Fire and Rain
For Storm Thomas
When the rain wakes me
at that early hour,
no longer night
and not yet morning,
I think of you, my now-gone friend.
I measure your absence in seasons—
that first fall of endless rain and floods,
of mudslides and collapsing cliffs,
overflowing dams and evacuations;
the mountain trails we used to hike
blocked off before I could return, alone;
each “Storm Update†email alert
more cutting than cautionary, each
bringing me back to that first email,
the one that informed me
of your demise.
That second fall, wind storms
ripped through the mountains,
roared into residential zones,
left freeway-jumping fires in their wake.
All through that dry summer of your departure—
before the fire, before the rain—
you struggled to reinvent yourself,
wondering how far a man could fall,
how many mistakes he could make
before that initial spark inspiring change
would wane and, then,
snuff out.
Tonight the rain falls hard,
disrupting sleep, disturbing dreams,
washing away
last season’s ashes.
Buy the book.
She was a 54-year-old light-skinned black woman, a technical engineer at the H. Upmann Tobacco Factory by day and, under the cover of darkness, a black market beautician prowling the poorly-lit alleys of Centro Habana, trimming beards and plucking eyebrows for those too elderly to do so for themselves, giving pedicures and cleaning pores for those too young and too vain to see past their own noses.
An excerpt of Es Cuba has been included in The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2006.
In Isla de la Juventud, a small island off the south coast of Cuba, Alfredo and I decide to tell everyone we’re married. It is a game, a way of survival in a country where foreigners have more rights than Cubans. And on this Island of the Youth, home to Cuba’s foreign exchange students in the years following the revolution, something has gone dreadfully wrong. Not only can Cubans not enter a restaurant or club without a foreigner in tow to fork over the U.S. dollars but here they need to be married to that foreigner.
Cabañas Tranquilas, on the Pacific side of Costa Rica, lies on a dirt road in an unnamed town between Dominicalito and Uvita. There are no telephones or electricity and the bus passes by only once a day. Literally “the hidden cabins,†Cabañas Tranquilas is as much about the landscape (both physical and mental) which obscures it as it is about the cabins themselves.
Guatemala has Rigoberta Menchú and, in the northern rainforests, rebel guerrillas. In Honduras, Maya ruins line the cobblestone footpaths of Copán. Nicaragua has the legacy of its Sandinista uprising and a clan of rebellious poets who live out the revolution’s ideals on the communal Solentiname Island. And Costa Rica? Costa Rica, the fashionable gringo gripe goes, well, Costa Rica is just the tropics. It is beautiful landscape but nothing more. It has no revolutionary heroes and no oppressive military. Unlike its Central American neighbors, Costa Rica has no narrative of subjugation, no tragic struggle for independence, and thus (from the school of thought that misery + strife = art), Costa Rica has no culture. And even worse, I’ve heard many an expatriate lament, there are no indigenous people.
Mount Chirripo, Costa Rica’s highest peak, is a rock tower looming nearly 13,000 feet above a landscape of surreal contrasts. Dusty trails crisscross and dead end into clear blue lakes that appear like mirages in the middle of a desert. The seventeen miles of uphill terrain alternate between mosquito-infested jungle and fire-blackened forest. In the early morning, jackrabbits chase each other through parched brush, and at sunset the sky echoes with the cries of wild boars.
They enter my makeshift classroom