This was written today....i refuse to change any words....it was nice to do it....I apologize in advance if any words offend....

July 24, 2006

Somewhere deep in the heart of darkness….well, not quite but sometimes it feels that way at night when one hears critters of dubious origin rooting around in da bush….IT IS WEIRD TO BE ALONE in da woods.

At least some of them are quite edible. The critters that is.

Dear Friends (yes a letter of the aggregate sort which will morph into a story anyway):

You would think that I would hate the heat that we are experiencing today (91.5 with gobs of humidity!) but after two weeks of rains it is quite welcome. My clothes, hell everything, was starting to smell moggey. Sneezing fits have been the order of the day. Popping a benadryl at night is not a luxury. Good thing my blood pressure is okay or I would have croaked by now.

I have learned not to watch certain films late at night. I was watching Signs the other night (invading flesh-eating space aliens) and even though I have seen it a zillion times it still freaks me out…especially when the trees are shedding excess branches, lizards are moving about and tapirs come crashing through the brush….AND THIS IS IN PITCH DARK WITH NO MOON!!! I have trained myself to discern the noises of nature versus that of dangerous space aliens but when you are alone and you have maybe had a couple of hits of the old bong? Well actually the other night I was not indulging so if I had smoked up I probably would have just passed out in da hammock and not heard [#%!]-all! That is one of the nice things about being older.

I have gotten quite good with a long machete when it comes to chopping some of the deadfall and trimming the vines that hang down everywhere. The diminutive Mayan nicknamed Chuckie (yes because he does sort of resemble the evil doll) who acts as the all-purpose labourer around here is quite impressed with the fact that I have not chopped any extremities off yet. The machete is longer than what you would buy in Canada and it takes a bit of getting used to. I can make great angular cuts in the hardwood consistently and it takes me hardly any time now to dispatch fallen limbs in a good fashion. Considering the fact that I am pretty much centre-blind in my right eye I am quite pleased with myself.

There is this twenty-foot long branch hanging over my stairs that came crashing down a couple of days ago after what I like to call Freight
Train Rain. It rarely rains in a gentle fashion here. It is more like a runaway CN grain-hopper express speeding across the prairie. When you hear it you swear to gods and goddesses that disaster is about to occur. And because my roof is zinc the noise is amplified. To get to the bathroom (herein after referred to as the Bano in Espanol) I exit the cabin and go down the stairs of death…named so because there is no rail and death to any thieving or raping arsehole who thinks he is gonna surprise me! Why do you think the great warrior societies built their fortalezas up on hilltops? That was so they could kick the sorry asses down of any fools who wanted to maraud, rape and pillage. I digress but it’s my story so there! Har de har and ar be dar!

Anyway, heading down the stairs one morning to empty out the old kidneys I hear this loud CRAAAAAAAAAAACK! And right over my head comes down this large branch but it misses me and the house. So now it is hanging in such a way that the brandishing of a machete ain’t gonna cut it? So now I have this vision of me being Tarzan-like and leaping off the stairs holding the errant branch so I can snap it.

It will work. The drop ain’t that precipitous. I just gotta move the big bbq out of the way or I will impale myself on its little chimney. Now the question here is just how many beers will I need to consume in order to get up the gumption to do this? I have plotted this exercise in my mind many times over and because I do consider myself to be brilliantly demented it oughtta work just fine. I flunked math so I better be cautious about the beer calculation factors concerning feats of acrobatics.

One day Chuckie and I decided to yank out a couple of trees that my husband had rightly figured may be trouble in a squall. The trees here cannot establish deep roots so even though they may be tall they are not anchored sufficiently to withstand the winds of rainy season. It used to be cane fields here years ago so the trees are young. They look older to a winter person’s eye because that person is not aware of all-season growing patterns.

So this is what Chuckie and I decided to do…he would shimmy up the tree that we figured would eventually crash onto the roof. Machete in hand this little man who could have auditioned for a Chinese contortion circus act started to chop away at the crown. I was watching from the ground and when the tree started bending towards the roof I heard Chuckie, whose English is bare, softly say Oh Shit. But he was able to achieve his goal. He shimmied back down far enuff for me to toss up a makeshift electrical cable and rope that we had fashioned so I could be the anchor who would pull the tree down once he started chopping near the base. It was a good idea but unfortunately the rope kept breaking and he had to go back up the tree which by this time had an unstable base due to the chopping. After the third try we succeeded. So here I am pulling on this rope, Chuckie is chopping and I am starting to feel that the time is now to pull it away from the cabin. I start to yank in such a way so that the tree will come down towards the driveway and I can feel the shitty rope starting to slip from my hands. I yell out CHUCKIE MAS AHORRA and he comes ripping over and between the two us, the five foot nothing Mayan and me the five-seven (five-eight or nine in army boots) Gringa, we got that sucker down.

It is the little things that make one feel triumphant…woman versus nature and all that shite. I am so used to having my husband do all the Tarzan shite and me play the Jane role so this little act of roof protection made me feel pretty darned great! That was until the cleaner (army) ants came through.

Yes the ants that move in an organized phalanx….they move fast and if I did not have excellent peripheral vision I would have suffered some pretty nasty bites because when this army arrives you get the [#%!] outta their way. They always seem to arrive either when I am writing or deeply ensconced in a great page-turner. The two times that they have barreled through I had just enuff time to grab the laptop, my purse and keys and leave for sanctuary, usually at my neighbour’s or if the time was right, the little village pub. They take about two hours to do their business down here. I am glad that they are not as plentiful as the marchers on the west coast of Oaxaca…those guys can take days!

