What's With This? III

Remember this guy? He's the reknowned "Boy Buddha" of Nepal, who first created a stir back in 2005. He emerged from the jungle, so it was said, and spent several months meditating under a tree and dispensing an occasional word of wisdom, a la the original Buddha. It was reported at that time that he attracted a crowd of 10,000 people, many of whom were convinced that he must be the actual reincarnation of Buddha himself.
It was said that he sat immobile, meditating most of the time. At night his "handlers" would cover his place of meditation with a curtain. They claimed he neither ate nor drank. A French news crew was allowed to observe him over a 48 hour period, and they reported that they did see him eating a piece of fruit.
After a few months he disappeared, only to re-emerge in late 2008, looking hale and hearty as in the photo above.
The above photo shows the boy during his appearance in 2005 at the age of 16. He seems to have cleaned himself up considerably for his second appearance. The second time he stayed around for a shorter period, and has now disappeared again.
So what's a skeptic to think? He doesn't seem that he has started a cult, although with 10,000 visitors he certainly could have started one. We're left wondering about his third appearance: when and where, and to what signifigance. What does he do when he's not "on stage"?
And what about his handlers? What's their motivation? Helpful boddhisattvas presenting the young saint to the multitudes? Or perhaps only enterprising food vendors....I mean, with a crowd of 10,000 you could sell a lot of kebabs.

ADDENDUM: "Getting It Honest" (Cynicism, I mean.)
For several years this bumper sticker was seen on the rear of a VW van parked on Southard Street in Key West. Noted, that the people of Conyers downplay this nowadays.

Da Train! Da Train!

I recently had a chance to do something I hadn't done for ages: take a trip by train. I'd heard many stories over the years, some good and some bad, about our quasi-nationalized rail system, Amtrak.

--"Th' unions ruined th' railroads!"
--"Rail travel remains the best and safest way to travel, and will be moreso in the future."
--"The condition of the railroads is a perfect example of why socialism just won't work!"
--"There's something romantic about train travel." (And so on and so on....)

Ironically all the above statements have an element of truth to them. But the only way to know for sure what modern train travel is like is to travel by train yourself and check it out.
Last week I purchased a one-way ticket from Raleigh to Orlando. The trip would take a little longer by train than by car, 13 hours, leaving around 9:30 PM and arriving a little after 10 the next morning. You'd have to sleep sitting up....

The train was running late, giving me time to check out my fellow passengers. There was a huge family who appeared to be from India, sitting off by themselves. I chatted with an older lady, who said that this was also her first train trip in years. She decided it might be simpler to take the train rather than hassle the parking at the airports. She had rented a sleeping berth. There was a teenage girl and her boyfriend, also both first-timers, who were on their way to meet her family who were already at Disney World. The girl's mother, who was waiting with them, having taken the train before, made sure they were equipped with cell phones, their own pillows, and other necessary supplies.

When the train did show up at the platform about 15 minutes behind schedule, it seemed like the first few people coming off it were having trouble walking. “Sea legs?” I thought. “The train lurches around so much they have trouble navigating when they get off?” The conductors, most of whom were black women, gave everyone a seat number as they got on the train.
I sat next to a young Air Force dude. “Wow, I’m glad that guy that was sittin’ here got off the train. He was really drunk!” Well, that explained the “sea legs” of some of the disembarking passengers. “He had his own bottle with him. I didn’t think they allowed that.” The Air Force guy was a little hyper himself. He kept drinking these "energy drinks," so he wouldn't miss a stop where he could get off and smoke a cigarette. In between times he worked a PPS (portable play station), tried to trade games for it with other people on board, and organized card games in the "lounge." He was here, there, then everywhere. By the end of the trip I was thinking, how can this guy possibly be in the military. I didn't see any i.d. or uniform, but maybe he was....
Amanecer en la Florida. The hardest part was sleeping in the seats. And oh! The get-off-to-smoke deal was a little complicated. The train made about a dozen stops, but only a few were long enough for smokers to indulge their habit. One fellow didn't make it back on, somewhere in South Carolina in the middle of the night. "Hey!" says the Air Force guy. "That bald guy got left behind!"
Apparently this was not uncommon. "The train didn't leave him," said the conductor, breezing by. "He left the train."
Thirteen hours after leaving Raleigh the train rolled into Orlando. The fare was $49, about the same cost in gas if your car got 30 mpg. If the trains were cleaner and faster, it would be a pretty good deal, but I guess "path dependence" says we keep the cars for a while longer, anyway.
Jim Kunstler’s latest rant includes some comments on an article about California’s proposed high-speed rail project, which appeared recently in the New York Times. (See Kunstler’s link at right.) He quotes:

It might have been nice if, say, in the late 20th century, some far-seeing governor had noticed what was going on in France, Germany, and Spain but, alas.... It would have been nice, too, if ... George W. Bush, when addressing extreme airport congestion in 2003, had considered serious upgrades in normal train service between the many US cities 500 miles or so apart...
...The sad truth is it's too late now. But the additional sad truth, at this point, is that Californians (and US public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that !).

It should be noted, too, that Jeb Bush, when he was governor of Florida, vetoed a plan to develop a “bullet train” between major Florida cities. We’re sure it would have been prohibitively expensive, especially in light of the history of Miami-Dade’s Metrorail boondoggle.

Still, with the maxing out of regional airports and the increasing price of gasoline and crowding of interstate highways, it would be nice to think that safe and economical rail travel might once again play a part in the national scheme of things.

The younger people I met on board seemed uniformly enthusiastic about train travel. Maybe it was the ability to move around and talk to other people while traveling. There are already a great many “Amtrak” groups on Facebook for fans of train travel.
Would I do it again? Well, maybe. As soon as I recover.

Changes in Blog Links

Jim Kunstler's blog, Clusterf**k Nation, has a new URL. Jim is an acerbic, opinionated son of a gun, but he predicted the spike in gasoline prices right down to the day, almost. Author and speaker, he's been sounding a continuous Jeremiad against American urban planning, or the lack thereof for years. He's also an artist--maybe not a Rembrandt, but his paintings (sample above) evoke a certain sense of upstate New York, where he makes his home. His blog is always worth a read.
Tom Kemper (who I can't remember if I ever met personally or not) has left Key West after a ten-year sojourn. His heart is in the right place, and we'll stay linked to his Bahama Village Blog for a while longer. You can't say he didn't fight the good fight on that crowded island, reminding us that paradise might well be best experienced via a short vacation, or even better, seen at a distance from the surrounding seas. (After almost forty years on the islands, I'm still amazed at how the local political dynamics work. No,if you wrote a book, nobody'd believe it. 'Nuff said: when ignorance, is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.)
Good luck to ya, neighbor.

Oh! Almost forgot! I've added Rock Trueblood's Watchworld to the blog list. He's got a lot of economic news. But scroll down for some great insights into the current real estate situation in Key West. As usual, when the rest of the country catches cold, the Keys get pneumonia. Some heavy info there, and don't forget to check the comments, even if you have to read between the lines.

