A Different Kind of Schadenfreude, Part 2

In my last entry, I took a stroll through Gardiner, Montana at midnight, looking for food. I found it, and also discovered something that I ought to have noticed years ago: that places like this are as notable for their economic distress as for their beauty.

To briefly recount: one of my memories of my first month in Yellowstone was of being utterly charmed by the decayed rusticity of places like Gardiner. But as I walked through the town, I found myself looking again at the vehicles, the worn-out pickups and nearly dead Ford LTDs, Mafia Staff Cars from the late 1970s, which is a long time ago now. I looked again at the stuff in peoples' back yards (the town does put forth a relatively attractive face): the old horse trailer with a flat tire, the oil drums, the stacks of rotting lumber and pieces of even older cars. I looked again at the architecture, by means of which one can gaze back through the decades: from recent commercial kitsch back through the tourist boom of the 1950s and all the way to the original tourist boom of the late 19th century. And I came to understand--perhaps not for the first time, but for the first time with any force--that what had looked charming to me before looked like rural poverty now.

Not that Gardiner is really "poor." The town is unusual because it has been a tourist destination since before it was even founded. But it is not wealthy, and other places in Montana do not have Yellowstone National Park to live on, and so are even harder pressed. This opinion is not just based on personal impression. According to the Census Bureau, at the time we made the trip I am about to describe, per capita personal income in Montana was 47th in the nation (it has come up a little since then, but no one can tell me if that is merely the effect of having a couple of software billionaires buy houses in the state). This distress is a consequence of having an economy that is largely based on agriculture, lumber, and mining--basically a 19th century economy, one that will never grow very rapidly. And you can see the effects in the lines on people's faces.

A year earlier, during our annual extended visit to Yellowstone, we found ourselves in a Chinese restaurant in one of the gateway communities outside the park. The tabletops were sticky, the floors were sticky, the restroom door was blocked permanently by a stack of cardboard boxes, a ceiling fan languidly stirred the flies. I was quite happy with the place, and we fed the family for about sixty cents.

"What a beautiful child!"

A customer, seated nearby, was commenting on Lewis, who was then about a year old. He was insanely cute, so we were used to this sort of remark. I turned to acknowledge the compliment.

It had come from a woman who sat with her husband or boyfriend, eating what seemed to be boiled carp. Her man looked like Hulk Hogan, only he weighed about ninety-eight pounds. The woman looked neither healthy nor wealthy. She smiled. Half her teeth were missing. The other half looked like the fossilized teeth of the dinosaurs they dig up in eastern Montana.

At this moment, I went into a Jekyll-and-Hyde conflict. I have two brains, a home-brain and a Yellowstone-brain. The first is guarded, suspicious, easily annoyed; the second, as you might suspect, is a whole lot mellower. We had been in the region for a few days, so I was balanced on the fulcrum point between the two, right on the verge of tipping over into the ramshackle serenity of Yellowstone. My first thought, when I saw her missing teeth and deeply-lined face, was "methamphetamines." I was assuming she had meth mouth, the tooth decay that comes of amphetamine abuse. I went on alert.

And then Lewis smiled. He had about as many teeth as the woman did, with the same wide gaps. He smiled because he was a baby, not because he was a great judge of character, but he broke my train of thought. My earlier judgment, I decided, was stupid. The woman--still smiling--was too big for amphetamines, and actually looked nothing like an addict. The gravest meth epidemic, I knew perfectly well, rages among journalists writing stories about meth epidemics. It's a big-city prejudice: the urbanite assumes that country folk, along with their mullet haircuts and house trailers, have all got amphetamine habits. At that moment, I slipped into my Yellowstone self. I smiled, as I always do when people compliment Lewis. I do, at least, have pretty much all of my teeth.