There are other ants, the little biters that get between your sandal straps and your tender tootsies….ouch. They are the dreaded fire ants and when they bite you know it!

I hate scorpions and am still trying to understand just where they fit in the scheme of nature. I have spotted three of the bastards whilst showering in the bano and they are impervious to chemical warfare. Think of the nastiest wasp sting times 50 and you have the pain of a scorpion stinger. It won’t kill you but you will wish that you were dead or dead drunk. So far, knock on hardwood, I have not suffered them nor have I seen one up in the cabin.

I will not even begin to get into what I call the Giant Space Bugs or Humongous Flying Roach categories…suffice to say there are enuff kinds of bugs (spiders too!) that I sometimes wished I was fearless like some geek entomologist.

Many of the gringos, most of them being American (denizens of the United States of America for this story for we are all Americans in this hemisphere), questioned our sanity when we told them how high up we were building the cabin. We did because for the most part we are able to escape many of the bugs. I only wished that we could escape some of the Americans.

Like army ants some Americans move and swarm over territories scooping up all the real estate in their way hoping to make that magical profit margin. And as they move into new territories they bring their societal baggage and precepts with them even though the original idea of coming down here was to escape the bullshit of home? As they engage in their profiteering little places like Belize start to experience what the state of Florida must have felt like thirty-odd years ago. I call it the Great Belizean Land Grab and Extra-Large Panty Extravaganza. And some of them love to let you know that they know EVERYTHING.

Yes you too can make money on swampland….get your fat greedy ass down here because there are lots of desperate rubes freezing their arses off who would pay your inflated rates for less than a quarter acre of bug-infested swamp. Shit, you may even get a whiff of the sea which isn’t really a sea but it does have a bit of salt in it right? Well at least that is the case up here in Corozal District. We were lucky…we found an ethical developer whose vision for a parcel of land, which he gained because of a debt owed to him, was to have as diverse a group of folks on it as possible meaning that he was not necessarily geared towards selling to folks who were fluid or retired.

One developer, whose parcel makes a zillion internet claims and is outrageously priced had the balls to castigate the man whom I bought from for not charging enough for his parcels!! This guy dug up virgin land that no archeologist has had a chance to get at and he wonders why the locals think his development is cursed! Spit down here and you will find evidence of Mayan occupation. It is so easy. I guess if one has enuff money or braggadocio they can do pretty much what they want to and damn the consequences eh?

I know that what I have written will [#%!] certain folks off but those are not the Americans that I would count as friends and good business folks anyway so they can [#%!] off and die slowly or try to come over to my luv shack and give me hell. The slingshot is ready and the beers are cold. I await the arrival of the angry developer and control-freak army ants.

Now before some of you out there think that I am only gonna slag Americans I need to let you know that I have made acquaintance with a few asshole Canadians (Brits and Germans too)….I HANG MY HEAD IN SHAME!!! I wonder sometimes why the Belizeans even tolerate us gringos!

I love Belizeans. I am so blessed to be in the midst of a very polite and caring group of folks. As to the expats? Some of them can kiss my brown eye. They just don’t get it. I often wonder why some of them are even here. Oh yeah, money, that is why. Much easier to live large down here in the midst of obvious poverty than it is back at home because after all some of them made a shitpile of money on a house that they paid thirty grand for back in the seventies.

And those folks are still miserable!!! These are the kinds of people who tell you NEVER to let a Belizean into your home because they are all thieves after all and you just cannot trust THEM. You know what – of all the great rip-off stories that have been told to me down here none of the cases involved Belizeans but there was certainly a great many gringos implicated. Oh yeah some expats do get robbed by locals but for the most part this is not as common as the scaredy-cats would have one believe. Robbery is just a part of life. It eventually happens to all of us, some of us more often. At the one “gringo colony” all of the so-called home invasions happened to people whose opinions of Belizeans were rather low. Go figure eh? Assholes. You reap what you sow. It is true.

I have no quarrel with someone who wants to make an honest buck. I would only ask that some of you out there consider the consequences of your actions on a little country that you may just be passing through. Spout off negative shit and it will come back on tenfold. The Dalai Lama has it right man!

Everyone gets beach fever. We did…several times over. The fact that it took us fifteen years to finally build a place in the tropics sort of attests to our patience and willingness to explore as many spots as possible. Oh yeah dear friends some of you know what financial boners we have gotten into but hey, we prevail. What the hell else is money for anyway? Spend it cuz it ain’t gonna mean shit after you kak it! You know, become worm food, buy the farm, [#%!] up and pushing daisies and all those other irreverent colloquialisms for death?

I guess what I kinda find ironic is that we deliberately bought a parcel of land that is the furthest back from the sea as we could get. The way I see it is this…if I wanna go out and play in the sea it ain’t that far away. I can hear it at night if there is no wind or Freight Train Rain. I know it is there. And if we do get a big blow the chances of my modest little luv shack surviving are pretty decent.

I have almost total privacy here. Yes, there will be other folks starting to build soon but most of them will be snowbirds so I am pretty much the queen of my demented domain for now. It’s just me and the myriad of fauna and flora that abounds for now.

If it wasn’t that way I would not have been able to share these thoughts now would I?

Peace Out.

The DriveGoddess