Roaming Around: A Daughter and Father World Journey

By Pete KJ

"Where do we want to go?"

 

That's what Nia and I asked ourselves as she worked her way through elementary school. We tacked a laminated map of the world up in our front room, and kept dry erase markers and a footstool handy. Over the years we went through many iterations. Then we went out and did it! Of course our plans kept on changing, as did we.

 

Join us as we set out from our home in Colorado and voyage to Florida, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Easter Island, Hawaii, Iceland, Paris, Rome, New Zealand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangkok, and Ghana. Photos included!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pete KJ
• Release date: Jan 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386855675

Book preview

Roaming Around

A Daughter and Father World Journey

Pete KJ

and

Nia KJ

Copyright © 2016, 2019 by Pete KJ

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

Unless otherwise noted, all source maps are courtesy of the Univesity of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin

Unless otherwise noted, all photos and images are by Pete KJ or Nia.

Cover by Sue Campbell Book Design

Author website: www.petekj.com

Author’s Note

These stories and essays originally appeared on my website, petekj.com, in serial form while our journey was in progress. Typically we posted each chapter within a few days of departure from the subject country.

To prepare this volume I made minor changes to the text. I fixed grammar and spelling errors, tried to improve the flow of the words, and added verbiage here and there when I felt it improved the clarity of what we were trying to say.

My overriding concern was to retain the spirit of spontaneity, digression, adventure, randomness, and rawness with which this document was created. Like the tag says on your made-in-Bangladesh shirt, Imperfections are part of the character of this garment. What follows is an authentic record of how we traveled and what we reported, real-time, from the field.

_

Prologue

May, 2014

Who are we?

We are Nia and Pete, a daughter-and-father traveling team.

FYI, Nia is 9 years old and Pete just turned 50.

Where in the world are we going?

It will be interesting to see. We haven’t figured that all out yet. We intend to go around, as in the world. You know: circumnavigation.

But travel is funny and fluid and we hesitate to make such a claim in advance. Many variables, many unknowns.

All we can say right now is: follow us and find out! We hope you enjoy the trip.

How long will we be traveling?

Hmmm. That is a good question. We know we will travel through the summer of 2014 (though it will be winter where we're going). Then Nia plans to do the first half of fifth grade at her school in Colorado. After that we plan to jump off again and home-school it the rest of the way around the world for winter-spring-summer of 2015.

But let’s not overthink it. Let’s just begin to travel.

Why are we going?

We have a few goals.

We are going to learn about the world first-hand. We’ll explore and check out diversity and possibilities. We’ll examine how the world is changing, where it's heading, and we’ll immerse ourselves in the wonder of it all. Maybe we'll get some new ideas for our place in it, and for what we do next.

Most of all we will have FUN getting to some of the places we've never been, and checking up on some places we have been.

Yee-Ha!

My Thoughts About the Trip

by Nia

I know I will be leaving things that I love like gymnastics, acting, and soccer.

But who cares? I am ready to tackle 5th grade, and I am ready to buckle down and have fun!

Nia KJ

Nia KJ

Chapter 1

Colorado, Part 1

May, 2014

Puerto Rico

Source Map: Natural Resources Canada

25 May, 2014

Here’s where the journey begins: on a prairie beneath the Rocky Mountains, in the peaceful town of Longmont, Boulder County, USA. We’ve lived here for the past five years, lived it and loved it. But it is time to resist the pull of home and hit the road.

We’ll be back. We tried to leave Longmont before, even managed to stay away for eight years and live in places as far-flung as Puerto Rico and India. But then something pulled us back. Gravity, maybe? Or maybe it was the curse of an Indian chief. More on that in a moment.

It’s true this place possesses a strong magnetism. First there’s the mighty wall of Front Range mountains that looms over town. Above these peaks, blue skies soar with more than 300 sunny days per year. Hot arid summers give way to scarlet-leafed autumns, and then chilly winters graced with intermittent blankets of powdery snow. Most days after a snowfall, that brilliant sun comes right back out to warm your face and bare knees as you run about doing your errands in shorts and a bulky sweater.

We will miss this place!

But it is time for us to get on the road.

Left Hand's Curse

Many people who live here find it hard to leave. Many who do leave end up coming back. It’s called the Curse of Chief Left Hand.

His actual name was Niwot. He was a leader of the Inuna-Ina people, also known as the Southern Arapahoe, a nomadic group of Native Americans that wintered in Boulder Valley during the 1700s and 1800s.

A popular pastime around here is to blame Chief Niwot/Left-Hand if you find yourself unable to leave your idyllic home.

The blame, of course, is a bit misplaced.

Niwot leveled his curse at a group of gold prospectors in the fall of 1858. The prospectors had set up camp on Valmont Butte, a sacred Arapahoe site just northeast of the present day city of Boulder. It’s a stone’s toss from a pharmaceutical factory where I used to work.

Niwot gathered a few of his deputies and rode up to the butte to meet the whites. Speaking English, he requested them to leave. Niwot knew a bunch of languages; he’d acquired English from his fur trapper brother-in-law.

Niwot’s curse is widely quoted as follows:

People seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty.

When the prospectors didn’t pack up, Niwot threatened force. While his deputies headed back to round up a war party, Niwot stayed on Valmont Butte and hung out with the prospectors. He reportedly ate pork and beans and had a few drinks. By the time the war party arrived, he had tentatively decided to make peace.

