an angel in white.

The priest walked up the steps right next to our apartment, accompanied by a number of suited men, one of whom was ringing a bell like it was going out of style. And then the cars left. I presume they came back to pick him up a little bit later, but all I heard was
the dreadful a capella singing, mercifully going away from me. It was, apparently the ecclesiastical version of the "IIIAAAAGAAAAA!" we hear from the gas vendor.

Mass was beautiful. I actually got to see the results of something I had read about. The reason that churches are oriented E-W is to take advantage of the lighting behind the altar. The sun rose on that crystal morning and the light exploded through the stained-glass window. Absolutely stunning effect. I had heard about the reason for the orientation of the building, but had never been inside a cathedral for sunrise services. Well worth the effort, if you have the chance.

The city is, of course, festooned in white, gold and black in memory of the late John Paul. Every business has a multicolored bow or an oversized poster commemorating his life and mourning his death.

The pictures of Semana Santa have been developed, and will be uploaded to my Dad's business web site (www.dixielumber.net, and click on "Antigua Journal") where a friend of mine is recording my journal. The pictures are a little washed out. I don't know if it is the camera or the development (it couldn't possibly be the shaking hand behind the disposable camera) that was at fault, but it gives an interesting visual image counterpoint to my descriptions. I will be stealing Matt's digital camera soon for general Antigua pictures, since I saw the results of his shots from last year's Semana Santa. The richness of the detail and the color is astounding.

Matt came back from the SAAs on Monday, and he was more relaxed than I have seen him in months. The meetings went well, and an edited volume on Motul will, Matt informed me, include a chapter on the lithics.

The deadline for the draft is December; I have some work to do.

Still no news on the grant front. I re-read part of my proposal, now that it has been a month since it was submitted (as of today), and it is not as bad as I remembered. I just need it to be "not bad" enough to get funded. Continue to keep fingers crossed.

The lithic analysis I have been doing was getting me deep into the dumps, so to speak, until yesterday morning, when I finished up analyzing a unit that had taken me a long time, and started another from a different group. The difference was night and day. I went from working with tiny pieces of shattered stone with almost no interesting traits to working with big, pretty utilized flakes. This is really good news, because it means that the elite residence where this stuff is coming from got the end product, and pretty high-quality products, whereas the knappers in the other house had to deal with huge quantities of low-quality material. I think it was not so much the awful material that was getting me down about Group G's material, it was more the sense of sameness for every lot. Now that I am seeing different stuff, it makes more sense out of what I am doing. I can look at how many flakes per tool there were, what proportion of flakes were utilized, and compare them across the site. I just wasn't seeing the petrified forest for the wood chips.

On a completely different note, my birthday falls on the 28th of December. In Latin America, that is Santos Inocentes, the day of the Innocents. It is a perfect birthday for me - the Latin equivalent of April Fools Day. Last Friday, as you all know, was April Fools,
probably my favorite holiday. My indoctrination started early (just ask my parents about the snake and the shotgun) and I have always felt unrepressed glee at even the silliest of pranks. And for those of you who received my Yucatecan journals, I am sure that there was a sense of foreboding when you read last week's entry, mailed out on March 31st. I have heard from a couple of people that they read it all the way through, to see what lies I was going to tell this year. And were a little disappointed when there was nothing there.

In fact, I even got a message from Ali, a friend of mine from Northern Illinois, in which she forbade me from contacting her on April Fools day – that in her mind, that day is permanently classified as Crorey Hell Day. I called her, of course, but without any joke to play – just to talk. She was shocked to hear from me, but we had a good conversation. We haven't seen each other in almost a decade, and narrowly missed being in Antigua at the same time – her sister adopted a pair of Guatemalan children from an orphanage here, and Ali came to help with the finalization of the adoption.

But simply surprising someone wasn't enough. I couldn't let my day pass without pulling something. A few select recipients got an email on Friday informing them that I had been mugged on the way back from one of my early-morning jade-cobble runs, and I was unhurt, but sans wallet, driver's license, twenty dollars, and ATM card. I explained it as a sort of Antigueña instant karma, where I steal the city's cobbles and she extracts her pound (sterling) of flesh in return. Not exactly up to my usual standard, but effective, since I am living in a place where it could happen. One recipient, who had scoured the earlier epistle for a joke, even asked Kathe about my ordeal. Kathe, who was unaware that I had anything planned, asked "What mugging?"

I am sure that my comeuppance is imminent, but I simply couldn't help myself.

Heh.

Don Oswaldo

15 April 2005

Last Saturday was a good day. I got two tasks accomplished – I braced the shelves that hold the pottery and went to Pastores to look at boots. The first part went pretty well. The 2x4 only cost 23Q, and I sawed it using the saw I purchased at the beginning of the season. I took it up on the roof to cut it, refusing offers of help. After about five minutes of struggling, I looked down and said "Hmm."

Matt and Ingrid both came running up the stairs. Ingrid later said that she had never before been around someone who said "Hmm" when they hurt themselves. The back of the saw had metal burrs on it, and in using my left thumb as a guide for the cut, I had sliced it open. The cut was pretty deep, and I am a bleeder. The paper towel was dripping onto the floor in 30 seconds. We used up most of the remaining gringo bandages (local band-aids, predictably, use Teflon as adhesive) trying to attach bandage to slick finger. And when something like this happens, I am always amazed at how many times I manage to whack my thumb during the day.

