L. S. Kreeba Unleashed

Kayak Water Polo at 58

Ron Snell — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The first time I played kayak water polo, I was 58.

Jacki, an active, innovative friend, had just purchased a fleet of kayaks for a teen club. So since she had them anyway, why not invite one and all to play once a week at an indoor pool? Having been a paddler of one sort or another all my life--I mean since I was, like, two years old--I bit.

The thing that caught my eye my first time was a woman about sixty years old who was ferocious. I decided on the spot that "if she could do it...." She only played a couple games more before she left town, but I was hooked. It was also encouraging that there were as many women playing as men, and the women were mostly better at it. I like sports that are inclusive.

I may have been hooked, but I wasn't all that good. Sure, I could paddle fast. And yes, I knew how to maneuver and outmaneuver. But polo is as much about the ball as the boat. I had a lousy arm, bad aim, and no sense of strategy. In a game where the second greatest joy, besides scoring a goal, is to push someone out of their boat, I had to adjust my pacifist tendencies.

I'm a lefty, and about the time I started getting better at all this, my right elbow and my left shoulder began to hurt so badly that I could barely paddle or throw the ball ten feet without deep pain, but for some reason I didn't think either of those were relevant. Still, I finally went to an orthopedist. My wife would probably point out that I waited until the polo season was over before I went to the doctor, but I prefer to see that as coincidence.

I have now been playing three years. Exercises at home cured the pains, and practice has made me a formidable competitor. That's not the word others would use, but I'm the one writing this blog. I can smile broadly while dumping the smallest child out of his boat. I can adapt to rules as they are made up or broken. I can score sometimes. I can ram and scram with the dexterity of a teenager. That's not the word a teenager would use, but I'm the one writing this blog.

Yesterday I played my last game before leaving town. It was raucous and anarchistic, which are words any observer would have used. In a fit of brand new 2013 delirium we tackled players who didn't have the ball, refused to give up the ball even when we were out of our boats, held on to each others' boats and refused to let go. I scored the last goal of the game standing in the water about half a pool away from my boat, which normally wouldn't have counted, but it did this time. At the end, we said goodbye to each other, and cried. Who would ever have guessed that I would have forged such special friendships with so wide a variety of people playing a sport that I only started at 58 years of age.

We are not too old to start something new. At fifty plus, we have the tools and components to invent our next self in ways that will surprise us. The process may be slower than it used to, but things we have done before will suddenly pop up and speed our learning curve.

The first thing I ever want to say when someone invites me to try something new is, "Sure, I'll give it a whirl." If they think I can do it, who am I to say I can't?

Here's the best part: the older I get, the more likely it is that someone will say, "He's pretty good for his age." The lower the expectations, the easier it becomes to exceed them.

1/1/2013. Happy New Year.

Ron Snell — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 06:00:00 GMT

1/1/2013. Happy New Year. It is my 61st.

I rang in the new year running a 5K with 200 friends at 12:13 AM. 18 degrees. Snow glow for atmosphere. I cannot think of a better way to embrace my 61st New Year.

In 10 days my wife and I will move to Dominical Costa Rica, not to retire but to begin building Selva Pacifica Revitalodge, a gathering place in the jungle overlooking the Pacific, for active, inquisitive, thoughtful, adventuresome travelers. A place where all ages will find inspirational companionship.

Numerous friends have remarked that this is an unusual undertaking for someone my age. I reply that I don't want to get 10 years further down the road and wish I had pursued my dream "10 years ago" when I was younger and stronger.

In this space we will explore, you and I, the vast opportunities that await those who are over 50. We will affirm the documented reality that our lives count now more than ever, that we are role models still, and that the world is both ours to embrace and ours to lead.

Some things are harder now. If we don't keep up physically, it takes longer to catch up. If we don't force our minds to stay open, they close and rust. If we default, we talk more than we listen. If we bow to stereotypes, we cede the high ground to the "cool" kids.

Other things are easier now. We know that human worth is more than human appearance. We more easily shun "things" in favor of "values." We don't panic in the face of endless gloomy prophecies. We have stamina. We know what we're capable of when we commit. We have seen the consequences of decisions played out over time.

Harder or easier, here we are and I believe we should make the most of it. But I am merely one jotting scribe. As readership grows, so does perspective. You are as likely to inspire me as I am you. You will show me where I am wrong and where I am more right than I know. We are better when there are more of us. Engage!

This site will take shape as I learn how to take advantage of the features that are offered. Until then, good enough is good enough for a start. I do not want to look back a year from now and say, "I wish I'd started back when...."

Today's To-Do's? First, comment on this post with a brief description including your first name, your age, and one new thing you'd like to do this year. Second, subscribe to the feed from this blog. You won't have to read every one. But you will at least know when there is a new one.

Plant a Tree for my Mom and Dad

Ron Snell — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:00:00 GMT

So my question was, “How could I symbolize lasting appreciation for my parents?”

There are so many ways. I suppose the one they’d like the most is for me to practice in my own life the best qualities of their lives. I like that as a goal, but not as a goal I’d be able to accomplish during my 60th year.

Make them a plaque? I did that, dedicating the Executive Director’s office at The Connection Homeless Shelter, Inc. to them. But plaques are inanimate, and you’d never use that word about my parents. Besides, the next director might be inclined to pull off my plaque and put up his own.

Name a pair of tortoises after them? They’re animate and last a long time, but beyond that, the symbolism is completely lost. No one who has known either of them would think of them as tortoises.

Name my children after them? Neither of my sons is even close to being a Betty. My Dad got close, since we gave Micah the middle initial W. The W can stand for anything Micah chooses, but we hope that sometimes when he writes it, he thinks of Wayne Walter.

I could buy naming rights to a star, or discover a new species and name it Watty, or build a subdivision and name all the roads after my parents—Betty Ave, Betty St., Betty Blvd, Betty Circle, Wayne…., or so many other things.

I decided to plant a tree. Psalm 1 of the Bible says a Godly person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever that person does, prospers.

In Nebraska, you have to make a decision: a) yields its fruit in season, or b) its leaf does not wither. You can’t get both. I went for “b” and drove in search of an evergreen. Then I used a liberal translation of “streams of water” to include “outside faucet,” one of which is beside the spot I chose.

My only other constraint was the dirt strip between the front of the shelter and the parking lot. Not wanting generations of homeless drivers and shelter staff to curse my parents for inspiring a tree that blocked all traffic, I had to find one that would prosper in Biblical proportions vertically, but be horizontally less ostentatious. So, a spruce. It does spruce up the front of the building, which adds a nice linguistic touch.

It is, in its own special way, a blessing to all who see it, and it will be for a long time. So here’s to you, Mom and Dad. Thank you for being a blessing to all who have known you, and for sprucing up our lives, whatever that might mean to each of us.

# 42: Plant a tree for my mom and dad. Check.

Caroling with Friends

Ron Snell — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Sometimes when you go caroling, you take what you can get. Like a hodge podge collection of tone deaf relatives. I think it’s more fun that way.

I had to go caroling with some friends, because it’s on my list of things to do while I’m 60, and you only get one shot at it per year. Since a tribe of family members assembled on Christmas eve at my mom’s house for tamales and beans and apple cider, I simply asked how many would be willing to go caroling with me. The response indicated that I had asked the right question; had I asked how many would be ‘eager’ to go, I’d have caroled solo.

We didn’t practice even once. I handed out 6 song sheets to share around and off 10 of us went in search of a house with the lights on. “Silent Night” followed by “We wish you a Merry Christmas,” I suggested, and rang a doorbell. We were about as silent as a herd of elephants with a flock of starlings on their backs since some in our party had never done this before and didn’t know we were supposed to be stealthy until the door cracked suspiciously open. We fruitlessly shushed and hushed each other, then burst into song when a face appeared.

Let me just say that most of us are not singers, and most of us aren’t all that comfortable knocking on doors in the dark, so agreeing to do this was a gift to the world. We would have been mightily encouraged had the face at the door smiled broadly, summoned everyone else in the house, and applauded wildly.
Instead, the face said, “We’re eating supper,” and slammed the door shut. Well, maybe she didn’t slam it, but that was the effect. We hadn’t even gotten to the part about “all is calm, all is bright.” I heard clear calls for mutiny and an immediate return home, but I marched resolutely to another house with the lights on and knocked loudly.

It was a great improvement. As hoped, many brown and white faces immediately collected inside and outside the door with broad smiles and clapping hands. I was rather impressed with how we sounded—it’s amazing how if you get enough tone deaf people together, they average out into something that sounds more or less like a Christmas carol. With an audience like that, you’re almost tempted to go for three or four songs, but my younger choir members did a pretty quick job of helping avoid that temptation. They were already walking away as one lady gushed out to give me a huge hug, only because I was the closest and not because I was the best singer.

We headed back toward home, having met the minimal criteria for my checklist, but stopped at Mom’s immediate neighbor’s house. He appeared, and then his wife, and they looked so happy that I thought we should do this every year, wherever we might be in the world. When we’d finished he said, “We’ve lived here 10 years and this is the first time anyone has done that.” I thought that was a shame.

Finally we sang at our own front door for those who hadn’t come with us. Mom missed most of it while searching for a camera and I noted that she didn’t exactly run off hunting for a recorder. The sight was apparently more impressive than the sound.

I think we should go caroling more often. It’s a lost art. One might suggest that it’s especially a lost art in our case. I’m not sure why it was so fun, but it was.

And maybe the door that closed in our faces was a good reminder of the first Christmas. Jesus had the same problem. But "to those who received him… Joy to the World!” on a night that was anything but silent.

The 60 Year Old Book

Ron Snell — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 06:00:00 GMT

My list of 60 things to do while I’m 60 includes reading a book first published in 1951. Tammy just happened to have one in her collection: True Believer—Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer.

I was intrigued right off by the blurb on the back cover: “A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940’s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards.” Somehow a stevedore’s musings appeal to me more than a professor’s.

The book is loaded with quotable quotes. I started off turning down corners of pages, then using skinny sticky notes, then collecting quotes on my computer. After the first couple of chapters I gave all that up because I was essentially marking and quoting everything, which is the same as marking nothing.

It’s amazing to read something 60 years old and feel like I’m reading about the Arab Spring and the Tea Party. Hoffer doesn’t address any one kind of mass movement in particular. His examples come from all sorts of movements, from Christianity to Communism to Islam to Nazis. No matter how unique we feel our approach to be, in the end it follows a pattern.

So, a few especially memorable thoughts to whet your appetites, and then you’ll just have to read it for yourselves. But expect a slow slog—it wasn’t written at the 6th grade reading level so that today’s college graduates could understand it.

1. In order to have a mass movement, you don’t have to have a god to love, but you do have to have a devil to hate. Furthermore, that “devil” should be a foreigner to the group. I read that and thought, Wow! So is this why certain fundamentalist conservatives have to believe that President Obama was born abroad? Is this why they push that idea relentlessly even in the face of documented evidence to the contrary? And apparently hate is a stronger unifying force than love. With enough hate, you can get people to murder millions, all the while thinking they are advancing the common good. We always look for allies when we hate.

2. Fundamentalist radicals of different groups have more in common that any of them do with people who are not radicals. It is therefore easier to recruit a radical to your cause than a lukewarm individual who is not passionate about anything. I’ve had the hardest time understanding the fervent swings from one conservative GOP candidate to another in recent weeks, but this helps explain it. True believers of one thing switch to true believers in another thing without ever pausing to contemplate the contradictions. Right now there is a groundswell of support for Newt Gingrich, who pretty much represents everything radical fundamentalist christians don’t support.

3. Doctrine is critical. And here I just have to stick in some quotes:
“The readiness for self-sacrifice is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life… All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world…. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it…. The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observations but from holy writ….To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason….It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible…. Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth….It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand…. The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds…. (At the root of the fanatic’s) cockiness is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula—his formula.”

I can’t help but think of the number of comments I’ve heard/read disparaging today’s intellectuals, as if being smart and articulate and nuanced are bad things. How many times have we heard that President Bush was preferable because he was a guy you’d like to sit and have a beer with? And how many times have conservatives mocked attempts to present a lengthier, nuanced perspective on complex issues? And how often have we based our whole viewpoint about an issue on a catchy phrase like “death panel” or “Obamacare” or “death tax” instead of trying to understand the realities behind those deliberately emotional labels?

4. Religiofication. “The mastery of the art of religiofication is an essential requirement in the leader of a democratic nation, even though the need to practice it might not arise.” Isn’t it interesting that candidate Bush needed Karl Rove to tell him that what he really needed to do was to sound more religious and appeal more to the evangelical church? Or that candidate McCain gained so much ground so quickly when Palin brought religious fervor to their side, even if it was calculated and full of inconsistencies?

So now I’m thinking about starting a mass movement, but I’m not quite sure what to focus on. I need to find something that people are feeling really unhappy about, then find someone to hate, then come up with a doctrine that I can present in a few emotional sound bites instead of long nuanced speeches (how about “9-9-9”? Oh, someone else got that one already), then scorn anyone who disagrees with “us”, then tie it to fundamentalist religious fears and fervor and voilá.

Oh…I know…I should jump into the presidential race. Within weeks I could be a front runner for a few days.

Grow a Goatee

Ron Snell — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Growing a goatee is not, per se, an accomplishment. I mean, it’s a sort of passive activity that happens while you’re sleeping or eating or thinking about doing something more interesting than growing a goatee.

As with most things in America, however, we have managed to make it complex. You don’t, after all, just grow a goatee. You grow a certain kind of goatee, and the kind you grow says a lot about you. One of the things it might say, for example, is that you are not endowed with enough of the right genes to grow a goatee that says something nice about you and you should never attempt such a thing. I’m in that category, it turns out.