This policy of accommodation of whites was cemented a few days later, after one of Niwot’s shamans reported a dream in which he saw a flood cover the Earth and swallow the Arapahoe people, leaving the white men standing. Niwot seemed to take this as his cue to recognize that the sheer numbers of whites arriving meant peace was the only option. He went on to spend several years working diligently to negotiate peace with settlers.

Unfortunately, peace also turned out to not be an option.

By November of 1864, Chief Niwot and his Arapahoe were among the group camped along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. They had located themselves there per instructions from the territorial administration in nearby Fort Lyon, which had designated Sand Creek as a safe haven for friendly Indians and had raised a United States flag at the site.

And there they were massacred, on November 29th, by a band of about 700 white militiamen, several dozen of whom were recruited from what would later become the Longmont area. The story is entirely sordid. We will not repeat it here. Suffice to say that about 100 Native Americans were slaughtered, mostly women, children, and older men since the warriors were out hunting buffalo. Corpses were mutilated and body-part trophies were paraded through Denver.

Chief Niwot was reportedly on site at Sand Creek that morning, but his body was never recovered. Rumor has it that he stood in the middle of the mayhem frowning with his arms folded.

Perhaps Niwot was wounded, and escaped, and died soon after. We will never know. He exits the historical record at this point.

How is My Tree Doing?

When I got back to Longmont five years ago, I planted a tree.

My son and I had just completed a 13-month, around-the-world journey that began in Puerto Rico and ended at our mothballed home here in Longmont. Boy did it ever feel great to be back! To be home, after more than a year on the road and, before that, seven years living in other places. I ran up and down the stairs, caressed the bannisters, pressed my cheek against the walls, wandered through rooms, and soaked it all in. Bliss!

Then I ventured out into our back yard and met with a worrisome sight. Our beloved maple tree, the yard’s centerpiece and primary shade-giver, appeared to be on its last legs. Fearing we were about to lose it, I ran out and bought a new little tree to stick into the ground next to the maple.

My initial goal was shade generation, but for some reason when I got to the tree farm I chose a slow-growing bur oak. The young thing was only a few feet taller than me and would take decades to give off any significant shade. But I bonded with this tree instantly. I knew it was the one. I loved the fact that it was native to these high Colorado prairies and that it was drought, fire, and insect-resistant. I especially loved that it had the capability to live for up to 1,000 years.

Planting this tree was an emotional experience for me. There I was: freshly home after a year-long, around-the-world journey. It felt poignant to plant something new: something that would live, basically, forever.

As for our old maple tree, it turned out the poor thing was simply thirsty. Our maple is now thriving again, along with everything else in our formerly-parched back yard.

Including the bur oak. I look at my little tree every day. It’s doing well, but it is hard to tell if it has grown much these past five years. I suspect it has added a couple of inches.

One thing’s for certain: my son Baraka has grown. I look at him every day too, yet I know he has grown. I’m pretty sure he has grown more than the bur oak.

I get to see both my son and my tree, every day. And as I look at them, pleasant random quotes float through my mind.

Such as:

The word remember comes from Latin recordor, which means to pass back through the heart.

and:

If you, my friend, want the best in life, life will repay you.

from The Arabian Nights

and:

What is the color of a minute? A month? A year?

-The Dreamer, by Pam Muñoz Ryan

Pyramids

Baraka in January, 2009

On the Road Again

To help kick-start my spirit of adventure, I decided to read On the Road again. This 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac is widely regarded as the definitive novel of the Beat Generation. In fact, Jack coined the term beat with the help of his friends. The Beat culture of the 1950s grew and evolved into the Bohemian-Hippie movement of the 1960s.

I first read On the Road about 24 years ago when I was in the Peace Corps. It was one of those books that tended to get passed around. I laid on my couch one weekend in Navrongo, Ghana and read it straight through, mesmerized.

As I read it this time, I had my eyes peeled for a particular passage. It came early, on page 31.

It’s 1947. Jack a.k.a. Sal Paradise is on his first road trip out West. He has a drunken night in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and then thumbs a ride to Denver the following morning. There are two highways he can take. He chooses the one closest to the mountains so that he can look at them.

His ride deposits him in Longmont, at around noon:

It was beautiful in Longmont. Under a tremendous old tree was a bed of green lawn-grass belonging to a gas station. I asked the attendant if I could sleep there, and he said sure; so I stretched out a wool shirt, laid my face flat on it, with an elbow out, and with one eye cocked at the snowy Rockies in the hot sun for just a moment. I fell asleep for two delicious hours, the only discomfort being an occasional Colorado ant…And after a refreshing sleep filled with cobwebby dreams of my past life in the East I got up, washed in the station men’s room, and strode off, fit and slick as a fiddle, and got me a rich thick milkshake at the roadhouse to put some freeze in my hot, tormented stomach. Incidentally, a very beautiful Colorado gal shook me that cream; she was all smiles too; I was grateful, it made up for last night…I got on that hot road, and off I went in a brand-new car driven by a Denver businessman of about thirty-five. He went seventy. I tingled all over…

I bet I know what you’re thinking! That gas station is now a local monument, right? A roadside tourist attraction in the center of town! And each summer Longmont holds its annual Miss Jack Kerouac Gas Station Beauty Pageant, and the winning Colorado gal gets crowned behind that roadhouse counter, where she smiles and shakes that cream in front of cameras and an adoring crowd! Right?

Um, no.

But the gas station is still around. Sort of.

Johnsons Corner

Johnson’s Corner, in happier days (public domain photo)

The Jack Kerouac Gas Station

The gas station is 668 steps from my back door. And it is in pathetic shape.

