Missed it last time? Get thee to a Kindle (free download to your computer) and download my book, the "unputdownable" La Chiripa, and Katje van Loon’s intriguing foundation novel, Bellica, absolutely free all day!

Bellica tells the story of two sisters in Athering, on the planet Zarqon, where women call the shots. Wannabee-empress Zardria, dedicated to the dark forces, schemes her way to absolute power by getting rid of sister Yarrow, one of her best generals. Should Yarrow lead a revolt? A fascinating variety of characters and relationships moves the sisters towards the ultimate contest between the love of power and power of love.

La Chiripa intertwines two stories to a heartbreaking climax. Newly divorced Japanese tourist Makoto is killed by a Mayan mob when he makes the mistake of admiring a baby in the market of Todos Santos Cuchumatan, high in the mountains of Guatemala, as he’s buying a gift for his ex-wife. (Yes, this really happened!) The other divorce is not a love story–or is it? Teenaged Pira and her mother have lived quietly in Todos Santos for five years. When Makoto’s death makes the TV news in Canada, their enemy packs his briefcase and plans his next vacation–in Guatemala.

You won’t have to find a cheap Spring Break vacation in 2012–visit Latin America and take an interplanetary trip for free with Kaimana Wolff and Katje van Loon!

Two generations of alpha-bitch novelists–what were the odds? Enjoy!

Kaimana Wolff

Katje van Loon

That’s right. For the next 24 hours, you can get a copy of my — admittedly fantastic — novel for absolutely zero dollars.

Just click right here.

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Not a problem. You can download the Kindle reading app to your computer for free too. (Or your iPhone. Or Blackberry. Or whatever else.)

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-Kaimana

PS: Make sure you go to the bathroom before starting La Chiripa, or, better yet, make sure you can take it in with you — it’s absolutely UNPUTDOWNABLE. Or so my readers and my publisher tell me.

Friends, House, and BSG on Steroids!

Katje van Loon began writing Bellica at the age of thirteen. Twelve years later–imagine how many revisions!–she is ready to launch this flagship narrative of her series of tales of Zarqon, a planet whose history is mysteriously tied to a long-ago Terran past. This first book, an action-packed adventure that is yet keenly observant of interrelationships of both love and hate between people, is set in Athering, a country run by valiant women whose male cronies and partners are the men we on earth have so longed to meet. Swashbuckling Bellica Yarrow, who fancies herself hard as nails and twice as sharp, stands at the center of this tale of a death-defying duel between the forces of light and darkness–and its remarkable ending.

Future books in the series will touch on other times and continents on Zarqon–the second volume is well underway. Here’s your chance to own a first edition of the foundation volume, signed by the young author, at a special price. When Zarquon is on re-runs on TV (or whatever it is we’ll be watching in another twenty years), you’ll be guarding this well thumbed souvenir copy from your envious friends!
La Chiripa is a Costa Rican word meaning the stroke of luck. Could be good luck; could be bad luck, but the fugitives, Alma and her daughter Pira, hang onto the little brown wooden bird that symbolises luck for them through thick and thin.
Praise for La Chiripa

“A piercing look at the psychology of the main characters, especially insightful into the mind of a Canadian pre-teen abducted by her mother. Inventive plot, language and structure make La Chiripa enjoyable on many levels. Sparkling dialogue and all-too-human vignettes bring together Japanese tourists, the peoples of Guatemala and, best of all, the sparky character of precocious Pira, on the run with her kooky mother from her estranged—and strange—father. A feat!”

—Tanis Helliwell, Decoding Your Destiny

“This, the tale of a young girl’s struggle to create meaning, is not a young girl’s book. It is a book for adults, a cautionary story about the chaos we weave and for which we must ultimately bear responsibility.

“Its heroine, Pira, is the not-so-quiet centre at the book’s heart. What to say about Pira? In describing her, I’m driven to cliché: a tough shell guarding a tender, hidden heart—a heart that can be, and is, wounded. But Pira herself is no cliché. She is, in the author’s own words, ‘Ix, the jaguar girl!’