I googled “goatee” just for chuckles. The first site I clicked on had 213 pictures of men with different styles and a few pictures of women, but I’m not sure why they were in there since I didn’t see any goatees on them. In any case, 213 is way too many choices. It didn’t help when I then came across this frightening piece from askmen.com:

“While facial hair is a natural phenomenon for men, it's a part of the body that can be considered an art form in itself. Who would have thought that hair could actually become a way to decorate a man's face? Consider it a free accessory, that can complete your appearance and transform your look from night to day. There's a fine line between what is considered in and out of style in terms of facial hair. Any style is acceptable as long as it suits a man's face and his personality. We've covered the different hairstyles for men that are presently fashionable, but now it's time to cover the kind of body hair that can make or break a man's look; facial hair.”

That’s scary stuff. What if my goatee were to break my look instead of make it? What if it transformed my look from day to night instead of night to day? What if I looked older? Or out of style? Or…the worst…what if I’m (I can hardly bring myself to utter it) inadequate?

Help is at hand. A little more searching and I found out via YouTube that I could buy an expensive template that would help me trim my goatee to perfection every time. What I found most appealing about it was that when this guy used it, a woman in a slinky dress appeared from nowhere to glide up behind him and give him a seductive kiss under the ear. Since Tammy has never once responded to my facial hair that way, I thought it might be worth the investment. On the other hand, my goatee had so little hair in it that I wasn’t quite sure I should trim any of it away or the whole effect might disappear.

At least I had an excuse to get started. For my speech at our shelter’s international dinner in October I would wear a white shirt, a black vest and pants, a Greek fisherman’s hat and a goatee. With five weeks of no effort, I’d have “the look.”

After the dinner, I just kept it, like a forlorn stray animal, because there was this lingering hope that if I kept it, “the look” would eventually come. It was a vain hope, so in Costa Rica I had a stark choice: cling to the fantasy, or shave it off and let my upper lip and my chin tan like the rest of my face. I shaved it all off. Only then did Tammy say she liked me better without it. But of course that was after spending half a day with me, including a kiss or two, completely oblivious to the fact that I had shaved it off. Inadequate doesn’t even begin to describe my utter sense of failure.

Grow a goatee. Check.

Three Weeks in Costa Rica--The Finale

Ron Snell — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

I was a little dismayed approaching Manuel Antonio, where we’d spend our last few days. Tourists and tourism everywhere. Even our nice little hotel, selected at the last minute, was crammed with luggage as a group of young people either arrived or exited—it was hard to tell which but we prayed the latter. A man with a tripod and telescope advised us to hire him for a tour right away because the next day high season would begin and there’d be even more people. Nice pitch, but we didn’t swing.

We decided on a walk for lunch and a bakery. Inevitably it turned into a long, sweaty climb, which meant that by the time we arrived at our restaurant, our pores poured. It was a pretty classy restaurant, too, which made puddles of perspiration more conspicuous and less appropriate, but that’s life in the jungle. We certainly weren’t going to back and freshen up before lunch, in case that’s what you’re thinking.

The thing about breathtaking climbs is that they’re the only way you’re going to get breathtaking views. From our table in El Avion restaurant we could look out on the vast Pacific and watch parasailors glide past far below us thinking they were the ones getting the bird’s eye view. It’s all relative.

So what’s cool is that the restaurant is built around a cargo plane that was one of only two of its kind ever made. Its sister was shot down in Nicaragua in the middle of the Iran-Contra Affair, so with our menu we got a 1-page summary of that fiasco. Now there’s a clever little bar inside this plane called the Contra Bar. We have pictures of ourselves in the cockpit, for what it’s worth. Oh, and the super nachos were definitely worth the hike even without the history lesson.

By the time Monday morning and the squirrel monkeys and sloth made their appearance right outside our door, all had changed. Weekend hordes had vanished, the sea of tranquility had returned. With a beach 5 minutes away, we wandered. And read and wrote beside the pool and acted like we were in a tropical paradise. I even lay in a thoughtfully provided hammock for a while reading a fascinating book written in 1951 about mass movements. Insightful and prescient and not relaxing.

Plus the hotel had a couple of boogey boards of dubious quality for guests to use. Tammy isn’t all that comfortable standing in surf watching oncoming waves thunder and crash and break all over themselves and her, but she thought it worth a try and after a while she actually got some decent rides all the way back to the beach. By then I had rubbed a sore spot on my chin from banging down on the board when crashing off the crests of waves, and had caught a lot of long rides. She decided we’d have to do it again sometime. I said okay, whatever, I suppose I could stand one more hour in the surf.

Along the way it turned out that both the owners of the hotel in Monteverde and we were more serious than we’d thought about having us buy the place, and it seemed like it would be well worth our time to all get together once more face to face and talk about it. So we rented a tiny little Hundai and drove to meet at a restaurant where we didn’t eat anything because we were talking too much. Oh well, the fruit drinks were great. And the drive was nice except when it was raining hard.

We told them we’d have an offer ready by the beginning of the year. They told us they’d open the books to us but admitted that we might not learn much because a lot of business in Costa Rica is off the books in order to avoid income taxes. We told them we understood that because they aren’t the only ones.

The man who shuttled us to and from our rental car is putting four kids and his law student wife through school on a salary of about $600.00 a month of which $400.00 goes for his house payment and he can’t figure out how he makes it but thanks God for making it all possible. Nothing but good cheer and optimism. He invited us to his house for coffee, which we declined in favor of getting back before dark.

Wednesday we did Manual Antonio park, bypassing countless aggressively marketed opportunities to hire a guide in favor of “doing it all” ourselves. It’s a beautiful chunk of rainforest including two gorgeous beaches where the raccoons will actually engage you in a tug of war over your food. We thought it was funny because we didn’t have any food. We summited and plummeted numerous times to get breathtaking views while blinking the sweat out of our eyes.

The worst trail of all was the best because it was the worst. Turns out a lot less people take a trail where you actually have a chance of experiencing nature. We slipped and picked our way through rappelling caterpillars and an eye-level sloth that tried to attack me when I petted its hind leg. Let me just say that if you can’t get away from a mad sloth, you really need to spend more time at the gym. By the time they get their head turned to see what the problem is, you can be a quarter mile down the trail, walking slowly. We learned from a passing guide that sloths have seven species of fleas plus beetles and other things living in their furry ecosystem. I’m not quite sure how a sloth would even scratch himself. They’re like watching a slow movie in slow motion.

Our last night there we wanted to do something special for dinner, but it was raining so we settled on a funky little nearby place that’s being upgraded. We asked for balcony seating, which was pretty funny because the rain pounded so hard none of us could hear each other. Tammy washed her hands under a stream of water coming through the roof, and I kept moving the table seeking a dry spot. The waiters were enchanted with their only customers and chatted loudly about their dreams for the place, which include patching the roof. It was one of our most special dinners ever, even though the food was pretty lousy. A local resident later told us that was the hardest rain they’ve had all year. One year, she said, they got 56 inches in six days. Maybe that’s why there aren’t so many tourists in October/November.

We spent Thursday night with a couple who work for the state department. She’s a Peruvian whose parents were good friends of my folks starting back in Peru when he was a brilliant communist lawyer. They ended up in Costa Rica because he wanted to go to Bible school so he could pastor a church. Life has its fascinating conversions and conversations. In the meantime, our hosts have a lot of respect for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the way she relates not only officially to other countries, but also personally to those working in her department. Listening, my own respect grew.

One of the sisters who want us to buy their property lives in San Jose, so we got to spend the last morning with her and her husband. He is an award winning Costa Rican tour guide, so if you want the best for your next trip, let us know and we’ll put you in touch. He once wormed his way through a crowd so he could ask the president to shake hands with his tour group. You know, that kind of stuff. Very enjoyable couple and a friendly way to share cookies and coffee before flying away.

So, three weeks—or was it a lifetime?—in Costa Rica. Pura Vida! Check.

Three Weeks in Costa Rica--Part 6

Ron Snell — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Ahhh, Dominical. How we love thee.

I’m not sure why I didn’t fall in love with Dominical at first sight. It was frumpy? Muddy! Surfy? Whatever, it didn’t take long to change my mind.

Rosa helped. Rosa runs Café Suenos right across the street from our hotel. Her smoothies are a foretaste of heaven, and you don’t need to wait for the rapture. Tammy eventually decided to become addicted to Mono Locos, a mixture of coffee and banana, and I couldn’t help falling head over heels in love with a combo of pineapple, mango and papaya. My oh my oh my. We went back more than once a day. Besides, we fell in love with Rosa and her daughter. They’re from the Dominican Republic and have beautiful smiles. Rosa said she’d expand her shop if I’d put in a bakery. I’m tempted, but it would be devastating to be that close to her smoothies all day.

I made a huge mistake in walking over to order a couple for us to enjoy in our room and realized too late that that tall mountain of frozen deliciousness wouldn’t last long in the tropics By the time I got back to our room, streams of smoothies were running like decadent waterfalls all over everywhere. The ants on our porch were ecstatic and I’m sure started believing in a benevolent creator—something they probably don’t believe in when we’re just stepping on them.

And of course the beach helped. We went for walks in the early mornings when the light was sparkling and we owned the beach. Surfers apparently aren’t early risers unless they have to catch just the right waves, but of course you already have to be up to know if the waves are just right, so that’s not likely. Coming back from the beach, Tammy’d get ready for class and I’d feed our addictions to smoothies and I’d walk her to class and then go back to the beach to read and meditate. At least that’s what I called it.

I think when I meditate I’m “supposed to” take a short phrase or something and let that slow roast in my mind for a while. Instead, I slow roasted under a tropical sun and galloped through pages of Phillip Yancey’s new book, Grace Notes, which I recommend highly. It’s a book of daily meditations for the whole year, but I gulped about a weeks’ worth at a time.

Tammy fell in love with her teacher, Christina. Because we were there during low season, which meant rain almost every day, she had a one-on-one class that she finished with a glow on her bilingual face each day. I probably should have been embarrassed by my lack of productive time, but I chose to just enjoy hers vicariously. Christina is cute, fun, and a good teacher and now they are best friends. Christina is getting married this weekend, so wish her well as you recover from Thanksgiving.

I took a surfing lesson that almost inspired me to buy baggies and some 60’s CD’s, and went rappelling down waterfalls that almost inspired me to get out my old rock climbing gear, and kayaked up a river in a battered old boat that wasn’t actually designed for that sort of thing even before it got its bottom stove in on some rocky beach. But it was free, courtesy of a new friend, and I loved the part where I dragged it up through a rapids reminiscent of Matsigenka land.

But mostly, yet again, it was the people we met who carried the day. Michael, the Dutchman who was so surprised that we spoke good Spanish that he came and chatted with us in English while we ate in his fancy restaurant. Oscar, our waiter with the dry wit who never quite got the idea of my jokes about chickens crossing the road after he told us the chicken soup wouldn’t have chicken in it because they had none—some things just don’t translate--but nevertheless got into the spirit of the thing and enjoyed trying. Christina and the rest of the staff at the Adventure Education School. Alex, the manager of a surfboard rental place who I just happened to hit it off with and who called out to greet us each time we walked past. Javier, who drives a van and organizes tours for students at the school and who was an endless source of information about everything in the area including the lady who became very rich by buying an enormous tract of land and selling it off in pieces and built an eye-popping manor in Dominical and was a generous contributor to the community until she died at 47 leaving it all to her heirs who don’t want to live there. I could run on, but that sentence already did.

It turns out that almost everything is for sale along the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, so if you want to retire there, check it out. We were tempted, but are more inclined to live in the mountains and go to the beach than to live on the beach and go to the mountains. Not that we’ll do either one any time soon, but one can dream, so we did.

Oh, and if you go during rainy season, go ahead and take umbrellas with you from the start instead of wondering each day if you should buy some and concluding that, well, it can’t go on raining like this forever, can it, and getting soaked day after day. One evening it was pouring so hard that we decided to just put on our rain jackets and go across the street to an elegant restaurant to get a little dinner, and by the time we got there we were drenched and an elderly snobbish foreign couple in the restaurant looked sourly down their noses at us when we arrived, so we just sat out under the eaves and ordered soup to go. We should have had umbrellas, is my point.

All things, yet again, must conclude. Tammy had her own little graduation, complete with a nice certificate, and we took her teacher out for lunch, and we spent a leisurely Saturday, and then Sunday morning after Tammy took pictures of me “surfing” we packed up our new acquired Spanish, surfing and rappelling skills, invited Javier to join us for a final smoothie, and headed for Manuel Antonio an hour up the coast.

Ahhh, Dominical, ‘tis better to have loved and lost….

Rappelling Waterfalls

Ron Snell — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Having flown an ultralight in a previous life, but having never rappelled down waterfalls, I decided to make a switch on my “60 List” and take advantage of an opportunity while in Dominical. I got a message from “Scotty” saying he had a group I could join, so I dropped everything—meaning my beach bumming for the day—and joined. Scotty’s been all over the world leaping off of things and considers it amazing that he can do it here in shorts and t-shirt instead of multiple layers of Michelin Man clothing like you have to in frigid mountains. I agree.

We started off by putting on harnesses that give you an eternal wedgy. Not something you’d want to wear around all day unless it was going to save your life, which ours would, so we did. Once we got those tightened up to the point where we both looked and felt…uhhh…undignified, we put on light, bright yellow plastic helmets that I didn’t think would make any difference should it come to that, although I could see how they might be helpful on the off chance that while you were in a waterfall, a log came over the falls on top of you.