It didn’t used to be so close to my back door. Johnson’s Corner Service Station was moved to its present location on a flatbed truck in 2003, from its original spot about a mile farther north along Main Street. The highway needed to be widened, and Johnson’s Corner had to go. At that point a sentimental developer named Kiki Wallace partnered with the Historic Longmont Society, pitched in some funds of his own, got some state money to top it off, and moved the building to a new housing development he was constructing on the southern edge of town. The cost of the move came to more than $100,000, and total expenses to-date have ballooned to over $550,000 thanks to additional land, legal, architectural, engineering, and stabilization costs.

Why did Wallace do it? Well, it was Jack Kerouac’s gas station! Also, it happens to be an interesting and innovative piece of architecture. Designed in Art-Deco-Pueblo style by the architect Eugene Groves in 1937, it was constructed almost entirely of poured, cast, and reinforced concrete, an unusual technique at the time which Mr. Groves went on to patent. Additionally, its lunch counter has historical significance as a symbol of racial tolerance. More on that in a moment.

Apparently Mr. Wallace felt that the gas station would be a fine addition and a showpiece for his award-winning quirky modern neighborhood. This is along the lines of what a similar new neighborhood in Boulder did when it preserved and incorporated the signboard of a 1950s drive-in movie theater that had originally occupied its site.

The idea is/was to convert Johnson’s Corner Service Station into a café with indoor and outdoor seating as well as a concessions window to serve the community swimming pool located behind it.

Obviously, things haven’t gone as planned. Here’s what happened:

2003: Building moved to Prospect housing development. Sits on blocks while rest of neighborhood gets completed.

2007: Building is designated a local historic landmark. Application for state funding is made for a $600,000 restoration project.

2009: State funding denied amid international financial crisis.

2010: Wallace, under pressure from Prospect residents about the eyesore, announces plans to apply for demolition permit.

2010-2013: Building not demolished, largely due to its protected status as an historic landmark.

March, 2013: Wallace applies to revoke the landmark status but later withdraws the application.

August, 2013: Neighborhood residents ask the Longmont Historic Preservation Commission to revoke its landmark status. The Commission responds that it needs more information before reaching a decision.

May, 2014: It’s still there! And getting more decrepit every day.

Historic Longmont still wants to preserve the building, although it acknowledges the unlikelihood of getting three quarters of a million dollars from the state to complete the restoration. It may instead pursue a phased, piecemeal approach using a variety of funding sources.

Many Prospect residents have long lost their enthusiasm for the gas station project, if they ever had any to begin with. During a community meeting last fall with the Historic Commission, as reported in the Longmont Times-Call, local business owner Edward Vanegas clicked through a series of slides.

This is a burned-out building in Iraq, he said. And this is Johnson’s Corner. They’re similar.

Except Jack Kerouac didn’t go On the Road to Iraq!

Turns out, Jack also didn’t go to this gas station.

The Real Jack Kerouac Gas Station

I love the internet. In researching this story, I came across the following reader’s comment posted to a webpage expounding on Johnson’s Corner and its Jack Kerouac connection.

This was written by a Mr. A.G. in 2012:

I liked your story, but you have the wrong Johnson's Corner. I grew up in Longmont and was going to the old High School on Main Street when On the Road came out. There were two Johnson's Corners in Longmont -- one on the south end of town and one on the north end of town. The Johnson's Corner on the north end of town had a soda fountain where you could get malts in those days and there was grass and trees nearby. The Johnson's Corner on the south end of town was surrounded by asphalt and gravel and lacked the soda fountain that the Johnson's Corner on the north end had. I knew the south Johnson's Corner well. The south Johnson's Corner manager lived in an apartment over the station. I know, because as a very young boy, I was infatuated with one of his daughters.

The north Johnson's Corner stayed open very late: You could buy beer there up to two o'clock in the morning or have a cup of coffee. It was interesting who you might see there late at night…doctors who were still making house calls, police officers, newspaper reporters. Sometimes, one could feel that it was part of a Hopper painting such as Nighthawks. I've also drunk malts at the north Johnson's Corner. And like Jack Kerouac, a very beautiful Colorado gal shook me that cream.

I haven't been to Longmont for many years, but I have followed the glamorization of the south Johnson's Corner. I have been amazed at how a station sitting in the middle of nowhere with nothing around it has attracted so much attention.

I believe A.G.’s story. In 1947, the south Johnson’s Corner indeed must have been in the middle of nowhere, well outside of town in a sugar beet field worked by Hispanic and Japanese families. I think it is much more likely that Kerouac got dropped off at the north one, which was in the town part of town.

What’s more, I believe that the north Johnson’s Corner building also still exists.

One block north of the old High School on Main Street sits an old low brick building thickly coated in green paint. A long, low-roofed canopy extends out from its front entrance. Clearly this used to be a gas station once upon a time.

And yes, if you stand and gaze into its windows, you might feel like you are peering into Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting. You can almost see the ghosts of the big silver coffee urns on the counter, the couple sitting at the counter, and the attendant reaching for something beneath.

Currently the building is vacant. It’s most recent incarnation was a Mexican restaurant. I know this because I stumbled in there one day a few years back, ravenously hungry after fasting prior to getting blood drawn at the doctor, and I sat outside beneath the canopy and devoured tacos.

If this is indeed the real Jack Kerouac gas station, why has the bombed-out structure sitting in the kitchy koo neighborhood near my house had so much money and effort put into its failed preservation?