“The plot embodies the same twists as the roads of Todos Santos, where it is impossible to guess what is coming around the next corner. Know only that the author’s sure hand will guide us through the most frightening of mountain passes. Some books have a straightforward plot that takes us decorously from beginning to end. This is not a decorous book: it twists, it turns, it flings us into the air, and cares little where we may land. But there is truth at its core. Simple, profound truth, if we take the time to discover it.

“[A]ll children must reclaim the stolen parts of their lives. The glory is that it can indeed be done. That is the lesson Pira has come to teach us.”

—Susan Young de Biagi, Cibou

“Fantastic! I’m not an avid reader but I couldn’t put it down. And I really couldn’t—I was glued to that bench in the kitchen for two days.”

—Carla Soregaroli

“I have finally finished reading La Chiripa and must say it was the best (and I do mean the best) book I have read, ever! WOW! I’m going to re-read it, again (Mom can wait her turn)—it was that good! It definitely should be a movie! Thank you so much for letting me read it! I LOVED IT! You did wonderful describing Guatemala! I felt, even though I haven’t been there, I’ve been there. Well done! I can’t wait to read the next one—I’m hungry for more reading!”

—Luis Zajac

Please attend to support your local writers and the Community Heritage Publishing Project Powell River!

If you received this email more than once, please accept our apologies and enjoy again the beautiful artwork on the cover of La Chiripa, a painting by Powell River painter Autmn Skye Morrison.

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The presentation proved as tedious and self-serving as my last visit to a church. Its only entertainment value was the barked instructions of the young lieutenant or whatever he was, dressed head to toe in traditional white and gold, to the women visitors to cover their bare flesh—Show some respect, Ladies! I stood off to the side with MJ, who was seething with teenaged fury as much over being told what to do with her body by some male as by the glorification of the American past pouring into her ears, wondering if allowing this smarmy version of history into our lives was really a good way to celebrate Spence’s birthday. Dion and Lili weren’t impressed, either—“I’m terminally bored,” as Lili put it. It was no surprise the kids opted to hang out at the hotel this morning while Spence and I ventured into the wilds of Waikiki, telling ourselves we were open to the new while really looking for the past.

He’s never let a public light shine on his life in the American navy. I am one of the few who know enough to form a picture of the skinny twenty-year-old who found himself a navigator on the USS Lexington—the first Lexington, CV2, not CV16. It was an early aircraft carrier, built for the first world war, eventually sunk by the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea. He’d signed up as soon as he’d cleaned himself up from the weeks of freight-train rides to San Francisco.

A farm kid from Missouri with no prospects during the Dirty Thirties, he’d decided to take the burden of his upbringing off his grandparents and go see the world. He said goodbye to the farm dogs and hopped a freight train one day, equipped with nothing more than youth and a yearning for something better. It didn’t take long for him to tire of his new life as a penniless hobo, nor did it take long for the US Navy to recognise his native intelligence and enroll him in more than combat training. Mensa didn’t exist in those days, the Age of the Individual not quite having dawned, and the intelligence of Spence’s brain had never been measured, but he must have show himself to be a quick study. He’d always wanted an education; so he took to navigation eagerly. Perhaps even then he anticipated how a stint in the armed forces could support him right through a PhD, should he desire it.

Those early days in San Francisco must have been exhilarating. Spence was so confident of his new life, he married somebody. Every other sailor and soldier was getting married—it was the thing to do when you had no assurance your next assignment would not be your last. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Get in there while the gettin’s good. Get a little livin’ done while you’re above ground—or, in the Navy’s case, while you’re not drowned.

Then he arrived on the Lexington, along with hundreds of men, only men, young to old, and reality hit.

The cook, noting the short, skinny new junior navigator who had so obviously never before been to sea, invited him into the kitchen for some extra gourmet goodies to fatten him up a little. Aware of knowing looks among the seasoned sailors, Spence never made the mistake of accepting the invitation a second time. Others, however, did. He claims, in fact, that the Lexington was far from sex-free—it more or less rocked its way through the waves aided and abetted by much personal motion below decks. Steering clear of these personal relationships proved a constant battle. Spence soon acquired a reputation for stand-offishness but found a new appreciation for the combat training he had initially resisted, assuming that in the Navy he would never be faced with personal combat, anyway. At the end of his training, his hands had been registered as deadly weapons, and everybody onboard knew it. His instructors had never mentioned this could come in handy against anyone but the Japanese.