One sees a lot of missing teeth in the Northern Rockies, as in other rural regions. It results from a lack of dentistry added to physically tough jobs and sometimes violence. Take ranching as an example; you don't come away unhurt after spending all day for years on end forcing obstinate horses to force obstinate cattle to their doom. Of course, the economy of the West has changed, and the busboys outnumber the cowboys now, but the old economy is still there; sometimes it lives hidden behind the new West, and sometimes the two live in a makeshift partnership (if you've seen it, recall the movie City Slickers, where the beef ranchers use their New York dude customers to move their herd). We tend to love a place the most if it is "authentic" and not "touristy," but in the rural West, an authentic place is one with that 19th century economy I was talking about. Gold mining sounds romantic; so does being a lumberjack or a cowboy. The reality is hard on the knees and back and everything else, and dependence on these ancient extractive models has kept economic opportunity limited in some of the same ways they were when Ulysses Grant signed the bill that created Yellowstone park.

There is probably more to it, cultural differences that keep the region from changing too much. In a place like the Northern Rockies, personal appearance can be almost unbelievably informal; a bylaw of the local culture states that looking like a woods hermit, or even being one, is acceptable here. I have always had the impression that most Montanans--except businesspeople--would not want the place to change in the ways necessary to turn it into another Texas or California. And there are, of course, vast advantages to such attitudes. People in the Northern Rockies are not slaves to fashion and ostentatious display the way Texans and Californians are; if and when they do sell their birthrights, they seem to spend the money more wisely. When I took that walk in Gardiner, I noted something else that was lacking: expensively manicured lawns. Here was wisdom; the locals had decided to forego the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours' work that the green tyrants demand. "You don't have a lawn," the saying goes. "The lawn has you."

There is no easy solution to these problems. There may be no solution at all. In the meantime, people limp along as they always have, turning the failed general store--once a saddler's shop, a hundred years ago--into a gourmet coffee place and internet café that might or might not fly.

When I first came to Yellowstone, long ago, I think I believed that the people here liked living in poverty. What I can now no longer ignore is that people like having all their teeth.

Nebraska the Beautiful?

I recently read an article in the Washington Post entitled "Pearls Before Breakfast." The article examines the timeless question of what makes beauty beautiful. Is beauty beautiful only within certain contexts? Is beauty perennially beautiful regardless of its social appreciations?

"Pearls Before Breakfast" is an article in the form of a social experiment that involves a world renowned classical musician and an intellectually sophisticated downtown district. Joshua Bell, one of the top violinists in the world, was asked to trade his tuxedo and Carnegie Hall venue for jeans, a t-shirt, a baseball hat, and a crowded, dirty metro station in Washington, D.C. Bell, who regularly plays to daunting audiences across the globe, ranging from private sessions for European monarhcs to standing room only audiences in the most prestigious music halls in the world, is reportedly worth $1,000 per minute of performance. It is safe to say, when it comes to violinists in the world, he pretty much takes the cake.

The Washington Post had the idea to dress Bell in every day street clothes, have him perform six classical masterpieces in a busy downtown location, and observe D.C. citizens' reactions: would they recognize his brilliance and the beauty of his music, or would they immediately write him off as just another street performer?

After the experiment was conducted, classical music gurus were posed such a hypothetical scenario and asked what they thought the outcome might be. The experts predicted that people would not be able to disregard Bell's brilliance and the beauty of the musical selections he played, that he would make a significant amount of money (in the form of street performance donations), and that large crowds would ensue with the possible need for preventative crowd control measures.

What actually happened was that Bell played for nearly forty-five minutes as more than 1,000 D.C. residents scurried in and out of the metro station disregarding the musician. Nearly every passerby ignored Bell despite his energetically interpretive, not to mention loud, performance. The only attention Bell received was that of children, three adult passersby, and $32.17 in donations.

Three nights prior to his metro station performance, Bell played for a sold out audience in Boston in which the cheapest tickets were sold for $100.

Numerous passersby were asked by the Washington Post if they could be interviewed by telephone later in the evening. Throughout the subsequent interviews, individuals stated that they had not noticed anything unusual in the metro that morning and were then informed that they had obliviously breezed by one of the top musicians in the world, and that he was playing some of the most difficult musical pieces ever written. All this in Washington, D.C., where people with sophisticated tastes and intellectual backgrounds crowd the metros.