The trip to Pastores was, by contrast, completely without incident. We went into a half dozen or more shops, all with nearly identical boots. There was a pretty wide variety within each store, and you could get riding boots, cowboy boots, dress boots, or high-heeled boots. And they are also made to order, so if you have special tastes or wide feet, they will make the boots (by hand) for you. 250Q – roughly US30 - buys the basic cowboy boot. An alligator boot runs 1400Q. Expensive, but still cheap by gringo standards.

There was one store, obviously the most successful of them, where they sold, among other things, hooded cobra belts - they used the heads of the cobras for the belt buckle. The guy – get this - also had a pair of cobra boots. The head looked like a tassel on the top of the foot.

I didn't ask if it flopped around. Matt asked a guy about them last year, and was told that a local guy is raising them on a local farm for these belts.

Now Guatemala is home to a number of highly venomous snakes, including the very deadly fer-de-lance. Maybe it is just me, but the idea of introducing another deadly snake with no natural predators into an ecosystem that is ready made for such an animal…. well, it seems about as bright as swimming with a laptop. The good news is that once a couple of 'em escape, real estate prices in neighboring Antigua will quickly plummet.

Oddly enough, the town is not friendly at all. I am accustomed to being welcomed when I shop. I know it is crazy, but I figure that if I am in the store, perhaps to buy something, and if I smile a lot and speak politely, nice things will happen, New Orleans Winn Dixie notwithstanding. Not so here. In every store we went into, the people tending the store were grumpy and sullen.

It also makes no sense to me that there is no outlet in Antigua for the sale of the boots. Twenty stores located five minutes from Guatemala's tourist Medina (the hajj akbar is the pilgrimage to Tikal) known as Antigua. Each gringo, Guatemalteco, German, French and Cuban makes their way to Antigua on every trip to Guatemala, but never to Pastores, unless they know to go there to buy boots. Why not sell the boots in a kiosk in town, with a big sign, stating plainly "Boots Pastores"? How easily I forget that capitalist rules do not apply in Guate, and that the boot mafia puts its foot down, so to speak on the "export" of their products to the metropolis five minutes away. Go figure.

I am interested in talking to them about using some spare leather from their stocks for my microwear study. Cutting and scraping leather should be one of the items on my list of activities I am doing with the stone tools, and that would be the logical place to do work, just like Jades, S.A. would likely be the best place to work with jade here in town.

On the way back into town, we stopped at the ceviche stand down the street and had some really tasty seafood. Ingrid and Matt just got the shrimp, but I got the mixto, which had crab, shrimp, fish, mussels, all of which was delightful, and pulpo – octopus – which was a little on the tough side. Honestly, I am going to suggest to the guy in Pastores that octopus boots might be a big seller. If the meat is that tough when fresh, I can only imagine what curing it for a couple of days with tannin would do. And you already have the ink for a natural dye. I'll be the first guy on the block with octopus cowboy boots.

And probably will remain the only guy. But such is the price of being a fashionista.

Over dinner on Monday I felt my first earthquake. Pretty exciting stuff. Ingrid looked at me and asked "do you feel that?"

The answer was unequivocal. Yes, I felt it, and it got stronger over the next thirty seconds. Matt announced that if it got worse, we were headed out of the house. As soon as he said it, the house rocked with a little more force, and he yelled "keys!" and grabbed them and headed to the door.

We bumped into him from behind, as we were already headed the same way. But the impact of tectonic activity is exciting. It turned out to be a 5.4 quake originating 100km to the SW, near the border with El Salvador (where we headed to re-up the car).

The grant situation is no nearer a conclusion. I received a message from John Yellen, director of NSF Archaeology division. He basically told me to wait my turn. Two of the three reviews needed to make a decision had come in (he sends out six copies) and the typical wait was twelve weeks for all three to be returned to him. It has been five. Good news? Bad news? No news? I can't tell. Likely that the reviews were positive, or he would be waiting on more than a third review. But I don't know.

I did get my first bit of bad news on the grant front: I got turned down for the in-house Latin American Studies summer research grant. I had asked for money to hire a canoe builder to construct a canoe using traditional techniques and stone tools (which would be studied as part of my microwear analysis). The money was also to purchase a digital video camera to record the process of production. As other modes of transportation are becoming more readily available, fewer and fewer canoes are being built, and the craft is disappearing. Recording the process would be important for reasons beyond the value to my dissertation.

Will offered me money from MARI to help offset the expenses of this subproject. Electrons had scarcely traversed the wires before I had accepted the money – I am a grad student, after all. I am going to try again submitting the grant elsewhere, as soon as I figure out where.

Obtaining a flight to Atlanta to get to my grandmother's funeral was pretty tough. The agent of one carrier (the name of which is a greek letter) told my wife that bereavement fares were refundable, and therefore cost more than double a normal fare: $1195.

