Eclipsed

Posted on August 21, 2018 by dawkins53

The longer I live, the more clearly I hear what the universe is telling me. I listened a few years ago when Kathy Bresler recommended a subscription to the BrainPickings.org e-newsletter, which on July 17, 2017 covered When Things Fall Apart by the Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron. The excerpts in the BrainPickings newsletter made Pema’s book seem a good read for Tina, my supervisor at Positive Coaching Alliance, who was on leave because things fell apart for her when her father faced sudden, serious health challenges.

The day I learned of Pema’s book, I mentioned it during a phone call with my friend, Ann, who lives up in Kennewick, Wash. Ann called it the most important book in her life, key to sustaining her sobriety.

The next day I mentioned the book over lunch with my co-worker, Shelley. She also exclaimed the book’s importance as a basis of her own Buddhism and a force that helped her accept and embrace even the most difficult changes life can bring.

When several influential people in my life all at once try to fill the same gap in my knowledge or experience, I understand that the universe is trying to tell me something. So I listened. I read When Things Fall Apart and gave Tina her own copy when she returned from leave. Less than two weeks later, on August 3, Tina tearfully told me she had to lay me off just a month shy of the 12^th anniversary of her hiring me. My last day there would be August 16.

Within minutes of the initial shock, Pema’s message surfaced in my mind. Her lessons about the inevitable, painful change that life brings helped me survive that moment, and because her message had arrived so serendipitously, it seemed ordained that I could accept and embrace this difficult change. I became attached to When Things Fall Apart the way other people attach to their Bible or Koran.

The book’s arrival as largesse, courtesy of the universe, got me thinking how some turns of phrase equate inexplicable good fortune with interstellar events. If something is meant to be, “it’s in the stars.” Right-place-at-the-right-time moments happen because “the planets must be aligned.”

My cosmic musings soon had me hearing the universe tell me to go to Oregon for the solar eclipse. Unemployed and in need of a vision for next career steps, I planned to leave in three days, listen to rivers while sleeping on their beds whenever possible, cross Crater Lake off my bucket list, and witness the eclipse in its path of totality at Madras, Oregon.

I packed my Mazda with camping gear, road snacks, Pema’s book and another that guides my spirituality, Luther Standing Bear’s Land of the Spotted Eagle. Preparing for what amounted to my version of a Lakota vision quest (which, in Trump times, I knew would involve socially purposeful work), I needed Standing Bear’s consideration of the Great Mystery of nature at the heart of Lakota spirituality and what the wasichu has wrought.

Leaving home the morning of August 19, I spent the first hour of my vision quest seeking NASA-approved eclipse glasses, which 7-Eleven stores were offering for free. Several stores were out of stock. It dawned on me that if my pace to Oregon did not speed up, there would be no need of eclipse glasses, anyway, and chances were that I would find another 7-Eleven along the 550-plus miles to Madras.

I crossed the glassy San Francisco Bay over the San Mateo Bridge, passed glass towers of East Bay towns trying to be cities, rolled over decrepit railroad tracks built in a time when our country had a future, past dust devil dancefloors of fallow farms that fail to feed the fieldhands who work to feed us, only to be demonized and deported back to the violence they feared enough to flee to our violence. At a Safeway in Redding, where I bought water, almonds, peanut butter and beef jerky, the parking lot was full of tweakers. But those frustrating Americanisms were somewhat soothed by a burger and a beer and the sight of Calatrava’s famous Sundial Bridge.

Then came the natural scenery of the Lake Shasta area, Castle Crags and Black Butte and other majestic-but-less-famous-than-Mount-Shasta formations. Depending on the highway curve, they resembled the new problems in my life, looming deceptively large from a distance and seeming to shrink to less imposing heights up close.

Snow-covered Mount Shasta offered no such illusions. It is just one giant mountain.

The next natural feature of note after the split off on Highway 97 and crossing the Oregon border was Upper Klamath Lake. Forest fire smoke gave an unnatural orange to the setting sun, and from one angle, Aspen Butte slashed diagonally across the orb, so it looked like a quarter-eaten pumpkin pie.

Near dark, I decided to camp at Jackson Kimball State Forest, pitching my tent by the light of my cell phone clenched between my teeth. Coyotes howled most of the night in a surprising variety of voices, some so distinct – real, dreamed or imagined through on-again-off-again sleep – that I picked out the sounds of several individuals. They became distant pets in the night, playing a rhythm-and-echo game with a herd of terrorized cattle bellowing in the distance.