A DIfferent Kind of Freedom

Recent rummaging in old boxes led to the discovery of a few weathered slides, some of them recording a madcap junket made decades ago, when my friend Capt. Jim Leonard saw an advertisement for a cheap trip to Guatemala--"Guatemala Ganga!"-- in the Sunday Miami Herald. Jim owned and chartered a 27 ft. catamaran in the Florida Keys and avidly followed any news of multihull designs and exploits. Mark Hassal, a friend of celebrated trimaran designer Jim Brown, had built one of Jim Brown's Searunner designs, and had sailed it around the world, heading west, from California to Guatemala.
Things were slow in the Keys that spring. This was the year of the Nixonian gas shortage; you could have shot a rifle up US 1 mid-afternoon and not hit a thing. As not much else was happening, we decided that it would be a worthy adventure to go to Guatemala and check out Mark Hassal and his boat in person.
Guatemala had just had an election, and there was still a degree of unrest in the capital. We headed for the Caribbean side, where Mark was supposed to be living. After driving for miles through clouds of acrid smoke (it was slash-and-burn season) we came to a river crossing. Some boatmen said they actually knew him, and took us to what they said was the only place to stay: a "Stage One" resort on a nearby island, which had purportedly been a training camp for the Bay of Pigs invasion twelve years before.
Word of our arrival went out via jungle telegraph, and that evening we were pleasantly surprised to see a 37 foot trimaran come ghosting out of the shadows to make a perfect landing at the island's dock, and Mark Hassal stepping ashore. After a couple hours of most engaging conversation he and his wife Bonnie agreed to take us down to the mouth of the river to Livingston the next day. Livingston was then a remote Garifuna village, seldom visited by outsiders, although we did meet some German hippies living in stick huts and an Irish nun at the local school.
Needless to say, I'm leaving a lot out in this short narrative. On the river trip Mark pointed out the very few riverfront homes owned by wealthy Guatemalans as we went by. Of course it wouldn't do, we were told, for a foreigner to invest in any such thing. If it were too nice, it might be coveted by a bigwig from the city, and you might have no choice but to give it up to him. Mark himself lived in a simple but incredibly striking native-style structure right on the river, self built with the aid of a chain saw and a few local friends. But in spite of the government and sociological realities of the place, he found his situation on the river to be the most agreeable thing he'd found after a near-complete circumnavigation of the earth. "It's a different kind of freedom," he said.In those days there was an old van up and down the Keys with the words written on the back. "When reality starts expanding, it's time to start truckin'." Although that slogan always annoyed me, I wondered how long it would be before reality started expanding on Mark and Bonnie. We'd hear reports from people who visited down there from time to time that they were still there and doing well, and it turned out that paradise for them lasted a good fifteen years. I stumbled on their exodus story here. It's a interesting tale for those with a little time and patience. The most poignant section (on page five) clearly sums up why the Hassals "...needed to get out of the Rio Dulce. It was time. Past time."
Reflecting back, I'm grateful (and a little amazed) we were able to travel like that on a shoestring budget. And for all our occasional national self-deprecation, I still prefer the type of freedom we have here.

Was Gibt's Hier Dann?

Da sprangen ploetzlich in dem “Live Feed” Fenster eine grosse Menge deutscher Fahnen. Warum waere das? Die Meisten kamen aus einem Google-sucht fuer “quem ad finem” an. Vielleicht hat’s was mit Schularbeit zu tun.

So warum nannte ich dieses Blog “Quem Ad Finem”? Zuerst hatte ich die Idee, eine Rede gegen politische Schaendlichkeit (besonders in meiner Heimstadt) zu machen. Und welcher bessere Name waer’s, als etwas von der historischen Rede von Cicero gegen die Schaendlichkeit seines Zeitgenossen Catilina?

Ich entdeckte bald aber, das die Redensarten der zwei ersten Saetzen (“Quousque Tandem?” und “Quam Diu Etiam?”), schon im Gebrauch von anderen “Bloggers” als Blogtitel waren! So musste ich den Anfang des dritten Satz fuer meinen Blogtitel wahlen.

Und das is warum, du “Quem Ad Finem?” hier findest.
Hoffentlich geht’s alle gut aber mit der Schularbeit.

Und nach Jahren auf einem kleinen Floridainsel haben wir endlich auf’s Land umgezogen. Hier geht’s besser, weit von der Schaendlichkeit entfernt. Noch eine Geschichte....

Country Funnin'

I’d gone up to the house to have a cup of coffee, when the truck from the lumber yard pulled up. Running out to greet the driver and show him where I wanted the lumber put, I saw it wasn’t one of their regular drivers, but a big, younger guy with a heavy Southern accent. He was shouting something over the truck engine. I couldn’t understand him, and came along the side of the truck so I could hear him better. “Beg pardon?”