The travel agent on this end did a good job, coming up with a flight that was full (but we could come back and check for cancellations tomorrow) but that cost less than $400, and two others for $890 and $680. Matt's dad got pulled in and got me a fare for $520, and we bought it. I became a Matt's dad fan in a bigger way than I had ever been before, as of that moment.

All that remained was to get the car permit "renovated", an activity that can only take place at a border with another country. So Matt and I got up early Wednesday morning to drive through Guatemala City, with its terrific traffic and smog and crime and chicken buses (with their Pig Pen-esque plumes of black smoke) and make our way south to the border with El Salvador. The actual renovation of the car papers was a very straightforward affair. I think the fact that the car was still hooked up to the tow truck played a strong sympathy card for me.

Let me back up a little. After we finally escaped the black hole of the capital, we started doing some serious driving. And about 40 miles later we stopped driving at all. The exact cause of the problem is still up for debate, but it involves the rear differential housing, a leak, and a loud scraping noise that continued for as long as I was coasting or braking (which, among the volcanoes of Guatemala, is a large percentage of the time). It had gone from an odd whine that I had asked Matt about, to a sound of something being unequivocally wrong. I limped us into a gas station, where the attendant (with true Latin American nepotism) took us to his brother-in-law's business down the street. He fixed the problem by replacing the grease with heavier grease, and explained that we could probably get there and back, as long as we ignored the noise. And after riding around the block with me, he put us back on the road. I tipped him heavily, figuring we'd get him to check us out as we passed through on our way back.

We entered Barbarena, a dump of a village 75 km outside of Guatemala City, and about ten kilometers beyond where we stopped to refill our grease. The sound was getting worse, but was still manageable. Matt suggested maybe trying it in second gear instead, so we would be pulling instead of coasting a greater percentage of the time. It made sense to me, but the car did not agree to the plan and screamed in protest. There were no options. We stopped, pulled off the side of the road, and stared at the dash.

The thing is, the Guatemalan government is unforgiving about the timing on the permit renewal. If you are late by a day, it is this huge expense and bureaucratic hassle. And they don't care what the excuse is.

So we decided to hire a tow truck, not to take us back to the capital or Antigua, but to take us to the border first, and then back to the capital. Great. Now where do we get a tow truck?

The place where we stopped said that there was a grua three km back toward Barbarena. So we started walking, itself a pretty dangerous proposition, considering that we were carrying a fair amount of cash between us, and were very alone on a pretty empty stretch of highway.

Matt kept his eyes peeled for a bus to take us the three km to the grua, I kept my eyes open for more jade.

And we both found what we were looking for. I have two beautiful pieces of jade, one a gorgeous blue-green color, the other a lime green. They are both harder than knife steel (the serpentine I have been finding in Antigua is much softer) and very dense.

Matt, meanwhile, had flagged down what appears to be a combi – a van taxi. As we get in, he asks one of the guys "is this a combi?" The reply, a 'yes, but no' answer does not instill confidence. He took us the remaining two kilometers to a dirt road and let us out without charging us for the ride, and told us the grua was down that road.

With very little humor, Matt and I joked as we trudged up the hill, that the taxi driver had not robbed us himself – he had just sent us to his brother-in-law's house to get robbed. I can imagine the cell phone conversation: Hey, chulo! I sent you some juicy specimens!

We finally got there and met the owner of the towing company. He was a short man, a little over five feet tall, had a huge belly and a fat head. Perched on top of his head was a shock of grizzled hair that had been carved into a wide Mohawk. The skin along the sides had been shaved, leaving a couple of moles protruding out of the side of his head.

We approached him, and he looked up, a little surprised at the appearance of a couple of gringos who were obviously out of their element. We explained the situation to him, and Matt asked if it was possible to do it the way we needed – tow us to the border for the paperwork, and then back to the capital. While towing the car backwards to avoid further damaging the differential. I interjected with one of Matt's pithy sayings – "This is Guatemala! There is always a solution!"

Don Oswaldo shook his head. "Here," he said, "here there is always a solution. But those guys down there," he pointed down the road where another tow truck company was based, "they would just be scratching their heads. But here, we can do it!"

He bellowed at the kids to pull this thing and push that thing and disappeared down the road in a tiny Nissan truck (bumper sticker in the rear window – Los Ladrones Prefieren Victimas Desarmadas -- Thieves prefer unarmed victims) hauling a small trailer. We sat for about half an hour and waited, occasionally trying to make sense out of the confusing array of events that confronted us by asking questions of his son (also sporting a Mohawk, but one that was not so tightly trimmed). He explained that we would be towing it with this truck (pointing to a Toyota 4-runner) and not the Nissan, and that we would be hauling it backwards. During this time I called MARI to begin breaking the news to Will that I was in need of more money, and I found another piece of jade, right in front of the house.

Finally he speeds up the hill with a slightly larger trailer and slaps on his brakes, sliding to a halt in front of us. After a few minutes of beehive-like activity, the trailer is attached to the Toyota, a small girl comes out and feeds him a huge pill with a large glass of water (he's on meds? High blood pressure? Bipolar? Narcolepsy? Should we be worried?) and we are off.

