Hi,
After that lengthy and perhaps somewhat disturbing missive about the vagabond dog I’m back to writing on my Blackberry. It’s a lot of trouble to get the laptop into its’ temporary setup, and doing so has thus far rewarded me with lots of Microsoft downloads and updates and one especially nasty virus delivered through a friend’s Facebook account.
On the other hand, I’ve installed an FTP client and discovered that I can maintain my weblog from here. That’s pretty convenient and is something I’ll pursue once the machine is in a more nearly permanent position. Once that’s accomplished, I’ll spend the next rainy day or 3 getting the pages up-to-date and presentable and then I’ll send you the URL address and you can take a look at some short notes that haven’t been sent to this list and some photos and other stuff, including current weather conditions here.
🙂
Back at the ranch and over morning coffee I’m surveying the seemingly unending list of tasks around here. It’s encouraging to reflect on jobs already completed and appreciate the fact the that many of the projects won’t need to be repeated soon. This review provides just the sort of “attaboy” that might inspire me to face the Sisiphsyian job of attempting to bring order to the tropical jungle that is our garden.
But the plants come later. First an inventory of structural improvements and repairs.
Since buying this little one bedroom house four years ago, with its thatched A-frame guest bungalow, detached garage and adjacent thatched gazebo/dance hall we have: replaced the roof membrane/water-catchment system on the house and the thatch on the gazebo and over all doors and windows; replaced the wooden walkways through the gardens and the wooden porch on the bungalow with rot-resistant rough-cut (“bruta”) lumber. I’ve painted the house, inside and out. We replaced the topping slab and made a new and much larger thatched roof over our “front porch,” nearly doubling that useful space. That’s made a big difference because that’s where we practically live.
I’ve built a sturdy workbench in the garage and erected a few shelves and done some mechanical maintenance on the diesel Mitsubishi jeepeta. With neighbors, we’ve done a wee bit of engineering and some construction on the road leading up the hill towards our place.
Plumbing, wiring, and repair of the propane gas system and refrigerator have all taken their respective place at the head of the list at one time or another–although the claim of refrigeration mechanic may be something of an exaggeration, even though I did manage to re-start our relatively new refrigerator with a well-placed blow with a carpenter’s finish hammer the other day.
I’ve finished grouting the decorative paving on the walkways adjacent to the house and put a metal locking hatch on the cistern. We’ve spread gravel in the driveway, repaired fences and burned countless and huge mounds of brush. We’ve built and installed hurricane shutters and varnished lots of furniture and cabinets.
Some of these accomplishments are relatively permanent and may need to be done, at most, one more time during my lifetime. Others are more regular occurrences and I list them in the same spirit as that in which one adds an accomplishment to a list of tasks only to immediately scratch it off. The sense of satisfaction is almost illicit, but gratifying nevertheless.
This brings me to the water pump, persistence, and the notion of quality control.
Actually, this brings me to the second of the two water pumps on the property. The first is atop the cistern, located at the lowest point on the property. This pump is wired to a float in the storage tanks on our roof and–so far–it sends water up to the roof just fine.
The pump on the roof is a different story.
Its’ job is to pressurize the water in a small tank and deliver the water to the tap at something resembling a familiar pressure and volume, as judged by residents of the “developed” world.
This pump is controlled by a pressure switch that is plumbed into a little christmas-tree sort of fitting that also connects to the gravity water feed and a check valve, a pressure gauge, the pump itself and a pressurized line to the pressure tank. This bronze fitting is central to the whole system. It has lots of different size and pitch threads which share a common trait in that none of them match up nicely with any of their respective attachments or connections. This is so consistently the case that it is as if by design.
I set out to replace the whole pump and plumbing system, salvaging only the 250 gallon tanks and the 5 gallon pressure tank.
Prudently, I assembled the whole thing on the porch before packing it up to the narrow space between the tanks on the roof. I discovered that nothing fit.
