In early 2020, just as the first stories about COVID-19 were hitting the national news, I took a trip to Panama. I rented a little car and drove nearly every paved road in the country, and a few unpaved ones, some of it with a friend from college, but mostly solo.

Yesterday I found my daily journal from the trip. It was mainly field notes and observations that only I would find interesting, but I have selected a few excerpts to share. Just in case it’s not apparent from these selections, I had a great time.

From Day 6:

I had good orange juice and a so-so burger at the hotel restaurant. The other guests were all garbage.

On Day 7, I checked out Boquete:

Boquete is a nice town, but it’s full of backpackers, retirees, and other white people.

So I didn’t stick around. Instead I drove over the Continental Divide, left my car in Almirante, and took a water taxi to Bocas Del Toro, where I only stayed overnight. I had this to say on Day 8:

On the water taxi ride I saw some brown boobies, which are birds.

Also …

I don’t like the kind of tourists that go to Bocas Town. There isn’t only one type — I just don’t like any of them. The old people are probably the worst, though. When we got off the boat in Almirante, one old man decided he needed to tell one of the kids working on the dock how to do his job, that he needed to help the passengers off the boat before he started unloading luggage. What pisses me off the most is that he thought he was doing a good thing. Seriously, fuck that guy. I hope he dies soon.

Then I ended up back in Boquete.

I was planning to go to David or thereabouts, but I took a wrong turn and didn’t realize it until I was already much closer to Boquete, and since I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I was tired and sore from sitting in the car and from hitting a few too many massive potholes that the car only came out the other side of because it bounced so goddamn hard when it hit the bottom … Boquete it was.

On Day 9, I discussed the luxury of a hot bath.

… I’ve been roughing it for years and I don’t have indoor plumbing. I shower at the gym or take an ice bath outside. Yeah, I’m super hardcore, and also some high school kids saw my wiener.

Sometimes that school bus pulls up at the exact wrong moment.

Later, I recounted a conversation I had that morning with the owner of the hotel.

David, Panama is growing quickly. I can see how that sentence could be confusing; he didn’t call me David, and I’m not calling you David, even if your name happens to be David. David, which is the name of a large city in Panama, is growing.

I’m not sure who “you” was, but I guess I always write as if someone else will read it, even if it’s my private journal. Day 9 was the best day of the trip; it will find its way into at least one of my longer pieces, so I won’t say more about it here.

On Day 10 I got to do some real driving.

The road up the hill was pretty steep and winding, and it just kept going up, higher and higher, and all along the way there were Ngäbe people, and kids especially — hundreds of them. I went to Hato Chamí and kept going. I went to Cerro Flores, then back down and off another side road to Peña Blanca and Llano Tugrí.

After awhile I was on a new road that isn’t even on the map yet, and I just kept driving up these impossibly steep hills and around these ridiculously tight, blind corners, dodging kids and cows and whatever else turned up.

After awhile I was pretty sure I was headed back down again; first I started seeing more vegetation, then dump trucks and taxis, and finally I arrived back at the Panamericana in Tole.

Later that day, I became a bit frustrated with the local commuters.

The road was very bad, and people were driving like absolute imbeciles trying to avoid the potholes. Most of them were in trucks, driving them like they were in cars, and I was in a little car, driving it like a truck. I must have passed at least forty of them over a fifty kilometer stretch, and some of them didn’t like it one bit, but they could only chase after me for about thirty or forty meters before they had to start swerving around the potholes again, as I just skipped across the tops of them. I don’t like to call a giant group of people stupid, but … they were acting like their axles were held on with rubber bands. You hit a bump once in awhile. Calm down.

Then I had a hard time finding my hotel.

Eventually I came to the right driveway and got off the bumpy road, onto a worse one. This was a very poorly maintained dirt road that I really shouldn’t have the rental car on. In fact if I damage it here, my credit card’s insurance won’t cover it. I’ll have to stage an accident somewhere else.

Thankfully, that wasn’t necessary.

The only other people here have a two year old, and she chose 9-10 pm to run around screaming, while her parents, who had been giving me suspicious looks ever since I arrived, did next to nothing to stop her. I was tired from driving all day and needed the sleep, and was also annoyed that this guy thought I was into his weird-looking wife or something.

At dinner the kid wanted to come over to my table and they wouldn’t let her within twenty feet of me, like I was some kind of monster. I don’t give a shit about socializing with their child — ok by me either way, but give me a fucking break.

It’s possible they just knew more about the pandemic than I did, but it’s more likely they were freaks.

The place had some privacy issues, which I discussed on Day 11:

I don’t want to hear my neighbors talking ten feet away while I’m sitting on the toilet, and I’d rather they not hear me pooping. When I was coming back up to my room last night I noticed that the curtain on my bathroom window was transparent when the light was on.

So I either shower in the daytime or with the lights off, I guess, or measure my waist height compared with the windowsill, and calculate the angle of the tallest female guest’s eye line to the windowsill from the nearest point in the hallway.

Or they could just get a better curtain and thicker doors and I wouldn’t have to think about any of it.

I got out of there and back on the road.

