The Saga Continues--On the Road with Chesty and Rocaa

I hope you enjoyed last weeks interview with Claire Croxton.  If you missed it, just drop down and check it out.  It's a fun interview with a wonderful writer. 

Now, we continue with the adventures of two clueless gringos immigrating to The Republic of Panama with two giant service dogs in tow.  You know the drill.  If you missed a post, just drop down and read what you missed.  Sort of like demand television. To catch you up on story, my husband, Jack, and I have sold our house in Arizona and are flying to Panama with two service dogs in cabin with us.  Yes, in fact, I did say IN THE CABIN WITH US.

Read on, this just gets better and better:

  My best friend Mona drives us to Tucson on Halloween. We’re scheduled to fly out the next morning at what Jack calls dawn-thirty. I hug Mona good-bye. She takes our picture. Two beat-to-crap suitcases, two scared leather daypacks, two large bright-eyed dogs, and two old fools standing in front of the Day’s Inn, as ready as we’re ever going to be for yet another adventure.

   I can see Mona crying as she drives away. I’d love to join her but I need to concentrate on getting safely to our room with my suitcases and Rocca, the dog for whom I’m responsible. Jack and I have worked daily with the dogs. Their behavior has improved, but mostly, they’ve trained us on how to handle them in tandem. Rocca has transferred some of her allegiance from Jack and to me. This is good. It means she now looks to me for guidance instead of to him. Most of the time. We’ve learned to seat the dogs, whenever possible, back to back, not facing each other.

   This is the move that all parents recognize as the old, “You look that way and you look the other way. Don’t even look at each other!”

   The problem with this solution, as all parents know, is that, sooner or later, you’re going to hear the dreaded words, “He’s looking at me!”

   In our case, we would hear a low rumbling growl that sounds more like the noise an enraged lion makes than anything that should come out of the throat of a dog. This would be Rocca. Chesty would be peeking over his shoulder at her. Every time. His stubby tail jerking away, his eyes round and sparkling. The boy loves this game. I have learned that once we hear the sound of the ground shaking with Rocca’s warning, we have less than two seconds to prevent her from jumping up and into the middle of Chesty, giving him the exact feedback he seeks. You’ll notice I said, “I learned.” Jack, on the other hand learned that my nervousness and insistence on anticipating problems is causing the dogs to misbehave.

   All right, so for now, we’ve gotten the dogs through the lobby and into the room at the Day’s Inn in Tucson without incident. Jack wants to take the dogs and go down the street to Burger King for dinner. I’m not leaving the room with both dogs unless I’m forced to do so. We compromise. We do it my way. He goes and gets burgers, I stay in the room with the dogs and attempt to convince myself that the shaking that overtakes me periodically is probably just excitement over the trip.

   Cane Corso mastiffs have been bred as guard dogs for centuries in Italy. Our two have been raised on a five acre patch of desert with the nearest road a mile away. People walking past their front door in the night, bumping suitcases into walls or doing that loud whisper common to all drunks are the equivalent, to Chesty and Rocca, to a band of trained guerrillas sneaking in to execute us in our big queen size hotel bed. Rocca, like me, is a light sleeper. I spend most of the night sleeping with my hand on her head, ready to grab her snout and whisper “No! Enough! Leave it! Stop! SSSSShhhhhhh! No!”

   It feels like I never close my eyes, but truthfully, the snout grabbing thing probably didn’t happen any more than a dozen times in this, our first of a long line of nights in hotel beds. Jack and Chesty, both able to sleep through a mortar attack, wake bright-eyed and bushy tailed and ready for the day. Rocca and I shake ourselves into a blurry sleepwalk and away we go.

   The dogs fall into formation in a heel beside us as soon as we buckle their working capes on them. Jack leads with Chesty, who’s trying already to turn his head to look at Rocca, and Rocca lumbers along beside me, she and I grumbling at each step. Onto the shuttle bus we go and are delivered to the terminal just as the sun’s light is beginning to reveal the silhouettes of the many armed Saguaro Cactus and desert palms around the airport. Inside, at the Continental check-in desk, the agents don’t even blink at the dogs. Jack has spoken with the manager several times and also, as luck would have it, Randy Todd, who works in air traffic control and is the breeder from whom we bought Chesty, is at the check-in counter.

   Besides this lucky occurrence, many people at the Tucson airport are familiar with both Chesty and Rocca as we’ve brought them here often as part of their training over the years. Several of the security guards come over to say good-bye. Chesty takes all this attention with wiggling dignity until the stewardesses arrive. Then he throws himself on the floor, rolls over on his back, and presents his best side for rubbing. Rocca and I stand back and watch this foolish display of unprofessional behavior while Jack’s voice booms around the terminal announcing to everyone that we’re moving to Panama. Yes, the country, not the city in Florida.