We get to the car and spend another half hour backing it onto the trailer using methods that would not be endorsed by even a 19th century version of OSHA. After he bellows instructions I cannot understand in a dialect I don't speak, pointing to things I cannot see, Matt steps up and tries to translate the bellows into some semblance of order. Finally the truck is straight on the trailer, and is trussed up, complete with ropes tying steering wheel to frame; the chains used to secure the bumper are, in turn, secured by strings to hold them up off the ground. And we are off to the border, Chevy Blazer in tow, two teenagers holding on through the back window of the 4-runner.

He proceeds to tell his life's story, full volume mumble, to Matt in the front seat. I am in the back seat with the engine noise and hear little and understand less (how does he manage to project such an amazing voice with no enunciation whatsoever?). But the story Matt later relates to me is pretty astonishing.

Since becoming a Christian, he no longer robs, murders, rapes or assaults anyone. He turned down a drug-running deal (he would have received a woman, money and cocaine in the deal) from the local organized crime syndicate and they are extorting him for 300,000 quetzales. If he doesn't pay, he dies.

Hence the Mohawk, to scare off ladrones and to show them he means business. And the weapons? They are to kill any member of the mafia that comes to pay a visit (no 'turn the other cheek' in his Bible).

He tells of how he hasn't had a drink in 8 years, hasn't smoked or chased women in all that time. He then proceeds to relate how God is rewarding him for his good behavior, that when he needs money, God sends him someone who needs his services (he must have really needed money on Wednesday).

We get to the border, and, as I related before, the process went very smoothly. On the way back, both Matt and I slept. Over lunch, Don Oswaldo relates that he sometimes gets sleepy while he is driving, because he is a diabetic (he lifts his second glass of Kool-Aid in salute before draining it). The diabetes, he explains, is because he drank fourteen bottles of Pepsi every day when he was a young man.

His diet confirmed that it was the Pepsis that got him, and not the fourteen tortillas and four glasses of Kool-Aid and rice and pasta and… well, you get the picture. His statements were all bellowed at full volume and without the least concern for whether we would be able to understand. At one point, he bellowed at his nephew and his son that "They don't understand Spanish!" I felt like asking if he spoke Spanish, but for once in my life, I held my tongue. I think it was the Mohawk that convinced me.

We were on final approach for Guatemala City, with the car on an overwide trailer with no reflectors. It is at this point in the narrative that Matt spotted two motorcycle cops eyeing the operation.

They seemed particularly interested in the presence of two gringos in the cab of the truck. Surprise, surprise, fifteen seconds later I was pulling out my vehicle registration. And passport. And picture ID (driver's license will do). And the title. And I listened in fascinated silence as he asked me, in perfect English, what had happened. I am not sure he entirely believed what sounded like a cock-and-bull story about breaking down, but was enough impressed by our ability to tell a good story that he let us go. As we started to get into the car, he said "After all, it is our obligation to serve you."

We got to the capital without further incident, arriving at about 6pm, a mere 12 hours after beginning the trip. We paid for the tow (1600Q) and left the car with the only mechanic open at that hour in that neighborhood. The mechanics watched in astonishment when we chugged into their driveway. One mechanic whispered to Matt "I can't believe you survived the trip".

By now it was dark, and we waved goodbye to our Mohawk and our money, and called a cab. Matt and the owner of the mechanic shop started talking about work that both had done in Petén, Guatemala, swapping stories. In passing, Matt also (smoothly, I thought) mentioned that he was looking for a place where he could bring his Toyota – a semi-subliminal message inviting good treatment in exchange for a future relationship. They accepted it in stride, and seemed ready to have a new customer. We'll see what the result is when I get back from the US.

The taxi arrived and we climbed in, waiting to finally get back to the apartment. The taxi driver was entertaining, and over the last hour of our long day, we learned first that Don Oswaldo had vastly overcharged us – a 500Q charge would have been more appropriate. We later found out that it was a fair price - Alejandro finally realized that we had not just been towed back to the city, but to the border and then back to the city. He laughed at the antics we had to put up with, but then asked how we had come to decide on that mechanic. We explained that Oswaldo had suggested the mechanics barrio in Zone 13, and that we had circled until we found one that was open. Alejandro then told us that we had chosen well (got lucky, is more like it) --- a regular client of his took her car there, and was always treated fairly.

And when we finally got home, Ingrid had already made dinner for us.

All things considered, if we had to have bad luck, we had the best run of good luck to accompany it we could have. We found a great character who towed us around the entire countryside for a fair price. We found a mechanic who has the reputation of fair treatment. We got jade, and we got home. A few hours more than we expected to spend, but not too bad.

Second bit of bad news on the grant front: I found out about the Sigma Xi grant, but I didn't find out much. Using a typical form letter, they announced that I was not to receive the grant because of one of the following reasons: (and then listed the most general reasons why people don't get the grant). Who knows? I have not found a good reason why they would give or not give a grant. All I can do is guess, and reapply next go around. The good news about the grant is that I am waiting on the third pitch.

If it comes in positive, that will be a bottom of the ninth grand slam to win the game, and the first two missed pitches are quickly forgotten.

On another note, my uncle Paul spent two hours trapped under his flipped tractor. He has large areas of second degree chemical burns and his two legs were pinned, cutting off circulation. He was unable to move either leg when he was admitted to the hospital.