I left the hotel, and that road … I had forgotten in the short time I was there just how bad the road was, and how long … I went south to the end of the highway first, then doubled back, and when I passed the driveway for the hotel again, I thought to myself, if I had forgotten something in the room, would I go back and get it? Fuck no. The road is that bad.

There was much less traffic on the way back than there had been coming down, and that made a big difference, even though it was still a real piece of shit drive.

Finally, I got onto a better road, only to get stuck behind a parade.

… I don’t know what they were celebrating but it appeared to have something to do with Jesus and/or balloons.

At least I found someplace to stop for lunch, at one of Panama’s ubiquitous chicken shacks, where …

… I had chicken, French fries, and sadness. But it was under $5 so it’s fine.

Later that night, in Chitré, I went to a restaurant and encountered someone who rubbed me the wrong way. I’d forgotten about him until today.

My food wasn’t great, but the patacones were good. The Canadian guy giving his adult son relationship advice — not good.

It made me think of how they call Panama the Great American Interchange, where you have species from North and South America expanding their ranges, moving past each other through this narrow corridor; this guy was stuffing food into his mouth at about the same speed the bullshit was coming out of it.

I always like getting a read on dirtbags like him, and it’s so easy. Listen to them talk for thirty seconds and you know all there is to know about them, more than they even know about themselves.

He’s in his 60s but wants people to think 50s, so he dyes his hair, but to wear that Cuban shirt you have to be over sixty or under thirty, or just Latino, and you, sir, are very Canadian. The shirt also isn’t vintage, it’s retro, and those are two very different things.

He likes to pretend to be rich, but he makes about $60-70k a year and vacations in places like Panama because it’s cheap and he gets to feel like a big man here. Still, he doesn’t have the balls to go someplace even cheaper.

He works in sales and considers himself to be slick and persuasive, but in reality a website can sell his product better than he can; he knows he’s becoming irrelevant and has no idea what to do about it.

He’s single; he’s been married before, but he’s so insecure he can’t just have a relationship, he has to dominate, or cheat, or both. He needs the fuel for his ego.

He was never much of a father to his son, and that’s part of the reason his son has bleached, spiked hair as an adult. He’s trying to make up for that now, because his son is probably the last chance he has at someone looking up to him or thinking anything of him at all.

He tries to be authoritative, but he doesn’t know anything, especially about relationships, so he just talks and talks and never really says anything.

At the same time, he wants to be his son’s buddy, because he has no friends and he longs to be liked, so he keeps calling him “dude,” and saying gross shit that no son should ever hear from his father, about “smelling like pussy” and “fucking the shit out of” some poor, poor woman.

The truth is he’s never fucked the shit out of anyone in his life. When he does get the chance to have sex, it’s all about him, and it’s over very quickly.

He likes to talk about his son’s sex life because he gets a vicarious ego boost out of the deal. He also likes [sex workers], but he doesn’t want anyone to know, because it makes him look like he can’t get laid without paying for it.

A young woman recently told him he had old man smell. She didn’t mean it as an insult, but it’s been bothering him ever since.

They take a selfie and he flips off the camera, trying to look spontaneous. It doesn’t come out well so they take another one, and he spontaneously flips off the camera again, but this time he’s less confident and the middle finger is less pronounced, more timid, and sad.

He keeps looking over at me. He wants to be sure I can hear him. I’ve spoken only Spanish since I came in, so he doesn’t know if I can understand him or not.

I look straight through him. He doesn’t like it. In the time it takes him to get out his wallet and figure out what to tip, I get my bill, leave my money, and bounce.

On Day 15, it was time to go back home, and on the second leg of my flight, the reality of 2020 set in, aggressively, when a man …

… coughed directly onto the back of my head while there’s a goddamn pandemic brewing, so I’m probably going to die.

I got COVID pretty quickly after that, but I’m alive.

Happy travels.

It was a win for all parties involved, as the restaurant could feed me for very little money compared with what it would cost to hire contractors, and the amount of work I actually had to do was negligible in light of what it would have cost to pay for my meals.

Most days I let the chef decide what I ate, and I was never disappointed.

One afternoon an older man and his wife walked in and took a seat at a table near the salsa bar. When the server came to take their order, the man asked her, “Do you know what a Taco Supreme is?”

It occurred to me that knowing what a Taco Supreme is and being able to make one in your restaurant are not the same thing.

This was an authentic taqueria. The owner had a second location in Mexico City. Her corn tortillas were handmade. Her ground beef, for those few who ever ordered it, had actual beef in it.

And here was a man, in an authentic Mexican restaurant, asking an authentic Mexican waitress for a trademarked fast food taco. And when she hesitated, because she had a basic understanding of reality, he began to describe it to her, and suggested she take notes.

It turns out that it’s not that easy to make a cheap, shitty taco with quality ingredients, but at least they had the requisite sour cream to make that taco “Supreme^TM.”

The customer wasn’t thrilled with what he received, but in the end his wife told him to shut up and leave the poor girl alone. Or not. I don’t remember, but I like that ending.

I’d have sent him packing, but that’s why I was snaking drains for free tacos and not running a restaurant.

On another occasion a young man and his girlfriend visited the taqueria and he ordered four beef tacos. What he received were four, fresh, handmade corn tortillas, piled high with carne asada, which he was free to top as he saw fit with various salsas, diced or grilled onions, cilantro, and lime juice.