The central fitting wobbled on the pump, threads on the pressure switch were not stripped but were very poorly machined and would not thread to the central “christmas tree” fitting, right out of the box. The pressure hose did not seal but wallowed over the nipple, and (predictably) 2 of the 4 hose clamps didn’t work.
It made no difference if the fittings were iron, bronze, or plastic–and I tried them all, nothing was even close to watertight.
In the US, and before the advent of teflon tape, plumbers used putty on the threads when coupling pipe. As I recall, it worked pretty well.
Teflon tape also worked pretty well when it came along in the 1960’s. It was more convenient and effective than putty. Five or six turns of tape on the male fitting and “Bob’s your uncle,” as our Canadian friends might say.
It turns out that Dominican plumbers generally don’t know Bob and plan on something between 15 and 25 turns of the gossamer-thin Dominican teflon tape for each joint.
Even then half the joints leak. This usually requires the disassembly of the non-leaking joints to get to the otherwise inaccessible problem leaks, occasioning new leaks in the process.
I checked: there is apparently no plumbers putty to be had in the DR. You see where this is heading, I’m sure.
DAYS of hunching between the tanks, patiently cleaning threads of failed teflon tape and winding tape anew. The only thing that made this at all funny was discovering that my neighbor and a retired machinist Roy was experiencing the identical frustration with the pressure pump at his house.
I’m sorry to admit that I finally resorted to a combination of teflon tape and silicone gel to finish the job, after decades of disdain for anything with the word “silicone” associated with it.
Now, days later, I’m reluctant to go on the roof and check the integrity of the connections.
I suppose that this may be training for our future in the US as our machine tools wear out and are not replaced but shipped to places like the Dominican Republic where they continue to manufacture items but now for export to places like the US.
Do you suppose that this is on Mr. Obama’s list? If so it’s perhaps no further up the list than for Presidente Fernandez, as long as some water still arrives with the turn of the spigot.
In the US we’ve seen that it won’t do for a politician to put words in the mouth of the plumber, whether he’s named Joe or Jose’ however we should remember to listen to the plumber’s stories and respect his experience. Who knows what that may reveal about the world we live in?
Bill
The old pump looks innocuous enough.
And the new one doesn’t seem like such a big deal in this little snapshot but, trust me, it is.
Tags: Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
Hi,
Final campaign calls made, one more contribution mailed, and an early absentee ballot cast in the 2008 election, I decamped for our place in Las Galeras a couple of weeks ago.
The episode recounted below is not a proud moment for me. I share it in the same hope with which I offered the tale of the head-on collision with a cow last Christmas: that I will remember and that others may derive such allegorical benefit as the story may provide.
It began innocently enough last Sunday with a casual glance over my shoulder while crapping in the bathroom. I looked back just in time to see a skinny furry shank slip soundlessly out the front door.
“Odd,” I thought, “I don’t believe there are ocelots in the Dominican Republic,” and I returned to the classified ads in the Listin Diario, which for me offer a practical course in Spanish comprehension.
Some things, like learning a new language, are apparently not to be hurried. I showered, shaved, brushed and pulled on a pair of shorts before going to investigate the mysterious hindquarter which turns out to be attached to a young and intelligent-looking dog. Apart from his face–which was unusually dignified for a two or three year old Dominican dog, his most distinguishing characteristic was a six or eight-inch patch of missing flesh and fur on his right shoulder. I could actually see the shoulder bone and socket. He seemed accustomed to his infirmity and accepting of his state. The wound appeared surprisingly clean. The dog and I looked wordlessly at each other.
Having presented himself, he seemed content to wait for my response.
There was a Rottweiler somewhere in his past. His forehead was broader and his snout shorter than those of a typical Dominican stray and his face and fur had the coloring and texture of a Rottweiler. His eyes held the luminous calm present in the best of that breed, tempered with a canine shrewdness so necessary for a dog in the DR. He was narrow-chested and very thin and he smelled as a wet and dirty dog several times his size might. It was the sort of hot steamy smell that three or four wetly panting dogs generate when they’ve got a cat cornered on a damp morning after a nasty chase. I wondered if the heavy note in his smell came from the wound which seemed the sort a machete might make.