Scotty introduced his assistant, Travis, then asked us if we had anything wrong with us that he should know about. No one admitted to anything, including me. I did have a headache and a backache, the latter of which he specifically asked about but he wasn’t looking directly at me when he asked, so I took it that he was asking someone else.

Then we climbed into a 4-wheel drive monster truck for fifteen minutes of low gear climbing and two river crossings on gravel road to our starting point, where we got some safety instruction as soon as we’d jumped out. The safety instruction was pretty concise: watch your step because turned ankles are a much greater danger than dangling from a rope in the middle of a strong shower, even if you don’t think so when you’re dangling. If it looks slippery, it’s slippery. If it looks swift, it is. If it looks like it might hurt you, don’t grab it. Questions?

It hadn’t been lost on me that during the whole signup process we hadn’t filled out a single form. Not name, birthdate, next of kin, emergency contacts, liability waiver, etc. I actually liked that concept.

Canyoning, it turns out, is a fabulous combination of difficult scrambling and controlled falling. The river we followed is precipitous, but not everything is a waterfall, so you slip and slide down the river on boulders and rocks until you reach a dropoff, and then you rappel. We reached our first fall in fifteen minutes, where Scotty demonstrated how this whole concept worked.

The equipment is deceptively simple. By means of a special little fitting clipped to our harness, a rope would take a tight turn in such a way that with very little pressure we could make ourselves go slower or faster or not at all. The rappelling skills are therefore straightforward once you’re clipped in, and can be summarized in two phrases that we’d hear shouted over and over throughout the day because no matter how often we heard Scotty and Travis yell them, we usually acted as if they were talking to someone else: LEAN BACK! FEET FLAT!

So if you want to try it yourself, like down the wall of your multi-story office building or off the next cliff you and your wife are driving next to, here’s the scoop: Get clipped in. This is really, really important. The difference between plunging to your eternal fate and rappelling is getting clipped in correctly. Then grab the rope just so, lean back so there’s pressure on the rope, and as you descend, let through enough rope that whatever the slope, you’re legs are perpendicular to it and your feet flat against it. If your feet get ahead of you you’ll be on your tiptoes. If you get ahead of your feet, you’ll be on your heels. Both are slippery propositions, as we saw demonstrated throughout the day.
About the only thing you can seriously do wrong is let go of the rope with both hands and reach out to steady yourself. That sends you into the eternal fate posture, which is not what you came for.

BUT, just in case, Travis was always at the bottom with the lower end of the rope in his hands. If all else failed, he’d give a little tug and everything would stop immediately. For the person on the rope I’m sure it felt more like cardiac arrest than assisted arrest, but s/he’d be the only one wetting their pants because from the spectators’ point of view, it was no big deal. Besides, in a waterfall, who’s going to care if you wet your pants?

We were a group of 10 people, so everything took a while. At each waterfall, they tied off the upper end of the rope to something solid, which is as important as getting clipped in properly. Then they threw the rest of the rope over the edge. Travis went first and then each of us in turn, honing our newly acquired lack of skills. Since I never slipped or careened off balance, I didn’t get to experience the full range of (e)motions, but watching others do so helped me enjoy it vicariously.

Scotty treated every wild swing and expression of panic with a loud cheer, as if that were the only part of his job he really enjoyed. Which makes him sound evil, which he definitely isn’t. He just gets a lot of pleasure out of watching people learn and every gleeful shout is followed by appropriately encouraging shouts like, “GREAT RECOVERY! LEAN BACK! FEET FLAT!”

When everyone had had their turn and was safely at the bottom of the fall, Scotty would show us how it’s really done. On the last waterfall, which was about 85 feet high, we crept down, theoretically enjoying the moment but more realistically trying to keep ourselves balanced and hear Travis’ instructions above the pounding of the water on our helmets. Then Scotty came down so fast that I lost count—I’m thinking his feet only ricocheted off the face of the cliff about three times before he stood amongst us with a big smile on his face, not so much for his accomplishment but because he was pretty sure everyone was now past the point of suing him.

Between rappels, there could not have been a more beautiful place to wait and watch: narrow canyon in the jungle, clear river cascading through ferns and boulders, blue monarchs, patches of sun to warm you up after a plunge into the cold river, and even a spider monkey crossing the river on a thick vine, as if he’d been paid to show up right then.

Okay, so the patches of sun didn’t quite make it through the trip. By the last waterfall, where I was last in line, it was raining very hard. When I asked to make sure I knew my route down, Scotty said, “You know what you’re doing. The gnarly route is over to the right. Go for it if you want.” I did, because we only go around once in life. Gnarly's good.

By the time we finished, the river was rising very fast. We slipped and slid our way out to the road, but the truck could no longer get to us. The little streams it had splashed through earlier were now waist deep, chocolate brown and running hard, so we waded across them. It was exhilarating, stumbling on hidden rocks, pushing against the current, reliving my youth on the Camisea, finally feeling like something could really go wrong! But it didn’t.

I pondered whether or not I’d like to practice rappelling long enough to get really good at it. The answer is ‘no’, in part because of that wedgy harness thing, but it’s certainly something I’d do again poorly. If you ever get the chance, go with Scotty. He’s a lot of fun and his waterfalls are gorgeous. And his brand new baby boy is so cute. I wonder how old he'll be when he goes over his first waterfall. I doubt 60.

Rappelling waterfalls. Check.

Surfing Lesson

Ron Snell — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

I’m not quite sure why I didn’t really look forward to surfing. I put it on my list not because I thought it would be fun, but because I thought it would be different. Sure, I’ve body surfed and boogy boarded in different places around the world, but surfing just never captured my interest.

So yesterday I paid my $40.00 and signed up for a lesson today at 9:00 AM. Here’s one thing you can always count on: if I’ve paid any money at all and it’s non-refundable, I’ll show up.

The shop is on the way to Tammy’s school, so we walked together, dodging mud puddles, enjoying the crisp sunshine after a night of pounding rain. My teacher looked like a surfer dude and I didn’t. He’s brown, has long hair somewhat bleached on the ends, is skinny like he’s built out of bamboo, and wears whatever surfers wear. I’m pretty much the opposite of all that. I think I might have looked a little like an old man trying to relive his youth.

Still, here’s something we’ve come to count on in Costa Rica: once you’ve paid your money, they give you their all. Every guide, driver and teacher we’ve hired has been very good at making us feel like we’re special and trainable, whatever their private misgivings. My surfing teacher even had the social graces to tell me I didn’t look that old, but of course when you’re a young surfer dude, EVERYone looks old so he couldn’t be telling the truth.

So he fetched this board about the size of a barn door and had me carry it to the beach, which was a 10 minute walk down main street. Main street is the only street, and I’m pretty sure that every single person we passed immediately thought “Beginner!” as I walked past with my huge board. I didn’t care—my teacher and I were having a lively conversation in Spanish about all sorts of things including the fact that he grew up pretty close to here and has been surfing since he was seven. If his parents were anything like mine, his dad thought that was a better idea than his mother did, but here he is, still undrowned.

This area is renowned for its surfing. In high season the town is overgrown with dudes and their boards, and many of the local businesses are owned by outsiders. We found that out from the Dutch owner of a lovely hotel called Con=Fusione. He, Michael, has been here seven years and when we talked to him in Spanish he was so intrigued that he grabbed a glass of wine and sat with us at our table to chat for an hour in English. Okay, so that sounds like a disconnect, but the point is that he says only about 5% of the foreigners, mostly American, who live and work here ever learn Spanish, which he finds offensive in the extreme. Then he talked to us in English. Go figure.

The food was fabulous and his observations about all things Costa Rican, Dutch and American were perceptive, so we had a most invigorating evening while rain poured in torrents around us. His restaurant is elegant and the temperature is just right for no doors or windows. He told us that although it’s impossible for him to ever close, because there are no doors or windows, he has never, in seven years, had a robbery.

Okay, so lots of people come here from all over the world to surf, but not in November. Since it’s low season, edging toward the end of the rainy season that they euphemistically refer to as “Green Season” around here, there’s hardly anyone around, which means that I was in a class of one. Yup, I got a personal coach for the price of a class.

So we started in the sand with instructions on how to paddle, how to manage the board in the waves so it doesn’t knock your teeth out or knock you out, how to stand up and how to get off. I frankly didn’t think I’d need to learn how to get off as that part would come pretty naturally if I ever managed to actually stand up. Still, I listened attentively when he told me to NEVER jump off in front of the board and to NEVER dive off. Assuming, of course, that I had a choice.

Then I fastened on my leash, not knowing if that was to keep track of me or his expensive board, and we waded out into the breakers. The sky was deep blue, the sun bright, the jungle backdrop deep green, the ocean a perfect temperature and the waves, well, breaking in long rows, one after the other, like you see in the pictures. At first when you’re out in them, they look rather intimidating, building up all strong like that and then crashing and churning and full of sand. But Esekias didn’t seem concerned, so I decided to look like I wasn’t either.

Here’s what I think. I think that when you’re learning something new, you have to sort of pretend like it isn’t new. Instead of being tentative, you have to just do it like this isn’t your first time. Otherwise you spend the whole time acting like a beginner, which you are, but which you don’t want to be.

So I envisioned everything he’d told me, waited until just the right moment, placed my hands in a totally wrong position, pulled my back leg forward into the wrong position and with one deliberate motion pulled the forward leg also in the wrong position, tried to stand with knees bent and back straight and feet sideways, eyes on the horizon, and toppled off the board completely unable to control where I fell or what went into the water first. Which is what I’d envisioned before I envisioned success. And that’s how I learned to say in polite Spanish, “You didn’t do anything I told you.” He needn’t have said it at all because I was already well aware that it hadn’t been as pretty as I’d done it on the beach.

My second time, I stood up. My third time, I got a ride. Within fifteen minutes I was riding some of the small waves clear in until I jumped off. Within an hour, I wondered why I hadn’t started doing this when I was 7. It’s incredible!
I like pure sports. I like impure sports too, but the ones where you don’t use gas or electricity have something special about them. And I like acceleration in my sports. So surfing is all of that. You hear this roar behind you, and when you get better at it you start paddling at just the right time, and then you feel this powerful push that comes out of nowhere and if you’re lucky (like me) or good at it (like real surfers) you play off of that acceleration to get up and feel the wind in your hair while you race toward shore.

By the end of my lesson, Esequias was urging me further and further out and I was sort of on my own, as long as I didn’t get overconfident. Of course there’s some pretty good immediate feedback if you get overconfident. It’s called getting off the board looking like an old man having a seizure.

I get the board for two more hours on my own as part of the price. Then I’ll buy some baggy shorts, learn to say Dude in Spanish, get some cooler sunglasses and become part of the vibe. I can’t wait!

Surfing. Check.

Three Weeks in Costa Rica--Part 5

Ron Snell — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

We finally tugged our hearts and suitcases out of Monteverde at 8:15 AM, but not before we’d summited and plummeted one more time to get some money at the ATM and buy some bakery stuff. If anyone wants to start a business in North Platte, it should be a Costa Rican bakery. We’ve become somewhat addicted. Okay, totally addicted. And just in case you care, Raymond makes the best cinnamon crusted “ears” in town, especially just as they come out of his oven. Three o’clock in the afternoon, but don’t get me started.

There was a lot to pack as we left. Not in the suitcases, but in our heads. So many new ideas, exciting impossibilities, acquaintances, experiences. It feels like we’ve been here a month? A year? A lifetime? Lifetimes should be measured not by years, but by indescribable chunks of different experiences.

In addition to the separately chronicled pseudo bungee jump, we did a night tour of the jungle where we learned that it’s really hard to see things at night in the jungle, which is something you learn early on if you grow up in the jungle. We also learned that it’s not cool to call it “jungle,” but cloud forest, rainforest, primary forest and secondary forest just don’t have the same ring. But I digress—we had a great guide and did see glowing mushrooms and some other fascinating stuff including two very interesting snakes, but probably not enough to justify the price.

So here’s what was worth the price. The guide told us to use our flashlights to look for little things. He said, “We see the big things by looking for the little things.” I thought that was profound and applies to far more than the jungle at night.

In both our day tour of the jungle and our night tour, my inclination was to clock miles. Before we decided to pay a lot for a guide who turned out to be worth every penny, we had calculated that we could walk all the way around the protected reserve in about three hours.

Then we got the guide, and went nowhere. He stood around, listened, poked, turned leaves and found the most incredible things. Tiny things that work together to make bigger things possible. An itty bitty beetle with a parasite growing out of its head because the parasite reprograms the beetle to climb up into the sunshine where the parasite can kill it and flourish in the sun. A tiny bird that just eats this kind of fruit and then poops its seeds all over to repopulate the plant. A walking stick with unimaginable long legs probing her way through leaves, a bright green frog tucked under a broad leaf just his color.

While we were waiting in the emergency room of a local health care facility Saturday morning, we saw a worn National Geographic magazine in Spanish with an article about how many species there are in a cubic foot of this or that. The author/researcher/photographer and some biologists picked several quite different places on the earth and in the sea and spent time finding out what was in that cubic foot or passed through it. It’s pretty amazing. Just so, our guide told us that much of what he knew about the jungle came from the research of a woman who spent a fascinating year studying one tree in the preserve.

There’s probably a lesson in there for us globe trotters. How often do we fly over the most interesting stuff, or drive past it, or even cycle right over it, clueless? What would I learn of people, places and things if I slowed down? If I stood still? How much more interesting might my world be if I sat and listened face to face instead of assuming that I’m getting to know anyone on Facebook and text messages?

It’s not in my genetic makeup to study one tree for a whole year, but surely I can do better than setting a goal of hiking clear around the park in three hours. Can’t I?