“These aren’t fuckin’ tacos!” he growled, violently shoving the plate away from him.

The owner had made them herself, and was fairly certain she knew what tacos were, as the proprietor of taco shops in two different countries.

“These aren’t fuckin’ tacos!” he repeated, to the stunned taco professional.

His girlfriend was on the phone when his outburst occurred, and stepped outside so her belligerent boyfriend would not be heard by the other party. When her call concluded, she did not come back inside immediately, instead sending a text to her companion to join her out front.

Through the closed door, she could be heard shouting, “WHAT THE FUCK!”

It was more of a statement than a question.

He stormed off and she came back inside and apologized for his behavior. It seemed that the only tacos the young man had ever seen were from Taco Bell, so authentic Mexico City-style fare was unrecognizable to him. I could almost feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t such a bitch.

Thankfully, minutes later, he was hit by a logging truck and killed, and we all finished our meals before going outside to point and laugh at how silly his guts looked all over the street, and then I made out with his girlfriend with tongues and everything.

That’s how I choose to remember it.

I have spent nearly all my life eating Mexican food, and for many of my years, I thought I had a solid grasp of what it was.

I did not.

There was a time when I’d have told you that Taco Bell, with its weird, crispy corn tortillas and mealy ground “beef” was merely the white man’s crude attempt at Mexican food.

I’d have confidently asserted that only the whites ask for flour tortillas with their carne asada. I’d have insisted that ground beef was for hamburgers, not tacos.

Then I learned that entire regions of Mexico prefer tortillas de harina over tortillas de maíz. And I learned the history of Taco Bell.

San Bernardino, California has as much a right to call itself the birthplace of modern fast food as any. The first McDonald’s developed its assembly line approach to cooking there, and it’s where Glen Bell was introduced to Mexican food.

After seeing lines around the block at Mitla Cafe, he began eating there daily, befriended the owners, and eventually learned their recipes, which he adapted to the assembly line system used by every fast food restaurant today. Since then, his restaurant chain, Taco Bell, has done pretty well.

The story of Mitla is a bit more interesting. Founders Lucia and Salvador Rodriguez were unable to find many of the ingredients they had cooked with in Mexico, so they improvised with what was locally available, and their own unique style of Mexican food was born, though one could argue quite convincingly that the food is nothing if not American.

You can still eat at Mitla Cafe today and judge for yourself.

When it comes to Mexican fast food, I’m more of a Del Taco fan, but I no longer write off Glen Bell’s creation as the white man’s taco, though it literally is.

Neither do I pretend to know what Mexican food tastes like, even after living and traveling extensively in Mexico.

Most of the food in Mexican restaurants in the US consists of a handful of the same ingredients and the choice of which delivery mechanism to receive them with. A taco, a torta, a sope, a tostada. Same stuff, different vessels.

But try cochinita pibil or chiles en nogada and you’ll have your perception of Mexican flavors turned on its head. As a lover of more familiar Mexican dishes, you might not even like them.

Or you might find them to be supreme.

More importantly, you will be reminded that a nation of over 130 million is not a monolith, and it can no more be constrained by our narrow perceptions than its people can be held behind a crudely built wall.

You might be inspired to travel, and learn, and eat. To get to know your neighbor.

You might even decide that cultural authenticity is a false ideal, because a culture is just a bunch of people finding meaning where they can, in schools and churches and artisan workshops; kitchens, the backs of trucks, and drive-through windows.

And that’s pretty fuckin’ great.

The job started as a case of mistaken identity. I’ve gotten a few jobs that way. “You work on mobile homes, right?” “Sure.” “That’s your job, fixing up mobile homes?” “I can fix mobile homes.” “But that’s not your main job?” It went on like that for awhile, and then, “Can you do drywall?” “Yeah.”

Conkle owned a few mobile home parks around the western US, and he and his wife spent their days moving from one to the next, living in a large motorhome. Before he got into real estate he was a first mate on a cargo freighter, and he still took a job on a ship from time to time.

That must be where he got his management style. On a ship, it makes sense to keep your crew busy with routine maintenance — cleaning, painting, minor repairs. But in a mobile home park, especially one as distressed as Conkle’s properties, there tends to be more work than there is time to do it all, so you have to prioritize.

I started with a bathroom remodel — really more of a total rebuild, because the floor below the tub had completely rotted out, as had some of the walls, and some previous repairs had not been done particularly well.

Before I could finish the job I was hired to do, Conkle asked me to repair the skirting on several homes around the park. This was the tenants’ responsibility, but he complained, “These people will never do it, so we just do it ourselves and I bill them for it.” A couple tenants weren’t happy with this arrangement and thought I was the right person to yell at about it, but it turns out that I’m not a very satisfying person to verbally abuse.

Next he had me build a storage shed, which I almost finished before he pulled me off to skirt another home. In that one I found a massive plumbing leak, filling the plastic sheeting under the house like a giant, upside-down waterbed. I poked a hole in the plastic to let the water out and told Conkle I wouldn’t touch the home again unless it was to fix the plumbing. It was likely that a large section of the floor would also need to be replaced.