This morning, he has regained some movement in one leg, and is frustrated that the other is not responding. They will be putting him under anesthesia so they can clean his burns later today. Now, a day later, his kidneys have also failed and he has had the legs cut open to reduce swelling. A really tough situation.

Please keep him in your prayers.

Memorium: Caroline McCrorey Lawton

13 April 2005

Lives again our Glorious King
Where, o death is now thy sting?
Dying once, he all doth save
Where thy victory, O grave?
Hallelujah!

My grandmother, Caroline McCrorey Lawton, died yesterday afternoon. She was eighty five years old. She lived to see her children serve the God she worshipped all her life. She lived to see them pass those selfsame beliefs on to their children. She got to watch as her great-grandchildren began to be taught the things she thought were important. Serve your God. Be true to him. Don't forget to praise him. And be sure, your sins will find you out.

Grandmamma was a diabetic, and her feet had been giving her trouble for years. There were toe amputations and she had had sores on her legs since before I left for grad school. The day before yesterday, from what I understand, the doctor told her that she could no longer wait. The infection had gotten into her bones. He was going to have to amputate both of her legs.

For Grandmamma, that was more than a simple loss of mobility. She was also losing the freedom to live with her daughter. She was losing her dignity. She was losing any ability she would have to assert independence. It was what she had worried most about over the past few months.

Her family gathered around her. Aside from the few of us who lived far away, this afternoon the Lawton clan, now roughly forty strong, got to watch one of the strongest women I have ever known leave behind a very weakened body, but also leave behind an indomitable spirit and fierce pride in the people she claimed as hers.

The Doxology has been sung as a blessing before meals at the Lawton Sunday dinners for years. She would raise a reedy, but strong voice and start the tune before the beginning of each dinner. Most of the time (but not all the time), she would pitch it pretty close to where it was written. And the Lawton clan, in a capella four-part harmony, would join in right behind her, regardless of how high or low she pitched it.

In the hospital room yesterday afternoon, the family gathered around her and sang the Doxology.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.
Praise him, all creatures here below;
Praise him above, ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

According to my dad, she shed a tear at that point. And then died.

You see, this was the most important thing to her. Sometimes, especially after Granddaddy died, she would have a hard time remembering to praise. She would see all the problems around her. She would get cranky and hard to deal with. But a simple reminder was always enough to push her back to the recognition that she served a merciful God, and one that deserved to be praised.

She would also remind me. Every time we spoke over the last few years, she would say that she was just so blessed to have so many children that lived to serve her God. And then she would remind me to trust in the Lord, and serve him. Because that, after all, is what we are all supposed to do.

I have been very lucky. In the three grandparents I was old enough to remember, I received the incalculable gift of a lesson in dying with grace. My nana, Emma Parker, died before I started graduate school. She endured pancreatic cancer, and even in its final stages, a scant few months later, she approached death with a pluck and vigor and a sense of humor that I am still astonished by. Her family came together before she died, and she said goodbye.

Francis Asbury Lawton died the week I was headed to Tulane. Much as his widow would do eight years later, he faced an unpleasant surgery with a strong chance of difficult complications. The family gathered around, he told everyone that he loved them, and died the day before the surgery. I am convinced that he had a conversation with God and they settled on a time for his death that was best for everyone.

And my grandmother, Caroline Lawton, on the twelfth of April, 2005, went to join her husband. And is headed to do the thing she thought was most important: to praise God.

Grandmamma, you influenced all of us whom you claimed as yours, in so many ways. We, the creatures here below, will praise him, just like you instructed. You have already given us the pitch. We just have to sing.

Today we sing in your memory.

Ladrones Prefieren Victimas Desarmadas

15 April 2005

Last Saturday was a good day.  I got two tasks accomplished – I braced the shelves that hold the pottery and went to Pastores to look at boots.  The first part went pretty well.  The 2x4 only cost 23Q, and I sawed it using the saw I purchased at the beginning of the season.  I took it up on the roof to cut it, refusing offers of help.  After about five minutes of struggling, I looked down and said "Hmm."

Matt and Ingrid both came running up the stairs.  Ingrid later said that she had never before been around someone who said "Hmm" when they hurt themselves.

The back of the saw had metal burrs on it, and in using my left thumb as a guide for the cut, I had sliced it open.  The cut was pretty deep, and I am a bleeder.  The paper towel was dripping onto the floor in 30 seconds.  We used up most of the remaining gringo bandages (local band-aids, predictably, use Teflon as adhesive) trying to
attach bandage to slick finger.  And when something like this happens, I am always amazed at how many times I manage to whack my thumb during the day.

The trip to Pastores was, by contrast, completely without incident.  We went into a half dozen or more shops, all with nearly identical boots.  There was a pretty wide variety within each store, and you could get riding boots, cowboy boots, dress boots, or high-heeled boots.  And they are also made to order, so if you have special tastes
or wide feet, they will make the boots (by hand) for you.  250Q – roughly US30 - buys the basic cowboy boot.  An alligator boot runs 1400Q.  Expensive, but still cheap by gringo standards. There was one store, obviously the most successful of them, where they sold, among other things, hooded cobra belts - they used the heads of
the cobras for the belt buckle.  The guy – get this - also had a pair of cobra boots.  The head looked like a tassel on the top of the foot.