   This is as good a time as any to tell you that while Jack loves to be the center of attention, I am happiest when I can come and go and no one even notices I’ve been there. Taking the dogs with us everywhere, puts us firmly in Jack’s glory and my discomfort zone. Having taken not one, but two giant dogs with us every single time we’ve left the house on absolutely every errand and excursion for the last month in order to accustom them to working together has left me a tad grumpy. All right, let me modify that self-assessment, I’m already a flaming bitch and we haven’t even gotten on the plane yet.

   By the time we line up at the boarding gate, it’s full daylight and I’m saying a silent goodbye to the clear blue desert sky under which I’ve lived for the last six years. Jack is explaining to the passenger in front of us in line about how he’s going to breed these dogs in Panama and sell them to rich Latin Americans who will pay any price to get them as guard dogs. Chesty is prancing along in full handsome working dog mode.

   Rocca is looking up at me and asking with her big ole eyes, “So, last chance. Are you absolutely sure this is a good idea?”

On the Move with Chesty and Rocca - Huricane Scene

We're rushing headlong into selling our house and moving out of the country when I begin to panic.  Here's the next installment on that story:

Again, Jack gives me the tone, the head tilt, the cocked eyebrow. “Stop worrying. Everything will turn out great. Hasn’t it always turned out good for us when you just trusted me?”

And, just like that, I’m remembering the hurricane and, before I can open my mouth, he’s read my mind.

“One tiny little mistake and you’re never going to let me forget it!”

                                                         ***************

We’ve been married 15 years, Jack and I. In that time we’ve lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, the Caribbean coast of Mexico, the high desert of Arizona, and traveled the U.S in an old motor home. Jack says before he met me he changed jobs and wives every five years. Now he’s retired and this wife just moves with him to each new location.  It’s not a lifestyle for everyone, but it works for us.

The hurricane episode happened when we were living on the beach in the Mexican Caribbean, about sixty miles south of Cancun, in the community of Paamul. At that time, Paamul was a small, funky little trailer park where an interesting, slightly shady, and decidedly odd collection of gringos rented narrow slots of sand from a local politico. We all built wooden decks along one side and shade palapas over our trailers. Palapas are palm-leafed shelters the local Mayans are happy to build to protect a gringos frog-belly white skin from the tropical sun for the low, low price of whatever the above mentioned clueless foreigner is stupid enough to pay.

We had dragged a 35 foot park model trailer the length of Mexico. A trip that still makes me shake and my left eye twitch whenever I think about it. But that’s another story. Let’s just say we were robbed at gun point, held up for three days by a political demonstration which blocked the only road south while hardy little brown men with large machetes ranted in Spanish what we assumed were the instructions, “Kill all the gringos first.”

That was the good part of the trip, before the transmission died three times and we sat in three different dirt yards and visited with the locals while the children chased the geese and turkeys and pigs and chickens to retrieve the small, probably inconsequential parts of our transmission that were scattered about in the freshly swept dirt. I’ve pretty much recovered from that little adventure, but, still, please, give me just a minute. The twitching goes away much quicker now. I just need a moment or two.

Okay. So. We’re set up under our termite infested palapa on the Mexican Caribbean, enjoying the pale blue sky and the clear turquoise waters of the Caribbean, when we begin to hear rumors that a class five hurricane is headed our way. Let’s rethink this. We’ve built a grass house over a mobile home in a hurricane zone. Huh. Remind me again. What happened to the little pig that built his house of straw? We throw a couple of hurricane parties, talk loud and bold, keep a sharp ear cocked to the weather channel, pack some clothes and a couple bottles of water into the van. We do our best not to hear the wolf calling for us to come on out and play.

Just after midnight on the third day, a knock at the aluminum door of the trailer announces the evacuation order. We had a dog then too. Truffles. The best dog in the whole world. Calm, disciplined, only slightly neurotic, a Shar-pei the color of milk chocolate. So we load Truffles into the car along with a cooler of gold fish. We had the fish in an outside pool. We couldn’t very well leave them to fend for themselves in the hurricane. Could we?

Off we go, headed inland, fish water splashing onto the carpet of the van at each turn. Truffles, always fastidious, refuses to put even one paw on the quickly soggy floor of the van. She rides perched on the tool box which is in between the two captain’s chairs in the front. Each time a turn causes a little more water to fly from the crest of a fishy wave and onto the floor, she gives a small, but clear humph and glares at us. We really never were good enough for that dog.

By daybreak we’re about fifty miles inland. It’s raining and the wind is blowing, but nothing too impressive appears to be happening. We try to find a station on the van’s radio to find out if the hurricane has hit land. We locate several, all in Spanish. All we can understand are the words Hurricano and Cancun. This is not especially useful information.