Back at the original home, I finally got to finish the bathroom and then started rebuilding the roof trusses in the living room. Some of my tools were stolen from the job site, by a particularly stupid tweaker who was trying to use my drywall screw gun to make a repair on his car, and then became frustrated when he learned that the batteries on cordless tools have to be recharged. He hadn’t stolen the charger. I’m told he exclaimed, “I thought they were supposed to be cordless! What’s the point if you still have to plug in the charger?”

Without going into detail, I got my tools back. I’m also told the thief is now sober and doing well, and I’m happy to hear it.

Conkle came into the house one day to check on the project. We got to talking and it turned out he was from the same part of California where I grew up. I told him I used to go to punk shows in his home town. And then he asked the dreaded question, “Which groups did you see?”

He called them “groups.” We didn’t see groups, we saw bands. We didn’t go to concerts, we went to shows. I always hated talking about music with anyone outside of the tribe. If I told him he wouldn’t have heard of any of the bands, I’d sound like a snob. If I listed off a few of them, he’d ask more questions, and my answers would only be increasingly confounding. I opted for snobbery — one awkward moment and it’s over, versus one after another, and another …

Then he began talking about his tenants, and it was clear that he had only disdain for them. His attitudes, his phrasing, the way he talked about money — all suddenly familiar. “Ah, I know who this is,” I thought. I’d met this guy before, a thousand iterations of him.

I suppose it’s possible to run a successful business when you despise your customers, but why would you want to? It sounds like a miserable way to make money.

Across the road, a hoarder was being evicted and moved into an assisted living facility. The scene was at first heartbreaking, then disgusting. No one had been in the home in many years. Mountains of clothing, much of it never worn, intermingled with moldy, half-eaten sandwiches; years-old jugs of milk; envelopes full of cash; dead cats; jars of urine and feces.

Conkle wanted me to clean out the house, and it took all the restraint and self-control I could muster not to tell him to fuck right the fuck off. It was a job for a hazmat team, not a general contractor. So he hired a teenage kid to do it.

It took several days to get everything out of the home, and it filled two large construction dumpsters, which Conkle didn’t want to rent until the last possible moment, so he had the kid pile the trash on the ground, and then he hired an excavator operator to bring his machine and scoop all the garbage into the dumpster.

Dumpster rental: $50 per day. Excavator with operator: $180 per hour. In other words, for every two hours of excavator time you could rent the dumpster for a week.

Conkle also needed to install some culverts and dry wells for drainage. He’d originally tried to get me to dig the trenches for the culverts by hand.

Time to dig by hand: 8 hours at $25 per hour. Time to dig with an excavator: 5 minutes at $180 per hour.

Thankfully I helped Conkle see reason on that one. Besides, I still had a lot of unfinished projects around the property, and that was becoming increasingly frustrating.

When the excavator arrived, Conkle decided to have him clear brush and weeds from a mobile home pad, which was a much better job for a smaller machine. It took half the morning for him to realize he was wasting money, and then he was suddenly in a rush, grabbing any laborer he could find to get the culverts in the ground so the shovel operator could bury them before end of day.

When things didn’t go smoothly, Conkle panicked. He finally started doing math in his head. He began to tremble. He snapped at his laborers. They snapped back. And then, one of the funniest sentences I’ve ever heard on a job site: “This is costing me five cents a second!”

I wasn’t the only one who found it funny, and a beet-red Conkle stormed off his own job site in the grip of a mental breakdown. I wondered how many of these his wife had talked him down from over the years.

With the hoarder house emptied, Conkle wanted to remodel it and sell it. His concern was that if he demolished it, as he should have, he would be hit with all kinds of regulations, like asbestos abatement laws. A few coats of fresh paint would be much cheaper.

The house was still quite ripe with the disturbingly sweet smell of decomposing waste. I suggested that if he insisted on remodeling, he start by painting the entire interior of the home with Kilz, a brand well-known for its odor sealing capabilities, but Conkle insisted that any paint would work.

I ended up agreeing to do a little work on the house after it was painted. It still smelled bad, but it was tolerable. Conkle insisted on cutting corners. Some of his laborers and I began using his name as a verb for any half-assed repair. Leaky drain line? Conkle it with a little duct tape. You bought three different types of flooring at a surplus sale and don’t have enough of any of them to do the whole floor? Just Conkle them together, it’ll be fine.

After several months of moving me from one project to the next, without ever letting me finish anything, Conkle and Mrs. Conkle decided to go south for the winter. He wanted to wrap up our business arrangement, but he also wanted the first home I’d worked on completed. He had a buyer lined up, and he proposed a three-way trade.

I would complete the remodel and install a new roof on the home. Conkle would pay me for any unexpected repairs, as I was continuously finding new problems inside the walls and ceiling. I would provide the roofing materials at my own expense, but he would be responsible for all other materials. The buyer would give Conkle a sum of money for the home, and she would give me her travel trailer as payment for the new roof.

There were weather delays, but I completed the project. I took delivery of the travel trailer, and I emailed Conkle the bill for the unplanned repairs. The total was a little over $3,000. He pretended not to understand the bill.

When we spoke on the phone, he tried to change the terms of our deal. He claimed he’d never agreed to pay me for the extra repairs. In effect, he tried to cut himself out of the equation entirely. So I put a lien on his mobile home park.