“I just killed a snake,” he said, coming around the back of the truck. Just then I caught sight of an orange and yellow object coiled up on the open bed of the truck. I jumped back.

“See?” he said. “You don’t like ‘em either.” No, I don’t. I lived in a place in Central America once where there were just a few too many of them for comfort. Sometimes people would be bitten by them. But then again, I don’t go around killing them just for the heck of it. Most of them are shy, retiring, and actually beneficial.

“I stopped up here, right on the dirt road,” he said, pointing behind him, “to check the load. I thought it was comin’ loose. And there it was.”

“It was in with the lumber then?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “it was layin’ there right in the road. So I got him with this.” He held up a steel pipe, used to turn the winches that tighten the straps that held the load down on the bed of the truck. The snake, although badly damaged, was still moving.

“You know what kind it is?” I asked. I know corn snakes and milk snakes were fairly plentiful around here, and have basically the same coloring. I figured a country boy would have a name for it.

“No, I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t care what they call ‘em, I don’t like ‘em.” Apparently he didn’t have a name for it. “I’m gonna have me some fun with it, though.” We went ahead and started unloading the truck. He explained to me what he meant.

“My boss knows none of the boys in the yard like snakes. Kenny and the old black guy both hate ‘em. So he’s always putting them in the truck when they go to make a delivery. Now I never go out without checking under the seats, behind the seats, and in the glove box. Just like checking the oil, fuel and water, gotta check all them places.

“But, whoo-ee, I’m gonna have some fun with this one. Not sure where I’m gonna put it yet, but I’m gonna get ‘em back good.” He got a large piece of plastic out, and picked up the snake with two sticks, and rolled it up in the plastic. It was then I noticed that it had sort of a triangular head.

He threw the rolled up plastic into the cab of the truck, backed it around and headed out. “Y’all have a good one, now!”

It’s sort of unusual for any snake to be out on the road in the heat of the day this time of year. And I’d never seen a snake that looked like that around our place before. I’m not convinced that snake didn’t come out of the load of lumber when he stopped.

When I got back to the house, I looked it up, just to be sure. No doubt about it, it was a copperhead.

Slouching Toward Emmaus

A recent Newsweek article states that the number of Americans identifying themselves as "Christian" has declined by ten percent in the last twenty years.

A young friend of ours was no exception to this trend, even unsure about what denomination his family had identified with at one time. "Methodist, I think we were. Or maybe it was Baptist. No--Methodist--that's what it was." He found out later that it was Baptist, for what it's worth, and he's still pretty much a stranger to the inside of a church. But an unusual happening a few years ago got him thinking, maybe there is something to this whole business after all.

His work with a construction company took him up and down Florida's east coast. One day while grabbing a quick lunch at a fast food place in Deerfield Beach, an older woman whom he described as a homeless person, came up and placed something in front of him. "This old dirtbag gives me a napkin with a bible verse written on it. 'Luke' something. I threw it out and didn't think anything more about it."

"Then get this. A few days later, I'm in Miami, thirty or so miles south of there, and the same woman comes up, and hands me another napkin with the same verse written on it! I remembered it from before: Luke 24:32."

He was going to say something, but when he looked up, she was already out the door and disappearing into the crowd. "I mean, what does this mean?" he said. "Is this old lady going into every fast food place between Deerfield Beach and Miami and handing out the same bible verse written on a napkin? That's a lot of fast food places, man."

He got a bible, and looked up the verse. "It said, 'Weren't our hearts burning within us as he walked with us on the road and opened the scriptures to us?'


"It's about these two guys meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion and all. He lays out the whole thing for them, they invite him to lunch, and he just disappears right in front of them, like into another dimension. That's when they realized who it was. They were the first ones to see him after, you know, what happened."

"And the Old Testament tells exactly what was going to happen. It's all in there. You just need to look for it."

So, is He still causing hearts to burn on a modern-day road to Emmaus? Or is there an elderly lady who visits fast food joints along Florida's concrete canyons, handing out napkins scribbled with a scripture verse? Or both?