The truth is, many of the South Johnson’s Corner advocates play down its purported On the Road connection. Its status as an historical landmark is based more on its architectural style as well as on another factor: It was a rare business in Longmont that, at that time, did not enforce segregation rules.

(South) Johnson's Corner played a vital role in Longmont's social and economic history, said Margaret Hansen, chair of Historic Boulder's preservation committee, in an e-mail as reported on the website of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. "It was a gathering place, and more importantly, it was the only place in Longmont that served Hispanics at a time when other local businesses posted signs saying White Trade Only."

Well, good for Mr. Johnson. However, I suspect his motivation had a sound economic basis (and that his North Johnson's Corner operated differently). The town of Longmont, and society, originally expanded northward from the center. To the south was the farming belt, a fertile river-bottom plain watered by the Saint Vrain and Left-Hand Creeks. And a decidedly different sector of society worked the fields near South Johnson’s Corner: the society of migrant workers.

Here's an interesting side note: Twenty years prior to Jack Kerouac’s visit, the Longmont City Council was run by the Ku Klux Klan. This was from 1925 to 1927. At this time the governor of Colorado, the mayor of Denver, and one of Colorado's US Senators were also Klansmen. Ah, but those are different stories.

Jesters

by Nia

Jesters of Longmont is my favorite performing arts theater. I think it gives kids a chance to get into the acting industry. To me it’s very groovy.

When you walk in there is the front desk and a snack bar. Every actor needs a snack. Then you can either go left or straight. Now, if you go left you will see the bathrooms and a drinking fountain and that type of stuff. If you keep walking and take a right, you will see dozens of picture frames full of old pictures of past performances. You can keep on walking and get to the back stage, but I’ll tell you about that in a sec.

Now, if you go straight you can take a left or right to get to the auditorium. The auditorium is filled with nice wooden tables and green chairs. In it you can see a view of the stage where all the magic happens.

Now let me tell you about backstage. We have what we like to call the Green Room. It has the boys’ dressing rooms and a piano and lots of chairs for us to sit in and practice our songs with Mary Lou. Also backstage you can find thousands of props used from play to play. In the basement you will find all of the costumes, from a four-year-old size to a seventy-year- old size. Of course backstage there are also the girls’ dressing rooms. With daylight around the windows, it is just so fun!

I have not been in that many plays, but I have been in some, including:

The Secret Garden (as Colin)

The Princess and the Magic Pea (as Jester)

Jack and the Giant (as Mother and the Bean Seller)

Mulan (as Great Ancestor, a hairdresser, a guard, and a Hun)

I just finished Mulan. Lately my dad and I have been working nights, we joined the crew of The Sound of Music. I help up in the box with lighting and sound effects. My dad helps move props, and he also performs as a Nazi with nine lines.

I think acting is fun because once the play starts, you are someone else. That’s why I think that Jesters is where I found my home.

More About Nia

by Nia

Favorite Color: Pink.

Favorite Things to Do: Gymnastics and acting.

Favorite Subject in School: History. Why do I like history? I like history because it's cool to learn about what happened when you weren't even alive, and you get to learn about how others' lives went badly and very well and all the unsung heroes who made the world how it is.

Favorite Food: Cheeseburgers and cheese pizza.

Favorite Drink: Frappuccino.

Favorite Website: Club Penguin. I like Club Penguin because it's a good place to visit after school. You can hang out with your friends, and maybe even challenge them to a little sled racing.

Favorite App: Subway Surfers.

Other Things We Love

Going to Boulder

Flatirons

Boulder Mountain Park

The famous, beautiful, and interesting city of Boulder, Colorado is fifteen minutes from our house, down the Diagonal Highway.

Here is where Baraka trains regularly in parkour at a gym called Apex Movement. If you are ever in Boulder, you should stop by and check out this remarkable gym.

Other favorite things to do in Boulder include heading to Boulder Chill on Arapahoe Avenue for frozen yogurt (watch out, the proprietor might pelt you with gummi bears, thrown clandestinely from behind the counter), and taking walks down Pearl Street, Boulder’s renown pedestrian mall. There we often duck into the Boulder Bookstore to check out latest titles, and also head over to the Boulder Tea House.

Skiing

If you like to ski and you live in Colorado, you are basically a kid in a candy store. Colorado skiing is truly special, and we like to keep it that way by limiting the number of excursions we make and enjoying each trip to the max.

To do this, we often employ a method I call the Ski Road Trip. Here’s what you do: Reserve $55.00 rooms in various Super 8 and Days’ Inns located in population centers (not resorts) scattered throughout the mountains, and head out for several days to revel at the more far-flung ski meccas.

It’s advisable to ignore the little clause on the school district’s website which states that skiing is not a valid excuse for missing school. Just leave a message on the attendance line saying your kids are involved in a family activity, and take off on a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon.

Some of our favorite exquisite spots to enjoy in this fashion are Crested Butte, Aspen Highlands, and Steamboat Springs. And last year we added Taos, New Mexico to the roster. Wow! Taos is amazing!

Pinball in Lyons

Lyons is a little town about ten minutes from Longmont, on the way to Rocky Mountain National Park. In Lyons there is a pinball parlor stocked with dozens of classic old machines, all in mint condition. The owner does a fantastic job keeping them in good working order.

They even have Super Surfer! I was hopelessly addicted to this machine in Seattle in the early 1980s. Also present are nearly all of my other old favorites. And they still cost just a quarter at Lyons Pinball!