I followed all the correct procedures and notified him properly, but Conkle didn’t respond. He could have challenged the lien in court, but he missed his window. If he ever wanted to sell the property he would have to pay me. And as it turned out, he did want to sell.

Conkle rolled back into town and we had a tense conversation in the grocery store. By tense, I mean that I said bad words to him in front of a lot of other people. He was visibly rattled, and complained to other shoppers and store employees, but he had a hard time finding a sympathetic ear. I’m not the most friendly guy, but I have more friends than Conkle.

Ultimately he agreed to pay what he owed. We met at the bank the next morning. He wanted to watch me cash his check so I couldn’t claim he’d never paid. I’ve noticed that dishonest people tend to think that everyone else is also dishonest.

In the bank lobby, he was shaking, with tears in his eyes. Paying his debt was traumatic for him. I wrote him a receipt and filled out a form to remove the lien, but I made him file it and pay the fee, which also made him very upset.

Some time later I saw him in the hardware store with his wife. He avoided me, but she wanted a fight. I wasn’t interested. I’d already won. Her attacks devolved into her telling me I stank. I said she was probably right — I’d been cleaning the barn. The owner had a later conversation with them about what is and is not appropriate behavior in his store.

Conkle sold his trailer park for around half a million dollars. It should have sold for at least four times that amount, but he could never hold onto his tenants, so occupancy was below fifty percent. He couldn’t get qualified contractors to work for him because he didn’t pay his bills. He always cut corners when it came to maintenance and repairs.

Had he treated workers fairly and given tenants a good value for their money, people would have wanted to work for him, and his park would have been at full occupancy, at a higher monthly rate, like every other mobile home park in town.

Instead he’d saved thousands of dollars, and lost millions.

You might say he Conkled himself.

When I was a kid, most of our back yard was a steep hillside that we did almost nothing with. If I had it today I would plant avocados, assuming the HOA would allow it. But in those days it was dominated by three eucalyptus trees that smothered the hillside with bark and leaf litter; their roots secreted a toxin into the soil that prevented any native plants from competing with them.

Every so often the HOA would send tree trimmers to absolutely massacre the eucalypts, giving us the worst of both worlds — invasive trees that destroyed the local ecology and substantially increased wildfire risk, trimmed to their ugliest possible forms.

I want those trees dead.

I know the timber business, the trucking business, the paper business, and I have the added benefit of not caring where the trees go — whether they’re shipped to Chinese plywood mills or pulped locally for paper, or simply thrown into the ocean — as long as they’re dead.

The trees also take up massive amounts of water from the soil, which exacerbates drought conditions. In a wildfire, strips of eucalyptus bark, full of flammable oils, become airborne, drifting several miles and starting spot fires wherever they land. They also form massive pitch pockets that explode when they heat up, sometimes throwing fireballs a hundred yards or more.

You might think that trees that burn so readily would eventually be consumed by wildfires, problem solved, but the blue gum also has exploding seed pods that are heat activated, so for every one that’s killed in a fire, many thousands more can be planted in its place.

They may pose this same fire risk in their native Australia, but numerous ecological and environmental factors exist there to keep them in check. In California, the factors that would limit their dominance are all but absent. Those first seeds brought to North America in the 1800s have grown into the gift that keeps on taking.

If California doesn’t want to give me millions of dollars to wipe them out, they should still give it to someone. Such a project would create jobs and tax revenue for decades, significantly reduce wildfire risks, and allow for the reestablishment of native trees — trees that actually feed birds and other wildlife.

In some California communities, “environmentalists” have vehemently opposed the removal of eucalyptus forests, I suppose to prove that stupidity cannot be bound by ideology. People would rather have a forest of the wrong trees today than to wait fifty years for the right trees to mature, and I suspect that no amount of environmental, ecological, or economic benefit will ever change that.

It is, in fact, the reason the railroad companies planted eucalyptus in California in the first place, believing their rapid growth would provide a ready supply of railroad ties. Then they learned that the young wood warps, rots, and splits when you drive a spike through it, and the costly experiment was over. Then the trees escaped the lab.

Today, when I look at a eucalyptus monoculture, I don’t see a forest. I only see the cost.

I haven’t picked the book up in many years, but on occasion I will see an unknown bird and its name will simply come to me. More often, birds in real life look very little like their idealized illustrations, and identifying them takes a bit more work.

For that reason, other field guides followed. I became particularly fond of the National Audubon Society guides, which featured high quality, color photographs of every species. I had not only the bird books, but also guides to mammals, reptiles, and trees.

The stack of books traveled with me on every summer road trip, to be consulted after each animal sighting, or whenever a tree needed to be identified. My mother might have occasionally regretted buying them for me when I corrected her more colloquial nomenclature: They’re not blue jays, they’re Steller’s jays — blue jays live east of the Rockies. It’s not a chipmunk, it’s a golden-mantled ground squirrel. Those aren’t pine trees, they’re Douglas firs.

I must have been a treat.

I never stopped poring over field guides and other nature books, but where I eventually took issue with both National Geographic and the Audubon Society was in their narrow definition of “North America,” which they treated as the United States and Canada only.