I hit the road at ten for Crater Lake. Hiking the Rim Trail reveals one of those rare views that match its hype. Crater Lake is a blue you can’t see anywhere else.

About 90 minutes later, wildfire smoke almost completely obscured the lake.

The park offers a lot of other scenery along a loop drive, including Vidae Falls.

Out the southern edge of the park, Highway 62 rolled to the Rogue River National Forest, where I pitched my tent at Natural Bridge. This would be my first night of this trip to listen to a river and perhaps receive a vision. That seemed to call for some form of purification ritual analogous to the Lakota inipi.

While pale in comparison to what a traditional vision seeker endures, my wood-gathering turned into a self-imposed, quixotic, ascetic challenge to carry as much as possible as far as possible in the sun-setting heat. However brave I felt four days after being cast out from my professional home, that wood-gathering was a needed emotional purge. Then, in the cool dusk and overnight, the river whispered especially sweet secrets.

And in the morning, less than a mile’s hike away, the Rogue roared. It reminded me of Lower Falls in Yellowstone – not as tall and majestic, but just as effective in eliciting involuntary ego loss.

The river’s whisper and its roar both echoed inside me. Otherwise, I felt empty. Back in the car, creative and artistic visions took shape. I drove blissfully to Bend, where the universe delivered me those 7-Eleven eclipse glasses. I’d only snacked since that burger two days before in Redding, so lunch was a steak sandwich splurge at Deschutes Brewing.

Friends had recommended Bend for its natural beauty and recreation opportunities, but lingering there would keep me from finding a campground close enough to Madras to get there in time for the next morning’s eclipse, given the apocalyptic traffic predictions. First choice, Tumalo State Park, was packed. A ranger said she’d just called Prineville, and they had plenty of space, but none by the time I got there. Jasper Point also had no vacancies. I asked the campground hostess what she would do in my shoes, as I did not want to violate any laws sleeping roadside in my car.

“Can you do without electricity?”

“Sure.”

“OK, well, you see that stop sign, about 50 yards outside the gate? You take a right, onto that unpaved road. Anywhere you see a pullout is a campsite. They’re free, because they’re undeveloped, just a pit toilet. I’m so sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”

The jagged rocky road threatened my tires, which were overdue for replacement, so I took the first turnout. Beyond the parking area, and that pit toilet (which, on my third night on the road, was the cleanest I’d had yet), a grassy hill sloped down to the reservoir. It lapped at the shore during a mellow sunset and all through my sleep and when I awoke at sunrise.

In Prineville, I stopped at the first place that sold coffee, figuring it was not the kind of town to offer much selection. The coffee was bitter and burnt. Leaving out the other end of town took me right past a Starbucks, but I did not want to pay for more coffee. Instead I paid penance for my metropolitan bias, which assumed that Prineville could not offer quality coffee. Newly sensitive to my narrow views, rolling down the road to Madras past rural poverty and dead soldier tributes, it was easier to see how people in so-called “fly-over country” would vote differently.

The hysterical traffic forecast never materialized. A few pockets slowed over the last five miles. Many cars randomly pulled over for eclipse viewing from the shoulder, and some paid sites had their fields covered with rows of RVs. By eight, I was parked in downtown Madras, sipping delicious coffee at a picnic table in a food truck court near Sahalee Park, and testing angles toward the sun with my cell phone camera on a tripod.

I tried tricks I’d heard, such as draping eclipse glasses over the camera lens, but no cell phone photo can do an eclipse justice. That’s OK. Relying on mind’s-eye photos can make an experience more memorable.

The sky slowly darkened. The air cooled. People murmured and shouted as totality neared. Then, for about two minutes, all that remained of the sun was a brilliant blazing liquid-chrome rim the color of the Silver Surfer. Two days after seeing the nowhere-but-here blue of Crater Lake, I saw the nowhere-but-here-and-never-but-now shine of a disappeared sun.

Later on when the crowd thinned out I wandered the streets looking at souvenirs. I left around noon so I could make it to Ann’s house in Kennewick on time for the dinner we’d planned. It took an hour to get out of Madras and another hour before traffic loosened enough to really move.

Around three, a tire blew out. From the shoulder, with cars speeding dangerously close, and no experience changing tires, I called Mazda roadside assistance. I was so far from anywhere identifiable that, even with Mazda using its GPS, they asked for descriptions of physical aspects of the landscape to help figure out where to send help. They said they would have to call back.