Miniature Golf in Estes Park

For a real throwback afternoon, either before or after playing pinball in Lyons, head 30 miles farther into the mountains to the national park gateway town of Estes. There you will find a classic green-carpet miniature golf course that is currently in its 59th year of operation. It costs three dollars to play nineteen holes, and is run by a sweet 87-year-old gentleman named Mitchell who told me it makes him happy to know that people still have fun doing this.

Yes, there is a hole where you have to putt your ball through a windmill. Yes, if you make a hole-in-one on the nineteenth hole, you get a free game.

By the way, Rocky Mountain National Park is right there too, and not a bad place to enjoy in its own right.

Climbing Fourteeners

Okay, this is one that Pete loves, and Nia and Baraka more or less tolerate. Nia summited her first 14,000+ foot peak at age six. This was Uncompaghre Peak in southwestern Colorado’s glorious San Juan range.

The Longmont Ice Pavilion

From mid-November to mid-March, the City of Longmont operates an open air ice rink at Roosevelt Park in the center of town. It’s a good size space, set beneath a soaring canopy roof that lets in tons of daylight. Admission is free if you have a family membership at the city’s Rec Center, which we usually have.

It is particularly wonderful to come skate here right after school on sunny afternoons during the shortest days of the year. This is when that sparkling, brilliant sun slants inside the pavilion and lights up the ice like a dream.

We also never miss the March Meltdown, held on the closing Sunday each year. Here you get free ice cream with beaucoup mix-ins. You also get to paint whatever you want on the ice. It’s a blast!

On the Road Again, Again

It’s May 25th, our last evening home.

Bags are packed. We’re ready to go.

As I gaze out my home office window, down onto Highway 287, my eyes meet a sight much more impressive to me than any gas station Jack Kerouac may or may not have slept in the grass outside of.

Here’s what I see: the open road, bathed in sunshine.

What’s more, it’s the exact same road about which, without a doubt, Jack Kerouac wrote the following words:

I got on that hot road, and off I went in a brand new car driven by a Denver businessman of about thirty-five. He went seventy. I tingled all over…

As I look through my blinds, I can see Kerouac in that car, shooting off to his next adventure.

Tomorrow Nia and I will head out on that exact same highway.

I’ll drive.

I’ll go seventy.

Chapter 2

Florida

May 26-June 1, 2014

Florida

Mass Sliming

28 May, 2014

Our goal was to begin our journey covered in slime. It’s always a good idea to cover yourself with slime before you head out into the world.

Slime is synonymous with Nickelodeon, the TV station that produced the show All That back in the 1990s. And the Nickelodeon Suites Resort in Orlando, Florida invites its guests to a mass sliming event every afternoon at 4:45 at their water park.

So off to Orlando we went, and we checked into the Nick Hotel.

Like any responsible parent preparing to coat his child in goo, I consulted the Material Safety and Data Sheets (MSDSs) for slime prior to arrival. The chemical name for this industrial powder-thickener is hydroxyethyl cellulose, and it goes by the trade name Natrosol. Here’s what the MSDS had to say:

May be harmful by inhalation/ingestion/skin absorption. Causes eye and skin irritation. Material is irritating to mucous membranes & upper respiratory tract. Absorption into the body leads to formation of methemoglobin which causes cyanosis.

Cyanosis? That sounded bad.

Sliming’s off, Nia, I said. It gives you cyanosis. Mama will kill me if you get cyanosis before we even leave the United States.

What’s cyanosis?

I googled.

The Medline Plus website informed: Cyanosis is a bluish color to the skin or mucous membranes that is usually due to lack of oxygen in the blood.

Still very concerned, I did a little more research and discovered that Natrosol is commonly used in the production of sauce for factory-made apple pies. Hmm, maybe it’s not so bad then, I thought. Then I read that Natrosol is the primary ingredient in KY Jelly. Aw, heck! I said. "I have plenty of experience with that!"

Okay Nia, sliming’s back on, I told her. Knock yourself out. Try not to eat it.

Yay!

I thought perhaps we could practice sliming in our back yard before we left, where in past summers we have enjoyed many a Jell-O fight. But Sigma-Aldrich wanted me to pay $95.30 for half a kilogram of Natrosol powder, which seemed like a lot of money to make a bucket of custard. Of course this was probably laboratory-grade Natrosol, not throw-in-your face Natrosol.

A few more clicks brought me to an alternate supplier, Alibaba.com, which sold Natrosol for only $5 to $6 per kilogram. What a bargain! But there was a catch: the minimum order size was one ton, shipped from Ningbo, China.

Well, at least now I know where the Nick Hotel gets is slime. Good thing for them there’s this thing called the Panama Canal.

Gunge!

The folks at Nick may have invented Sponge-Bob, but they did not invent slime. Nick in fact acquired slime when it bought the rights to the 1980s Canadian TV show You Can’t Do That On Television. In this show the characters often got sprayed or dunked in slime if they said, I don’t know, or made any reference to slime, or to its color, or to pies.

Nick reran the Canadian show through 1994, then copied it and kept it going as All That.

But the Canadians were not the first slimers.

Before it was called slime, it was called gunge. And gunge-based game shows were all the rage in the UK and Europe in the latter 20th century. The first TV slimers (or gungers rather) go all the way back to the 1960s. Can you guess what country they were from?

That’s right. Great Britain.

Yes, the country that brought you Monty Python was naturally the first to appreciate the showbiz—and literary—merits of gunge.