Enough of that. We also toured a bat house where we were far more amazed that I thought we’d be and I even got a photo of a bat peeing, which must be something of a rarity. At least the guide was impressed. And we did another hike around the forest on our hotel property, oohing and ahhhing at the appropriate times, and the owner gave us a tour of the whole property and all of the buildings because she thinks we should buy it and run it. I think she likes us, but not enough to suggest a price we could afford.

Our van arrived right on time Sunday morning and drove us down the mountain to the coast, eventually dropping us at our hotel in Dominical, which is a little one horse town with no horse. There’s one road through town that you can walk in about fifteen minutes if you aren’t in a hurry. Since it’s still the tail end of rainy season, the population is thin and some stores are closed, but it’s pretty clear that this is a place catering to the baggy panted, sun-tanned surfers. The whole vibe is very different from Monteverde, so it’s a bit of a shock. More on that as we adjust.

We settled in and walked to Tammy’s Spanish school to get the timing down and went grocery shopping, then had a late lunch and found that food is as expensive here as it is in Monteverde. Then we settled in a bit and by 5:00 PM both felt so sleepy that we decided to take a little nap before we ate peanut butter and crackers for supper. That tropical torpor is like a drug. The alarm went off, Tammy reset it, it went off again, and we finally actually woke up at 5:00 AM wondering what had hit us.

But at least we felt refreshed! Now we shall get to know Dominical, and Tammy shall polish her Spanish, and I shall learn to surf, and we shall certainly be sorry to leave in a week.

Bungee Jump

Ron Snell — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Okay, so it wasn’t actually, technically, a bungee jump. It was awesomely better!

Even before coming to Costa Rica we’d been looking for a good place for me to do a bungee jump. The best one we located was an hour outside San Jose and cost $60.00 for one jump off of a bridge over a river gorge. Fine, but that’s a lot of money and a lot of time for 2-seconds of abject terror.

So since we’re here in Monteverde anyway, I asked around and heard about a Mega Tarzan Swing that is a hybrid—part long freefall and part rope swing. Better yet, it included zip lines and a Superman ride just fifteen minutes outside of Monteverde for $40.00. I say any time you can save money on being miserable, you ought to.

Tammy went along as a witness, not particularly eager to join in the lack of fun, but willing to take pictures, which is more of a challenge than flying through the jungle. Turns out the signage for trails to pic spots isn’t that great.

We got lucky and had a Norwegian family of three in our group—Mikkel & Lene and their 5-year-old son Sebastian--as well as a physiology professor on sabbatical from his college in Seattle. They were all so much fun that we’d have paid $40.00 just to get to talk with them, then gone home the richer. But no… I had to check one more thing off of my list, and the sooner the better.

We got harnessed and then had a brief demo of how to ride on a zip line. How to hang on, how to brake, and how NOT to get your fingers chopped off by the pulley, which would have been memorable but not all that enjoyable. I didn’t know when I signed up for the tour how much fun we were going to have riding ever longer zip lines ever higher in the trees before we ever got to the bad part. If I’d known, I could have looked forward to it.

The first line was short so we could get the hang of it. The 12th cable went almost a half of a mile and a couple hundred feet off the ground, which gave the illusion that the trees had gotten a lot shorter. All of that was interrupted by one brief rappel during which one of the guides controlled the speed and got quite a kick out of just sort of dropping us to the ground. It was such a surprise that I let out a yelp that I wasn’t proud of. It just sort of came out.

The zip lines concluded with a “Superman” during which we were suspended laying flat under the cable and putting our arms out like…yes…Superman. It was an incredible half mile ride across a valley several hundred feet in the air. The only scary part was leaving the security of the platform, but once I was in flight, it was totally cool.

And then it was time for the Super Mega Tarzan swing. Like I said, it wasn’t a bungee jump because it wasn’t on an elastic band. Instead, the idea was to step off of the platform, fall 148 feet and then convert all of that momentum into a swing with a 295 diameter arc out over the treetops. If that sounds relaxing, I haven’t described it quite right.

Dave the professor went first, but only because he thought if he waited he’d chicken out. He walked the plank, so to speak, along a suspension bridge that wobbled and swayed. Then we watched as a guide strapped him in. All I can say is that when he stepped off the end, it wasn’t comforting. We couldn’t see him, but he sounded just like a man being executed painfully. The rest of us looked at each other dubiously, but 5-year-old Sebastian went next and when he didn’t make a peep, we were all irrevocably committed to follow suit.

I can’t say I know how it feels to march toward your certain death, but this had to have had some similarities. The whole length of the platform, as I walked uncertainly against the wobble, I kept thinking that this wasn’t something I really wanted to be doing. To have done, yes, but not to be doing. And then my stomach clutched when I reached the end. It looks a lot higher from the top. Darn that 5 year old!

Our guide was all business like, as if he were preparing my body for lethal injection. Straps here, more straps there, a safety line in case the regular line broke—WHAT! IN CASE THE WHAT BREAKS?!

“You’re okay,” he said, tugging on a couple of lines so tightly that they pulled me forward toward the edge, which I wasn’t really ready for. “I’ll hold on to you for a couple of seconds and open this gate. Then you hold on to these two lines and step off.

It was nothing but awful. I don’t care if everyone knows it—there’s something gut wrenching about stepping off into the void. I didn’t hesitate because I knew that if I did, I wouldn’t. When he said go, I went.

The worst thing about spending that much money to do something like that is that you don’t remember it. I wanted to carry with me forever the feeling of plunging 120 feet in a free fall, but all I remember is yelling uncontrollably and hitting the end of the fall, when I was hurtled out over the trees at a hundred miles an hour. And that’s when it was suddenly and unexpectedly fun. Instead of bouncing at the end of the line like in a bungee jump, I swung wildly back and forth a few times with the wind whistling in my ears, making happy noises now and exulting in the fact that I don’t ever have to do that again.

When I finally got stopped and the guide unhooked me on terra firma, I was shaking like a leaf. Those who went before were clearly still recovering, a triumphant bewildered look in their eyes. The man from Norway said that’s the most his son has ever heard him swear. It’s just too much adrenaline all at once, I think.

We decided that since we were all bonded and stuff, we should celebrate life by going out for lunch in a little hole in the wall restaurant that Tammy and I had heard of. There we spend two hours chatting about the world, eating real “Tico” food, and swapping contact information. Someday we’ll have a reunion and all jump off a chair in our living room, which frankly makes a lot more sense.

If you’re ever in Costa Rica, I highly recommend this outfit, “100% Adventura” at montevideoadventure.com. It’s the most alive you’ll ever feel for the money.

Bungee jump. Check.

Three Weeks in Costa Rica--Part 4

Ron Snell — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Here’s a tip: When you plan to visit Monteverde in the rainy season, and the guidebook says to bring rain clothes, don’t skimp. It’s not the time to flippantly tell your wife that, “Oh, I’ve lived in the jungle before and it can’t be that bad.” After walking five hours in pouring rain today, feeling streams of water running down her neck and out her pant cuffs, she knows that it really is that bad.

But I maintain that everyone should experience the cloud forest in the clouds, and the rainforest in the rain. It’s just so appropriate. The day had started off balmy enough that I actually got out the binoculars and looked at the gulf far away and far below. But as we made our preparations to hike off on another adventure, the clouds were already steaming through the valleys and climbing into our treetops. It looked ominous enough that we took rain jackets, but not ominous enough that we took rain pants. I wish we could say we’ve learned our lesson, but I suspect if we had it to do over again, we’d still be eternally optimistic.

Leaving the cheese factory, we continued upward and onward on a narrow gravel road through thick woods under thick clouds and unpredictable showers. When we got there, we bought tickets, had lunch, and then decided we might as well spring for a guide.The Monteverde biological reserve is nicely organized with great trails and good signage, but we didn’t want to miss anything and mostly we wanted to practice our woodland Spanish. So we landed Roy, who was another “find of the day.” Roy is tall and goateed and comically expressive and carried a very powerful monocular on a tripod that he would plunk down at a moment’s notice so we could see faraway “snowman” orchids, a rare quetzal bird, or whatever. He also had, in his handy dandy guide pack, a laser pointer that he used to great effect and a flashlight he whipped out when we needed to look into a long, deep hole being borrowed by a tarantula.

So we got to see lots of stuff we wouldn’t have seen on our own. I’m actually not quite sure how he saw them. Here’s a baby frog small as a bead. Here’s a walking stick that looks just like a stick walking. Here’s a weird cluster of grasshopper eggs dangling on a borrowed strand of spider web. Here’s a tiny beetle with a parasite growing out of its eyes. (The parasite invades the beetle and reprograms it so that it climbs up a bush or branch until it gets into the sunlight. Then the parasite kills it and grows out of its head, flourishing in the sunshine--I’m telling you, we don’t have enough imagination to make up what nature routinely does just for the fun of it.)

It would be tempting to feel that we were on a Disneyland sort of adventure and that each of these things was placed in exactly the right spot so that we could see them. But when you sit back and ponder the fact that the whole vast acreage of jungles and forests all over the world are literally crawling with these things, from microscopic to elephantine, and that they work together in unimaginable ways to gain survival advantages, it’s rather overwhelming. We learned to say “Wow!” in Costa Rican Spanish. When Tammy wondered out loud why our Congress couldn’t learn to work together as well as beetles and ants, I suggested that it’s because the beetles and ants are the product of intelligent design. Whereas….

We learned about the mating habits of different birds, about the strangling figs that hug trees so lovingly that they smother them, about the difference between roots and lianas, which is grossly equivalent to the difference between stalactites and stalagmites, which means I can’t remember which is which, and about many other memorable things that I can’t remember but left a great impression.

About 15 minutes into our 3-hour tour it started to rain yet again, lightly, which was a lovely reminder that we were sort of in the rainforest, although technically we were too high for “rainforest.” That technicality aside, suffice it to say that by the time it turned into an roaring downpour, we’d had a lovely reminder of why there aren’t many tourists in the preserve these days. Everything, including us, was soaked tops to bottoms. The trail was a stream, the trees ran, the rivers rose, the temperature dropped, the animals hid, and still we were fascinated. There’s nothing like being in primary forest in a soaking rain, and we didn’t even have to try and make camp in the middle of it, which is a huge step up from my childhood trips in Peru.

Roy, who had long since stashed his mega monocular under a protective plastic cover, remained in high spirits. We talked about his kids, his days on a rescue team, his experiences as a guide, and more as we huddled and bonded under patches of leaves that at least slowed down the rain. He seemed happy that he could do all of this in Spanish rather than English, and even took the time to correct Tammy’s Spanish as she’d asked him to, like when she told him about the cheese ‘invoice’ instead of the cheese ‘factory’, a mix-up of two similar words. We enjoyed him as much as the forest--he clearly has a heart for the strange but true and loves to share what he knows.

When it was all over we decided that since we were already soaked, there’d be no harm in walking the hour home again in the rain. We stopped along the way at the cheese factory store to buy snacks that for some reason didn’t include cheese, and got home to a dry room and a hot shower. Bliss.

We love these people, and never want to go home.

Three Weeks in Costa Rica--Part 3

Ron Snell — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 05:00:00 GMT

We’d read a bit about the Monteverde cheese factory, but I can’t say we’d have gone if we hadn’t starting chatting with a random lady who was walking on the same road we were. It turned out that she is in charge of the laundry at the factory and she said they offered tours and we should go. Not wanting to disappoint a random stranger, we decided to give it a whirl. After all, it was only a brisk half hour SAP in light rain (“Summit And Plummet”, which is how we refer to every walk we take in this area).

Back in the early fifties, a young group of Quaker men decided that the war in Korea wasn’t their thing and they should emigrate from Alabama to Costa Rica, in large part because Costa Rica has never had an army. They arrived not knowing where to go or what to do, which I think is sort of a Snell approach. But it wasn’t long before they had to figure out both the where and the what.

Unfortunately it wasn’t that simple. The only road into where they wanted to settle was nothing more than two muddy oxcart tracks. When we were coming in the van to Monteverde, the driver apologized for how bad the road was. It took us a bumpy hour or less on packed gravel. It took the Quakers three months on the same road! Tammy and I agreed that we would never complain about the road.

They decided that whatever they did, it had better be worth a lot per pound because transport was going to be a major issue. One day someone said, “Let’s make cheese!” And everyone nodded wisely and asked, “Do we know how to make cheese?” And everyone shook their heads. But Quakers are a hardy bunch, and they persisted, and pretty soon they had some land, and some dairy cows, and a cheese factory which is now one of the premier cheese factories in Central America. One of the original guys still has his home just up the road.

Our guide, Sabrina, was a delightful great granddaughter of one of the founders. She was bred and born and raised here, so she’s completely fluent in English and Spanish. She’d like to be in university, but has a couple of strikes against her: first, she went to the Friends school, which is geared to college prep in the U.S. rather than in Costa Rica, and second, although she owns stock in the cheese company, she can’t afford the tuition. Cheesy deal.

Sabrina’s mother was Catholic and her father is Quaker. When I suggested that she is “Quatolica” she found that hilarious. When we asked her about her plans for the future, she pretty much said “ABC”--anything but cheese. Actually she wants to be an interior decorator and we suggested that there are some beautiful cheeses that would look decorative on a dining room table. Which made her think, but not for long.

I’d love to go into fascinating detail about how cheese is made. It is, after all, more interesting than I’d thought. Did you know, for example, that they used to throw a bit of cow stomach into the milk to turn it into cheese? Or that the kind of cheese you get depends on the kind of bacteria you toss in and how long you store it and what you’re smoking when you make it? Okay…what you smoke it in? At the end of the tour we samples several kinds and agreed that they were all good but some were better than others, and that’s all I’m going to say about a most educational couple of hours.