While waiting, I re-read parts of When Things Fall Apart to remind me how to embrace this unwelcome change. Minutes later an official highway rescue tow-truck pulled up and two real men put my spare on in about 10 minutes. As they did, Mazda called back and said it would cost some hundreds of dollars and at least three hours because of my remote location, and by the way, didn’t I know that the roads were crowded because of people wanting to see the eclipse earlier that day?

The tow-truck crew thought the spare could make it to Kennewick if I kept my speed under fifty. That meant I would not reach Hermiston for tire replacement before closing time, so I should pull over and check the heat of the spare compared to the other tires, because if the spare blew I’d be stuck in the countryside until I could get a tow. I offered them $20 for beer in a coded attempt to regain a sense of masculinity, but they refused it.

Less than thirty minutes later, I was in a seven-mile back-up in Wasco, waiting an hour-and-a-half to turn from highway 97 to highway 84. But (I summoned Pema), what beautiful rock formations out my windows! Such intricate Mighty Favog faces and patterns you’d see as a child when you had nothing but time! What a blessing to recall the eclipse image—“best album cover ever!”

Other than fear of tire troubles, I loved 84, which skirts the Columbia River with its barges, its John Day Dam, its barren hillsides, and its spectacular swallowing of the setting sun in my rearview mirror as I hit Hermiston. The spare was warm, but I decided, in all my vast automotive expertise, that it would be OK.

During another 90-minute delay in a two-mile backup to get onto 82, my rearview showed a drunk staggering up behind me holding a wrinkled bag of booze. He wandered past again, coming from the other direction a half hour later, holding a new bag, and it was another 15 minutes before I saw the liquor store.

Once through that back-up, the homestretch to Ann’s house was a grooved road over the bridge and onto the interstate. I encouraged my tires out loud that they could make it. They did! And only five hours late for dinner! Ann and her husband, Jim, and I spoke deeply that night and over the next two days. Some of the topics were personal and painful, born of the trying experiences that had led us to Pema.

The eclipse experience remained vibrant, too. Folks standing in line with me at Discount Tire started talking about it. The guy in front of me showed me a photo on his phone that matched my memory but far exceeded the quality of anything I could shoot on my phone.

“How did you get that on your phone?” I asked.

“I transferred it from my $20,000 camera.”

After two days of rest and real food and clean sheets at Ann’s place, I took off for Portland, completely relaxed and able to enjoy the piney scenery of the Columbia River Gorge, near the town of Hood River. I stopped to see Horsetail Falls.

I had to make that quick to be on time for my visit with Pastor Craig Brown, whom I had not seen since our playground basketball days in high school. We caught up for a couple hours sitting in the sanctuary he was rebuilding in his historic church, and I heard every war story he was willing to share from the streets of Milwaukee to his tours as an Army infantry sergeant in Iraq. We had taken much different paths to the peace we felt that day.

That night I slept on a river bed about 40 miles outside Portland at the Gales Creek Campground in Tillamook State Forest.

In the morning, I aimed for Silver Falls State Park, about a two-hour drive, and decided to try the Trail of 10 Falls.

It was one of the most spectacular hikes of my life, winding past, behind, and under the 10 waterfalls that provide the trail’s name.

Between waterfalls, the trail meanders along a creek and through dense forests of fern and moss in every shade of green you can imagine and some you can’t.

The beauty at every step helped ease the pain that accumulated from all those steps. Even without the waterfalls, the hike through such rich and varied greenery would have been worth it. But when you hear that thunderous falling water and wonder what it will look like, and then catch a glimpse where the trail curves, your pain fades, and you keep on until just the right slant of late afternoon light strikes the falling wall of water and rainbow flame licks dance from its edge.

Going around the bend after one of the falls, I saw a woman standing on the trail, writing in her notebook. I stopped, “Are you a poet?” I asked. It started a conversation that probably lasted 10 minutes.

We covered the usual where-you-from and what-brought-you-here, but what had brought us each there was deep. She’d been eclipsed, too, something about a man and then the need to drive from Ohio just to watch the sun — which keeps us all alive — disappear in broad daylight and then re-appear to let us know that even apparent cosmic cataclysm is just an illusion.

We fellow road warriors, wanderers and wonderers were both so raw, so vulnerable and awestruck from recent past days of packed senses and surges of urgency that soon we were both near tears. Even as we each acknowledged our unusual openness while it was unfolding, it still seemed completely natural that we strangers bare souls.