NatGeo has since changed the title of its book to Birds of the United States and Canada, but Audubon continues to draw an arbitrary distinction that ignores a massive, and massively biodiverse, portion of the continent. It also ignores seventh grade geography.

At the risk of pedantry, I submit the following rant:

For anyone who doesn’t scour maps like I do, North America contains twenty-three countries, including all of Central America and the Caribbean, as well as territories like Puerto Rico and Greenland. And of course, Mexico is one of North America’s three largest nations.

Central America is not a continent; rather it is a region of North America. Mexico is not part of Central America, with the possible exception of the area east of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Five US states, six Mexican states, and Cuba share the Gulf coast, while several other states are heavily influenced by its weather patterns. Thirty-three US states, eleven Mexican states, and two Canadian provinces are part of the Gulf of Mexico watershed.

The eastern side of the Yucatán Peninsula is Mexico’s Caribbean coast, while Cuba is widely considered the northernmost island in the Caribbean. Thus the two countries with which the United States shares the Gulf are also part of the Caribbean.

It’s worth noting that the southernmost part of the continental United States sits around 564 miles south of Mexico’s northernmost point. In fact Mexico reaches fewer than 700 miles farther south than the continental US.

Much of the United States is closer to Central America than to Canada. My home in Texas is roughly the same distance from Canada as it is from Panama — Central America’s most distant country.

Florida is only about 90 miles from Cuba. The Bahamas are only 50 miles from the Florida coast in some spots, and that’s 50 miles east, not south — Grand Bahama has roughly the same latitude as West Palm Beach.

This is all to say that these are not faraway, separate places. We are one continent. We are inextricably connected. Birds know this, even if some of us do not.

More than a third of the bird species in the United States and Canada migrate here from Latin America and the Caribbean. Others have year-round ranges that extend past our southern border. I recall feeling surprised, and then a little stupid, the first time I saw a northern cardinal in southern Mexico.

Of the nearly 700 native bird species in Texas alone, all but eighteen are also found in Mexico or the Caribbean, or were historically found there. That’s over 97 percent. California has the most bird species in the nation, about 75 percent of which are also found in Mexico.

Mexico has over a hundred endemic birds — species found nowhere else on earth. Puerto Rico has almost twenty. The entire continental US? Fifteen. Despite its enormous land mass, Canada has no endemic birds.

Mexico and Central America are home to more than ten percent of the entire world’s bird species, despite comprising less than two percent of its land mass.

Panama alone hosts more bird species than the US and Canada combined, on a narrow isthmus smaller than South Carolina, making it acre-for-acre one of the most biodiverse nations on Earth. Costa Rica is similarly species-dense.

I could go on … and on … but instead I’ll simply say that the most ecologically rich parts of our continent are the parts that the nature guides are ignoring.

It’s easy to think the omission has little to do with wildlife, and more to do with the people who live, or don’t live, in those disregarded places.

Is Audubon is ‘othering’ about twelve percent of the continent, which also happens to be home to about twelve percent of the entire world’s biodiversity — you know, the thing they’re supposed to care most about?

Several years ago I contacted Audubon about this and to their credit, I received a response. I was told they simply didn’t have the resources to produce guides for those regions. They assured me that it had nothing to do with race, or culture, or the prevalence of spicy food.

But they do have teams working there, as they continue to publish data for regions that are much larger, much more remote, and much less ecologically significant.

There are Alaskan islands so remote that they’re much closer to Asia than to the North American mainland. They’re rightfully included in the guides.

So I’m left still questioning their priorities, and I’m frustrated, because I’d really like an Audubon field guide to the birds of the whole continent.

Given that every one of the seventy-plus bird species I’ve identified so far on my own property spends at least part of the year in Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean (at least 24 of them even range into South America) — I think I’m being reasonable.

I’d spent a couple years volunteering at a big cat rescue. I knew what tigers sounded like. And there was one on the other side of the river.

I’d just slid down the trunk of a fallen tree laid against a steep hillside, and landed in a tangle of rattan palms. I managed to keep from being too deeply impaled.

I was trying to get back to the river. The trail had become overgrown and the river was the only thing I had left to orient myself.

My trip had started a bit easier.

At the bus station in Surat Thani, I’d met a couple guys who drove me to Khao Sok, a little village on Thailand’s Malay Peninsula, and the gateway to a national park that shared its name.

In the coming days I’d learn that they were tattoo artists; they spent about seven hours applying a dragon to my arm with sewing needles tied to the ends of bamboo skewers.

It was the only time I was ever tattooed by two people at the same time. A third man held my arm steady and stretched my skin taut — a more receptive canvas.

Unlike the buzzing and the grinding feeling of a tattoo gun, I could feel every time the needles entered and exited my skin.

The four of us were arranged around a large, futon-type mattress, in a bamboo hut with holes in its thatch roof, and paintings of Bob Marley and Che Guevara on the walls. I watched geckos chasing insects across the ceiling as the needles popped in and out, in and out.

The guys arranged for me to camp on the lawn at an eco-resort for free, as long as I promised to only use their guide services and to have some meals in their restaurant.

I took a boat trip with their guide just to hold up my end of the bargain, but the rest of my time was spent hiking in the jungle.