Some of the people with whom we left camp decide to travel another 100 miles inland to the city of Merida. They figure they’ll get a hotel room and hang out until the storm has passed. We decide to stay where we are. We play cards, walk around the tiny village where we’re parked, walk the dog, and pick the pig teeth out of the meat from the local taco stand where we’re buying breakfast, lunch and dinner.

By noon on the second day, the rain seems to have let up a little, we’re tired of pig head tacos, the novelty of a dog covered in wrinkles has worn off for the local kids and we decide to start cautiously back toward Paamul and see what we find. I did warn you earlier about our lack of common sense, right?

Here’s the thing. The further we drive toward the coast, the harder the wind blows. Or so it seems to me.

But, when I mention this to Jack, he says, and this exact quote is burned indelibly into my memory banks, he says… and can you hear the tone of voice? Can you just envision that eyebrow cocked in frustration, the portrayal of exasperation at having to explain the way the world works to a woman?

He says, “Do you see that the wind is blowing counter clock-wise?”

“No, not really,” I say. “It just seems like it’s blowing harder.”

“Trust me, if it’s blowing counter clock-wise, than the hurricane has already passed.”

“Well, see that’s the thing, I’m pretty sure the clock-wise/counter clock-wise thing has to do with where we are in the world. And I don’t guess I do actually trust you to interpret the conditions of a hurricane. Since you’ve never seen one before.”

   That, more or less, is what I said.

   Evidently, to a man, that actually means, “You have an extremely small penis, are an inadequate lover and general all around fuck up.”

   “I know what I’m doing,” he says and we keep heading for the coast.

   A few tense minutes later, after he’s dodged a fallen limb and one of our windshield wiper blades, having been turned up to maximum speed, has flown off into the jungle, he says, “This is all just windfall from the hurricane. See? So the storm has past.”

   Even Truffles can hear the uncertainty in his voice as she gives him a look and one of her snorts.

   It’s just about now, as we’re creeping along the obstacle course of fallen limbs, that a policeman in a brown poncho runs up to our van, taps frantically on the driver’s side window and begins yelling, “Hurricano! Alto! Alto! Ven conmigo ahora!” which, roughly translated means, “You fucked up and drove directly into the hurricane. Your wife is never going to let you forget it and, yes, you really do have a tiny little penis.”

   We are shown where to pull our van off the side of the road and hurry toward a small cement school house. The officer clearly tells us to leave the dog in the car. I just as clearly make him understand that if the dog doesn’t go, neither do I. With no time to argue, we bring the dog and step into the school house where we join a dozen Mayan families and a scattering of truck drivers and police officers. Standing room only. The toilet is a bucket in the corner of the room. There are a few pieces of soggy cardboard scattered on the cement floor which the children are using to make themselves little beds. 

   This is where we spend the next thirty-eight hours. The walls bend and bow and the men line up and push from the inside to offset the winds on the outside. The children, at first frightened of Truffles, and of us, settle in and use Jack as a shield at the height of the storm and the dog as a pillow. When the eye of the hurricane passes over, we all rush outside to pee and hurry back inside before the next wall of destruction hits. A person can’t remain standing for 38 hours, so long before the end is in sight, we’re all curled together, lying in a foot or so of water and balancing the children along our bodies to keep them as dry as possible.

   So you get the idea.

   When Jack says, “Trust me. I know what I’m doing”… tone of voice and lifted eyebrow notwithstanding, I do get a teensy bit nervous. It’s taken six years for his penis to reach its current size, we don’t need to do anything to shrink the little guy again.

   But I digress. Back in Arizona, I, the instigator of the plan to move to Panama, am getting nervous, while Jack is in full-speed-ahead mode. I can only pray we’re not headed directly into the eye of yet another storm.

On the Move with Chesty and Rocca

Here's a page or so of a non-fiction book about how I ended up living for a few years in the Republic of Panama. The previous post is actually the prologue of that book.  Disconcerting that the sentiments fit so well into my life now, but what're you gonna do? I'll post a little bit every day.  See what you think.  This will make you feel better about your own marriage and, if you're not already in love with one, probably discourage you from ever getting a large dog.

                                               *****************************

We sit, my husband, Jack, and I, in our old-people recliners, watching CNN and petting the fur- covered, 150 pound trunk-less elephants we call dogs at our house, contemplating another winter in the high desert of Arizona.

“You know what?” I ask my husband rhetorically.

He doesn’t answer. We’ve been married long enough that, first of all, he knows one of my lead-ins to a discussion about our lives when he hears it and, secondly, he’s trained his brain to simply filter out nine tenths of what comes floating out of my mouth.