In the 1960s, there was a show on the BBC called Not Only…But Also which featured a closing segment called Poet’s Corner. In it the guest of the week had to face off against Peter Cook in an improvised poetry contest, with Dudley Moore refereeing. Each contestant, as well as the referee, had to sit on a rigged seat in a corner above a square tank filled with BBC Gunge. Any repetition of words, hesitation, or deviation from the poetry theme would catapult the offender into the tank.

Naturally each sketch ended with all three people in the tank, chest deep in gunge, reciting poetry.

This I had to see. I scoured YouTube to no avail, but had a blast watching comedy experts Dudley Moore and Peter Cook nail sketch after sketch in this very funny and ancient show. Priceless! If anyone has a link to any of the Poet’s Corner segments, please let me know.

It's Not Slime

by Nia

I was so excited to get slimed at the Nick Hotel. So after I got into my swim suit and waited for ten minutes, I figured out it wasn’t slime!

You couldn’t even hold it in your hand. Plus it was dark green like spinach; the one you see on TV is light green like a lime. It was just dyed water I was guessing. But if you’re going to dye it, dye it the right color! Way to bring my hopes down, Nick!

Slime

Nia, post-slime

Jernigan

Okay we admit it. We didn’t come to Orlando just to get slimed. We also came to visit a theme park or two.

Offbeat world travel Orlando is not. You’ll have to check back with us a little bit later for that. Here in Orlando we were simply a father and daughter in a sea of vacationing families. This is one of the USA’s most-visited cities, with more than 50 million tourists per year.

Walt Disney put Orlando on the holiday map beginning in 1971. He chose this inland site over Tampa due to hurricane concerns. Universal Studios and others piggy backed. The biggest things here prior to theme parks were military bases and, much earlier, oranges—until the Great Freeze of 1894 sent the citrus farther south.

Jernigan, as Orlando was first called, didn’t really exist as a settlement until the end of the Second Seminole War in 1842. That’s when cattleman Aaron Jernigan acquired land here under the Armed Occupation Act, a government-sponsored program aimed at populating central Florida with white people.

And Mr. Jernigan had the place largely to himself. Before and throughout the Spanish occupation centuries and right up through the American Civil War, the Orlando area was pretty much no man’s land. Native Americans didn’t care for it much; they arrived mostly in the 1700s after being displaced from elsewhere. And white pioneers didn’t get interested in settling in droves here until after the Third Seminole War ended in 1858.

So why is this city’s orca torture tank called Sea World Orlando and not Sea World Jernigan? Well, it seems Aaron Jernigan didn’t behave very well during the Third Seminole War and was relieved of his military duties during the middle of the conflict. Later, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis wrote: (Jernigan’s Militia) are more dreadful than the Indians.

Thus the settlement of Jernigan was renamed Orlando the following year, perhaps in honor of a character in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

A more intriguing question (to me) was: Who were these dreadful Indians called the Seminoles? And where are they now?

In truth, the Seminoles were not a very established tribe at the time the Seminole Wars were fought. They were in fact an amalgamation of several indigenous groups which had moved to Florida during the 1700s and banded together in a process known as ethnogenesis. Today the Seminole Nation is based primarily on a reservation in Oklahoma (there is also a smaller Seminole reservation here in Florida). And today, if you go to Wewoka, Oklahoma—the capital of the Seminole Nation—and have a look around, you will see a bunch of people who do not look like indigenes of southeast America. Rather they look like they came from Africa.

Why is this? The answer is in the name.

Seminole comes from the Spanish word cimarrón, which means wild one or runaway.

It also means runaway slave.

Black Seminole

By the late 1600s, Spain’s plan of protecting its Florida colony through missionizing and arming the Indians was looking dodgy. Too many natives were getting wiped out by disease and by raids from the English Carolinian colonists.

So Spain began to encourage fugitive blacks to settle in Florida, and promised liberty in exchange for Catholic conversion and four years of military service in the defense of the town of St. Augustine. In this manner Fort Mose, the first legal black town in North America, was established two miles north of St. Augustine, in 1738.

Many Africans rejected this Spanish version of liberty and headed to inland Florida, where knowledge of tropical agriculture and genetic resistance to malaria served them well. And here they developed tenuous alliances with the Creek Indians and other Native American groups who were simultaneously taking refuge in the same place. A further wave of Africans arrived in the later 1770s as a result of escape opportunities created by the American Revolution.

It would be nice to say that the Indians and the Africans melded into harmonious communities in the central Florida wilderness, but this was not the case. The two cultures were decidedly different. The Seminoles were matriarchal; the Africans were traditionally patriarchal. The Seminoles had their Great Spirit; the Africans brought a syncretic Christianity developed on plantations. Also there was that classic, age-old African skin color/hairstyle issue.

Africans typically set up communities alongside Seminoles, often paying them tributes in the form of livestock and crops in exchange for sanctuary. Some Seminoles held Africans as slaves. You get the picture.

In one aspect, however, the two races were firmly aligned: in defending themselves against the USA.

The first Seminole War began in the aftermath of the War of 1812, when Britain withdrew from a fort in the Spanish Florida panhandle and left several hundred African conscripts and their families in charge. Andrew Jackson soon obtained permission from the US government to attack this Negro Fort, in 1816. During the battle, most of the Africans were killed or wounded and the survivors were put back into slavery. Some Seminole Indians were also killed, prompting the rage of their chief, who issued a warning, and the First Seminole War was on.

Unity among Africans and Seminoles further solidified in the 1820s when the USA acquired Florida. Also around this time, several hundred Africans managed to escape to the Bahamas in canoes. Today their descendants continue to live there, mostly on the island of Andros, and identify as Bahamian.