For years I didn’t know why Spence goes quiet and keeps to himself each eighth of May. Especially in the evening, company is not welcome on that date. At first I thought it might have something to do with his lost marriages, but one day I came across a brief history of the Lexington:

“On the morning of the 8th, a Lexington plane located the Shōkaku group; a strike was immediately launched from the American carriers, and the Japanese carrier was heavily damaged. However, Japanese planes penetrated the American defenses at 11:00, and 20 minutes later Lexington was struck by a torpedo to port. Seconds later, a second torpedo hit her portside directly abeam the bridge. At the same time, she took three bomb hits from enemy dive bombers, producing a 7-degree list to port and several raging fires. By 13:00, skilled damage control had brought the fires under control and restored her to an even keel; making twenty-five knots, she was ready to recover her air group. Lexington was suddenly shaken by a tremendous explosion, caused by the ignition of gasoline vapors below, and again fire raged out of control.

“At 15:58, Captain Frederick Carl Sherman, fearing for the safety of men working below, halted salvage operations, and ordered all hands to the flight deck. At 17:01, he ordered "abandon ship" and the orderly disembarkation began. He contacted the Yorktown and told her the magazine had blown, salvage operations were secure and that all hands were on the flight deck, and that he gave the order to abandon ship. The Yorktown replied back, saying that they copied, and said, All vessels away; rescue parties. Many of her crew went over the side into the warm water and were almost immediately picked up by nearby cruisers and destroyers. Unfortunately, as many as three hundred men were trapped below decks and, although herculean efforts were made to save them, they remained unreachable because of the raging fires.

Captain Sherman and his executive officer, Commander Morton T. Seligman, having done all they could to save as many as possible, then left the ship. Lexington blazed on, flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air. Despite those trapped on board, to prevent enemy capture, the destroyer Phelps closed to 1,500 yards and fired two torpedoes into the Lexington’s hull. With one last heavy explosion, Lexington sank on an even keel at 19:56, May 8, 1942.”

I left the page lying open on the table when I went to bed, and found Spence reading it the next morning, coffee mug in both hands. I said, “May eighth. Every year.”

He nodded. The good eye closed its folded lid as he let his chin sink to his chest, the glass eye following suit. I persisted. “Where were you?”

“On the bridge, of course. With Sherman and Seligman. On duty, where a man’s supposed to be when he’s fighting to keep a ship afloat.” A historic sigh escaped him. “She was just too big. Too slow. Too awkward. A sitting duck. We’d taken two torpedoes and three bombs and there was more coming. Still, we might have made it if the magazine hadn’t blown. I’ll never forget the sound of that.”

“How’d you get off the ship?”

He didn’t want to answer. “I was a junior officer. I had to follow captain’s orders and get into the damned whaling boat.”

“You didn’t want to abandon ship?”

“Not like that!” Suddenly he was fierce, both eyes up and impossibly bright. “I belonged on that bridge—all the officers did!—until the last man was up on deck! Hell’s bells! Everybody knew it was game over for Lexy as soon as the magazine blew! By thirteen hours the smoke was so think even on deck that there was no hope of getting our planes back! But that stupid bastard…! He wastes four hours before giving the order to abandon ship. By that time we can’t get to some of the boats. Not that there were enough lifeboats for all of us, anyway. Men are sliding down lines to get to the water and swimming for their lives while the rest of us are fighting the fire—which we were never trained to do! Why not?” He was almost yelling. “They send over a thousand men out on the sea in a box full of explosives with no fire-fighting skills or equipment and not enough boats to carry them all? Why? I’ll tell you why! Because if she blew, we weren’t expected to survive, that’s why! We were worth something only as long as there was a ship under our feet! Cannon fodder—that’s all we ever were!”

“I don’t get how the captain could report all hands on deck.”

The sudden silence is a small bomb flung through the window of our time, now lying on the scarred table between us in its last instant of wholeness. “He lied.” The knuckles on his left hand were visibly white, gripping the coffee mug. I opened my hand and reach for the mug as if to offer a refill. It worked. His jaw relaxed along with the hand. “To get permission to abandon ship, Captain Sherman lied. The hardest step I ever took was putting a foot into that damned boat to escape the Lexy, when I knew damned well there were hundreds of men still under the deck.” He reached for his tobacco and rolling papers, patting the table and his chest pocket before remembering he doesn’t smoke any more. “And then it took those sons of bitches three hours to finish off the poor bastards. I just hope the smoke got them before they drowned.”