What I got from the article is that people unfortunately seem to be consumed by their busy daily lives. Too consumed to observe or even try to understand the world in which they live. Additionally, people might be so entrenched into recognizing a familiar scene and immediately writing it off as another worthless daily occurrence that they miss a lot of potentially life enriching experiences.

I relate this to my recent trip back to Nebraska. Initially when most people hear the word Nebraska, they immediately dismiss it as a worthless epicenter of blandness and boredom. And I have to admit, after spending several months exploring the cacti, cliffs, and canyons of the Southwest, I expected my return to Nebraska to be somewhat less exciting. Yet what I found in the hard-wooded hills of the Missouri River Valley was that Nebraska can be just as serene and beautiful as anywhere. Deciduous forests as lush as any you'll find in Florida, powerful rivers half a mile in width, and a hundred songbirds singing with the sunrise are commonplace in a spring morning in eastern Nebraska. Yet most people immediately write off Nebraska as just another average place, just like the D.C. residents immediately wrote Joshua Bell off as just another average street performer. I don't mean to make the world's top violinist analogous to the state of Nebraska, but I do mean to highlight the way in which many people disregard worthwhile experiences and places because they are too consumed by their busy daily lives to acknowledge something that actually is worthwhile. True, the Midwest isn't Patagonia, or the Himalayas, or even the American Southwest, but it can be beautifully serene if people will allow themselves to view it that way. If you're still skeptical, I invite you to spend a springtime weekend in Nebraska City, Nebraska or Weston, Missouri and find anything ugly about it.

As for me, even after two years of constant traveling and a few exotic experiences, as I sat next to the swollen Missouri River, listened to the windows rattle with midnight Midwestern thunderstorms, and relaxed at my sister's 19th century farmhouse, I couldn't think of anyplace I would have rather been. It goes to show, worthwhile places don't always have to be the exotic product of daydreams and plane tickets. They could be the everyday places and faces that are so often written off as average daily occurrences.

Exotic Fish and Stylish Mullets

I suppose South Korea is how I imagined it to be, so many times. The streets of downtown are flooded with people. People in a hurry. People who slow down and turn their heads when they see my foreign face and lighter hair. People who are consumed with fashion. Guys with pink shirts and stylish mullets. Girls in high heels at a baseball game, long hair, tiny purses. People who don't speak English, but speak Korean very slowly in case I can understand them. And people who can say "Hello!" and are so excited to tell me.

The street that leads up to my apartment is narrow with cars lining the avenue. There is a small food store on the corner, a dry cleaner's next to that, where the clothes are hung to dry on the sidewalk. There is no shortage of Korean restaurants, and the smell of fresh fish and octopus lingers in the air. I pass by tanks full of exotic fish and squid on my way to work. Across the street there are people outside everyday selling plants and dried squid. People live in high-rise apartments. I have yet to see a house, or a front yard. There are mountains to my right, and a Buddhist temple adjacent to my apartment building, on the left. I still haven't been. And I haven't even figured out how to use my washing machine and I've been here almost three weeks now.

Teaching English here is exhausting. The days are long, and the demands are endless. It was a little overwhelming at first, being thrown into the classroom with little training or knowledge of what exactly I'm supposed to do. I have 13 classes total, with the kids ranging in age from 6 to 15. The kids here go through so much school, it's ridiculous. I can't help but feel bad for some of the children I teach, who don't really have much free time away from studying. My last class begins at 8:45pm (and that's not the latest class at my school.) I have kids falling asleep because they've been at their regular school since 9:00am, and then went to another academy (for science, math, piano, etc.) and then came to English Academy right after. Long days for them as well.

As far as the food goes, it's hard to find vegetarian dishes here. I eat a few animals, but I'm not as adventurous with mystery meats as I am with mystery vegetables. Koreans eat a lot of meat here. If I were a bigger fan of kimchi, I'd probably be feeling like a queen. They love their cabbage here, too. It's growing on me, but I definitely miss vegetables that are freshly steamed, instead of pickled and fermented.

