El Kookooee
New Mexico has its fair share of boogeymen: La Llorona, the wailing woman; Zozobra, ”Old Man Gloom”; the Chupacabra, the goat sucker; and El Kookooee, the Boogeyman. These supernatural apparitions bring with them bad luck and ill will. New Mexicans respond by burning them in effigy.
The burning of Zozobra, marking the beginning of Fiestas in Santa Fe, has grown into a major event that draws thousands. El Kookooee, though much smaller, has grown quickly in recent years. The event takes place on the last weekend of October, deep in the south valley of Albuquerque. Schoolchildren design the effigy each year, and each year local artists construct the boogey man per the children’s specifications.
El Kookooee, like Zozobra, is blamed for the ills of the world, and people are eager to place their fears and worries at his feet to kindle his flame.
I, though, think of Kookooee less as a demon and more as a vessel, a sacrificial lamb. As he ascends to the night sky as embers and ash, he carries our worst habits away with him.
Thanks, Kookooee, for bearing our burdens for us. We will meet again next year, when we Burqueños have amassed another heap of problems to unload onto your fiery altar.
Posted 6 months, 3 weeks ago. Add a comment
5:20 AM, Monday 3-Aug-09
I had a dream that I was back in Cleveland, biking in and around the Cuyahoga river valley. It was ahead of a really big ride – a century ride, a charity ride of some sort that I was completely unprepared for. I hadn’t trained, I hadn’t registered, and my bike was in need of all sorts of repair.
I decided to do a couple of laps around the valley to get warmed up. I headed out with a friend of mine. We rode out along the rim, several hundred feet above the water. The trail made a turn and led down to the river bank, and then out on a long, continuous boardwalk that rode us out offshore by about 30 feet. It was a series of small wooden planks about six feet wide. Every so often, a perpendicular boardwalk led back to shore.
We were coming up on a bridge which towered high above us, and I was dreading the thought of climbing up it. Off to our right was an elderly couple on a bench on one of these perpendicular pieces.. The next thing I know, the bridge gives out.
Now, because this is a dream, it defied the laws of reality. When I say the bridge gave out, I mean all of the wood instantly disappeared, leaving only a narrow strip of concrete support, about six inches wide, with a two inch rut running along the middle.
My friend and I were somehow balancing our bikes in this rut, while the elderly couple’s bench had vaporized, and they were sitting – looking rather dazed – on top of a perpendicular concrete strip.
I get the bright idea to bike along the rut to the next strip to try to get to safety. That’s when the concrete collapses.
The bikes are gone this time, and my friend and I are now standing on this concrete strip, the top of which is about an inch under water. The strip the old people are on is on an incline, from just under the water leading up to a concrete walk on the bank. My friend starts to walk up the incline, and I begin to follow, when the submerged piece crumbles away, and I fall into the water.
Keep in mind that, while the Cuyahoga River is sometimes even more of a pathetic trickle than the Rio Grande, at certain points it is quite deep. It is also murky and cold. I sank like a stone.
I got all the way to the bottom before I was able to push off and send myself to the surface for a gasping breath of air. The cold set in quickly, though, and I was unable to move my legs or arms fast enough to stay afloat. I sank several more times before a medic arrived and pulled me – and the other three – to safety aboard his boat.
As the paramedic was interviewing all of us to figure out what the hell happened and who was to blame (yes. Biking on the boardwalk caused the wood to mysteriously disappear and the concrete supports to collapse), many people were coming along the boardwalk on the other side, unaware that it suddenly stopped. The first was a young guy with a baby, and they went toppling into the water, the bike making an audible “thump” against the side of the boat.
Somehow, the scale of the river and the river bank had shrunk drastically. They were able to stand up in the knee-deep water and climb up onto the grassy bank. This happened several times to all sorts of people before everyone aboard this boat started yelling “STOP! THE BRIDGE IS OUT!” All this shouting woke me up, and I sat down to write this before I forgot it all.
(The image of the Cuyahoga Valley is not my own; it came from this website.)
Posted 2 years, 9 months ago. Add a comment
Certain experiences have a way of granting a new perspective.
This evening, I was heading to the dining hall with my old roommate from Rome, Tim Scovic. It was a year ago this Sunday that we and eighteen others boarded a plane for Italy. Tim and I are just one quarter away from graduation, discussing jobs and grad schools and what the future holds.