I didn't ask if it flopped around.  Matt asked a guy about them last year, and was told that a local guy is raising them on a local farm for these belts.

Now Guatemala is home to a number of highly venomous snakes, including the very deadly fer-de-lance.  Maybe it is just me, but the idea of introducing another deadly snake with no natural predators into an ecosystem that is ready made for such an animal….  well, it seems about as bright as swimming with a laptop.  The good news is that once a couple of 'em escape, real estate prices in neighboring Antigua will quickly plummet.

Oddly enough, the town is not friendly at all.  I am accustomed to being welcomed when I shop.  I know it is crazy, but I figure that if I am in the store, perhaps to buy something, and if I smile a lot and speak politely, nice things will happen, New Orleans Winn Dixie notwithstanding.  Not so here.  In every store we went into, the people tending the store were grumpy and sullen. 

It also makes no sense to me that there is no outlet in Antigua for the sale of the boots.  Twenty stores located five minutes from Guatemala's tourist Medina (the hajj akbar is the pilgrimage to Tikal) known as Antigua.  Each gringo, Guatemalteco, German, French and Cuban makes their way to Antigua on every trip to Guatemala, but never to Pastores, unless they know to go there to buy boots.  Why not sell the boots in a kiosk in town, with a big sign, stating plainly "Boots Pastores"?  How easily I forget that capitalist rules do not apply in Guate, and that the boot mafia puts its foot down, so to speak on the "export" of their products to the metropolis five minutes away.  

Go figure.

I am interested in talking to them about using some spare leather from their stocks for my microwear study.  Cutting and scraping leather should be one of the items on my list of activities I am doing with the stone tools, and that would be the logical place to do work, just like Jades, S.A. would likely be the best place to work with jade here in town.

On the way back into town, we stopped at the ceviche stand down the street and had some really tasty seafood.  Ingrid and Matt just got the shrimp, but I got the mixto, which had crab, shrimp, fish, mussels, all of which was delightful, and pulpo – octopus – which was a little on the tough side.  Honestly, I am going to suggest to the
guy in Pastores that octopus boots might be a big seller.  If the meat is that tough when fresh, I can only imagine what curing it for a couple of days with tannin would do.  And you already have the ink for a natural dye.  I'll be the first guy on the block with octopus cowboy boots.  And probably will remain the only guy.  But such is the price
of being a fashionista.

Over dinner on Monday I felt my first earthquake.  Pretty exciting stuff.  Ingrid looked at me and asked "do you feel that?" The answer was unequivocal.  Yes, I felt it, and it got stronger over the next thirty seconds.  Matt announced that if it got worse, we were headed out of the house.  As soon as he said it, the house rocked with
a little more force, and he yelled "keys!" and grabbed them and headed to the door.

We bumped into him from behind, as we were already headed the same way.  But the impact of tectonic activity is exciting.  It turned out to be a 5.4 quake originating 100km to the SW, near the border with El Salvador (where we headed to re-up the car).

The grant situation is no nearer a conclusion.  I received a message from John Yellen, director of NSF  Archaeology division.  He basically told me to wait my turn.  Two of the three reviews needed to make a decision had come in (he sends out six copies) and the typical wait was twelve weeks for all three to be returned to him.  It has been five.  Good news?  Bad news?  No news?  I can't tell.  Likely that the reviews were positive, or he would be waiting on more than a third review.   But I don't know.

I did get my first bit of bad news on the grant front: I got turned down for the in-house Latin American Studies summer research grant.  I had asked for money to hire a canoe builder to construct a canoe using traditional techniques and stone tools (which would be studied as part of my microwear analysis).  The money was also to purchase a digital video camera to record the process of production.  As other modes of transportation are becoming more readily available, fewer and fewer canoes are being built, and the craft is disappearing.  Recording the process would be important for reasons beyond the value to my dissertation.

Will offered me money from MARI to help offset the expenses of this subproject.  Electrons had scarcely traversed the wires before I had accepted the money – I am a grad student, after all.  I am going to try again submitting the grant elsewhere, as soon as I figure out where.

Obtaining a flight to Atlanta to get to my grandmother's funeral was pretty tough.  The agent of one carrier (the name of which is a greek letter) told my wife that bereavement fares were refundable, and therefore cost more than double a normal fare:  $1195.

The travel agent on this end did a good job, coming up with a flight that was full (but we could come back and check for cancellations tomorrow) but that cost less than $400, and two others for $890 and 680.  Matt's dad got pulled in and got me a fare for $520, and we bought it.  I became a Matt's dad fan in a bigger way than I had ever
been before, as of that moment.

All that remained was to get the car permit "renovated", an activity that can only take place at a border with another country.  So Matt and I got up early Wednesday morning to drive through Guatemala City, with its terrific traffic and smog and crime and chicken buses (with their Pig Pen-esque plumes of black smoke) and make our way south to the border with El Salvador.  The actual renovation of the car papers was a very straightforward affair.  I think the fact that the car was still hooked up to the tow truck played a strong sympathy card for me.