I'm going to start taking Korean classes in June. It's hard to learn Korean when we are only allowed to speak English with our students. I try to learn as much as I can, but it's hard to remember at first. I still stumble on the correct pronunciation of my apartment building when I'm catching a taxi to go home. And there are times when I have to fight the impulse to speak Spanish. Weird how that is. But I've caught myself a few times saying Spanish words when I'm trying to communicate with someone who speaks little or no English. I guess because I worked with a large Hispanic population back in the States, and only spoke either English or a little Spanish. So my mind registers "foreigner" as Hispanic. But then I quickly remember that Koreans don't speak Spanish, and that *I* am the foreigner here.

Learning Lingo

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? -Richard Lederer

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese. -Carl Sagan

To have another language is to possess a second soul. -Charlemagne

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves. -John Locke

Language forces us to percieve the world as man presents it to us. -Julia Penelope Mai mai mai mai mai. (Thai translation with appropriate intonation = New wood doesn't burn, does it?)

I've been working in Thailand since January, and I've spent a year in this Country previously. But until now I've never made a systematic effort to learn the Thai language. This has changed. Is changing. Will change.Grammar, gotta love it!

Five days a week, one hour per day, I am receiving private lessons from a teacher in the Thai Department of my university. After only two weeks I have experienced a significant rise in my speaking ability and a dramatic increase in my comprehension. And I'm gratified by this, don't get me wrong. I want to increase the depth of my interactions with those around me. I eagerly anticipate not just an evolving awareness of words, but a more subtle understanding of a rich and sometimes hidden culture.

Still, and this may strike some as strange, I feel a bittersweet emotion at the approaching departure of my ignorance. There is something magical about communication without words.

When I drove a snowcoach in Yellowstone, part of my job was giving short tours of the geyser basins enroute to Old Faithful. In addition to a general understanding of geysers, I was expected to have familiarity with specific geothermal features such as their names, anectdotes associated with them, etc...

That was fine. But at Old Faithful, where I lived and where I didn't have tours to lead, I purposefully remained ignorant of the 'facts.' I loved experiencing just the landscape as opposed to experiencing a description of the landscape. To paraphrase Sri Ramakrishna, 'I just wanted it to be, not to be this or that.'

Anyway, I have experienced a similar phenomena with words. Sometimes definitions and descriptions distance us from the reality they're describing. This is no original discovery on my part. From Chomsky to Ram Dass, Buddhisim to psycholinguistics, the discrepency between words and realities has been noted and explored. Semanticist Alfred Korzybski warns, "The map is not the territory." An even more colloquial Alan Watts reminds us, "The menu is not the meal."

They say that people who are deprived of one sense often develop their other senses more fully to compensate. For example, a blind man may be particularly sensitive to the nuances of sound in his environment. Well, surrounded by a language I didn't understand, I became more attuned to other clues in communication.

Interestingly, most research shows that only 7 to 10% of communication is verbal. A. Barbour, author of 'Louder Than Words: Nonverbal Communication,' breaks communication down as follows: 7% verbal (words), 38% vocal (volume, pitch, rhythm, etc.), and 55% body movements (mostly facial expressions).

Of course, there's always the possibility that my nonverbal comprehension isn't as good as I think it is. Maybe instead of saying 'she likes me,' her message was actually 'back off, stalker.'

Seriously though, I find myself watching, not listening to, interactions even when I'm not a participant. Not communicating, but still somehow communing. Watching people with an obvious love and respect for each other.... Studying people who are absorbed in activities.... Observing the goodness of people who are simply happy, and even the poignancy of people who are sad. And children? I love watching children! Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but it is so easy to be moved while watching the young interact with their world. And watching these encounters without understanding words, I really have been forced to look closer at what is actually going on.

At any rate, if/when I (semi-) master the Thai language, I hope I remember to listen without words sometimes.... There is a 'critical period hypothesis' in language acquisition theory. It states that there is a crucial time in our developmental years when we are biologically capable of learning languages as fluently as native speakers. Some theorists have softened this hypothesis, calling it an 'optimal period instead' of a critical one. Steve Pinker, in his book, 'The Language Instinct,' states: "Acquisition of a normal language is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter."

