Live Oak Blues What happens.

You know the Americans Abroad move, where they merely repeat an English phrase louder and slower to non-comprehending natives? I don’t do that. You’ll also never see me standing around tapping a Hello Kitty iPhone while a malnourished kid loads 10 pieces of Louis Vuitton in the trunk. I do not call people foreigners…especially in their own country*. But I’ve observed such disgraces so many times it makes me want to tattoo a Canadian maple leaf on my forehead.

No, my Ugly Americanism is more subtle, like never really learning Spanish and French even though that would enrich my travel experiences by an order of magnitude. Or feeling impatient in restaurants. Or tipping the hotel manager to turn on my AC, even though I know that involves their cranking up the generator (ugh). Also, I’m a big guy and usually tower over the denizens of every country I visit. I can’t hide the fact that I am very white and very American.

Nevertheless, my liberal guilt is always right there, so I try and make up for it. Just this morning, I brought my laptop down so that I could have a decent conversation with the guy who’s been bending over backwards to help me this week (I can understand French, but cannot speak it without embarrassing myself). We watched Manchester United and Arsenal play futbol this morning and I feigned excitement and–hooray for me–never said that American football was the far superior sport.

*This actually happened in Germany where a cigar-chomping American (no lie) called a German bus driver a “goddamn foreigner.” My buddy wanted to whip his ass, and so did I.

This time around I only see Haiti through a car windshield, a (barred) 3rd-story office window, or from inside the gated mansion where I am staying. The only time I am at any “risk” is when I walk the two blocks to the Giant store around the corner. It is modified house arrest. Don’t get me wrong: it is luxurious, but for most people luxurious isn’t what one necessarily wants to experience in Haiti. It seems sinful and separate and distorted to me, and I have yet to see anything but Port Au Prince.

Most of the Haitians I talk to here are excited by president-elect Martelly in a way I haven’t seen since the crowd scenes from the Obama Inauguration. And, yes, Martelly has borrowed a few of Obama’s trademark vocal inflections. As we watched Martelly’s speech yesterday morning, a waiter nearby looked at me, pointed to the TV, and said “Prezidan dayiti” and smiled in such a way that I nearly choked up. Politics is quite real here.

I’ve seen few sights as beautiful as storms clouds coming over Montagne Noire at sunset. And the sound! Thunder, metallic and insistent, echoing down the walls of Route Montagne Noire. The rainy season is imminent and that brings all kinds of anxiety with it: flooding and landslides from the mountains that no longer have trees to hold the ground in place and, of course, cholera.

Things seem calmer than when I was last here, a lessening in general tension that is difficult to describe. Perhaps it is because the country is definitely in recovery mode, rather emergency-response mode (at least until the next hurricane, earthquake, or election…and with the rainy season starting, another cholera outbreak is inevitable.) But Haitians take this “downtime” with the same willingness as they do the tough times. It is a cultural coping mechanism borne of centuries of chaos.

I bought some bananas from a street vendor this morning. I only wanted half of the bunch and she reluctantly sold them to me. I can’t throw down 15 bananas before they rot, and don’t know who can, but I was grateful for the bananas. In fact, I am eating one right now. She carried them for blocks in a basket on her head and they are warmed from the sun. Delicious!

I am staying at the ex-mansion of an ex-president. It seems as if every hotel in Pétionville was once the dwelling place of a disgraced dictator. Makes sense: Haiti has been independent 28 years less than the United States, but have had 70+ presidents, most of whom left office at the business end of a machete or gun. All the mansions here seem to look down into the guts of Port Au Prince, and in particular Cite Soleil near the shore. Do with that symbol what you will.

By the way, a friend of mine goes to Haiti regularly and is able to wander a bit more through the country than I am at liberty to do. Please take a look at posts from his latest visit.

More soon.

My brother came all the way down from Virginny to come paddling with me…well, that and to leave me with the elderly, incontinent dog known as Ernie. So the obvious jawdropper would be to take him to the Itch, and she did not disappoint. Highlights: my brother sporting a golf shirt as kayaking attire, an older couple who lectured us about kayaking, a mother duck and her ducklings, a highschooler who was swimming the entire length of the river, and a close encounter with a water moccasin who wanted nothing to do with us. At this point, I will let the visuals do the work:

Yes, I lived through this tornado

I love me some wind. The more, the better. During the ’04 hurricanes, I actually went for a run around Gainesville. Every time I took a step the wind carried me a few yards. I felt like a Kenyan. You could say that I have a fetish for severe weather in general. One of the many reasons I love John Muir is that he once climbed to the top of a tall pine in a thunderstorm to feel the full force of the wind. Ditto, Carl Hiaasen’s character Skink, who lashes himself to an overpass in Miami during a hurricane.

All this is perhaps my adult reaction to a childhood lived as a bad weather chickenshit. In Louisville, KY, whenever a tornado watch would come across the airwaves, I’d be down in the basement in the fetal position. So when I found myself at 11 years old, living through a legitimately deadly tornado on April 3, 1974–a tornado system so destructive it is known in weather circles simply as the Super Outbreak–all my worst fears came to pass. My father was up in a tree photographing it as it came through, my youngest brother was at day care directly in the path of it, and I was in the basement crying and doing a picture-perfect “duck and cover.”

The only dry space where I could take a picture yesterday

Today, I get disappointed when a tornado or hurricane misses us, so I guess you could say I sacked up at some point. It is no coincidence, I suppose, that my line of work now involves Disaster Management. When I heard it was going to be more than a little windy yesterday, I headed out to the Gulf to kayak in it–a lovely day full of gusts and salt spray and waves that soaked me from head to toe. I wanted more, of course, and although my loved ones will probably prevent me from lashing myself to a pine tree, that does not prevent me from fantasizing about it.