From my backpack, I pulled out Pema for a passage that would remind us both that everything would be OK. Some other tangent, maybe what we’d each observed on our hikes, prompted me to also pull out Standing Bear and flip – more quickly than I expected to be able, as though I’d been practicing – to the page where he shares the Lakota wisdom “He iye ki ya mani yo” (“Recognize everything as you walk.”)

I realized that between my five-day beard, my camp smell, my fatigue, my sensory overwhelm from the waterfalls and the ferns and the eclipse, and now my proselytizing from two strange and off-the-beaten-path books, that she was ready to back-pedal down the trail. I also caught myself experiencing for the first time a faith so full that I could not prevent its overflow. But she’d had enough, so I quieted and wished her well, happy for the mindblow that waited for her in the waterfall around the bend that I’d just come around.

Finishing the trail at seven I was exhausted and in minor pain. Sleep sounded good, but I doubted my luck at finding any more perfect river beds on this trip.

Instead, I loaded up on diner food and coffee and sped 10 hours through the starry night back to the Bay Area, at home on the road, comfortable with being eclipsed in a universe that showed me there are times when things fall together.

Striking Out in the Dominican Republic

Posted on August 15, 2018 by dawkins53

In the beginning, I thought of baseball as soon as Val told me we were going to the Dominican Republic, the offshore home of two great American pastimes – baseball and colonialism – that meld in a steamy stew of cultural imperialism.

My wife, Val, works for a software firm that each summer takes its distributed workforce out for a retreat. Celebrating the company’s 10th anniversary, the founder this year hosted employees’ families, too. About 80 of us from the U.S., South America and Europe met at Dreams-Punta Cana, an all-inclusive resort on the Dominican Republic’s east coast.

Where some folks’ fantasies run toward sun and sand, mine turn to bat and ball. I mentally unwrapped a pack of Dominican all-star baseball cards: Pedro Martinez, Vladimir Guerrero, Juan Marichal, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, Albert Pujols, Rico Carty, the euphoniously named Julian Javier, and those two tragic figures from my beloved Chicago Cubs, Sammy Sosa and Moises Alou.

I started plotting how to find the heart of Dominican baseball, knowing that the company’s retreat agenda left little time for side-trips, especially when the destination was “I’ll know it when I see it.” It would be the mythic rock-strewn lot full of skinny shoeless boys fielding bad hops with ragged gloves (or none) and rocketing line drives off nailed-together bats, because, as the local saying goes in explaining Dominican players’ aggressiveness at the plate, “You can’t walk your way off the island.”

Weeks before our trip, I location-scouted by phone, first with my friend and former sports-business colleague, Valerin Lopez, a Dominican native raised in New York, who occasionally returned to the island. Then I checked in with my baseball guru Terry Shapiro, whose expertise lies in Colombia, but who knows everyone. I emailed Gene Corr, whom I met on a discussion panel at a screening of his film — “Ghost Town to Havana” — about a baseball coach from inner-city Oakland taking his team to play in Cuba. Gene connected me with Tommy Goodman of the Caribbean Educational and Baseball Foundation. None offered specifics on when and where I might see my vision.

So I just started looking as soon as our flight landed. On the half-hour ride to the resort, the airport shuttle bus windows showed mostly a concrete landscape of strip malls and cell-phone towers. If not for the Spanish on the billboards, we could have been 10 miles outside of any U.S. city.

But the view changed inside the gate that swings open at the front of Dreams-Punta Cana to swallow whole busloads of tourists and in the high-ceilinged lobby of the main building, where fans whir over wicker furniture that invites your already-heat-and-humidity-weary self to rest and wait for the waitress to bring whatever you drink and as much as you want of it or more. From there a wide marble spiral staircase leads down to a disco, a casino, a theatrical stage that hosts a nightly revue of stereotype island entertainment, a gift shop, several restaurants, and a cigar stand.

Outside the building is an amusement area with a video game arcade, pool table, foosball, ping-pong, a climbing wall, an archery range, basketball and tennis courts and a batting cage. Within the one-mile circumference of the perimeter road, another dozen three-story guestroom buildings surround the half-mile long central swimming pool and other amenities, including a massage and hydrotherapy spa, a flamingo pond, lawn patches, foot bridges, a waterfall, and a bar or restaurant about every 50 yards, including that holy grail, the swim-up bar. The whole complex dead-ends into a plush beach and calm turquoise water.

Val and I, along with our “millennial” children, Eleni and Sam, headed out from our suite ready for lunch at the restaurant nearest the beach followed by tossing a baseball around on the sand. Playing catch on our walk to lunch, we started hearing “Beisbol!” from waiters at the other poolside bars and restaurants.