In case you want to buy stock in the company, which I recommend, you have to be a local resident, a local dairy farmer, or a Quaker, which I’m not sure I recommend. We decided to cross that idea off our bucket lists. But all in all, the people we met were so friendly, and the processes so interesting, that we were glad we’d done the hike. Sabrina, for one, was more fun than cheese. Besides, it was on the way to the cloud forest, a mere 45 minutes more uphill.

So now we’ve heard more about the Quakers from a variety of people. At present, only a few of the originals are still around but, as one young woman told us, they keep reproducing. Several of the originals and their descendents have married Costa Ricans, and they run a school for outsiders and rich kids.

A lady who lived with the Quakers kept us laughingly entertained for a long time over lunch about some of their idiosyncrasies, at least from a local perspective. One of which is that they don’t tend to learn Spanish and they pretty much keep to themselves, which has earned them a reputation as hard workers but bad neighbors.

Apparently their school is only for expats and rich kids and, as noted above, it does a great job of preparing students for studies outside of Costa Rica, but not inside. Sounds like the school I went to in Peru, so I can relate to the complications, but when a Costa Rican talks about it, it does sound rather standoffish.

The funniest stories were about the decision making process in the group. Our lunchmate storyteller had a daughter in the school for a couple of years. One day the daughter called in tears to say that she’d been yelled at for drinking coffee in the cafeteria. Her mother went to the school and demanded to know where in the rules it said that the kids couldn’t drink coffee in the cafeteria. No rules could be found, so it was submitted to a town meeting where everyone got to express their opinion and two hours later they concluded that the daughter could drink coffee in the cafeteria, but she couldn’t share it with anyone. “All that over a cup of coffee?”

Another time the Quakers decided to lease a little grocery store they had. The tenant wanted to sell wine in the store, which led to a three-month discussion at town meetings. Eventually they concluded that he could sell wine at the store, but he couldn’t display it and he had to add a surcharge that would go into a fund to be used to teach the students about the evils of drinking wine. Since I’ve been a part of such deliberations, I couldn’t help but laugh.

We just aren’t very good at sorting out the big issues from the little ones, and sometimes when we make a little one into a big one, it grows into a really strange sort of creation, doesn’t it?

Three Weeks in Costa Rica, Part 2

Ron Snell — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 05:00:00 GMT

We’re in Monteverde, shocked and awed at our good fortune. Somehow in spite of all my planning we ended up with the PERFECT little hotel at the end of civilization as we knew it. The view out our window is across cloud forested mountains all the way to the Pacific Ocean 25 miles away as the crow flies, but certainly not the way we came, corkscrewing our way inland and upward.

At our doorstep there is a hiking trail into the forest. We’ve inadvertently seen more wildlife in the first two hours than most see people intentionally in a week, including the rare quetzal bird, which some people hunt for endlessly. One of them obligingly sat on a fence post as we walked past, just so we’d feel special. Now something is screaming at something out in the blackness as I write. Other little somethings are racing across our metal roof and through our walls in search of something even littler on the food chain, I imagine, which makes us feel quite like an integral part of the ecosystem and makes us wonder if our peanuts are safe.

Plus we are about a mile and a half from the nearest source of good restaurants and grocery stores, three quarters of which is almost straight up and the other three quarters of which is almost straight down, so exercise won’t be much of a problem, should we survive it.

All of this comes after an exceptionally fun reunion with a guy named Terry Keith whom I went to high school with in Peru and his wife Donna. We haven’t seen each other since high school, and they have lived several lives since then as cattle ranchers in Costa Rica and Texas, paramedic in Colorado, and for the last many years director of a Youth With A Mission base just north of San Jose. They know Costa Rica inside and out, which Terry proved by getting us from the airport to his house along a route that I will never try to understand.

San Jose doesn’t have street names or numbers. I hate to be ethnocentric, but there’s a reason the rest of the world has street names and numbers. I wonder how many tourists who came for a week are still in San Jose five years later trying to find their hotel.

We stayed with them in their little cabin, made in the style of a log cabin and sort of creaky like that, too. We loved it, and had numerous opportunities to enjoy its quaintness as their roosters and the neighbors’ rather diverse pack of dogs announced the dawn and fought over it about three hours too early. We got a great appreciation for why we eat chickens, and made us wonder why we don’t eat dogs. Imagine a collie, a schnauzer, a terrier, a german shepherd and some other mixed breed all sorting out their hierarchy at four in the morning. I would not want to be a rabbit in that yard. Nor the collie—collies are just too nice to get firm with a schnauzer.

The YWAM base is a place for experimentation and training. Over the years Terry has guided its development from an empty patch of wilderness into a dormitory, classroom, shop, goat barn, chicken pen, garden and cottages. He believes in and teaches “creation care”, including recycling, sustainable technology derived from scraps, cultural awareness, and servant leadership. It’s a nice mix.

While touring the base we got to participate in a 50th birthday party for one of the trainees, which confirmed for me that 50 is still “Youth.” That’s reassuring. BBQ’d steak and baked potatoes and salad and cake and two games, one of which was an experiment in “Name Bingo.” I’m not so sure that one is going to take off, but it was hilarious fun for much longer than the planner had planned. Very nice group of people and exhilarating mix of languages.

So we ended our anniversary by taking Terry and Donna out to a fabulous Peruvian restaurant. Well, they took us out because I’d have had an easier time finding Peru than the restaurant, but we paid for it, so we’re even. It was as good a Peruvian dinner as I’ve ever had. Who would have guessed we would be celebrating our 11th anniversary eating at a Peruvian restaurant in San Jose?

Terry has read my books, which he found out about because someone asked him had he read “that book with your name in it.” That certainly piqued his interest. It’s not a bad idea when you write a book to put as many of your friends’ names in it as possible, because you’ll sell more that way. Anyway, Terry should write his own books—he’s certainly had the life for it. Somehow, we agreed, it’s a miracle that we’re both still alive. Sometime ask him about the time he was hunting wild boars and belly crawled through a tiny hole into a cave that his dogs refused to go into. It's pretty funny, now, but wasn't when he was blown deaf and covered in dirt by his frantic pistol shot in the cave.

If you keep your ears open, you meet the most interesting people when you travel. In addition to Terry and Donna, today we met a computer engineer who thinks our ideas for iPhone apps are splendid, and a Maritime Piracy Interdiction specialist who is an ex-Marine out of Iraq, and a mortgage specialist who has barely survived the last couple of years and wondered for several miles if he was on the right shuttle with us, and a British lawyer from Manchester who gets great pleasure out of prosecuting insurance fraud, and a Nicaraguan waiter who takes great pleasure in serving us Costa Rican food. It’s amazing how fast you stand out from the touristy crowd if you just speak Spanish. People love Tammy, and I get in on the glow.

So when we got back to our hotel after our 2-way summit and plummet venture to get late lunch and groceries, we lay down for a bit to catch our breath and the next thing we knew it was 6:00 and we were so drugged with tropical sleep that we now know what it’s like to be in a coma where you hear things going on around you but you can’t do anything about them. If a boa constrictor had slithered across our stomachs, we would have just watched in fascination. We’re pathetic.

Now the night life is in full array, which is amazing, and it’s almost bedtime. We simply have to make ourselves stay up until 8:30 or we won’t be able to sleep tonight.

Three Weeks in Costa Rica, Part I

Ron Snell — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 05:00:00 GMT

We’ve been planning this for a year, and now we’re on American Airlines flt 1886, headed for Miami and then San Jose. We’ve eaten our breakfast from Einstein Bagels, polished off our bloody Mary mix spiced tomato juice thingies, and it’s time to just chill for a while. A huge shout out to Peg, who checked our bags in Denver and changed our seat assignments so we’re right beside the main cabin door with so much legroom I can’t even put my feet up on the bulkhead in front of us, which is a minus. Still, everyone else is looking at us wondering how we pulled this off, so we’re trying to appear humbly grateful while feeling a little smug because we got all this at 1/2 of the price those folks up in business class paid. So there. And thank you, Peg.

The past few weeks, every FedEx and UPS truck that passed through our neighborhood had to stop and drop something else that had something to do with Costa Rica. Apps, maps, cultural books, bus schedules, guidebooks, apps, maps, guidebooks…you get the idea.

This started off as a “Let’s just go to San Jose and figure it out from there” sort of Ron trip and evolved into a “Let’s have some idea what we’d actually like to do for three weeks” sort of Tammy trip. Which means that we’ll have more fun and less time sitting in bus stations or sleeping on sidewalks wondering why Costa Rica isn’t everything it was cracked up to be. I think my approach makes for better travel stories, but Tammy’s approach makes for better travel. Somewhere in there, there’s a fine line.

Actually, it started off six years ago when we went to Honduras on a missions trip and Tammy couldn’t say anything except through my interpretation, which she apparently didn’t trust all that much. She came home determined to learn Spanish in North Platte, NE so she could speak for herself. This is akin to being determined to learn to cross country ski in Miami. It takes some creativity and determination.

Tammy has plenty of both. The house started filling up with lessons on CD’s, music on CD’s, children’s stories, poetry, radio newscasts downloaded from the internet, DVD’s, verb charts, dictionaries, phrase books, satellite channels and all of it in Spanish. If big brother has been monitoring FedEx and UPS deliveries to our home, he is certainly wondering about our intentions. If it were all in Arabic, we’d have been arrested by now.

As the patient advocate at our local hospital, Tammy started meeting monolingual Hispanic patients who needed interpretive services, so another avalanche of resources arrived, all helping her say in good Spanish things that I can’t, or wouldn’t, say in English. I mean, how often do you need to ask someone about their…oh never mind. The point is that she decided to raise her sights and aim for national certification as a health care interpreter.

At which point I thought it would be nice for her to spend some time in a country that would offer her lots of interaction in Spanish and offer me lots of interaction jumping off of things, jumping into things, rappelling down things and flying over things. Hopefully all those prepositions will match up correctly. Hence Costa Rica.

Kayak Water Polo Tournament

Ron Snell — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Last night I played in my first ever kayak water polo tournament and MY TEAM WON THE TOURNAMENT!!! Incredible. Our brilliant lack of strategy, as I ever so humbly refer to it, paid off: if you have no strategy, they can’t fight it!

We were playing to raise money for the Bridge of Hope, a beautifully remodeled house in a pleasant neighborhood in North Platte. According to their website,

“The Bridge of Hope Child Advocacy Center opened in February 2007 to enhance the coordination between community professionals involved in child abuse investigations, promote more informed case management decisions and most importantly minimize the trauma children can suffer following disclosure and the subsequent investigation and intervention process. At the Child Advocacy Center, the child is exposed to one forensic interviewer. The interview and medical exam are conducted in our child friendly facility, as opposed to being interviewed by several strangers, a number of times, in a number of very intimidating locations.”

Last year the Center helped about 270 children, 55% girls and 45% boys. Nationally, the statistics are appalling--check out this link for an eye-opener http://www.childhelp.org/pages/statistics. The bottom line is that in the U.S. there are now about 3 millions kids reported as being abused or neglected every year and 5 kids dying every day due to neglect or abuse. Worse, the number has been steadily rising.

The whole thing makes me furious. I work at a homeless shelter and it never ceases to trouble me how many of our homeless clients started life as abused children. The scars may be internal, but they are permanent and they are crippling. If they had been badly burned as children, we would see disfigured faces and bodies and our hearts would be wrenched. But when the scars are on the soul, the marks are not so obvious.

Supporting the Bridge of Hope is therefore a privilege, and kayak water polo is a brilliant way to do it. One might hope that someday former clients of theirs will be free to enjoy the exuberant exercise and camaraderie it offers. In the meantime…

Four teams showed up to play at five per team. While that wasn’t as many as the organizers had hoped, it was a nice start for a first year event. We were a hodge-podge of professions, ages, experience, ability and fitness levels, from the ripped police officers right on down to me. No one, the whole evening, referred to me as ‘ripped,’ although they could have referred to my other bathing suit that way once or twice. It got ripped when a dog bit the back of my thigh while I was jogging a few weeks ago.

Our first game was an eye-opener. My team was one Egyptian, two old duffers with something to prove, a lanky teenager and a woman with four boys. You can probably guess which one I was, and yes, the lanky teenager and the woman were our best hopes.

We were impressive right out of the chute with two breathtaking goals in a row, and not so impressive thereafter. Sticking to a strategy that we were sure would work someday, we were rather quickly put into our places and lost the match by several points. Thinking back on it, having played the tapes in my head over and over, I don’t think we had the best strategy.

Well, that got people started calling us the losers, which rankled. We discussed a different strategy that held some promise, if only in comparison to the one that didn’t. And we watched from the sidelines as the winners, so to speak, had fun.

So then the losers played each other, which sounds pathetic, and when we won we couldn’t exactly even get all uppity about it because after all we had only beat losers. But we did play better, I thought, even thought we didn’t exactly have to, if you know what I mean. Our Egyptian was getting leg cramps and had to be subbed out, but our old duffers and our lanky teenager and our woman were acting like we were on the same team, which is something you can’t just take for granted.

It was a bit different playing with guys who were ripped. The good news is that all of those muscles weigh you down, it turns out, and the more you weigh, the slower your boat goes, all else being equal—another great argument for not exercising. The bad news is that when they decide to tackle you, they make pretty short work of it, and when they fire on the goal, there’s a lot of speed on the ball. Back to the good news, fortunately they didn’t get the ball that often.

Our win of course meant that now we had to go right back in and finish the tournament by playing the team that had defeated us at the start. We started off by telling them that we didn’t need to rest because it was “just them.” We hoped to defeat them psychologically before we ever sprinted for the ball. They didn’t look defeated or dejected, but you can never tell about psychological warfare.