He didn’t ask for anything, beyond my awareness, as we stood looking at each other. Then he lowered his gaze, stepped surely around me and took himself into the house, up the several stairs and into the bedroom where he lay on the floor in front of the window. That was OK with me. He wasn’t wild; he didn’t appear to be rabid or otherwise diseased and while he was obviously distressed he looked as though he might actually belong to someone who had cared. I thought that I’d let him lay up for a few hours while I looked into his provenance with the neighbors and so I gave him water and walked away, leaving the front door open in case he decided to wander off.
It had been on my list to check in with the neighbors and share cellular numbers since learning of an invasion and a couple of pilferings that occurred during our absence. (809 840-4150 is my Dominican cell number, by the way. Sometimes it works from the States and Europe, sometimes it does not. I don’t know why.)
Neighbors Armelle and Cyril knew nothing of the dog, as we discussed in English. The same result with Ronald and Karin, who incidentally had a younger and Black-Labbish pup looking for a home. In Spanish, Tati averred no knowledge of the mystery dog, as did Uwe’s wife in her beautiful urban Spanish and later Uwe himself in English. The long-resident American Katie had seen the dog a few days earlier; it had scared the hell out of her when it popped out from the bathroom of their rental bungalow. She’d done some checking with others at that time, to no avail and the dog later wandered off.
In a polyglot of French and Spanish, Jean-Pierre suggested that the dog had deliberately chosen our house because it was a place of no violence. Then he promised to come running with his gun if ever we called for help in the night. In Spanish, but communicating mostly with her presence and demeanor, Jean-Pierre’s wife Nuris gave me to understand that my quest for the dog’s owner was unlikely to conclude with a happy reunion between animal and owner. The word we settled on in describing the dog was “vagabond,” a term which seemed as apt as any although I’m not actually sure which of the three languages contributed the word to the conversation.
My last big hope in tracking the origin of the dog was the farm of Quinengo at the bottom of the hill. Quinengo is a Big Man in Las Galeras. He is the local Holy Roller Christian preacher and at one time owned all of the land occupied by everyone I’d visited that morning and more. I’d already been in town for more than a week and it was time to pay my respects to Quinengo and his family anyway.
In Spanish with Quinengo and with his wife Vitalina I got nothing on dog ownership but affirmed a clear understanding of the importance of cooperative communities and mutual assistance between neighbors. Speaking quite good English with his grandson, Rudy, I repeated my litany and questions about the injured dog. Rudy allowed that he had noticed a young dog “with the bad burn on his shoulder,” but could offer no clue as to the dog’s home. He reminded me that dogs often run free in Las Galeras with no responsible person to care for them. “…children too, they are the same.”
I was given to understand that, left to his own devices, the dog would at some time pose a risk to the other animals on the farm. It was not the time to ask what becomes of vagabond children over time, those not taken in by Quinengo and Vitalina or some other kindly person, or otherwise. Rudy advised that I load the dog up and drive far away before dropping him off.
Sure now that the problem of this dog would be claimed by no one in the nearby community, I understood that any problem was solely mine if I chose to make it so. Burdened by this enlightenment, I returned home.
At the least, I’d plugged Denise and myself into the neighborhood watch network, had shared our telephone numbers and collected those we did not previously have.
The dog was where I’d left him in the bedroom but now against a cooler interior wall. He raised his head as I entered. Our eyes met and we each found no threat, only perhaps a measure of acceptance. He put his head down and exhaled deeply.
I stepped out of the room and to the porch to contemplate my next move. I was thinking only a single step ahead: I had a dog in my bedroom who seemed content to be there, no matter how discomfiting I might find that fact. My single focus was on resolving this immediate conflict, even if it meant ruthlessly cutting through the inchoate mess of thought churning through my head rather than patiently isolating and untangling strands of rationality and feeling and information in the hope of finding a pattern or somehow conceiving a plan. I now understand that this rush to a quick solution was to prove the problem.