One of them held up his hands in the international “throw-it-here” sign. His return throw showed enough control, break and style that we stopped to exchange tips on grips and other pitching tricks in his broken English and Sam’s broken Spanish. One of my knuckleball experiments landed in a thick hedge. Our new friend, Francisco, waded right in, nevermind his server’s jacket, and found the ball.

It was the first of many humble acts of service from the resort staff, who make Dreams-Punta Cana so special. Later in our stay, I thanked a waiter for the quality of the coffee and asked where to buy two pounds. He did not know, but 10 minutes later brought the ground coffee in bags and said there would be no charge. On my way out, I gave him $20 to cover the cost of the coffee and a tip. His eyes widened like he’d seen a ghost.

I could only imagine his life, presumably poor like most everyone on the island (thus, the baseball players’ commitment to swing their way “off the island”) and feeling forced to meet the whims of, mostly, descendants of the colonialists that created that poverty. Then my white-guilt moment faded into an easy weekend rhythm of eating, drinking, pool lounging, and an occasional run or Frisbee game or baseball catch on the beach followed by an ocean dip and hitting the indoor bars to watch World Cup soccer.

That weekend, Sam told me he’d planned with Francisco to get a few of his colleagues to commandeer a resort shuttle on Tuesday and drive us all to a ballfield in Higuey. It seemed we would have something even better than that baseball moment I’d envisioned, actually playing with the locals.

But first, on Monday, Eleni and I joined about 10 of Val’s co-workers for a kayaking trip in Parque Nacional Los Haitises led by Explora Ecotour. Our shuttle left painfully early in the morning, but I was jolted from self-pity after about 45 minutes at first glimpse of the island’s tragic poverty.

Some highway stretches just showed a blur of misery. Other times, traffic slow-rolled through whole towns of crumbling buildings, missing walls or roofs or both, skeletal elders seated on concrete floors in the hope-sapping heat and humidity, decrepit fume-spitting motorcycles with children perched precariously on handle bars, and cave-chested, rib-bare boys on horseback.

Some towns’ commercial centers consisted of a school surrounded by razor wire, a barber shop, a restaurant, a bar with a sign for “no menores/no armes de fuegos.” The best-dressed wore NBA team t-shirts commemorating championships never-won – the ultimate hand-me-down U.S. cultural detritus — answering the question of what happens to the pre-printed championship t-shirts for the teams that don’t win a game seven and confirming to those wearing the disposable losing-team shirts that the dominant U.S. culture also treats them as disposable losers.

Beyond some of these town centers lay scenic backdrops of forests layered in every shade of green imaginable, sloping toward the ocean that displayed just as many blues. When the road rose you could see both heaven and hell.

The final stretch to the national park was a pitted, unpaved path. Our Explora Ecotour guide, Eloisa, started pointing out features of plant and animal life, including the cattle egret, a bird that lives symbiotically by eating insects off the cattle that the insects otherwise would eat. Eloisa, a biology student from Venezuela (and therefore now practically a refugee), knew her stuff.

She hired local on-water guides at the kayak launch and led our easy paddle on the brackish green river, usually no wider than 20 feet, beneath a mangrove canopy. Several times she directed us to the river banks to let local power boats pass, and she alerted us to sights we could have missed, such as a blue heron picking off the tiny crabs that scuttled up the mangrove root.

Where the river emptied into a bay, our paddle power picked up. Eloisa led us for about a mile across the bay toward a cliff she described as a bite of cheese. The frigatebirds that soared above us with their distinct scissors-tails she called “air pirates” for their practice of stealing prey mid-air from other birds. An armada of pelicans flew past, low and large.

We nestled up to the cheese-bite cliff, felt it, eyed it from all angles to find patterns, forms and faces like you do when looking at clouds. We paddled around some smaller outcroppings of rock and coral for about 15 minutes until it was time to turn back across the bay, working hard in the heat, and then cooling again under the mangrove canopy.

Back up the pitted path in the town of Sabana de la Mar, lunch was fried fish and plantains and rice and beans beneath the thatched roof of Restaurant Jhonson. Wondering about the poverty, I asked Eloisa, probably less delicately than I hoped, how she felt about Explora Ecotour contributing to the economy but also potentially opening the region to further exploitation.

Her calm answer stressed the positive impact of any outside money, even the portion of our fees that bought us lunch. Eloisa detailed the exploitation wrought by Brazilian construction and engineering company Odebrecht SA, whose corruption scandal forced it to abandon a local project, and then she showed us the fallout on a walk of the town’s battered pier, another foreground of want against a beautiful backdrop.