I wish I could describe it as it happened. Play by play. We clicked. We even clacked. They led by one at halftime, but we could see victory coming. They had a nurse anesthetist and an anesthesiologist on their team, but nothing they tried could put us to sleep. Jenn was hot, Sherif was uncramped, Alex’s long arm was merciless and the two old duffers, Charles and me, reclaimed our long lost youth. When the whistle blew, we were up by one point and glad the whistle blew.

It was incredible. I have now won every kayak water polo tournament I have ever played in, and I intend to keep it that way.

#41. Check.

International Dinner Speech

Ron Snell — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Last night, I spoke at an International Dinner. #57. Check.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. Is it ever?

As if it weren’t enough to have to help sort out the issues that are keeping our homeless clients from getting and maintaining permanent housing, funding for shelters is an ongoing challenge. In today’s world of economic “tough times,” as increasing numbers of are sliding into official “poverty”, government leaders at all levels are looking for ways to cut back on expenditures and they can’t help but look at funding cuts to those who are least able to make a fuss about it.

The National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that there is likely to be at least a 5% increase in homelessness in America in the coming two years—an estimate that they consider conservative, all things considered. So at the same time that needs are increasing, resources are at risk. Which means two things: first, we need to stretch every dollar, which is a good thing, and second, we need to find new resources, which is a hard thing.

Our own shelter, The Connection Homeless Shelter, Inc., is funded from a variety of sources, including our thrift store, the Nebraska Homeless Assistance Program, United Way, the Hoggy Doggy Shadow Splash--a quick plunge into the icy South Platte River in February--, individuals, churches, businesses and more. Right now that all adds up to a conservative but healthy balance sheet, but since “right now” quickly becomes “back then,” we’re always looking for wider, deeper sources of income.

This year we had three ideas “out there” that hold some promise: a greenhouse that I built from scratch using a hodge podge of internet-sourced plans, an eBay account to sell some of the more valuable items that come into our thrift store, and soup lunches catered to the larger businesses in town.

Those three ideas are still full of unfulfilled promise. Meaning that this year we learned more than we earned. Which is fine for now but not forever. So when one of our Board members suggested an international dinner as a fundraiser, some of us thought it was a splendid idea. I’d worked with a couple other people to have potluck international dinners in North Platte a couple years ago just for the fun of it, so I was particularly drawn to the idea.

Over the course of several months we did all the things you do to put together a high quality banquet, including searching for a speaker. Enter college forensic competitions.

Our daughter Sheila is a very good competitor in speech tournaments, and is worth going to watch if you ever get the chance. Tammy goes to several of her meets each year (I catch a couple of them, usually toward the end of the season when the competition is getting stiffer and broader) and started talking about this girl who was “amazing.” Niveditha from Omaha. She was winsome and winning again and again in her events, and eventually I could see why for myself.

Bright. Brown. Brilliant smile, made in India. At 5’ 2” in high heels, she stood head and shoulders above the crowd and when she spoke, she took over the room. We laughed, we cried, we raged. And on the spot I invited her to be our speaker at the international dinner. She was interested, but would have to check, she said.

Many months went by. She wanted to do it, she began practicing for it, we counted on it, and then, just weeks before our event, her parents told her that she could not come because they had other plans and expected her to be a part of them.

She was clearly and deeply disappointed. I was more disappointed. She speculated that I would hate her. I didn’t and don’t. I actually thought it ironic and somewhat fitting that we were having a banquet focusing on the Mediterranean area and our speaker couldn’t come because her family still kept a firm grip on what she could and couldn’t do. I wrote and told her that as the director of the homeless shelter, I worked with many, many people who would have been so much better off if their families had loved and cared for them so much.

Now what? I made a few attempts to find another speaker and came up dry, so I decided to be the speaker. Well…I couldn’t exactly decide that by myself, but apparently no one on the board wanted to hurt my feelings by saying it was a terrible idea, so they nodded gravely, valiantly withheld their exuberant cheers, and I became the speaker.

Thank Gore for Google! Not that he had anything to do with it, but didn’t he claim to invent the internet? Whatever, I spent the next few weeks Googling. “Weird facts about Egypt.” “Longevity in Sardinia.” “Bosphorus Straight.” “Gaddafi’s bodyguards.” “Coffee in Turkey.” “Top 50 Tourist Attractions in the World.” “Madrid.” “Trivia about Algeria.”

You get the idea: Beyond a brief trip to Venice, I had never been to a Mediterranean country and knew almost nothing about them, so there was a rather steep learning curve.

Slowly, as I became so obsessed that I started waking up at 4:30 AM to work on it and practice it, my speech took shape. Mummies from Egypt were ground up and used as a medical drink in Europe for 500 years. Istanbul is the only city in the world to straddle two continents and gave us “Istan Coffee” (thank you, Tammy). In Algeria, 60% of lawyers and 70% of judges are women, or the other way around. Madrid is in the exact center of the country. Gaddafi’s bodyguards are women required to wear high heels. Sardinia has the highest per capita number of people who live to be over 100. I wove in some jokes that I thought were funny, and that was that.

The guests arrived, and then the dinner, and then the butterflies. So I didn't get much out of my expensive dinner. I walked to the stage wondering why people clap before you've said anything, and away I went with my opening line: "The good news is, we're saving a lot of money on a speaker tonight."

Three residents of the shelter briefly wove their stories into the speech. When Jacqueline announced that she was studying to be a nurse, working, AND moving into her own place that very weekend, the applause was spontaneous and heartfelt. Same for Nicole, a fourteen-year-old resident who captured everyone’s hearts talking about how she didn't like moving into the shelter, but now “Jimbo says I’m a staff member in training because I know so much about the shelter, and when I had my birthday I got a lot of presents and felt like a millionaire.” Then a dinner guest from Egypt spoke in Arabic about his surprise in finding out that there are poor and homeless people in the U.S., contrary to all expectations before he came. His wife interpreted for him just for effect—he actually speaks excellent English.

When I finished by summarizing Jesus’ (east and north side of the Mediterranean) and Mohammed’s (south side of the Mediterranean) perspectives on reaching out to the poor, and urging the audience to invest wisely in things that we cannot lose no matter how bad the economy gets, there was a standing ovation. I’m never quite sure if that’s because it was a great speech, or because it was over. But I am sure it’s over. #57. Check.

(Postscript: Friends who care for the homeless used the dinner as an opportunity to donate about $25,000 for shelter operations. Yeahhhhhhhh!!!)

60 Things to Do, Week 3

Ron Snell — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 05:00:00 GMT

After a long weekend of gluing and taping, the “Tourtoise” is taking shape. Sadly, it’s not taking the shape of a tortoise, but I’m not changing the name now.

There’s something fairy tale-ish about building an RV out of pink foam. Like it should be a little girl’s playhouse. The outside, of course, is nothing but an unpaid advertisement for Owens Corning, what with their bold black lettering and logo splattered higglety pigglety all over the thing. If they give me a thousand dollars, I’ll leave it that way. If they don’t, I might leave it that way anyway. Not a very strong bargaining position? I’m calling it my “foam away from home.” The whole inside is currently a charming pastel pink.

I feel neurobic. You know, the exercises that purportedly keep your brain healthy for longer than average. It’s interesting that it differs from neurotic by only one letter. In any case, building an RV without plans, using materials that you’ve never seen anyone else use, is like working a puzzle without pieces. First you design the pieces, then you see how they fit together, then you redesign the pieces.

The good news is that foam insulation board is very forgiving. Cut that one too short? Just spray on a bit more adhesive and add a piece. Joint doesn’t fit perfectly. Or at all? Get some rougher sandpaper. Are things rather wobbly? Buy another big roll of 2” strapping tape. This is the equivalent of baling wire and duct tape, but only temporarily. As soon as I add the fiberglass, it will be a gleaming rendition of something. I’m redefining my definition of first ascents to include building things that you have never seen before. I want the definition to include things that I might actually do, which don’t include anything steep or glacial.

In any case, I told Tammy the other night that I’m not so sure I even care if we ever use our little RV--the fun of making it is a reward all its own. I think she immediately saw through this as a preemptive admission of failure, but I’m not so cynical as that. I’m seeing signs of possibilities.

Costa Rica is also taking shape. I mean our trip is, with under three weeks to go until we go. Tammy has been rather typically acquiring all sorts of resources including guide books, maps, cultural orientations and websites. How did people ever plan trips before there was an internet?

Tonight we watched YouTube videos of people bungee jumping in the rain forest and I must say, I sure wish I hadn’t put that on my list. I absolutely cannot imagine walking the plank and leaping off into the void of my own free will. But that’s what I said about skydiving, and somehow I made it all the way back to the ground that time. I know that getting back to the ground isn’t exactly rocket science when you’re skydiving, but I take credit wherever I can.

We have a hotel sort of thing reserved in Monteverde for a week, and a seat in a Spanish class reserved for Tammy in Dominical for a week, during which I’ll learn about the area while she learns about the language. Canyoning is high on my list, having read about rappelling down six waterfalls in stunning scenery and numbing spray. Bloggers who have done it say it’s the one thing I HAVE TO do while in Costa Rica. I always wonder if people aren’t saying stuff like that to make them feel better about the money they just spent.

The third week is still up for grabs, in case I haven’t already thrown up enough to satisfy my adventurous streak and Tammy hasn’t already overindulged on Spanish vocabulary and grammar.

My book from 1951 is called True Believer, about mass movements. It’s rather interesting—so much so that I should go ahead and just start again at the beginning. I tend to read it just before I fall asleep, or maybe just after, so I’m having a little trouble remembering any of it. If I’m to write a review, I suppose I’d better highlight at least one or two thoughts.

And in a flight of nostalgia, I went and bought postage stamps, so with thank you cards in hand, I have started hand writing thank-you notes. There’s something so personal about that—a feeling I’ve pretty much forgotten. I have to think it through, since there’s no deleting and inserting, and I have to take my time, because at sixty my penmanship isn’t what it used to be, which wasn’t what it used to be anyway. And so I write nice things…appreciative things, and I mean them all.

I think my speech for the international dinner is pretty much roughed out, which is very untypical for me a week ahead of time. In 30 gripping minutes laced with humor and profound insights I’ll tie together all of the history, geography, politics, religion and culture of all the countries that border on the Mediterranean and relate it to homelessness and hope and sit down. The good news is that whether the speech is a resounding success or a dismal failure, I’ll get to check another thing off of my list. I am, of course, hoping for the former.

Oh, and Ann invited me to Open Mic Poetry night at A-Z Bookstore on Friday. They’re doing a sixties night, which I think has a certain ring to it. 60 at 60’s night. So I’m thinking of writing a poem to read aloud and wishing I’d put that on my list, because when you have a list of sixty things to do, you just sort of end up wishing that all of the things you were going to do anyway were on the list. If I write a poem, I may go ahead and post it and my readers (do I have more than one?) can feel like they got a bonus.

Okay, time for another paragraph of True Believers and bed. I’m a true believer in sleep. I hope my Tourtoise doesn’t cave in during the night. It’s at a fragile stage, which doesn’t exactly evoke images of its namesake. Although around here we see plenty of tortoises flattened on the roads, so maybe the name is apropos after all.

The Random Book

Ron Snell — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 05:00:00 GMT

I had never heard of Gilda Radner when I randomly picked her book off of the shelf at our thrift store. I simply closed my eyes 20 feet from a shelf of books, walked up to them, put each hand on a book, equivocated a moment or two, then chose my left hand. Most people’s left hands get to do so little important stuff, it was my way of building its self esteem. Besides, I’m left handed.

So I ended up reading It’s Always Something, by/about a fast track television star comedienne who was stopped in her tracks by ovarian cancer.

I didn’t enjoy the book. Maybe it’s because I didn’t know of her, maybe it’s because it goes on and on, maybe it’s because I can’t relate to someone who can afford to have any treatment imaginable from the best doctors anywhere in the country, maybe it’s because I couldn’t wholeheartedly endorse her lifestyle, maybe it’s because she promised to be funny and it wasn’t, or maybe it’s because it isn’t well written. Maybe it’s a combination of all those things. Whatever.

Two-thirds of the way through I decided I wasn’t getting into the spirit of putting a random book on my list, so instead of taking cheap shots for the sake of a few chuckles, I ought to try and learn something from a totally random person I’d known nothing about. So I parked a little stack of sticky note thingies beside my reading chair and stuck one in each time she said something that rang a bell. Okay, so the bell didn’t ring all that often, but still...

I suppose the thing that impressed me most was that nothing “worked”. It’s a book full of all kinds of medical, psychological, dietary, spiritual and other attempts to get past the cancer, but the cancer took her life. Of course I didn’t learn this from the book, which is autobiographical, but decided after I’d finished it to Google her name and see what I could learn beyond the last chapter. She only saw her completed, printed book a short while before she died. I guess I wanted a happier ending. She certainly did. Instead, she had to deal with what one of her psychotherapists called “delicious ambiguity”.

I relate to that concept. The psychotherapist, Joanna Bull, told Gilda that “one of her main purposes in working with me was always to remind me to leave open the possibility of ambiguity in life; that you just cannot know for sure, you can’t have everything be perfect, and you can’t control everything….Everyone has to live with unknowns. She also pointed out that such ambiguity is both a terrible and wonderful part of life: terrible because you can’t count on anything for sure…wonderful because no human being knows when another is going to die…The only thing that is certain is change…..Couldn’t there be comfort and freedom in no one knowing the outcome of anything and all things being possible?”

I was also impressed by Gilda’s experience with The Wellness Community. The hardest part of committing herself to this supportive group of people was allowing herself to get close to someone and then finding out that they had died. “But if I hadn’t gone to The Wellness Community, think of all the love I would have missed. While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die—whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.”