True disaster for Indian Seminole and Black Seminole alike came at the end of the Second Seminole War, in 1842. This was when about 5,000 of them were rounded up and marched off to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. At that point the Africans had the choice of either joining the march to Indian Territory or re-entering slavery in the United States.

Imagine if you were a black person living in Florida in 1842. What would you have done? Would you have marched to Oklahoma?

If you had marched, and managed to survive the march, imagine your next predicament:

You are an African living on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma.

Some of the Indians you live with own black slaves.

On any given day you might be raided either by whites or Indians and put back into slavery.

Oklahoma statehood remains an open question, along with its slave-or-no-slave status.

If you owned a gun, I bet you’d keep it close at hand!

Now imagine that the US Attorney General orders the US Army to take away your gun (which he did, in 1848). You cannot leave the reservation, you cannot defend yourself. What would you do?

Here’s what a group of about 180 Black Seminoles did in 1849: they went to Mexico. At that time, slavery had been abolished in Mexico for about 20 years.

The group managed to get across Texas and cross into Mexico by July of 1850. There they were admitted by the Mexican government, put into employment as border guards, and settled into the town of Nacimiento in Coahuila province.

And life went on. But that’s another story, set to the tune of Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier.

Mae's Doline

Here’s a question. What does this central Florida have in common with the Yangshuo area in China, that majestic region of soaring mountain spires along the misty Li River?

Gazing across flat-as-a-pancake Florida, you might say, Not much. But looks can be deceiving. To some degree, Florida is like an inverted Yangshuo.

A woman by the name of Mae Rose Owens learned this the hard way one day back in 1981, when she lived near the corner of Denning Drive and Fairbanks Avenue, a couple miles north of downtown Orlando.

One bright May morning, Mae’s dog Muffin began barking. Then Mae noticed a quote queer, swishing noise coming from her back yard. Then her 40-year-old sycamore tree disappeared with a quote ploop unquote. Mae and Muffin skedaddled before the house disappeared along with a pickup truck, five Porsches from a nearby auto repair shop, a chunk of Denning Drive, and the adjacent municipal swimming pool.

The good news is that the toilet fixtures were rescued from the pool’s bathhouse before it too got swallowed.

When this doline, or sinkhole, stabilized later that summer, it was about 320 feet across and 90 feet deep. A carnival atmosphere developed along its perimeter, where people gathered to watch the hole fill up with water. Three of the five Porsche owners got their rides back. Dude even got his pickup truck back. Dirt and concrete were dumped into the hole, and now we are left with pea-green Lake Rose, named in honor of Mae Rose Owens Williams (may she rest in peace; she passed in 2005).

A less benign incident occurred just last year, in 2013. 36-year-old Jeffrey Bush was asleep in his bedroom in suburban Tampa when it vanished into the earth. His brother Jeremy heard him scream, ran to where his bedroom used to be, and jumped into the hole to try to save him. The sheriff’s deputy had to pull Jeremy out and they never found Jeffrey. Eventually they dumped gravel into what became a 60-foot-deep hole. This particular doline is curious in that (so far) it has not expanded beyond the boundaries of the house.

If you own a home in Florida, it’s a good idea to purchase the sinkhole rider on your homeowner’s insurance. This usually won’t get you your house back in the event of a catastrophe, since most repairs cost far more than a home’s market value, but at least you can collect on your insurance before you sell the place to a sinkhole investor, who will then add your property to a portfolio of similar properties and work with a network of about forty Florida contractors to rehabilitate them on a volume discount basis.

Dolines in Florida are nothing new. The state sits atop a bedrock of limestone and dolostone which is riddled with underground caverns. Evidence suggests that increased water consumption in recent years due to population growth, and the associated reductions in the water table, have increased the rate of new doline formation.

Researching this topic has brought me back to some sweet memories.

As a child, I adored Dr. Seuss’s magical 1947 book McElligot’s Pool. I loved and still love to look at its enchanting pictures, and to imagine diving into a local fishing hole and swimming for miles through underground tunnels to the sea:

Down where no one can see,

Right under State Highway Two-Hundred-and-Three!

Right under the wagons! Right under the toes

of Mrs. Umbroso who’s hanging out clothes!

As I grew older, I discounted Señor Seuss’s tale as being one of fantasy. I did not realize that the good Doctor was telling me the truth.

In 2007, two cave divers set a world record by making a seven mile swim through an underground system of tunnels near Tallahassee, Florida. It took them 21 hours. Their dive began at an inland pool called Turner’s Sink.

In a March 2013 story, The New Yorker described Turner’s Sink as a weedy, mosquito-infested mud hole in the woods.

Nevertheless, the story went on to say, It’s a door to a vast realm…

Doline

Lake Rose

Kerouac, Revisited

En route to Mae’s Doline, we looked for another Orlando activity we could do that was peaceful. Anything that did not involve explosions, crowds, flashing lights, 4-D intrusions, jarring physical movement, and motion sickness sounded good.

I knew just the ticket.

My son Baraka and I stopped by 1418 Clouser Avenue on a similar warm lazy day six years ago. Confident my memory would steer me back, I naturally had a much harder time finding it. But soon enough Nia and I pulled up alongside the cottage, and parked beneath the draping moss of its massive, exquisite oak tree.

I am happy to report that the Jack Kerouac Writer-In-Residence Project is still going strong. We spoke with some guys who were scraping the outside of the house in preparation for a new paint job, and they informed us that the inside was in fantastic shape, and that the next writer was due to move in on June 7th for a three month stint.