My eyes filled with tears, and he was not too proud to let me see the suspect wetness beneath his own eyes. “They had to do something with us leftovers; so they sent a bunch of us to the Saratoga, Lexy’s sister ship. I spent the rest of May in Honolulu and then, June 6, it was gang-busters aboard Sara for the rest of the War. The old girl survived the War. Almost a hundred thousand landings on that carrier. And you know what the sons of bitches did with her? Used her for target practice for an A-bomb test, nineteen forty-six. Sara’s lying in a radioactive watery grave just off Bikini atoll.” He smoked his non-existent cigarette. “And people wonder why I left that godforsaken country!”

“The Navy ruined me,” Spence sometimes says. He doesn’t apportion the ruin to the cook of the Lexington, the registration of his hands, or the events in the Coral Sea. All of it played a part in shaping my beloved, who believes himself a lesser man than he might have become.

“Some ruin,” I reply. We smile at the little joke. Some chicken…some neck, as Churchill famously said of England. Both England and Spence proved tough old birds.

Revisiting Honolulu is not so easy as it sounds. I felt him stiffen as the guide at the Arizona memorial unspooled a politically correct spiel of America’s war history and could swear I heard him mutter something like, “Half a century of bullshit.”

1. Hard work is good–for its own sake. Hard work may not result in money to you, but it can be fun. When you reach the point in life where you look back on what you accomplished, the highlights are often those hard-work times.

2. Get an education. Borrowing for education is legitimate. Borrowing to buy essentials like food or rent, however, is the last step to ruin. Borrowing to buy luxuries is plain insane. Borrowing to invest is for experts–don’t try this at home unless you’ve put in your 10,000 hours to become an expert, in which case you already have an education.

3. Credit cards are the instrument of the devil. ‘Nuff said.

4. The credit industry is really a debt industry and a population-control device. Don’t play the game.

5. Most jobs are slavery. They eat your days and your health but seldom further your goals except with the gifts of experience and insight. A job may be worth that–but only for a while. Never pay for a job with your self-esteem.

6. Assume you will be unemployable at some point, even many points. Prepare to be self-employed. This is why you want to be a professional of some kind.

7. Your goal is to move from selling your time to selling product. There will be times when you need your hours for other things, like getting well or raising children. That’s when you need to be selling product.

8. Marriage is potentially the worst deal you’ll ever make. No matter how well you think you know him, your husband could turn out to be your slave-master or your sycophant. Before you marry or even live together, put your assets into some kind of trust and NEVER use them for a family purpose–or are you not serious about surviving a divorce? Marry broke and keep your assets clear of the marriage unless you like the idea of your elderly head on a stone pillow.

9. Having children is a ruinous idea but also the most satisfying thing you’ll ever do. Try to build up assets beforehand so that you can be an independent parent if need be–at least have a home in your name you can pay for. If you become a financially vulnerable parent, that is a time to use tools like insurance for protection.

10. At all times, have a will written by a lawyer expert in the field.

11. Assume the currency with which you live will not hold its value forever. Assume you could be reduced to living off the land somewhere and invest in land accordingly.

12. Learn the law, especially property law. Knowledge is power in this field as nowhere else.

13. Be as beautiful as possible (and that means healthy, too!). Youth and beauty are capital that seldom lasts long. One day it will dawn on you that the reason your offers and invitations to do business have declined is that you are no longer an object of desire to the people who still run the planet, or think they do–men.

14. Expect rape and pillage. Remember you are a life-long target for people who can’t make it on their own. Packs of marauders roam the planet looking for trusting chumps. If you appear well off or are obviously insured (lawyers, doctors, etc), this is especially true. Be wary. That way you can be pleasantly surprised on finding a few trustworthy people.

15. Diversify your holdings, but keep to basic values–land, gold, essentials for life.

16. The Western economic system is a house of cards full of poisonous gases–don’t get caught inside when the thing blows up. Always have an escape route in the form of a second citizenship, second viable home, and enough money to get there. Be at least two people.