As any reader of this blog knows–and by that I mean my mom (when I remind her) and whatever friends I have chosen to browbeat–I tend to be a little obsessed with the past and the passing of time. Even with something as seemingly now as kayaking, I become wistful watching green trees turn to black and then back to green again. It has always been thus.

At its root is an anxiety that I am losing control of my life, that what is past will be forgotten, etc., etc. I dealt with this early on by becoming a pathological collector: of records, military metals, shoes, even phone books (I am not kidding). I wanted the artifacts, don’t you know. That way I could lock down the sum total of my experience? Right? Nope. Ever seen an episode of “Hoarders”?

So imagine my joy at finding that this “Years” series on my radio show I have been relentlessly flogging has been pretty damn good at representing whatever year I have chosen to represent. “1975” took me back to my Toughskins with the reinforced knees and “1994” reminded of the first year I was determined to stay “current” (well, not the first year). In fact, there is something completely present when I do two full hours of a single year’s music. Hearing one song is nostalgia, but hearing 30 songs is to be transported to the past and the now at the same time. For those of you with a garage band and Hammond organ fetish, check out this Monday’s next installment…1966 (which just happens to be the most stylish year ever).

Note: Also check out the new tab up top where I include links to all previous “Years” playlists.

Typically, when I do these “year” shows I struggle to fill two hours with, for want of a better word, “good” music. Michael Jackson was a no-go for 1987, as was 10cc for 1975, for instance. No such issue for this week’s 1994, the brilliant suggestion of a “Left Of The Dial” listener. Kurt Cobain sure picked a bad time to check out, because I can’t think of a more rich, imaginative, varied, and prolific year for music than 1994. With solid outings by Pavement, Sebadoh, Elliott Smith, and Archers Of Loaf and hip hop never sounding better with Digable Planets’ finest and Outkast’s first, was this postmodernmusic’s Annus Mirabilis? Tune in tomorrow from 3 to 5 Eastern to find out. (Grow Radio).

Among The Airboats And Garfish

Airboats own the south end of Lake George. Clearly, we were the interlopers and took our lives into own hands when we crossed the channel at the end of the St. John’s. Below the surface, it’s all about the prehistoric garfish, one of whose skulls I proudly display on my patio table. They are everywhere, some up to 5′ long, jumping out the water, prowling the eelgrass. I always forget, but once you get out on a lake of large size, there ain’t much to do. In the case of Lake George, the abundant shoreline is nearly unapproachable, as it shallows out 100 feet away. But what better day than this to overdo it in the sun? Alligator update: they have now made it out of hibernation in full. We saw at least two not too far away from us…and yes they eat garfish.

Yesterday I put my boat into six inches of black muck at Orange Lake and had to turn around after only a few feet of serious digging. That lake is draining faster than the left side of my kitchen sink. Either because I haven’t had a decent outing in weeks, or because I am reading Henry Rollins’s Get In The Van: On The Road With Black Flag, I’ve been in a reminiscent state of mind of late.

I grew up in Suburbia, a subdivision called in Indian Lakes in Virginia Beach, Virginia. In my neighborhood, there were only three styles of house: three-bedroom, four-bedroom, and five-bedroom. Thus, we all knew the layout of every house we entered. About a half mile down the road was the lake of Indian Lakes, a steam-shovel-created borrow pit that no living thing who wanted to live would inhabit. This is where I paddled for the first time.  We stole the 17′ Grumman canoe from our garage when my dad was at work and put in, had a blast, and lugged it all the way back. Same old, same old.

The already suffering ecology of the lake took a serious beating several years later when my buddy Andy stole a huge chunk of potassium from the chemistry lab and threw it in the lake closest to Indian Lakes Blvd. The explosion was so loud that cars stopped. Years earlier, for whatever reason I can’t recall, the neighborhood bully, Ross, and his crew forced me off the bus one frigid day and forced me to walk across the lake. As the ice gave way under me I headed back to shore only to have Ross and gang throw rocks at me to keep me going. There are days, at work particularly, I feel just like that. This took place mere feet from where a neighborhood child of four drowned one fall morning the following year. I still think about him.

Either because of my “developing” emotional maturity or because I am “young at heart,” I tend to gravitate toward folks younger than myself, in some cases significantly so. So it is with some trepidation when tell people I saw the Stones when Keith Richards still had black hair or that I have more memories from the 70s than I do the 90s. A dear friend of mine, after watching “Hot Tub Time Machine,” asked me once, with complete innocence, “were the 80s really like that?” Yeah, they kinda were.

I bring all this up because I did a radio show on “1987” yesterday and the whole thing didn’t sound like that long  ago to me–even though some of my listeners had yet to grace the planet in 1987. In 1987, I was in grad school, newly married, and on a self-important hiatus from popular music. I was listening exclusively to classical and jazz and, as far I was concerned, I was done with anything that had a back beat or a fuzz box. Unfortunately, this meant that I missed out on latter-day Smiths, Dinosaur Jr., and early Pixies. But I recovered shortly thereafter and made up for lost time and have stayed ahead of the wave ever since.

And I also know a bunch of new/old farts like myself, people who don’t bat an eye when I mention whole decades of existence, but who stay fresh as I like to do. Truth is, much of the music I listened to in the 70s, 80s, and 90s still sounds brand new to me. “London Calling” will never age, for example, and by that I mean it could be released today and still sound more vital and current than anything else. So bear with us: we may be graying, but we can still whoop your young asses any day of the week.