As we head towards the cafeteria, I catch the eye of someone leaning up against the wall by the entrance. He looks familiar – there are few people on this campus I haven’t at least nodded at in passing – and he seems to recognize me, but maybe it’s just something in me he’s recognizing. Without thinking much of anything, I throw my hand up in a half wave, and he stops me with a “Hey…”
“You guys have any guest passes or anything?” This catches me off guard, and I give him a second look. He’s my age, and he could easily be a college student. Everything about him has a sort of tired vitality. His tight-curled beard, his plain brown t-shirt, brown pants, and his shoes. His shoes caught my eyes – brown workboots that could have come straight out of the “Boots with Laces” painting by Van Gogh that we’ve been discussing in my Theory class, symbolic of the downtrodden working man. His eyes were penetrating, clear, and wide with hunger and hope. He doesn’t look dirty. A little unkempt, maybe, but better than most students I know.
“Yeah, I just got into Cincinnati today,” he says while shuffling his feet. I realize that it’s not he who’s avoiding eye contact but myself. I figure it’s a lie, but if the guy is hungry enough not only to beg for a meal but to lie about it, he’s probably hungry enough to deserve it. We exchange a handshake and names – “Uh, I’m Brian.”
Tang, ever-vigilant sentinel at the door of Siddall Dining Hall, swipes my card with the same smile as always.
Siddall is set up in a series of stations all over the cafeteria – one for salad, one for pizza, stir fry, et cetera. Tim and I head to the nearest one to the door, and Brian dissolves into the swarm of freshmen. The line for the day’s special is especially slow. Tim and I chatter about the ‘good old days’ of dorms and dining halls, and I catch glimpses of Brian flitting about. I think he made two or three trips by the time Tim and I got our first plate.
We sit down with him in the back room – I guess he felt better being away from any authorities who might rat him out. If someone is really in need, I have no qualms about helping them out, but I get rather upset when they feel they have to lie to me to get it out of me, so I called him out. “This is really your first day in Cincy? You know your way around the dining hall pretty well.”
“I’ve been in a lot of dining halls. Most are a little easier to get into, though.” He starts rattling off the security flaws in various dining halls all over the east coast. DC, Baltimore, North Carolina, and so on. I felt bad about accusing him of lying, but I still wasn’t entirely convinced.
He said he was just in Atlanta, and he followed a friend he met who wanted to head up to Cincinnati for some anti-globalization conference or something. “Oh, you’re an activist?” “Naw, man, this other guy is, he just wanted to see the conference. But man, globalization is evil.” And that’s as far into the subject as he got.
“So you guys drove all the way up here from Atlanta?” Tim asked. No, Brian and his politically conscious friend took a train. Reminiscing about my travels in Europe and New England, I talk warmly about rail as being the only way to travel. He looks at me a little quizzically and brings me back to reality. He is a railroad bum, a living, breathing stowaway on freight trains, and he and his friends accompany all sorts of goods around the country.
I was completely blown away. I had no idea that railroad bums even existed anymore, and visions of hobos with the classic handkerchief-knapsack-on-a-stick flooded my head. While this obviously was a romanticized version of what really goes on, Brian was able to be somewhat poetic about it. “You think about it, you’re on this track with hundreds of tons of metal, just whipping by at like 50 miles an hour, and you have no control. You’re just on there, and you’re going.”
He started talking about various stations all over the country. The one he’d just passed through recently near Lexington amazed him: 40 or so tracks, just a huge field of rail, with trains stopping and going all the time. “How do you know which train to hop?” He replied that sometimes the workers were kind enough to let him know, sometimes he had to figure it out himself, and other times he just guessed and got on. There was an element of pride and bravado as he talked about the excitement of hiding from security, the excitement of sneaking on and off the trains, and the quick friendships he would make, sharing a meal and a few good stories.
Too astounded to say anything important, I asked him how the food was. “Oh, man, I’ve been eating peanut butter on crackers for eight days, this is great.” He bit into a veggie burger and hot sauce poured from the back of it. “Yeah, peanut butter and hot sauce on crackers is great, though.”
He was an expert on hot sauce, recommending what to look for in the ingredients – “no vinegar base, you gotta have some carrot juice or something, and it’s gotta be somethin’ hot, like habañero. The hotter the better.”
As he ate the burger, I noticed his hands for the first time. While the rest of him looked pretty clean, his hands were filthy, coated with a fine black dirt. A nasty sore about the size of a quarter occupied his left palm where it met the wrist. His knuckles were knobs at the joints of his fingers. He had the hands of someone twice his age, and he gesticulated with them wildly to illustrate his conversation.