If this writer wishes to channel Jack, they of course won’t need to tape sheets of paper end-to-end and feed them through a manual typewriter in order to generate their stream of consciousness scroll. Microsoft Word set to ‘draft’ view does a fine job of this.

By the way, Jack performed his typewriter-scroll method in this very house, drafting The Dharma Bums during a two week writing marathon in 1957. This was when he was sharing the house with his mom for about a year. It was also when On the Road finally was published and became a sensation.

Since no one was home writing, Nia and I felt comfortable relaxing on the front porch for a while. And climbing the old oak tree that sits in the front yard, of course.

Clouser

Nia on the front porch of 1418 Clouser Avenue

Ripley's Believe It or Not!

by Nia

Have you ever wanted to make a portrait out of candy?

Well, you’re not the only one. Check this out! It’s a famous singer, starts with a B. Think about it…

If you guessed Beyoncé, then you’re right. Her dress and hair are made of licorice, and the background is made out of hard candy.

Pretty cool, but there’s this other one, a Chinese landscape made entirely out of stamps. I wonder how long it took?

Overall, the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum is pretty groovy.

Cimar-ricans

Native Americans and Africans were some of Orlando’s early cimarrones, to be sure, but they certainly weren’t the last ones. Plenty of other folks have turned runaway over the years and come to live in Orlando.

During the past decade, one sub-group of Orlando cimarrones has increased dramatically in number: Puerto Ricans. Orlando now has the largest Puerto Rican population in Florida, and it keeps getting larger.

We mean no disrespect in bringing this up. We note it with some understanding, and also with affection and nostalgia. Puerto Rico was our home for a big chunk of the previous decade. It’s where Nia was born, and where she lived the first half of her life.

Puerto Ricans have been moving to Orlando for a long time. The presence of military bases here was an early factor, but the influx really ramped up in 2006. This was halfway through our time in Puerto Rico and we witnessed a shift. The island went into a deep recession, two years before the USA did, and it has yet to come out of it.

Real GDP in Puerto Rico has declined every year since 2006. The rate of decline has recently moderated, but forecasts for fiscal 2014 still peg it negative at -0.8%. Unemployment sits at 15.2% and this is for a population with an already very low labor participation rate. The government recently took the unprecedented step of opening up a website where citizens could go and write down their suggestions for curing the economy.

Some good news: GDP per capita decline in Puerto Rico has leveled off. The fact that hundreds of thousands of people have left the island undoubtedly has had something to do with this. In 2009, National Public Radio interviewed an Orlando-area Puerto Rican community leader who estimated that 1,000 Puerto Ricans moved to central Florida per week in 2006. These included lawyers, businessmen, and health care professionals. Many have since registered to vote, and they helped Barack Obama carry the state in 2012.

Unfortunately for them, this past decade has not been a particularly wonderful time, economically, to move to the USA and to Orlando in particular. I feel bad for those who came in 2006-7 and plunked down money on a house. Back then, median Orlando home values were at $265,000. In 2010, they dipped below $110,000. Since then they have crawled back, but only to the $125,000 range.

On a personal level, we feel concern for Puerto Rico. How are old friends holding up? Favorite places, beloved things we used to do?

Now would be a good time to go and check up on them.

Next stop: Puerto Rico!

Chapter 3

Puerto Rico

June 1-8, 2014

Puerto Rico

The Room by the Sea

1 June, 2014

There’s our old neighborhood, Nia, I said, pointing out the airplane window as we descended into San Juan.

Nia peered and shrugged. I don’t really know where to look.

We dropped lower, over the lagoon bridge.

Aw Nia, they took away the flags. I pointed at the long line of empty flagpoles along the bridge. All through our years of living in Puerto Rico, that bridge had been adorned a hundred of flapping Puerto Rican flags.

I don’t remember the flags, she said.

But there was something she did remember.

Get ready to clap, Baba!

As the plane’s wheels touched the ground, the passenger cabin burst into applause.

An hour later we were in our rental car and driving through the metropolis. It all felt pretty much the same, like we’d never left. Nia was on her cell phone with her mama. We’ll be in Rincón in time for sunset, she said.

Rincón is a beach town located on the island’s west end, where many Puerto Ricans like to go when they need a vacation. Even if you live in a tropical paradise, you still need to go on vacation once in a while. As transplants, we adopted the Rincón habit early on in our eight years here and became hopeless addicts. We also adopted a little beachfront hideaway called the Coconut Palms Inn as our second home.

I accelerated along Highway 22, visualized our destination, and sang the song that always takes me back:

There’s a room

By the sea

In an old house

With a view and a breeze

(Lyrics of Room By the Sea, by Susan Brehm)

Two hours later, Nia was asleep in the backseat and I was lost in Puerto Rico’s web of curvy mountain roads. My plan had been to drive to Rincón my favorite way, one that passes through an exquisite karst landscape that looks like a miniature version of Yangshuo in China. It also goes up and over what I consider to be the world’s prettiest hillside. But my years away from the island had fogged my memory and I’d lost my way.

And the clock was ticking! The sun was getting lower. We didn’t want to miss the sunset in Rincón!

There was only one thing to do. I pulled over at the next roadside bar for an ice cold Medalla.

The barkeep pulled out a golden yellow beer can, thwacked the top of it with her index finger and listened to make sure it wasn’t frozen solid, wrapped a white napkin around it, and handed it to me. I downed the first half in five delicious