The first day I went out, a village dog went with me. All I’d done was pet him, but that was all it took. His owner was certain I’d given him treats, but I had not. We’d just kind of clicked.

It was nice to have a companion, but hiking with a dog doesn’t make for very good wildlife viewing, so the following day, when he tried to join me, I insisted he stay behind, and he was smart enough to understand.

This time I took a different route, deeper into the rainforest.

The first leech I was aware of dropped from a tree and landed on the back of my hand. Many more would follow.

As I made my way up the trail, I found that if I took a break, hordes of leeches would immediately come somersaulting in my direction. Best to keep moving.

I reached a flat area with scattered, small trees and bamboo, where the air felt hotter, heavier, and the smell left no doubt — elephants had just been here. As much as I’d have liked to see wild elephants, I didn’t want to meet them on foot. I kept walking.

The leeches sat on the ends of twigs and on leaf tips, waiting for the next mammal to pass by. They can detect vibrations, body heat, carbon dioxide, and odors. I’d been counting them as I scraped them from my legs. Thirty-six, thirty-seven …

Their anticoagulant saliva left thin streams of blood running down my legs — trails for other leeches to follow.

Soon my earlier bites were drawing clusters of new passengers, arranging themselves around each feeding site like the petals of a flower.

Sixty-one, sixty-two …

By the time I heard the tiger, I’d already been fed upon for a few hours, and I was ready for it to stop. The one place the leeches couldn’t reach me was the middle of the river.

I walked out into the water, noting schools of Cyprinid fishes, similar to many I’d seen in my years working in a tropical fish store.

I found a large rock in the center of the river, where I could sit comfortably for awhile. I rolled up my pant legs and flicked away the last remaining leeches, and took a moment to relax.

Relaxation gave way to a stinging sensation on my upper, inner thigh — something between pain and itch, and it was intensifying.

I unzipped my pants and pulled down the waistband of my boxer shorts to reveal the biggest leech of the day, engorged, the size of a large grape, pulsating about an inch away from my left testicle.

Seventy-eight …

And then, the tiger.

It was time to go back. I left the relative sanctuary of the river and hacked through more jungle until I found the trail.

I didn’t stop to pick the leeches off until I reached a deep pool below a waterfall, where some tourists had gathered for a swim.

I waded to a large, flat slab where several of them were sitting, removed my boots and socks, and to their mild horror, I began flicking leeches from my legs.

Eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four …

As the airborne annelids landed on the horrified hikers, they shrieked and scrambled to escape. There were other waterfalls farther up the trail. This one was mine.

Alone, I stripped down and had a private swim before making my way back to the village.

I lost track of the leeches somewhere in the nineties.

Lar gibbons were well into their dusk chorus by the time I reached the edge of the village. My canine friend greeted me.

Back at the lodge, there was no hot water for a shower, only a bucket of water and a bowl to pour it over myself. I picked the last of the leeches from my body and did my best to wash away the blood.

My bites would take months to heal, whether they became infected from the leeches themselves or from all my scratching.

It was my first trip to the humid tropics, a blood initiation into the penetrating heat, the cacophony of birds and insects, and the intermingled scents of growth and decay that would draw me back for the rest of my life, and become the lodestar in my search for Home.

Tonight’s storm was not in the forecast. The rain wasn’t supposed to start for another twenty-four hours or so, but at around two AM, the sky exploded, violently.

The thunder awoke me about thirty seconds before it knocked out the power. I don’t know yet if it’s just a local outage or if it’s more widespread. I’m not going outside to investigate.

There was no advance warning, but now we’re under a storm alert that predicts 60-mile-an-hour wind and quarter-sized hailstones. It’s not a hurricane. It’s not the worst storm I’ve been in. It’s mostly passed already.

The lightning was like a strobe light. There was no counting the seconds between the lightning strike and its associated thunder peal — it was everywhere, lighting up the outside like flickering daylight.

My cats are handling it well. I have more cats than I’d prefer, but I trap them here whenever possible. The average lifespan of a feral cat is two to three years, but for an indoor housecat life expectancy is twelve to eighteen. I’m happy to spare them from the highway, the coyotes, or my neighbor’s shotgun. I’m also happy to spare my wild bird population from the cats.

So tonight I have two on my bed and one under it, and a feral tom in each of my two bathrooms. All of them have been in one of my traps at one time or another.

Bob showed up on my game cameras for a couple years before I finally trapped him. He had a tail for the first year or so, then I didn’t see him for awhile, and when he returned, he did not. My assumption is that he lost it to a coyote, but I’ll never know for sure.

Bob’s neuter appointment got me a call from Animal Control. Apparently he bit a vet tech through a heavy leather glove, puncturing the top and bottom of her thumb. Since he was a feral cat with no vaccine history, he had to do a ten-day rabies quarantine before he could be vaccinated. I was keeping him in the bathroom for awhile anyway, so this wasn’t a problem.

I like my vet, but I was pretty annoyed that Animal Control was called. I’m told it’s the law here. I haven’t verified that, but in this case it doesn’t really matter — Bob didn’t have rabies, he got vaccinated after his quarantine ended, and the officer never followed up with me.

I continue to believe that the less contact I have with law enforcement, the better, and that includes ACOs.