“It’s great that you guys have veggie burgers. If I go to a cafeteria, I won’t have the meat there if they have veggie burgers. If I find some meat, though, I’ll cook it and eat it no problem.” This confused me: “You mean you’ll eat meat from the dumpster, but the meat in the dining hall isn’t any good?” He explained something about how the meat in the dumpster is still good, but no one would eat it and it’d go bad. The stuff in the dining hall, though, people will eat, so he’ll leave that to everyone and content himself to scavenge the rest. I don’t know if it was based on some sort of altruistic principle, or just some quirky kind of logic, but I let it slide.
Towards the end of the meal, he started turning the conversation towards us – what we’re up to in school and such. Tim and I started complaining about some sort of graduation requirement that was just thrown on us two weeks into our last quarter. We moaned about it a good deal, how outrageous it was for the school to throw a required class our way on such short notice. All the while, though, I notice his waning interest and began to feel foolish. Here we were, talking about something trivial, something that probably won’t even happen, and this poor soul is trying to figure out where he’s going to sleep and where his next meal will come from.
Feeling a little embarrassed, I rearranged the mushrooms in my salad for a little while, not saying anything. After a while, Brian stood up, thanked us for dinner, shook our hands, and headed out.
And that was that.
Posted 7 years, 1 month ago. Add a comment
It was completely random. No planning, no map, no tickets, no hotel reservations. Nothing more than the desire to see the most beautiful place in the world (well, according to some).
Abby Jasper and I left the Villa Bassi around 8am. At the bus stop, we met some very kind people: a nun, passing by, smiled at Abby – an obvious sign of someone not from Rome. As we found out from the woman’s sister, who was visiting from San Antonio and spoke English and Korean well enough to translate between all parties, they were travelling from Termini (to which we were headed as well) to Assisi, where we had been the week before.
After a 40 minute bus ride to the Termini, we boarded a train for Caserta, from which would transfer to a train headed for Napoli (my least favorite location so far). This “train” was two cars long, spouted diesel exhaust, and blessed us with the entertainment of a screaming baby who was pacified only when playing ringtones as loud as possible on his parents’ phone… over, and over, and over. While the babe received quite an “education” of Handel, Mozart, and Kool & the Gang, everyone else was plugging ears and checking watches, as if the second hand’s ticking would end the Infinitely Long Half Hour Train Ride through Hell any more quickly.
Still, hopping off the train in Napoli was hardly a relief. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, you might say. Our guide book instructed us to take eigher the tram or the bus, neigher of which we could find. Locating someone who didn’t look too hostile to question was no easy task (In Rome, they don’t smile. In Napoli, they scowl). After being led in circles for nearly an hour (which was no isolated incident… perhaps it’s a past time to mislead tourists. I know I would), we found Bus R2. As we rode through town, we attempted to understand just why Napoli is so inferior to charming Rome.
For one, the greater part of the city is fairly modern. Instead of a centuries-old city center bent on preservation, downtown Napoli boasts towering skyscrapers in its financial district. Hotels built tall thanks to the invention of the elevator hardly have the intensity of the 3-4 story alleys of Rome, due to the six-lane roads cutting a path between them. Half-begun houses on the town fringes are living examples of Corbusier’s Domino: concrete slabs with concrete columns, and nothing else, except for rusted rebar jutting up, waiting for a concrete pour that never came. As opposed to Rome, which takes pride in its public spaces, Napoli crams its piazzas with buses and cars, gridlocked in what should be a pedestrian oriented city. Perhaps this is the reason there are so few people on the sidewalks and so many in cars – the city was built up too late, after the advent of elevators, automobiles, and steel trusses. Here the fumes of exhaust even overpower the persistent reek of urine. No one here is nearly as well dressed as in the New York City of Italy, but quite ironically, the beggars have much nicer clothes than any other place I’ve visited. Perhaps this is the origin of the phrase “Vai a Napoli” (Go to Napoli), said to bothersome panhandlers; instead of condemning them to hell, you’re hoping for a better future for them!
By the time we caught the 1-hour ferry to Capri, it was 2:40pm. Abby and I agreed that seven hours of travelling would have been much more tolerable if two hours hadn’t been spent in Napoli.
Yet all of our frustration (well, with Napoli anyways) fell away as wee woke up to a view of the Isle of Capri.