Tuesday morning we trained for the baseball game Sam had planned with Francisco. Sam, Eleni and I visited the batting cage and its gleeful old coach who yelled “hola!” each time he fed a ball into the pitching machine. Carlos, the husband of one of Val’s colleagues, joined us in the cage. A Venezuelan now playing pro baseball in Italy, Carlos proved that he was our best chance against the stuff Francisco showed us on day one outside the restaurant.

At the appointed hour, we waited for Francisco on the wicker chairs at the front of the resort, but he no-showed. The next day we learned that Francisco’s broken English and Sam’s broken Spanish had left us waiting for Francisco to bring the shuttle while he had spent the whole day at the stadium in Higuey, wondering when we were going to show up on that same shuttle. My baseball dream was dashed.

For our last full day in country, Eleni and I joined a group taking the tour bus to Santo Domingo. Our guide this time was “Nacho,” who sounded like Garrett Morris’ Chico Escuela character and looked like Godfrey Cambridge, circa “Watermelon Man.” Nacho was in his sixties, a retired educator, now earning money and perhaps peace of mind by setting some historical records straight for tourists.

His quasi-minstrel comedy act strained to keep us entertained enough to listen to the not-funny truth. His speech ranged from “fasten your seat belt” to “don’t engage street vendors” to “stay with our group so you don’t miss the bus and pay for a $250 taxi home” to “Christopher Columbus landed in 1492, when the island was home to 600,000 native Tainos, and 13 years later they were all dead.”

Throughout most of the three-hour ride, Nacho bantered with the driver, Enrique, and raised his voice to a feminine tone when joking about the local MamaJuana aphrodisiac elixir of rum, red wine, honey and herbs. Mid-act Nacho started working us for positive reviews and tips.

Unlike the local roads of our kayaking trip, the interstate-type highway kept us more distant from the worst views of poverty. Nacho still made his points about the sugar cane industry growing on the backs of slaves and who held power and land at what point in history, dropping the names of property owners, such as Beyonce, Robert Redford, Liza Minelli, Oscar de la Renta, and Donald Trump.

At our pit stop, Nacho warned us to be back on the bus in 15 American minutes, because 15 Dominican minutes would be more like three weeks. Re-boarding, Nacho counted each of us as we passed him in the aisle and said “Forty-four” as he tapped my shoulder. I said, “Just like Hank Aaron.”

He smiled wide and said, “Ricardo Carty’s old teammate!” When I recited Rico Carty’s .366 batting average that won him the 1970 National League batting title, Nacho said, “I use be berry berry good beisbol.”

His schtick stayed just this side of revealing a minstrel’s self-hate, which could have had me hating him and myself for complicity in his loss of dignity. But he knew when to quit that act. The skies darkened and sprinkled as we neared Santo Domingo. Enrique slowed the bus and Nacho directed attention to the Christopher Columbus Lighthouse, an ambitious and expensive piece of architecture that had drawn disdain for seeming to celebrate the genocide its namesake started.

Our three hours walking along cobblestones in Santo Domingo centered on Columbus: a palace, a museum, whips, chains, cuffs, branding irons, Bibles, canons. Another stop was a 4-D movie complete with slamming theater seats and sea spray to depict the 1586 conquest of the city by Sir Francis Drake. We visited the National Pantheon where an honor guard stands silent and still amid the crypts of national heroes.

Our lunch stop was Buche Perico, a beautiful restaurant with an indoor waterfall that tumbled behind our table and was later drowned out by a bachata dancing demonstration. Nacho ended the formal, educational part of our tour solemnly at the oldest cathedral in the Americas, the Cathedral of Santa María la Menor.

There was a shopping stop afterward. Along with the normal trove of souvenir kitsch, the place sold a great collection of local food, drink and cigars, plus jewelry of the unique native gems, amber and larimar. I was disappointed to find no baseball memorabilia worth buying, not even a Dominican national team t-shirt.

On the way back to Punta Cana, I stared out the window, feeling fatigue from heat and humidity, feeling depression from seeing too much oppression. Learning about history is interesting but not always uplifting. I started dreading the three-hour ride beneath gray skies back through sugar cane country, where Nacho would tell us more horror stories.

But around a bend in the road, outside a nameless town downhill from the highway appeared a patch of dirt and a bunch of boys chasing a ball and others running in the rough shape of a diamond and many more waiting for their chance to swing their way off the island.