Saturday, March 26, 2011

Summer Rains: A Nicaraguan Oxymoron


 It rains here nearly every day.  Not the useless drizzle common to this time of year, but heavy, drowning, downpours normally reserved for the wet season.  The sun is so terrified some days that he refuses to show his face.  On occasion he’ll sheepishly peer out from behind the clouds and send a rainbow in his stead, but that’s just about all the courage he can muster.
The summer months of December through May are supposed to allow us to raise a fist to the sky, shake it vigorously, and curse the sun and his repulsive, unwavering spirit.  He leaves us sightless from his unnecessarily intense shine and delirious from dehydration.  He’s like a narcissistic king, demanding that everyone recognize his divine authority and supreme greatness but always with eyes averted.  Then he makes up for his behavior by dimming his blinding light as he settles behind the horizon.  He picks the most brilliant reds, oranges, and purples he’s got.  He fires them high into the sky and in such great quantities that they have no choice but to take over everything.  The sun lets them slowly drift down towards the horizon long after he himself has already moved on.  In the later months of summer, when we can’t take it much longer, he picks the spot exactly between the two volcanoes rising out of Lake Nicaragua, Volcán Maderas and Volcán Concepción, and performs his same trick there.  He makes it appear as if both volcanoes are in full eruption.  “How could you stay mad at me?” he seems to ask.  And for a few short hours we forget what a pain in the ass he’s been.


 Well, that’s what’s supposed to happen, anyway.  But as I said, the rains never left.  Thunder and lightning respected the natural order of things.  One grand finale with zero encores and they were gone.  But the rain, that stubborn bastard, refused.  The rain isn’t capable of the same shocking explosions that thunder and lightning are known for so it turns the zinc roofs into deafening instruments.  It bangs on them wildly but with fantastic rhythm.  It’s hard to imagine that such a common occurrence can seem so out of place when stuck in the middle of March, but it is.  In fact it seems so out of place that every time it happens it’s worthy of intense discussion with whoever’s nearest.  It’s a summer like none before.  Sprinting from clothesline to clothesline to shelter the drying laundry from an approaching storm isn’t supposed to be a year-round chore.  The students should have one less excuse to skip class therefore leaving them with only 15 or 20 good ones.  And I shouldn’t be able to say, “God damn it I forgot my umbrella again,” with such a great Nicaraguan accent and accompanying dramatic body language.  But it’s not all grim.  The passing buses don’t leave clouds of suffocating dust in their wake as they travel along the gravel highway.  What would otherwise be an agonizingly hot day bearing down on us is kept at bay behind a thick layer of clouds.  And the rooster’s 4am performance is all but inaudible when competing with the white noise of rain pounding on metal.
It’s undeniable that things are different this year and you can see it in the expressions on the faces of those who have called this town their home for their entire lives.  There’s often comfort in familiarity and it can be a frightening thing to lose, especially when so many things are already out of our control.  But regardless of one’s personal opinion regarding climate change and human impact on an already unpredictable and powerful phenomenon, all this certainly begs the question: why haven’t the rains left as they have, without fail, every year before?

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Much Too Much


The cockroaches don’t scurry at the sight of an unexpected light.  They remain, undisturbed, clinging to the walls of the shower at 2am.  They may briefly move an antenna towards the source of the light, almost as if it were a shrug of the shoulders; but they do this only for an instant and only to pay it due notice.  The only way to get a cockroach moving is to seriously provoke it with an outstretched toe or the handle-side of a broom.  They are survivors and they know this.  They’ve been known to carry on, headless, for as long as a month, reveling in their fortune of not losing something more important.  The majority of the cockroaches, with heads still firmly attached, laugh at the decapitated chicken and the 15 chaotic seconds it’s determined to live on this earth before collapsing in the dust.  Soak it up, think the chickens.  Amateurs, think the cockroaches.  They are said to live in groups of thousands, tens of thousands even.  A strength in numbers to match their strength of body.  But these numbers are pitiful compared to those of another insect that briefly makes this small, lakeside town their home.


They are known locally as chayules.  Their name exists only in the plural because there is very little reason to refer to them individually.  The locals, who have seen wave after wave of them come and go with the years, acknowledge their presence by stating the simple yet obvious truth, “Tonight we eat chayules.”  Although I am unsure of where they hatch or how they come into existence, I posit they are spit out from the bowels of an angry lake and set forth to take vengeance on anyone who dares to look upon her shores.  They are merciless but make one concession by offering ample warning before making landfall.  They do this in the form immense, black clouds, visible miles off shore, which could easily be mistaken for a thunderhead that lost its wings and fell from the sky.  They taunt us with their slow yet persistent progress, moving ever closer.  Then, suddenly, they’re upon us.  They seem to be attracted to everything and nothing all at once.  They take over all unoccupied space.  They die away mid-air and coat every surface in an ash-colored snow.  Their weak bodies are no match for the slippery layer of sweat covering ones arms, legs, and face.  They collide, they stick, and they die.  In fact, they die everywhere.  Perhaps they die of exhaustion from the arduous journey.  Or maybe they sacrifice themselves, swayed by the promise of glorious privacy that they will know only in death.  It’s a fate they’ll all come to realize in little time.  Even the most enduring of their kind won’t make it past four days.

And so, for the three or four days that they gray the sky, they’re merely tolerated.  During the day it’s not uncommon to see someone going about their business with a handkerchief clutched firmly to their face to guard their eyes, nose, and mouth from invasion.  In the evening, the only defense against them is to keep the lights off.  Total darkness.  They hold raves underneath the lit streetlamps, swirling in hypnotic patterns and totally mesmerized by the flaming bulb.  In the morning, their tiny, indistinguishable bodies are swept into piles like so many bits of dust.  Clutching the broom and with a quick flick of the wrists they’re cast out the front door and into the gutters to be carried away by the coming rain; they sail down the slightly sloping streets of the town and into the lake from which they came.  It seems as though they’re swallowed by the murky waters only to be belched out again in the coming days or weeks.  But as I marvel at their sheer numbers and proclivity to reproduce, I can’t help but think, as one of seven billion helping to slowly consume this planet, amateurs.

Welcome...


I suppose I’ll just jump right into it.  When I first came to Nicaragua I set a goal to start writing at my one-year mark.  The time frame had no real significance other than that it took into account my inevitable procrastination.  I knew I would never start on day one.  But here I am, ten months in and already going.  Anyway, I have no idea where this will go but I promise to write exactly as often as I please and about whatever I choose.  With that said, the majority of it will more than likely be inspired, at least in some small way, by my time lived here.  Sometimes I feel as if so much happens here that I could never remember it all to write everything down.  Other times I spend hours on end swinging like a pendulum in my hammock; I read a book, I talk to the avocado tree, I avoid the flea-ridden dog.  I’ll mostly be writing about the non-hammock experiences.  Finally, before getting started, I would like to add that this is just a working title for the blog.  I started with the straightforward title of “Nica Hoop” but was forced to change direction due to its uncanny similarity to the word “nincompoop”.  It was a difficult realization for me.  Morale was low.  So for the time being, I lazily decided on some simple adjectives that describe the place where most of my writing takes place.  Enjoy!