Two tiny mountains rise out of the blue Mediterranean with such ferocity that even the lush green vegetation of the island is unable to cling to the steep, white cliffs. From the first moment you spot the harsh grades of the slopes, one word reverberates in your skull: Paradise. Of course, such an idea is marketable, and profitable. It seems as though every job on the island centers around tourism. Bus drivers schlepp them around. Cooks and waiters feed them. Shop keepers cater to them. And everyone is willing to relieve them of their heavy Euro coins and notes. Oddly enough, there are no beggars or street vendors anywhere. Everyone is comfortably content. And on Capri, who wouldn’t be?
Luckily, and in stark contrast to Napoli, everyone is smiling and eager to help. Perhaps even a little too eager; I was almost annoyed by the persistent use of English… Italian was merely a secondary code language used between natives. We boarded the incline – the easiest way to get up the mountain. From downtown Capri, we hopped the tiny orange bus, which zig-zagged up the narrow street.
Many passengers crossed themselves when they say six inches of pavement and a low, rusty railing were all that stood between them and a 400 foot drop. Still, the driver, undaunted, weaved around the streets without so much as a blink of an eye. The streets must have been carved into the hillside before the advent of automobiles, as vehicles had to wait or even go in reverse in order to squeeze by each other at widened nodes, engineered for this purpose. Drivers all honked as they passed each other, as if to say “Yup! Still Alive!”
After about 20 minutes of back-and-forth maneurvering, we had succeeded in traveling from Capri on one peak to Anacapri on the other. Looking at the map, the distance was only a few hundred yards as the crow flies. I only hope they send a helicopter instead of an ambulance in emergencies (and to all those would-be inventors out there: the first one to create a feasible jet pack will make a fortune on Capri).
From Piazza Vittorio in Anacapri (what idiot put two Piazza Vittorios on such a tiny tract of land?) the inkeeper’s daughter came to pick us up and drive us to the Villa Eva. At this point, I must thank Ryan Grass at City Architecture for recommending such a quirky locale.
Villa Eva is owned, built, maintained, and operated by a family of island dwellers – about three or four generations, if my count was right. The father must have stumbled across a book on Gaudí, as this complex of buildings amidst a jungle sport ornate chimneys, unorthodox door and window openings, and colored tile everywhere. The room in which Abby and I stayed was a suite of five single beds, a riif terrace, and a roof mounted array of solar water heaters. Natural sunlight streamed in through the stained glass windows and danced in green and yellow on the white stucco walls. A bed with layers of brightly colored sheets, blankets, and comforters was tucked under a staircase of dark-stained wood, and a hand-laid stone fireplace, shaped like a bee hive, squatted in the corner, adorned with decorative bottles. From the roof, we could look down on water on three sides, and look up through Eva’s strange roof lines to the peak of the mountain.
Dropping off our bags, we took a bus to the coast, where the famous Grotta Azzura lay. Several friendly fishermen chatted with us in slow, relaxed Italian and English as they threw chum into the blue waves. While reeling in a small fish, a man with a hat from New York told us that boats had stopped going into the grotto for the day, but said we should swim in. Abby and I looked at our nice-ish clothes, at the frigid water, at the high tide spitting foam through the tiny opening as it lapped at its sides, at the sharp rocks below, at the fading daylight, and more than once at the siggn that said in many languages: “Swimming in the Blue Grotto is Strictly Forbidden.”
Luckily, a man in a rowboat was paddling out, and I flagged him down, pointing at the grotto. We boarded, and he had us lie flat on our backs in the wet bottom of the dinghy. Timing himself against the waves for a good five minutes, he leaned back and heaved on the chain at the side of the cave, and we were in.
As our eyes adjusted, we saw that we had passed into a round cavern about 60-80 feet in diameter. Our navigator explained that the water was over 20 meters deep. The real treat was looking back to see the reason the grotto is famous. Even with a setting sun, the light dove down into the depths and reflected up in an eery, bright blue light. Plunging a hand in the water, I ignorred the chilling cold as my hand lit up in the light.
After witnessing such a wonder, we had to share the experience. We found a phone, and Abby called her boyfriend, one of the few people who insisted we brave the threats of rain (there was none all weekend), and I called Ryan, for suggesting such a fantastic trip and such incredible accomodations.
All that walking left us famished. We headed for Il Cuccilo, recommended to us by Eva’s daughter. The restaurant, like everything, took forever to get to, but as usual the hike was worth it. Perched on a cliff looking across the water to the lights of Napoli (from here, even it looked pretty). The primi piatti (first course) were incredible: spaghetti in lemon sauce, and spinach ravioli in butter sauce.
