83.
Iquitos, Peru:
Iquitos, Peru:
Rubber (not Robber!) barons built this city about eighty years ago and it is pretty strange.
There are about six square blocks of tile-fronted three-storied buildings in a sort of “baroque-modern” architectural style surrounded by a few acres of dilapidated shacks surrounded by steaming jungle and it has an airport.
I spend an interesting few days looking around.
The language is still Peruvian Spanish and the town is easier on a traveler than Pucalpa
In the evenings, the streets fill with cycles, cars, taxis and people. The most popular shops here are fabric shops. The mostly handsome, brown or black, well-dressed citizens apparently love costume.
I am tall in comparison to the other men here though I am average in America.
The tourists, such few as there are, lounge in one or the other of the two high priced hotels in town drinking tall cool ones all day and boogying all night.
There is an “Amazon Museum” for the curious, but the muggy climate isn’t kind to their collection of stuffed birds, animals, reptiles and fish.
If you want to see something really scary though, try viewing their moldy stuffed boa constrictor with red glass bead eyes, massive jaws and a body like a tree trunk.
About the man-eating piranha fish, the forty-five pound killer frogs, the murderous Indians with blow-guns and all that which you have heard about and seen in the movies—well, there is a riverside lodge near here where professional natives put on a safe “wild Amazon” show for rich tourists -- but it is too expensive for this traveler to visit so I miss the whole savage thing.
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When I woke up this morning I realized that this is an anniversary of sorts.
38 years ago--two days before New Years Day--I received a letter from a friend in Honolulu enclosing a newspaper clipping from the Honolulu Advertiser telling about the wreckage of a light plane being found in the sea off the shore of Mauai.
My dearest friend of those long ago days, Elizabeth English, was killed in that crash--though her body was never found.
My life has gone on--as they say--with my own little happiness and sorrows--pains and pleasures--the lot of all mortal beings.
Sometimes months and even years have passed with hardly a memory of Elizabeth.
But today at the end of the year 2009, I want to remember and express my thanks to all the people living and dead who have touched and enriched my life.
To my dear wife and friend, Tanya--my good brothers Joe and Jack, and the living survivors of my family, "The Gathering of Eagles", on and beyond: May the Circle be Unbroken and May we Someday Gather by the River.
May 2010 AD bring us all closer to understanding the Great Mystery.
. . .
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