I heard the dog lick and scratch occasionally, along with the occasional vigorous ear-flapping sound of a wet shake, as if he’d just come in out of the rain, but he didn’t move from his new spot in the bedroom. A heavy moist funk filled the house. I knew that whatever happened, the dog and I would not share the space. Certainly not before I got close enough to clean him and to clean him up considerably.
And so I rousted him.
At first he raised only his head to give me a look as if to say “are you quite sure?” And so I nudged him with my bare toe. Once, twice–it didn’t take three times or a single harsh word. He just got up and left. Neither did he seem to favor his shoulder as he turned the corner, leapt to and over the stone wall and disappeared. He was dignified. Not a beggar but a fellow traveler, now departed.
I applied soap and bleach and water to the two immediate areas where he’d lain, wiping the spatter from the walls and swabbing the floor all the while wondering how in God’s name I could keep a dog in one country while living in another. It was a clear and practical impossibility.
Perhaps he’d make it easy for me, if not for himself, and simply not come back.
At dinner that night a friend opened the possibility of caring for “my” dog “for three months or so,” while we were in the States. Actually, we plan to be in the US for considerably more than three months each year–which my friend well knows–but his offer opened my eyes to a new possibility and also to a new vein of feeling in my hard yet sympathetic heart.
I went to sleep thinking of the dog and thinking about myself, mentally snarled in the smelly and intertwining strands of compassion and commitment mixed with the sad emptiness of my inaction. Strands of depression hung like a gloomy mist in the room. I turned the fan on but the miasma remained, along with the still pervasive smell of the dog. Eventually I slept, awakening once in the middle of the night to a vivid dream of two weird simian beings engaged in some sort of fierce ritual posturing in a room or cage on high while I strangled to say “what are you doing up there?”
The dog rematerialized the following morning, looking hungry and even skinnier than the day before. He still seemed intelligent and self-possessed and he made a good feint to the right before attempting to dodge around me to the left and gain entry through the front door. A single stern word from me put an end to that. The dog made a small whimper, the first sound I’d heard him make. It wasn’t a plaintive or even slightly pitiful. It was more an expression of minor frustration or annoyance than anything else. I liked that about him.
He purposefully turned and moved away from me, towards the front of the house. Inside, I saw him up on his hind legs, looking in the bedroom window to the sanctuary that had been his the day before. He seemed to gauge the width between the iron bars in the wall outside the window and appeared to conclude that he might improbably but effortlessly slip in.
I closed the window.
He dropped down and turned the corner to the other window. I closed that window too and, without hesitating, the dog turned, mounted the wall, and disappeared through Gerard’s garden and down the lane.
Once again, my response had been narrowed by a limited range of imagination. In this world I had observed this phenomenon before, but usually in others.
In this case “No dog in the house” was as far as I could get in his presence and that was not much help to me, and none at all to the dog. I wondered about other instances in life where the same sort of deficit of imagination had operated, for me as well as for others.
Now that the dog was gone I had all sorts of time to reflect and consider different scenarios, alternate behaviors, and their possible combinations and consequences.
But mostly I dwelled on my failure to render assistance to the animal, who would most certainly benefit from help and would probably have appreciated food–even though he hadn’t asked for anything more than a safe place to lie down.
Unbidden words came to me. “No one ever said it was going to be easy.” I don’t know where they came from or exactly why those particular words were relevant but they did motivate me and inspired both reflection and action.
I recalled instances of trauma and crisis in my past, tearing shirts and staunching bloody wounds, soothing others while pressing slippery guts back into the sodden and warm sack of a living body, cleaning piss and shit and vomit–including my own. And I recalled the stink. I can conjure the smells nearly to the point of nausea if I make the effort. Really, this present dog situation is much less urgent. The not-as-compelling circumstance of this injured visitor has afforded me the time to feel rather than channel a mere but solid impulse to necessary action.