Since we were on an island, we figured we’d spring for seafood for the secondi. Despite the fact that neither of us were big on fish, I ordered the grilled fish and Abby the fried shrimp. I should have learned from my Zuppa di Pesce experience that guessing with seafood yields bad results.
The waiter came up to Abby with a steaming basket full of red, and when he set the plate down Abby’s face contorted into an expression for which words escape me. An entire pile of entire shrimp was staring up at her, eyes, legs, whiskers, and all. And just what I was afraid of: she looks to me pleadingly and says, “I can’t eat this.” Fine. Instead of splitting our orders, we’d just switch plates. While not exactly looking forward to downing 30-plus greasy crustaceans, I had to maintain a reputation as a human garbage disposal.
Of course, few memories will be more priceless than the moment the maitre’d brought my dish on a silver platter – a whole fish, scales, eyes, and fins – for our approval. I thought Abby was going to leap through the window and plunge into the sea. Luckily after a nod from me, they took it aside to slice out the good parts.
After I pried a lesson out of our server on how to eat a whole shrimp, we both rather enjoyed our meals. She never imagined fish could taste so wonderful (or look so awful, either), and I sadistically taunted her, speaking to “my pretties” while tearing them limb from limb: “Down the Hatch!” We resorted to calling the whiskers “Decorative Covering…” if not for the quality of her food and the euphamisms of mine, she probably would’ve left the table.
If the main course was at all uncomfortable, dessert made up for it. Tiramisu, strong with booze and cocoa, smelled even better than it tasted (It took all her willpower to keep Abby from licking the plate clean). Pineapple – an entire quarter of one, sliced artistically from the rind – melted in the mouth. Limoncello, bitter, thick, and sweet, made our heads spin as we clambered back up the hill to crash at the Eva.
At about 5:30am, I awoke to the shrimp arguing over which would have revenge on my intestines first. I will spare my audience any graphic detail and reduce the single negative experience at Capri to two words: FOOD POISONING. This accursed foe robbed me of more than any Napoli gypsy ever could – Time in Paradise. Our sightseeing was reduced to little more than finding the right bus, the right Farmacia (thank goodness for drugs), and the right postcards, knicknacks, and gelato.
We boarded the Vesuvio Jet at 12:40pm, and cranked our iPods to drown out the ferry’s safety videos, which we had seen the day before. Still, I find them amusing. A really high-quality production, as would be expected from a fleet of such luxurious vessels, complete with transition effects, glamourous models, graphic design, and grandiosely inappropriate “Last of the Mohicans” theme music. Yet inspite of all this, even the Plasma flat screens on which they were displayed could not hide the fact the cinematics were recoreded on inferior VHS… fine, call me a techno-snob.
Still, in spite of my lingering illness, I almost would rather have rolled over the waves on the ferry than set foot in Napoli again. The heat soared up from the asphalt and mixed with the fumes of cars, buses, and motorini. We approached a Tobbacheria to buy bus tickets. After being directed to each of the three people and then back to the first, we decided to risk being thrown into a prison in Napoli and boarded the tram #1 (ooh, that’s another form of transportation) back to Piazza Garibaldi. Luckily, by this time, we were expert travelers, and found our way without incident.
On the train back to Rome, Abby was getting a little nervous about the glazed eyed men sitting with us, their dirty, greasy denim jackets reeking of old sweat and cigarettes. You can imagine her relief when they got up and were replaced by a kind-looking woman in her late 50′s, reading a book. After a while, she leaned over and asked “Turisti?” We nodded, and she began explaining how mozzarella cheese was made (we had just passed the domestic ” buffalo” who are milked for the cheese). A number of subjects poured out of her after that: a castle marking the northern stronghold of the former Kingdom of Napoli, the bridge over the river separating Campania from Lazio, a brief history of the Unification of Italy in 1861. Agreeing it was easier to speak a foreign language than hear it, we spoke in each others’ native tongue.
When she found out we were architecture students, she started talking all about Wright, Mies, Scarpa, Vitruvius, Palladio… we were blown away by all she knew. As it turns out, besides living in Chicago for three years (hence such good English) she was also an archaeologist very interested in architecture. At the end of the train ride, I asked for her name. As it was Spanish, she asked to write itt down. As it finished my adventures, it also finishes my narrative: Bianca Maria Lopez y Royo.