However, other studies claim that multiple factors, including motivation and identity, are more key in language acquisition than a critical biological period. Either way, kids seem to breeze through this new language business a lot more skillfully than adults.

I have a friend, originally from England, who is married to a Thai woman and has two daughters, 8 and 10. They attend a school with many other kids of mixed nationalities, and are fluent in several languages. They speak to their father in English, and without missing a beat they switch to Thai when addressing their mother. Sometimes they talk with their friends in Italian or German. They also pick up a lot from the cartoon channel. The other day my friend was lecturing his youngest on one matter or another. This beautiful Eurasian kid, eight years old, long black hair and sincere brown eyes, extended her arm to her Dad's face, palm facing him. "Talk to the hand, Dad."

Since I am not a child, critical period or not, I'll just have to plug away. The Thai language is not unattainable, but it is a challenge. It's a tonal language, which means that depending on the tone used (high, low, rising, falling, neutral), the meaning of the word is totally different. Thai also has 'classifiers,' which I won't get into except to say there's an awful lot of the buggers. And mostly, the language is, well...foreign! I mean, how would you pronounce 'ngen' (one syllable only, please)?

But thank Buddha I'm not having to learn English! Once again, to quote Richard Lederer: "English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which of course, isn't a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it."

Chok dee! (goodbye/good luck)

California Dreamin'

Writing to you from our comfy hotel room in Pasadena, California...

We finished out our winter in Seward, Alaska, on April 30th. The Mayor's Cup Dog Sled Race went well, and Erin came in 9th out of 21 racers - not bad for her first shot! More importantly, we had a lot of fun, cooked some hot dogs, and bonded with Seward's finest. We also got published again in the local newspaper, The Seward Phoenix Log, several times - including a picture coming out tomorrow of Begee eating a Hungry Bear (that is, a 4-patty 2 1/2 pound bacon cheeseburger with a pound of fries at Terry's Fish 'n Chips, the first person to ever complete the task, thereby winning him a free t-shirt and his picture on the wall.)

After sending out a ton of applications all winter, we decided to go to Southern California for the summer. It should be quite different from our winter in Alaska! When we left Seward, it was 50 degrees, and when we arrived in LA, it was 70. Today, we walked around in flip flops and shorts, and boy, did it feel good!

We have a couple of days to explore before arriving at our jobs, and we are taking full advantage of them. When we got to the hotel last night at about 9 o'clock, we dropped our bags in the room and went running for the pool! Swimming outside under the full moon and watching the palm trees sway in the wind made us giddy. Excitement is definitely coursing through our veins.

Today, we slept in until noonish - and we needed it! We then got some lunch at KFC, where we watched a woman with a diaper on her head come in, steal some soda, and walk out again. LA definitely has some interesting characters... We were here on vacation last year in January, and we had a great time. After being in Alaska for a year, though, we definitely are feeling a little bit of culture shock - traffic, people, and the huge Port of Los Angeles; Toto, we're not in Seward anymore!

This afternoon, we went to Long Beach and toured the Queen Mary, including a really cool and worthwhile ghost tour to add to our list (our recommendation: always do ghost tours whenever available - they're so fun and interesting!). After the Queen Mary, we drove to Redondo Beach (just like in "Little Miss Sunshine!"). We went to the pier, watched the men fishing and children chasing pigeons, and then we walked along the beach, wiggling our toes in the sand. Oh, how different the water is here compared to the beaches in Alaska! Watching the sunset on the beach, with the waves crashing over our feet made us remember why we chose to come here for the summer. We felt such joy and complete happiness in that moment. Life really is good.

Tomorrow, we're planning a trip to Universal Studios, and then on Friday, we're going to try to walk around in Old Pasadena before getting on the ferry to our summer home. We're happy and excited, nervous and a little sad to have said goodbye to Alaska (at least for the time being), but, in the end, as long as we've got each other, we have all we need. Of course, seeing Cal Worthington commercials here in California gives us a chuckle and reminds us Alaska is always in our hearts.