Knowing this, with no encouragement whatsoever, I continue, “It feels like we’re just sitting here waiting to die.”

He turns his head and looks at me.

A minute later, he says, “Yeah. It does, doesn’t it?”

After breakfast, I say, “Let’s move to someplace green and warm with a beautiful blue ocean.”

This, right here, turns out to be the equivalent of saying, “I’ll bet we could strap these two giant dogs to our backs and, even at our age, we could just leap right across that rocky abyss over yonder. Don’t worry about those loose boulders. We’ll be fine.”

By noon, I’ve been on the computer and found Bocas Del Toro in the Republic of Panama, a thousand tiny islands in the southern Caribbean, right across the border from Costa Rica. Palm trees, pale, cerulean-blue water and monkeys. Too close to the equator for hurricanes. Plus, every internet site assures me, they speak English. Our new home? By early afternoon, Jack has called a realtor and set up an appointment for her to come out, take a look and tell us what we might get for our adobe brick house and five prickly desert acres.

We keep doing our research about Panama. Everything looks good. It’s affordable. The political situation is stable. Noriega’s in jail in Florida. Right? The government has set up lots of appealing incentives to encourage immigration and investment. The islands look beautiful. White sand beaches and clear blue water. The place looks like heaven. And they speak both Spanish and English. Hard to believe, but, what do we know, we’ve never been there.

We did live on the Caribbean coast of Mexico for six years. In a trailer set up in a tiny beach community called Pamuul. Gringos, all gringos in this place. Lots of Texan spoken there, but nothing but Spanish outside the community. Of course, Panama has had a huge community of Americans for years because of the canal. So I guess they learned English while our forefathers were fighting off yellow fever, building, and then managing, the waterway for a hundred years. Yeah, that makes sense. That must be how an entire, albeit tiny, Central American country became bi-lingual. The internet wouldn’t lie. Right?

Okay. So, a week later, the house is on the market and we’re booked on a reconnaissance flight to Panama for the first of November. That’s forty-seven days away. I was going to say we were making progress, but, in retrospect, moving toward our chosen goal is probably closer to the truth.

You need to know about these dogs we have, these Italian Mastiffs or Cane Corsos. Chesty and Rocca. But before I can tell you about the dogs, I have to fill you in on a little information about my husband.

Jack is a former Marine. He served in Vietnam. Well, he was there when there was a lot of shooting. Who the hell he or any other military personnel were actually serving over there is still up for debate. The point is, our government sent him and, in all ignorance and patriotism and innocence, he went. Into the quagmire. Six months in country, he disarmed a landmine the Marine Corp way. Put his fingers in his ears and stepped softly with the toe of his combat boot. Or, so he tells the story. At any rate, he died and, given the place he was leaving at that moment, he was happy to go. Except the damn corpsman dragged him out of the nice, warm, peaceful light and slam back into the pain and stink of the jungle.

So, it’s thirty years later and, except for the constant pain and raging PTSD, he’s pretty much gotten over the whole war experience thing. He’s still pissed at the corpsman, but he’s managed to live with it and make himself a good life. There’s not much to be done with the physical pain, but one of the ways he deals with his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD is by having service dogs. Another way he handles the residue of the trauma is to make chronically impulsive life changing decisions based on nothing more than an overriding sense of boredom. But you have, perhaps, already caught on to this.

The dogs are trained to let him know when someone is coming up behind him, to cover his back when he’s in public, to distract him when he gets anxious and to reassure him when he’s nervous. It works slick. We haven’t had to flee a grocery store leaving a full cart of food since he got the first dog. We even go to movies now. And restaurants. Of course, he still sits with his back to the wall and he persists in believing that the name of Ted Turner’s ex-wife is Jane Fucking Fonda, but, really, he’s pretty much recovered from the whole war trauma thing.

First Wedding Anniversary

Tonight, my husband and I will celebrate our first wedding anniversary.  For the twentieth time.

We’ve lived in Hawaii and traveled the country in a beater RV. We pulled a 35 foot trailer the length of Mexico and set it up on the Caribbean Sea where we spent almost as much time underwater as in a hammock and sat beside giant sea turtles on moonless nights as they lay their eggs in our front yard.  We lived in the high desert of Arizona with five dogs, an abundance of horned toads and a few snakes.  We bought a house in the jungle of The Republic of Panama and backpacked for months through Thailand, Vietnam, Nepal, and Malaysia. Poor health, a little planning and glorious luck have now brought us to Northwest Arkansas where we occasionally cuss the cold, always love the friends we’ve made since arriving two years ago.

It’s been a hellava ride. I pray it’s just beginning.