Let me back up a little.  After we finally escaped the black hole of the capital, we started doing some serious driving.  And about 40 miles later we stopped driving at all.  The exact cause of the problem is still up for debate, but it involves the rear differential housing, a leak, and a loud scraping noise that continued for as long as I was
coasting or braking (which, among the volcanoes of Guatemala, is a large percentage of the time).  It had gone from an odd whine that I had asked Matt about, to a sound of something being unequivocally wrong.  I limped us into a gas station, where the attendant (with true Latin American nepotism) took us to his brother-in-law's business down the street.  He fixed the problem by replacing the grease with heavier grease, and explained that we could probably get there and back, as long as we ignored the noise.  And after riding around the block with
me, he put us back on the road.  I tipped him heavily, figuring we'd get him to check us out as we passed through on our way back.

We entered Barbarena, a dump of a village 75 km outside of Guatemala City, and about ten kilometers beyond where we stopped to refill our grease.  The sound was getting worse, but was still manageable.  Matt suggested maybe trying it in second gear instead, so we would be pulling instead of coasting a greater percentage of the time.  It made sense to me, but the car did not agree to the plan and screamed in protest.  There were no options.  We stopped, pulled off the side of the road, and stared at the dash.

The thing is, the Guatemalan government is unforgiving about the timing on the permit renewal.  If you are late by a day, it is this huge expense and bureaucratic hassle.  And they don't care what the excuse is.

So we decided to hire a tow truck, not to take us back to the capital or Antigua, but to take us to the border first, and then back to the capital.  Great.  Now where do we get a tow truck?

The place where we stopped said that there was a grua three km back toward Barbarena.  So we started walking, itself a pretty dangerous proposition, considering that we were carrying a fair amount of cash between us, and were very alone on a pretty empty stretch of highway.  

Matt kept his eyes peeled for a bus to take us the three km to the grua, I kept my eyes open for more jade. 

And we both found what we were looking for.  I have two beautiful pieces of jade, one a gorgeous blue-green color, the other a lime green.  They are both harder than knife steel (the serpentine I have been finding in Antigua is much softer) and very dense. 

Matt, meanwhile, has flagged down what appears to be a combi – a van taxi.  As we get in, he asks one of the guys "is this a combi?"  The reply, a 'yes, but no' answer does not instill confidence.  He took us the remaining two kilometers to a dirt road and let us out without charging us for the ride, and told us the grua was down that road.

With very little humor, Matt and I joked as we trudged up the hill, that the taxi driver had not robbed us himself – he had just sent us to his brother-in-law's house to get robbed.  I can imagine the cell phone conversation: Hey, chulo!  I sent you some juicy specimens! 

We finally got there and met the owner of the towing company.  He was a short man, a little over five feet tall, had a huge belly and a fat head.  Perched on top of his head was a shock of grizzled hair that had been carved into a wide Mohawk.  The skin along the sides had been shaved, leaving a couple of moles protruding out of the side of his head.

We approached him, and he looked up, a little surprised at the appearance of a couple of gringos who were obviously out of their element.  We explained the situation to him, and Matt asked if it was possible to do it the way we needed – tow us to the border for the paperwork, and then back to the capital.  While towing the car
backwards to avoid further damaging the differential.  I interjected with one of Matt's pithy sayings – "This is Guatemala!  There is always a solution!"

Don Oswaldo shook his head.  "Here," he said, "here there is always a solution.  But those guys down there," he pointed down the road where another tow truck company was based, "they would just be scratching their heads.  But here, we can do it!" 

He bellowed at the kids to pull this thing and push that thing and disappeared down the road in a tiny Nissan truck (bumper sticker in the rear window – Los Ladrones Prefieren Victimas Desarmadas -- Thieves prefer unarmed victims) hauling a small trailer.  We sat for about half an hour and waited, occasionally trying to make sense out
of the confusing array of events that confronted us by asking questions of his son (also sporting a Mohawk, but one that was not so tightly trimmed).  He explained that we would be towing it with this truck (pointing to a Toyota 4-runner) and not the Nissan, and that we would be hauling it backwards.  During this time I called MARI to begin breaking the news to Will that I was in need of more money, and I found another piece of jade, right in front of the house.

Finally he speeds up the hill with a slightly larger trailer and slaps on his brakes, sliding to a halt in front of us. After a few minutes of beehive-like activity, the trailer is attached to the Toyota, a small girl comes out and feeds him a huge pill with a large glass of water (he's on meds?  High blood pressure?  Bipolar?  Narcolepsy?  Should we be worried?) and we are off.

We get to the car and spend another half hour backing it onto the trailer using methods that would not be endorsed by even a 19th century version of OSHA.  After he bellows instructions I cannot understand in a dialect I don't speak, pointing to things I cannot see, Matt steps up and tries to translate the bellows into some semblance of order.  Finally the truck is straight on the trailer, and is trussed up, complete with ropes tying steering wheel to frame; the chains used to secure the bumper are, in turn, secured by strings to hold them up off the ground.  And we are off to the border, Chevy Blazer in tow, two teenagers holding on through the back window of the 4-runner.