Bob will probably never be a house pet, but I’m slowly integrating him with the other cats anyway. I’ll build an outdoor enclosure soon, that will be connected to the house, and he can decide how much time he wants to spend in each area.

A few weeks ago, he managed to turn on the bathroom sink, and close the drain. So the sink overflowed and water spread through a significant portion of the house before I realized what had happened. The bathroom door was swollen shut and could not be salvaged. The laminate flooring all had to be removed, but it revealed more valuable hardwood underneath. This is the second time I’ve bought an old house and found good wood flooring hidden under a top layer of something cheap and ugly.

It was a stressful night, but I managed to stop the water before it got to my guitars and my mom’s piano. When I get ready to remodel the house, I’ll sand and seal the floors and end up with something much more attractive and valuable than I’d initially planned.

As for Bob, he got his sink removed and a screen door put on the bathroom. Now he interacts with the other cats through the heavy screen, and there’s no water for him to turn on. I put a table and a cat tree in there for him to use as he wishes.

____

It’s stopped raining, and the thunder is more distant now. Lightning isn’t illuminating the whole house anymore. The power is still out. It’s hot and muggy inside. Bob is calling to the other cats, maybe letting them know that he’s survived yet another trauma.

In the morning I’ll walk down and see how much water the storm added to the pond, and if the tarp stayed on my pallet of concrete. The forecast calls for several more inches of rain over the next ten days, but forecasts change by the hour.

Much of the millet and cowpeas I planted a couple weeks ago has already germinated, but this string of rainy days should really kick things off. The land is turning green again. It’s all alive.

And so am I.

Dave Mello of Operation Ivy fame joined his brother Pat and friend Gavin McArthur to form a power trio that blended punk rock with elements of ska, country, blues, and jazz. Dave and Pat were in Downfall together, with Tim ‘Lint’ Armstrong of Operation Ivy and Rancid.

The guys from Schlong also had a band called Three Finger Spread, a bluegrass band in the loosest sense, best known for their song Phone Me Bone Me, but mostly not known at all. Don’t let their obscurity fool you into thinking that when I joined a bluegrass band in the mid-nineties, we didn’t cover Phone Me Bone Me at the Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach. Because I know you were thinking that didn’t happen, and you were about to feel really stupid.

The one time I saw Schlong perform live was at The Barn, on the UC Riverside campus. I hated Riverside shows in general, and The Barn specifically, but seeing Schlong made the irritation worthwhile.

When my friends and I arrived at the venue, the show was sold out, not because there were a lot of Schlong fans in Riverside — I think we were the only people there to see them — but presumably there was a more popular band on the bill, or maybe just a lot of college rock shitheads looking for a mosh pit or an unsuspecting coed to grope.

Getting into sold out shows was never especially hard. We found the band in the parking lot, with a friend of theirs who introduced himself as Fuckin’ Wayne, and we asked if they could get us inside. They suggested we each carry in one of Dave’s drums and then just walk down to the floor and stay there — a tactic we’d employ a few more times in the coming years.

The crowd booed the band and part of me was glad they didn’t like it. As a young guitarist I was thrilled with Gavin’s phrasing and use of harmonics.

After their set we joined the band and Fuckin’ Wayne in a green room of sorts — an unused classroom in a portable.

We hung out and talked shop a bit; Gavin’s sister, Melissa was also there, and AJ was smitten when he learned that she was the singer for Raooul. She would later go on to be featured on Schlong’s Punk Side Story, their 43-minute version of West Side Story.

We talked about bands we liked, about the East Bay punk scene, and the perils of masturbating with shampoo. “I pissed fire for a week,” Gavin warned us.

I don’t remember how it started, but at some point Fuckin’ Wayne took out his penis and started chasing AJ and me around the room. I was immediately reminded of the moment I first realized my parents were fallible.

I was two years old, and had just finished peeing, while my older sister stood at the bathroom sink, washing her hands. I looked at her, and I had an idea.

“I’m gonna pee on you! I’m gonna pee on you!”

She shrieked, then ran, and I chased, yelling, “I’m gonna pee on you I’m gonna pee on you I’m gonna pee on you …”

The fun ended quickly when I was snared by one of my parents and given a spanking. It was one of the only times I was ever spanked, and I had tried to explain that clearly I wasn’t really going to pee on my sister — I had already finished peeing. But they spanked me anyway, and it was then that I knew they had the capacity to be wrong.

Back in shit-stinking Riverside, Fuckin’ Wayne settled into a chair. “This is my penis. It’s small, but it’s mine.”

Gavin sneaked up behind him and dumped a bucket of ice onto his lap, but Fuckin’ Wayne merely piled the ice cubes around his shrinking dink and wiggled it like a cold worm.

____

The next weekend I ran into Fuckin’ Wayne at another show. “Fuckin’ Wayne!”

“Oh, hey guys … Hey … Is it true that I masturbated in a bucket of ice cubes? I don’t remember any of that night.”

“Yeah, well … Not successfully …” I answered.

Wayne apologized, which was totally unnecessary — he was neither the first nor the last person to chase one of us with his dick out.

He said it was nice to meet us again, and that if we ever wanted to get in touch, we could mail him at Guttermouth’s PO Box.

I never saw him again, but I hope he’s well.