I’m thinking that too many people do that very thing. Just this afternoon in the grocery store I had a conversation with a woman who observed that by the time they turned fifty, most of her acquaintances and friends had pretty much started letting themselves just head toward a death of self. “Glorious uniqueness” isn’t exactly how you’d describe them. More like “casserole without seasoning.” I don’t want that to be my defining lack of characteristics.

Like I said above, I Googled “Gilda Radnor” and read not only about her death, but testimonials of people who knew her. I kind of wish they had written the book. Instead of being so much about the cancer, I got the feeling that it would have been more about the woman—stuff that she couldn’t say about herself but others would have. Where she saw despair, they saw courage. Where she felt angry, they saw a sense of humor. But of course there are at least two views of all of us—first the person looking out from the inside, then the person looking in from the outside. I know very well what it feels like to exclaim, for better or for worse, “Are they talking about ME?”

A couple of big questions were constantly on my mind: How much is one more year of life worth in suffering and dollars? If I had the resources, would I go that far? And how much of the outcome is dependent on the patient? Is a comedienne really more likely to survive than a curmudgeon?

And why, given that I didn’t like this book, am I sort of haunted by it? Why have I been thinking about it “ever since.” Maybe because in spite of all the differences, and there are many, she was a fellow human being. Someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s friend. If I can’t get past the writing style and my disagreements long enough to try and connect with her as suffering part of my human family, then what kind of person am I?

What if it were me with a particularly life-threatening form of cancer, writing my way through the journey? What would my book be like? In the midst of the delicious ambiguity, while my taste buds went numb, would I be able to savor Life and still have at least a few core certainties? What would those certainties be? Would I find humor and joy in the midst of it all? Would I encourage and inspire those around me? Would I jump off a cliff, or go down swinging?

I hope I never find out.

In the meantime, lucky me. I got to meet someone I’d never have known, just because I closed my eyes and walked toward a bookshelf. I may never do it again, but I recommend it.

60 Things To Do, Week 2.

Ron Snell — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Last week I grabbed a book while blindfolded in our thrift store. It’s Always Something, by Gilda Radner. I’m told that she was a famous comedienne. Actually, she says that in the book. Good thing, too, because just by reading the book, I wouldn’t have guessed. I haven’t laughed, snickered or snorted yet and I’m ¾ of the way through it. I don’t think you should tell people you’re funny. I mean, wouldn’t they know?

It’s a book about Radner’s battle with ovarian cancer, which is serious stuff. I wouldn’t expect anyone to say funny things about it, except she says that she does, but doesn’t. In the meantime, I’m commenting on the book rather than the experience. Thus far, I’ve learned that it took a long time to diagnose, that the treatment was awful, that the prognosis is not certain, and that I can write funnier than her even if she’s a comedienne.

Oh, and I’ve learned that if you’re wealthy and famous, your experience battling cancer will be quite different than if you’re neither. That’s all I’ll say for now because I owe it to myself and my faithful reader to finish the book first.

Second, I bought thank-you cards. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I learned that thank you cards are basically designed for women. Don’t men ever write thank you cards? Flowers, rainbows, ribbons, more flowers, stuffed animals, cutsie collages, curly fuscia designs…. We were at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver on Saturday and I’d decided that it would be the perfect place to get thank you cards because they’d be so unique.

The good news is that since they only had flowers, rainbows, ribbons, and more flowers, all expensive, I left empty handed. Which meant that when I went to Wal-Mart on Sunday and saw some really cheap, really bland cards, I snatched them up like the bargains they were instead of wishing for a chance to buy unique cards at the Tattered Cover. That wish had already expired.

While in Denver I also found a store that sells fiberglass supplies including expensive resins, expensive cloth and expensive stuff to apply the former to the latter. It was an expensive stop that I justified by amortizing it over the life of my little RV, which I’m hoping will last at least as long as it takes me to build it. I’m calling it my “Tourtoise,” or in Spanish “Tourtuga,” which suggests taking one’s time, so I am.

Armed with all of that liquid gold and woven glass, I have started fiber glassing rigid insulation panels that will form the body. I’ve never seen anyone use this approach before, which makes me feel alternately like a pioneer and a fool. Thus far, the floor is almost done, taking advantage of some very nice weather this week. We all know THAT won’t last. There are far more gripping details about this project, but for now suffice it to say that I have begun, and that’s a beginning. Check back frequently for painfully honest details. I’m not funny.

Sunday I spent some time trying to find someone who will let me fly an ultralight airplane for 60 minutes. Apparently it’s not as easy as it used to be. Back in the 80’s, lots of people were exulting in the fact that you could fly a lawnmower engine with cloth wings and no pilot’s license from any patch of ground bigger than a tennis court. Now there are a lot less of those people around, which might say something about the safety of flying a lawnmower engine with cloth wings and no license. I’m undeterred.

I have a couple of leads, but if any of you know someone with a 2-seat ultralight and you want me to come visit you, please let me know. Hopefully, the lawn mower engine will work better than mine does. It runs like a champion for about fifteen minutes, then coughs and dies. On a 60 minute flight, that sort of coughing and dying could take on a whole new, rather ominous meaning.

I have also started designing a T-shirt to wear in my sixties. So far I can only report that I don’t like any of my designs, which is some sort of progress, according to Thomas Edison. Maybe soon a light bulb will come on.

Oh, and I highly recommend that if you ever make a list of too many things to do in one year, you include something like “grow a goatee.” Girls, you’ll have to think of your own equivalent. The point is that growing a goatee is something you don’t do rather than something you do, so you don’t have to think about it because it sort of does it all by itself, relieving you of one thing to plan and coordinate. All you have to do is not shave there and put up with the comments of people who tell you right out that it makes you look ugly. I consider those character building interactions, like my new mission in life is to embrace ugly as the new “me.”

Off to bed. One good thing about It’s Always Something is that it doesn’t keep me up at night.

Walking Around Lake Estes

Ron Snell — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 05:00:00 GMT

I added this to my list of “Sixty Things to Do When I’m Sixty” as a reward for my mom. I hope in retrospect she’ll see it that way.

We talked about this birthday week trip a long time ago. I figured that since Mom was “there” when I was born, it’d be fun to have her “here” as I celebrated it sixty years later. My first thought was a trip to Venice because Mom has had a long-standing dream of sitting under a fancy umbrella sipping a cup of exotic coffee and watching the gondolas go by.

However, it was fairly clear even back then that I wasn’t going to win the lottery any time soon, all the more so because I don’t buy lottery tickets, so having cast about for alternatives we decided that a close second would be holding an umbrella while sipping instant coffee beside the river in Estes Park.

Tammy and I are regular exercisers. When we are enjoying outdoor spaces we go for long walks and hike a lot. Not sure what the difference is, but there’s a difference. We figured there was no reason Mom couldn’t join us for a few age-appropriate ventures, but there was a small problem: Mom’s activity levels have been up and down over recent years, and haven’t included much up and down.

As an 83 year old who has spent the last two decades deskbound while writing a definitive Machiguenga/Spanish dictionary, Mom’s mind has been more active than her body. In addition, a torn ankle tendon several years ago swept her off her feet for a long time. But something else crept in too—a sort of mysterious phobia about walking where she might plant her foot wrong or trip over something and go down in a tangle. The fear was tangible, with her legs quivering uncontrollably, and made more formidable by the fact that after Dad died, she lived and walked alone.We talked about this long before the Estes idea came together. How could she get some strength back in small steps so she could live alone more confidently and re-embrace the great outdoors on foot? Our manual turned out to be a little book, One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer. The author basically says that big things happen because of small steps. You build houses one little step at a time. You lose weight one little step at a time. You get ready for hikes one little step at a time.

Mom’s first little step was actually a pedal. We helped her get set up with a recumbent exercise bike and encouraged her to just turn the pedals once in a while. We’re not professionals, but it seemed that strengthening her legs would be helpful. I made an aluminum tray so she could put a book on the bike, and we waited hopefully for progress reports.

We weren’t disappointed. Within a few weeks she had gone from pedaling one minute at a time to several miles at a stretch and feeling like a more seasoned version of Lance Armstrong. That was fantastic, of course, but the bike was sitting in her bedroom the whole time, which didn’t seem likely to get her far on a hiking trail.

Then came the miracle drug: trekking poles. Tammy and I got acquainted with them while climbing in the Rockies, where we met some guys who swore by their trekking poles. We started using them on our longer hikes, and it occurred to me that Mom might feel more stable and confident if she had some.

On our next visit to her house, we handed Mom a pair of poles and invited her to go for a walk with us. She accepted, then rudely took off like a shot, leaving us scurrying to catch up. The poles click clicked along in a steady rhythm, she immediately quit worrying about falling, and she became the evangelist of trekking poles.
Back to Estes Park. About nine months ago I gave her a challenge: “It took you nine months to get ready for me the first time,” I said, “so on December 15 you could start a nine-month training program to get ready for Estes.” She chuckled, noted that it couldn’t make her any sicker than I had the first trimester, and started more deliberately training, with long interruptions due to blazing hot weather in Texas this summer.
“Walk around Lake Estes with my mom and Tammy.” It seemed just the right way to spend walking time together. Somehow when I put it on my list, though, I had forgotten how far it is around the lake. When we checked just before heading off for our jaunt, it turned out to be close to 4 miles. Oooops.

“Well,” I said with more encouragement than accuracy, “it’ all flat except for one little stretch.” And off we went in a light drizzle under thick gray clouds, accompanied now by my sister Sandy and brother-in-law Corky, slowly but steadily, enjoying the beauty and the level path.

There isn’t any point of no return, but there are numerous points where you have to either keep going or be rescued by a golf cart. As the trekking poles clicked our progress like a Geiger counter in feet and yards, I began to wonder if we hadn’t bit off a little much. Not that we were in a hurry, mind you, but the miles did sort of stretch out before us.

“When we get to the marina,” I suggested, we can use the restrooms and you can decide if you want to keep going.” The marina would be about a third of the way around, with an easily accessible parking lot.

I’ll skip a few impertinent details and only say that by the time Tammy and I came out of the restroom, Tammy was alone in front of the building looking around in bewilderment. “Where is everyone?” she asked. I had no idea, so we scouted back and forth like dogs trying to pick up a scent, phoned a wrong number several times, then finally got through to Corky. They had kept going, instead of stopping, so off Tammy and I went, around a sharp corner and down behind the dam in pursuit of the granny with the trekking poles.

By the time we caught up, Mom was sitting on a rock contemplating the climb ahead. She looked tired and winded and I assured her that she didn’t need to go any farther. “Oh no,” she said with determination, “I want to finish.” We assured her this would be the only climb, which wasn’t exactly true, but none of us knew it. So, standing on our promises, she started up, resolved to help me check this one off of my list for once and for all.
By now any astute reader knows that it wasn’t the last hill to conquer. As the afternoon slowly wore pleasantly on, so did we, taking pictures until our batteries went dead and our memories ran out. I mean our cameras’ batteries and memories, but read into it what you will. I felt that I might be killing my mother on my 60th birthday, which would undoubtedly sully every annual celebration henceforth, but decided that surely this was easier on her than giving birth to me, and somehow she survived that.

For those who keep track of such things, there were three climbs. You might not think they’re all that significant, but we should all withhold judgment until we’re 83, when mountains are made out of molehills. It was easily four miles, counting the non-lake route walking we did. It took close to three hours. And when we went to Poppy’s Pizza & Grill for supper, Mom wondered if she’d be able to get from the car to the front door.
She did, and walked two hours by herself on a trail at the base of Twin Owls the next day.

Trekking poles and determination. Get some.

Prayer at 12:01 AM

Ron Snell — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 05:00:00 GMT

So I wanted to suck the marrow out of a full year of life. ‘Carpe annum’. I decided that I could only thoroughly do so if I started it at the earliest possible minute and ended it at the last possible minute. To make it more meaningful, I would pray for the year ahead and then, assuming all goes better than anticipated, give thanks at the end. This didn’t turn out to be as easy as it sounds.

First, and trivially, I don’t do late nights. Never have. Midnight celebrations give me a virgin hangover and what I mean by that is that even with no alcohol involved, I hang over. Staying up until 12:01 AM just so I could enter the year prayerfully was highly unlikely, so instead I set an alarm for 11:55, hoping that within five minutes I could get oriented enough to remember why I was waking myself up, and hopefully avoid automatically getting dressed to jog or go to work. Such things have happened before.

As it turned out, waking up was the easy part. Not easy in the sense that it was easy, but easy in the sense that it was brief. I didn’t hear my alarm, but it had to have had the desired effect because from somewhere very deep I paddled my way to the surface with enough presence of mind to pray. In fact, I surfaced quickly enough that I had to struggle to stay awake for four more minutes. It simply wouldn’t do to pray too early, even to a timeless God.

Praying, however, was the hard part. Not hard in the sense that it was hard, but hard in the sense that I wanted it to be special.

To be honest, praying has become more difficult for me, for several reasons. Among them:

I hear and read a lot of prayer talk that baffles me. “Where two or three people agree on anything, it will be done for them, so let’s form a Facebook prayer chain of 2 or 3 hundred thousand people and it will work even better.” Really? Or, “Let’s all gather on the courthouse steps and pray for the healing of our nation.” And then go our separate ways and say mean-spirited things about its leaders and "those people." Or, “Let’s call together a bunch of famous Christians for a prayer rally to unite our nation and bring rain to our parched state”…(and launch my campaign)…” and hope no one has been listening while those big names have been making ungodly comments that divide our nation. And still no rain. Just fires. Ironically, the big names don’t get fired.