But the real difference, I think, is that patching up a person is essentially getting them ready to hand off to others: to medical personnel, to family, or even only to their own rational devices. Tending a wounded dog is in a sense a bigger deal, there is an implied but enduring commitment that transcends the time and place of immediate aid. Lending a helping hand to an irrational being, no matter how intelligent, portends a natural future together. Unless perhaps that hand is later raised as a fist, signaling an end to the relationship and the beginning of a new and unrooted existence for both.
I am now provided with an impulse to action, if not the moral and philosophical underpinning of logical reason. I went off in search of chow and sulfa powder (“antibiotic dust” in my tortured Spanish). I brought back ointment and salve, and food. I made a crate-like bed in the shelter of the gazebo outside and put fresh water nearby. I found anti-bacterial soap and readied the garden hose and I was ready. And I waited for the dog to come back.
I’m waiting still.
Bill
Bed for a vagabond.
Tags: Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
Hi,
My phone-banking on behalf of Obama is over, final contributions made, my ballot is cast and I’m writing to you from the porch overlooking the bay and the Atlantic in Las Galeras, Republica Dominicana.
It was dry here for several months after we left last Spring and then rained like hell for several more months. The cistern is full and the garden in downright menacing, this even after several days of vicious assault by an apparently very determined Haitian guy wielding a pretty savage machete.
This gonzo gardening was prior to my arrival on Wednesday. I imagine that in a few months you’d never know it happened but for the moment it’s reminiscent of a clear cut in the Pacific Northwest.
The house has fared OK in the storms so far this season and we were not one of several homes that were burgled in Las Galeras during their owner’s extended absence. I attribute this to my neighbor’s vigilance and our pretty consistent effort to assimilate as much as our Fort-Knox-like closure of the house.
As I’m getting things opened and functional it’s apparent that almost everything that spins suffered from an excess of stasis while we were in the US. The pumps, compressors, valves and various motors have all needed encouragement to one degree or another before functioning. Several haven’t come around yet. Fortunately the car started right up.
Our 6 months in the US were interesting and filled with all sorts of revelations, including self-revelations (always the most interesting sort.) On a number of occasions I thought of subjecting you to one or more of these epiphanies but didn’t consider that our tacit agreement about these e-mails is necessarily strong enough to transcend national boundaries. Most of you know that I’m pretty conservative in many of my assumptions like that.
In any event, I’ve made notes over the Spring and Summer and may yet chronicle the progress on my thinking these past 6 months as 2008 has drifted into Fall.
You can count on a Winter’s worth of missives from Las Galeras unless (as always) you elect to opt out. In which case just let me know.
I put together a blog before I left the US, containing all the previous messages from Las Galeras and a few photographs also. But it’s not something I want to introduce until I get better access to the Internet and am able to maintain it reliably from a PC. I look forward to sharing your responses at that time; several of you have been more than memorable in your replies. Until then feel free to e-mail me at this address if the spirit moves you. Otherwise, feel free to lurk as we live our lives and plan for the future.
Bill
It’s a good idea to make a visible difference with a first project. Just like working elsewhere.
Tags: Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
…actually, it isn’t. But it’s sure a world apart from the days of .html coding and the Mosaic browser and the first Web page within the Painters Union back when we lived in Seattle. (That’s a large city way out west in Washington State, by the way. Out there, they believe that the State is the real Washington, and that Washington, DC is at best some sort of chimera. As we used to say: “The Other Washington.”)
Washington, DC at its worst? Well, read a newspaper.
At worst, it seems as if Washington, DC pervades Washington State, and nearly everywhere else. That’s true in government and it may be true enough in labor as well. It remains to be seen if that’s the case in retirement.
Anyway: I’ve got a little technical learning curve here. Bear with me, I’ll spare you the internals as I figure out how the WordPress tools work and how this stuff is done today. It’s probably easier than it was 15 years ago. Might be one of the few things that is.
Bill
Tags: Retirement, Wordpress
Hi,
Denise and I are looking over the list of things to do before closing up here in Las Galeras and returning to the US in a couple of weeks. It’s a long list.
Not surprisingly, we’ve a few things to do that are completely foreign to the counterpart list that we use when we leave DC.