He proceeds to tell his life's story, full volume mumble, to Matt in the front seat.  I am in the back seat with the engine noise and hear little and understand less (how does he manage to project such an amazing voice with no enunciation whatsoever?).  But the story Matt later relates to me is pretty astonishing.  Since becoming a
Christian, he no longer robs, murders, rapes or assaults anyone.  He turned down a drug-running deal (he would have received a woman, money and cocaine in the deal) from the local organized crime syndicate and they are extorting him for 300,000 quetzales.  If he doesn't pay, he dies.

Hence the Mohawk, to scare off ladrones and to show them he means business.  And the weapons?  They are to kill any member of the mafia that comes to pay a visit (no 'turn the other cheek' in his Bible).  He tells of how he hasn't had a drink in 8 years, hasn't smoked or chased women in all that time. He then proceeds to relate how God is rewarding him for his good behavior, that when he needs money, God sends him someone who needs his services (he must have really needed money on Wednesday).

We get to the border, and, as I related before, the process went very smoothly.  On the way back, both Matt and I slept.  Over lunch, Don Oswaldo relates that he sometimes gets sleepy while he is driving, because he is a diabetic (he lifts his second glass of Kool-Aid in salute before draining it).  The diabetes, he explains, is because he drank fourteen bottles of Pepsi every day when he was a young man. 

His diet confirmed that it was the Pepsis that got him, and not the fourteen tortillas and four glasses of Kool-Aid and rice and pasta and… well, you get the picture.  His statements were all bellowed at full volume and without the least concern for whether we would be able to understand.  At one point, he bellowed at his nephew and his son that "They don't understand Spanish!"  I felt like asking if he spoke Spanish, but for once in my life, I held my tongue.  I think it was the Mohawk that convinced me.

We were on final approach for Guatemala City, with the car on an overwide trailer with no reflectors.  It is at this point in the narrative that Matt spotted two motorcycle cops eyeing the operation.  They seemed particularly interested in the presence of two gringos in the cab of the truck.  Surprise, surprise, fifteen seconds later I was
pulling out my vehicle registration.   And passport.  And picture ID (driver's license will do). And the title.  And I listened in fascinated silence as he asked me, in perfect English, what had happened.  I am not sure he entirely believed what sounded like a cock-and-bull story about breaking down, but was enough impressed by our ability to tell a good story that he let us go.  As we started to get into the car, he said "After all, it is our obligation to serve you."

We got to the capital without further incident, arriving at about 6pm, a mere 12 hours after beginning the trip.  We paid for the tow (1600Q) and left the car with the only mechanic open at that hour in that neighborhood.  The mechanics watched in astonishment when we chugged into their driveway.  One mechanic whispered to Matt "I can't believe you survived the trip".

By now it was dark, and we waved goodbye to our Mohawk and our money, and called a cab.  Matt and the owner of the mechanic shop started talking about work that both had done in Petén, Guatemala, swapping
stories.   In passing, Matt also (smoothly, I thought) mentioned that he was looking for a place where he could bring his Toyota – a semi-subliminal message inviting good treatment in exchange for a future relationship. They accepted it in stride, and seemed ready to have a new customer. We'll see what the result is when I get back from
the US.

The taxi arrived and we climbed in, waiting to finally get back to the apartment.  The taxi driver was entertaining, and over the last hour of our long day, we learned first that Don Oswaldo had vastly overcharged us – a 500Q charge would have been more appropriate.  We later found out that it was a fair price - Alejandro finally realized
that we had not just been towed back to the city, but to the border and then back to the city.  He laughed at the antics we had to put up with, but then asked how we had come to decide on that mechanic.  We explained that Oswaldo had suggested the mechanics barrio in Zone 13, and that we had circled until we found one that was open.  Alejandro then told us that we had chosen well (got lucky, is more like it) --- a regular client of his took her car there, and was always treated fairly.

And when we finally got home, Ingrid had already made dinner for us.   

All things considered, if we had to have bad luck, we had the best run of good luck to accompany it we could have.  We found a great character who towed us around the entire countryside for a fair price.  We found a mechanic who has the reputation of fair treatment.  We got jade, and we got home.  A few hours more than we expected to spend, but not too bad.

Second bit of bad news on the grant front:  I found out about the Sigma Xi grant, but I didn't find out much.  Using a typical form letter, they announced that I was not to receive the grant because of one of the following reasons: (and then listed the most general reasons why people don't get the grant).  Who knows?  I have not found a good reason why they would give or not give a grant.  All I can do is guess, and reapply next go around.

The good news about the grant is that I am waiting on the third pitch.  If it comes in positive, that will be a bottom of the ninth grand slam to win the game, and the first two missed pitches are quickly forgotten.

On another note, my uncle Paul spent two hours trapped under his flipped tractor.  He has large areas of second degree chemical burns and his two legs were pinned, cutting off circulation.  He was unable to move either leg when he was admitted to the hospital.  This morning, he has regained some movement in one leg, and is frustrated that the other is not responding.  They will be putting him under anesthesia so they can clean his burns later today.  Now, a day later, his kidneys have also failed and he has had the legs cut open to reduce swelling.  A really tough situation.

Please keep him in your prayers.