Email and Facebook and Twitter haven’t helped me sort all of this out. It’s actually a bit difficult for me to believe that just because I can instantly tell the world my problems, and just because some people can instantly tell me they are praying, that an eternal God is now technologically compelled to pay more attention to my requests. I’m reading a book on using social media for marketing. Would it work for prayer requests? Someone besides me should try it: “Prayerbook”—how to let desperate people in Africa know how to pray for you as you decide what to whip up for your Thanksgiving dinner this year. In response to posts, they can choose “Weep,” “Praise,” “Plead,” or “Say Hallelujah.” Or just “Like.”

I’ve become more aware through the years of how selfish most of my prayers are. Does it really make a cosmic difference if I get just the parking space I was hoping for so I won’t have to walk an extra 100 feet and instead some poor woman carrying a baby has to walk the extra 100 feet? Should I really petition the creator of the universe for my preferred brand of milk at the grocery store when there are hundreds of thousands of people who would give their very lives for one cup of any kind of milk to feed their starving children? Does it matter if my 60-year-old hip has been taking a little longer to warm up when I go for my morning runs?

It also doesn’t help that I wrote an article a while back titled “Prayer doesn’t work.” With that rather pessimistic approach, it didn’t seem exactly brilliant to wake myself up in the middle of the night to pray. I should note that the article was written after months and months of group prayer in every form and fashion and style, none of which achieved the rather explicit result we were praying for. The conclusion wasn’t nearly as pessimistic as the title sounds, but that’s for another day.

Fortunately I didn’t have to think all of this through in the four minutes of pre-midnight fog while fighting to stay conscious. Such things have been on my mind for some time, and all that remained as I set the alarm was to try and focus in on something simple that I could live with for a year.

To tell the truth, I only vaguely remember what I ended up praying, and am relying on God to remember it better than I did. But I believe it was something like this: “Please help me be a blessing and an encouragement to those around me who are touched or impacted by the things I do this year. And I would like to get to know you better along the way.”

If all goes well, there will be a lot of people of all persuasions and nationalities and worldviews and skills and backgrounds that I will rub shoulders with in a focused way. I have a feeling, now that I’m fully awake, that they will bless and encourage me more than I will them. Still, that was my prayer, and I’m sticking to it.
As for the rest? I’m full of doubts and questions and ponderings, but I still pray. At the end of my year, when I once again set my alarm and paddle up from the deep sub conscious to pray for a few moments, I trust that I will have many reasons to be grateful that I was able to do the 60 things on my list, but even more grateful to a God who accomplished through my life far more important things that never made the list, including a more relational approach to prayer itself.

60 Candles on the Cake

Ron Snell — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Jennifer, my daughter-in-law, suggested that my list of “60 Things to Do While I’m Sixty” include actually having a cake with 60 candles on it. Her observation was that people don’t do this very much anymore. Now I can tell her why.

My part was easy. On my last shopping trip for groceries, I picked up two boxes of birthday candles, 36 each. It didn’t occur to me that it would be better to get votive candles, or tapers, or something sturdy, so I just went with cheap. It did occur to me that birthday candles are getting skinnier, in indirect proportion to the U.S. population in general and me in particular, but I figured slim and light would pack more easily and maybe even be symbolic of my ongoing exercise program.

According to an unknown Wikipedia contributor, “the tradition of placing candles on birthday cake is attributed to early Greeks, who used to place lit candles on cakes to make them glow like the moon. Greeks used to take the cake to the temple of Artemis, goddess of Moon. Some scholars say that candles were placed on the cake because people believed that the smoke of the candle carried their wishes and prayers to gods who lived in the skies.”

I might just add that by the time you’re 60, that’s a lot of wishes and prayers heading to the skies. Somewhat contradictorily, the same Wikepedia article says that although the “exact origin and significance of the candle blowing ritual is unknown, the history of placing candles on top of the cake is well documented. This tradition can be traced to Kinderfest (Kinder is the German word for 'children'), an 18th century German birthday celebration for children. A letter written in 1799 by Goethe recounts: "...when it was time for dessert, the prince's entire livery...carried a generous-size torte with colorful flaming candles - amounting to some fifty candles - that began to melt and threatened to burn down, instead of there being enough room for candles indicating upcoming years, as is the case with children's festivities of this kind..."

Now we’re getting quite close to a description of my own birthday cake, except that my entire livery consisted of my wife and mother and our respective livers. Oh, and “generous-size torte” isn’t exactly how I’d describe my torte. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When we arrived in Estes, we shopped for groceries. I suggested to Tammy that we just buy a humble little cake of any sort, since I wasn’t as interested in the cake as I was in a place to hold 60 colorful flaming candles. She responded that “the cake is probably taken care of.” I’m not the most perceptive guy in the park, but the way she put it made me wonder why she included “probably.” I knew there was no cake or mix in our car, and my mother flew in from Dallas with small suitcases, so….

September 15. Early wakeup, long snuggle, 35 minutes of relentless Jillian Michaels exercise that made me feel 70, then a relaxing hot shower. Tammy must have heard the shower go off, because she poked her head in to tell me that I should wait until they signaled me to come out. I steamed and waited, hearing little yips but not being able to interpret them.

Finally, there was the unmistakeable sound of “Feliz Cumpleaños A Ti” being sung in a bit of a panic. Not sure, I waited until there was a pause and a hurried “You can come out now!” I did, and saw a raging forest fire on a mudslide. Mom and Tammy were still frantically trying to get the rest of the candles lit, while some were already smoldering stumps. Fingers were getting hot, yipping continued unabated, and there was a scramble to get my wishes made and the fire extinguished before it all turned into a puddle of multicolored wax flowing like lava through the lumps and crevasses of the cake.

Let’s just say this for it. The cake, a delicious “Denver Pudding” chocolate version with pudding sauce on the bottom, originated in Dallas, traveled as checked luggage to Denver, bounced around earthquake style in baggage claim, rode up to Estes Park, and still had enough substance to hold 60 candles. That’s an achievement all on its own, and not to be lightly dismissed. Maybe it was even fitting, since it looked a little like a mountain side that was once beautifully forested but has now been ravaged by Pine Beetles, burned to a crisp and eroded.

I blew out the remaining candles, which were making bubbling and hissing noises as the hot lava met the wet pudding. The resulting cloud of smoke took my wishes straight to the alarm on the ceiling. I wish I could say that I set it off, as that would have been a nice touch, but Tammy leaped to open the door before anyone had to call fire trucks to extinguish our ancient ceremony.

So here’s my advice. If you’re going to do 60 plus candles, get a huge cake and robust candles that you can spread out. And a torch so you can light them all at once. And take the battery out of the smoke alarm. And throw that cake around a bit before you put the candles in it—it really does make it all unforgettable.

(If you’d like the recipe for the cake, which has been a personal favorite for decades, let me know via a Facebook message.)

The Big 6-0 List

Ron Snell — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 05:00:00 GMT

I’m turning 60. Having decided to embrace this milestone with energy and creativity and senior discounts instead of mourn my long lost youth, a while back I started creating a list of 60 things to do the year I’m sixty.
The first thing I discovered in this process, of course, is that sixty is a lot. A guy could turn 61 while trying to come up with a list of things to do while he’s sixty. I came up with about 30, then turned to family and friends, who not only encouraged me to take some things off my list and revise some others, but also made fun additions.
Thankfully, having had the untypical-for-me foresight to start early and revise endlessly, I now have a list that, for better or for worse, says a lot about who I want to be. It’s pretty eclectic, but maybe that’s just me. I mean, unless you just plan to cook sixty recipes or read sixty books, it’s pretty hard to come up with sixty things that aren’t rather broad in scope.

In the end, there are things that aren’t specifically on the list but are important to me. I have asked myself what God would put on my list. I think one answer would be, “Love endlessly.” However, since that’s too broad, I decided to incorporate some things that might be attempts at loving endlessly without saying so specifically. Similarly with “Serve Others,” and “Share generously.”
Other things aren’t on the list because I don’t know about them yet. I’m allowing myself up to five unforeseen opportunities to replace things on the list. Who knows but what I might get to go spelunking instead of surfing, or crocodile wrestling instead of ultralighting.
Still, it’s a start. If it encourages even one other person to make a list of 10, or 40, or 70 things to do as they open their journal to a fresh new page, I’d love to hear about it.
Here, then, is my list, in no order or priority:
1. Eat and drink something I think is really gross.
2. Give a $60.00 tip to a waiter/waitress.
3. Get pictures of 60 people who have impacted me
4. Take 60 friends for a walk
5. Bungee jump
6. Bicycle up Mt. Evans
7. Walk around Lake Estes with Mom and Tammy
8. Spend about three weeks in Costa Rica
9. Surf or kite board
10. Swim from Hershey to North Platte (16 miles)
11. Learn 60 words in sign language with Tammy
12. Visit Scotland
13. Go bike camping at Potter’s 2 nights in a row.
14. Read a book by a Republican politician
15. Make a soufflé
16. Take someone very wealthy out for dinner
17. Design a t-shirt about being 60
18. Fly an ultralight for 60 minutes
19. Eskimo Roll a kayak
20. Make 60 donuts using Aunt Janny’s recipe
21. Scan at least 60 old family photos
22. Grow a goatee
23. Ride a total of 60 miles on my unicycle
24. Pray at 12:01 AM 9/15/2011 & 11:59 PM 9/14/2012.
25. Ride 27 miles down hill in Rocky Mtn Nat’l Park
26. Volunteer 60 hours.
27. Renew my SCUBA certificate.
28. Launch “Revitalives”
29. Pay off my car
30. Take a class in travel writing
31. Attend a protest or political rally
32. Have a birthday cake with 60 candles on it
33. Read/learn something about Base 60
34. Wear my cushma or a kilt everywhere one day
35. Take 60 pictures around North Platte
36. Host a party with 60-year-old guests
37.Give a nice gift to someone I dislike, anonymously
38. Pray for one person by name for 60 days.
39. Go fishing with a homeless person
40. Meditate in silence for 60 minutes, once a month.
41. Compete in a kayak water polo tournament
42. Plant a tree in honor of my parents.
43. Write a complimentary letter to a politician I dislike
44. Give up something I enjoy for 60 days.
45. Send a care package with 60 treats.
46. Send 60 thank-you-cards throughout the year
47. Read a book written in 1951
48. Record my first book for the grandkids
49. Read 1 thrift store book picked w/ my eyes closed
50. Hand write a letter to each of my kids.
51. Spend 1 day at the shelter just chatting with clients
52. Build and then go camping in my “Tourtoise” RV
53. Visit someone in prison/hospice/etc. 60 minutes.
54. Give away 60 flowers to people I don’t know
55. Open a $60 Kiva loan.
56. Go Christmas caroling with some friends.
57. Speak at the International Extravaganza
58. Spend 60-minutes calling old friends.
59. Watch & listen for anything that says “60 or “sixty”
60. Write a column about doing each thing on my list including writing about writing about each thing on my list. Huh?

Learn Another Language in Six Weeks!

Ron Snell — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Okay, I've had it. Surfing the internet in search of travel writing courses a few minutes ago, I came across a workshop that promises me a trip to Ecuador during which I can learn to write stories for money, take photos for money, and master Spanish in one week using a whole new way of harnessing my brain.

Hogwash. My wife is smarter than I am, and she has been working diligently on learning Spanish for the past 5 years. Granted, she lives in Nebraska, and works full time in English, and is no longer in her teens, all of which slow her down. Without those handicaps, perhaps she could have shaved off a couple of years. Still...

I'm not just sucking on sour grapes here. Yes, I have taught 6-week Spanish courses during which my students learned very little, but I don't blame myself or them or my methods for their lack of progress. I blame the fact that one cannot perfectly assimilate a whole new pronunciation and inflection, and 10,000 new words, and an unfamiliar grammar structure, and a different culture, in 6 weeks. Or 6 months. Or probably even 6 years, although that does approach the realm of possibility if you're motivated and bright.

Why do I care about this? Because most Spanish courses teach the students that they cannot learn another language. If an expert says you can learn Spanish in 6 weeks and you don't, what you believe is that you are the problem, a little like faith healers blaming your lack of faith for lack of healing.

Reality check--it takes time and sustained effort to learn another language. How much time and how much sustained effort is unique to each person's circumstances and brain power. The more intelligence you have, the more motivated you are, the more opportunities you can access for practice and the more resources you have piled around you, the better. But no matter what, it takes time and sustained effort to learn another language. Am I repeating myself?

So the next time you get all pumped up about learning another language, do this:

1. Set a reasonable goal. Maybe the first few months all you're going to do is listen to the language: radio, CD's, TV, movies with a soundtrack in your target language, people speaking around you.... Maybe the next few months all you're going to do is read the language: bilingual magazines, children's books, newspapers.... Or maybe to begin with you're going to repeatedly go through lessons 1-10 of a Spanish course on CD, just listening, giving it a whirl, letting it soak in at your own pace. Whatever your goal, make it workable so you end up measuring progress instead of failure.

2. Laugh out loud when you see anyone/anything promising mastery, or proficiency, or fluency in less than two years of consistent study. Laugh in their face, so to speak. NEVER believe the hype, or pay money for the promise. If you buy their stuff, scale way back on their promises so they don't discourage you in the end.

3. Remind yourself constantly that, even at 50+, YES, YOU CAN! and YES, YOU WILL! You have learned one language proficiently, or you wouldn't be reading this. Now take on your next one. And here's something you can take to the bank: the more you do it, the easier it gets and the faster it accelerates. If you stick with it, like dieting or exercising or riding a unicycle, what starts off excruciatingly slowly will pick up speed until you are mastering new words and phrases and idioms with ease. That's the only promise anyone should make.