Here, for example, we’ll ask a neighbor to keep an eye out for when the electric company folds up the monthly bill and sticks it in the gate. It just wouldn’t do for their invoice to dissolve in the rain and blow away, unpaid. (Although exactly that might be a desirable event in Samana or in Santo Domingo, where the theft of electrical power is a common and popular pastime.) Here in Las Galeras we love the electric company. We all eagerly keep coming back each month until finally we catch the receipts clerk at his desk and available to receive our payment in exact change.
The physical invoice from the power company is computer-generated and printed with a laser printer. The hand-delivery system is actually quite practical. The electricity itself is generated by a big Caterpillar diesel. Our receipt is hand-written.
That business is a good sort of sample of how things are done here. This is a new town with an emerging infrastructure and that retains rich personal and cultural traditions.
So we can be amused by the invoice-in-the-gate method of billing and wryly observe that it’s best to bring exact change when settling accounts, but we’ve also learned that the electric company is human too and that 10 or 15 pesos one way or another in lieu of exact change is acceptable in a pinch. I don’t expect that will work in Takoma.
Before we go we’ll ask another friend to keep our Dominican cell phones alive in our absence by adding 100 pesos (about 3 bucks) to the phones and making a call once a month. That way we won’t lose the accumulated pesos or the assigned numbers while we’re in the US.
Some things on our list, like the above, have a social component and require assistance from someone here. Another couple of items involve working with institutions like the government or the bank. Those transactions can be as vexing as anything that the Bank of America has to offer.
But mostly our checklist involves things and the cleaning, oiling, preserving, and securing of them.
Since we’re more established here, now we have more things. Accordingly, closing up is more involved than was the case with our previous and shorter visits.
Looking back to November, I’m impressed with the number and variety of things we’ve accomplished here.
We have friends, can make our way around without too much difficulty, and have made huge headway in turning this house into a home. We’ve finally found a good and convenient teacher of Spanish. People sometimes ask our advice. Occasionally we have some to offer. We’re more familiar than before.
Still, the shift from one kind of life and culture to another feels a little odd right now. I imagine that transitioning–in both directions–will only get more familiar and hence easier. My eventual goal, borrowed from a retired IBEW member from NYC, is to be able to get on an airplane carrying only a toothbrush.
Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how I’ll pack going home…
It’s warming up in DC and has lately begun to rain a bit here in Las Galeras, a preview of the season to come in both locales. We got down to 13″ of water in the cistern at one point last month but are now up over 42″ with more certainly on the way.
Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that we’ll both luxuriate in long showers when we arrive in DC. I imagine that the fully-automatic Maytag will hold a certain attraction and maybe central air conditioning will still have its appeal. The dishwasher is simply inconceivable at this moment.
To tell you the truth, I haven’t tired of the near-constant breeze off the ocean and our semi-automatic General Master Dominican washing machine still seems pretty extravagant by local standards. We wash dishes immediately and they never seem a problem, even with 8 or 10 people up for dinner. I wouldn’t know where to put a dishwasher here, maybe outdoors.
We expect a bit of culture shock upon returning, but have both demonstrated that we’re pretty adaptable, and so we’ll cope.
With everything that we’ve accomplished here (including a boatload of stuff that was never on ANY list) we’re still adhering remarkably well to the plan set out when I left the Painters last Labor Day.
At that time, we left home and traveled for a couple of months–making a clean break of it. And then we’ve spent 5 months here in the Dominican, as planned.
Now we’ll check in with family and friends and I’ll begin to look for projects or contract work, perhaps doing economic or political education or working with an internal organizing initiative; maybe I’ll do a little ghost writing or editing for union publications.
Vamos a ver, “we shall see,” as we say in the RD.
My friend and colleague still imagines developing transformative software to serve an international union. I’ve seen that he can deliver such, and doing so would make a respectable capstone to a very satisfying career. That’s something worth looking into as well.
Vamos a ver.
Bill
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Tags: Denise Hanna, Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana, Union