Off The Beach

Five days alone on the beach, alone, without obligation of any kind, is a privilege; I am well aware of that. 

I well remember a three week vacation wrangled by moving around my days off, swapping with colleagues and being careful to take the time with the least impact on my rather strange 24 hour schedule so as to use the least number of days off. 

Nowadays my time is my own, my obligations are to take care of the three of us and to use my time wisely. Solitude has been my portion in Uruguay, and I have used my time considering what might come next.

I enjoy reading about the history of our species not least because I find it encouraging to learn there is nothing new under the sun, no matter the catastrophe it turns out some generation has already had it worse and managed to get back on track. This knowledge allows me to bypass predictions of the end of the US or France or paper currency or whatever avalanche of disaster may be rolling across the news wires. However I cannot escape the sense that we are at a pivot in human affairs, a time when the path ahead may switch direction and cause misery as it goes. I think of the end of the 18th century or the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the struggles of the 1930s and the new world order post World  War Two. Now we find change sweeping us all aside  once again. Discontent, protests, war, and a new class of gilded robber barons organizing our world to their liking. 

There is a surreal quality to being a tourist in these strange times. I have no idea what good it might do me to be at home but it feels odd to be living so far away in a world so far removed from all the noise of a world in chaos. Webb Chiles is fond of pointing out the southern hemisphere is more appealing than the north with far fewer people, less than ten percent of the population of this planet lives south of the equator.

In South America prices are high for locals already but there are no huge increases, no shortage of fuel except as always in Bolivia which has its own problems. There is no protesting, there is no more malaise than usual. South America is peaceful and that poses an interesting dilemma for me.

Is there a reason to go home I ask myself.  Layne is doing heroic work in California stepping in to help her friend call in hospice for her husband, helping her organize her life in anticipation of solitude, buoying her friend up, helping her to find a routine amid the difficulties of the end of life of a long time partner. Perhaps that’s how one moves ahead, flying visits home, short journeys here in South America by van not to wear out our dog, forced to a life in the slow lane for a while. 

Young Rusty has spent most of this week sleeping, taking some short walks, curled up out of the wind outside until the weather got too wet or cold and in he’d come and sleep on the bed with me next to him reading, as GANNET2 rocked to the gusts. As we go forward he will need more time to rest and less time in motion, it is inevitable. Should we do that at  home? South America is much more easy going for dogs, so that too is a question of what to do. Stay or go? 

There are no answers, no clear cut choices, no signposts. But I feel privileged still to have choices. It feels to me as though the door on my past is closing and that’s unsettling. I like to think that among all countries the US has the greatest capacity for reinvention, to come out of this global change with a fresh new image of itself and always I hope, a brighter future for all of us. 

At this moment I’m trying to figure where do I want to be sitting and watching as this struggle for global change plays itself out. I would like to go home but as L P Hartley famously put it “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently over there.” 

The United States I left in 2023 has been obliterated in my absence. I find the irony of sitting in a South American republic, at peace with kits neighbors, free of rancor and social unrest, watching my beloved United States descending to the status of a corrupt banana republic, where the rule of law hangs by a thread. I never imagined such a thing were possible. 

A half mile walk is plenty for  two old dogs. 

I hear a lot of people rejoicing at the fall of the American Empire but I ask myself how much more will they enjoy the Chinese domination to come. I think we will look back on the loss of Pax Americana with sadness; I know I do. So maybe I really do have to consider not going home for at least a while. Allow the rage and confusion to subside, allow the country to breathe and find a new way forward. It’s on my mind.