17. Remember that every time you buy something not strictly needed, you contribute to pollution by prosperity. Why burden your life with the useless, the ugly, the expendable, the redundant, the extravagant? Do yourself and the planet a favor–forego the mountains of crap for sale on the poor old Earth’s crust.

18. Neither a miser nor a spendthrift be. Society despises both. Don’t hang onto your money to become rich–that doesn’t work–but don’t throw it away on buying friendship, either.

19. Hold to your grandmother’s rule for prosperity: First do the things that make money; then do the things that save money; then do everything else.

20. Pay it forward. Practise generosity while you can.

Congratulations on your first degree from the School of Hard Knocks. Onward now to the PHD (Piled Higher and Deeper)! Go forth and BE A SOVEREIGN WOMAN!

Love,
Dr. Mom

It was a heart-breaking case. The kid had been sick for years and doctors had prescribed a transplant. The issue that seemed central was the child’s right, at 16, to decide on her medical care. Socially, it looked like a battle between well-meaning parents bent on natural treatments and doctors bent on the miracles of surgery. Legally, it revealed a black truth whose revelation surely contributes to the death of idealism in lawyers: our government in paying lip service to the needs and rights of children is really most concerned with saving face. Covering its ass. If something is going to go wrong, make it the fault of parents or lawyers or doctors–not the government.

As more and more of our youth develop cancers in an increasingly toxic environment, these dreadful scenarios take place on stages still cluttered with the outmoded yet terrifying scenery of the legal rights and duties of competing professions, businesses and administrations, while before our eyes children sicken and die. The junk of western civilisation plays no small part in preventing good health.

I was so upset, I wrote a story. You may conclude, on reading it, that anyone so naive as I would have done better to avoid becoming a lawyer (or perhaps that lawyers shouldn’t write stories). Going over it today, I feel the tears pricking my eyelids again. I still believe in informed consent, for children as for anyone–the hard part is getting there with clarity and truth, love and compassion. Informed consent entails the practice of rigorous selflessness by all concerned, other than the patient.

Chrysanthemums always remind me of that.

Here is Fireworks.

“Can you get me out of here for the fireworks?” The kid interrupted my lawyer-ese in her thinned voice, throwing back the blue hospital blankets in bravado. I saw the pencil legs, a tarnished brown, and the unused bird-claw feet.

Hers was the kind of bated-breath request my eight-year-old made. Not what I expected from the blistered mouth of this yellow scrawn of a girl. “The Symphony of Fire?”

She batted oversized owl eyes and clumsily tossed the lank long hair, in denial of the stiffness I knew was spreading from her petrified liver up through the right shoulder, down through a spleen now eight times normal size. I knew, because I’d seen the catscans. “With my parents, you know? And my brothers, of course.” She issued a mock groan, the kind teenaged girls are obliged to make at the mere thought of pesky brothers.

“You sure know how to pitch ‘em, don’t you?” I smiled my best kind-eyes-even-though-I’m-a-horrible-lawyer squinch. Those hard-earned etchings around my eyes usually buy me a lot of client confidence. “Let me think about it.”

How did I get into this case? Was it my membership on that interminable right-to-die committee that got me into this mess with Jenna? Or maybe a mild reputation for shaking up the Family and Child Services Act so thoroughly that its sections rattled like the vertebrae in a dead snake? Snake is what I’d call that Act, in the improbable event that statutes would ever be symbolised by appropriate animals. The FCSA was, I submit, evidently put together by reptilian intelligence. And is equally dangerous in its cold-blooded slither through family life. Okay, don’t get me going on that one.

A self-styled child-advocate had called me about Jenna. There’s this sixteen-year-old, she’d said, got grabbed by the Superintendent in the hospital and the parents want to get her a lawyer of her own.

Oh, oh. This one smelled too close to real life. What’s the matter? I’d snapped. It was long, grey Friday afternoon. Trouble always creeps into lawyers’ offices late on Fridays. Haven’t you told them they’ve already paid for a child advocate with their taxes?

They don’t trust that lawyer, Jessie had explained. Anyway, he’s in Victoria, and the kid’s here, so what good is that? And everybody knows he’s the Supe’s man—been on every other one of these cases.

One of these cases? How many times does apprehension happen in the hospital? What have these parents done wrong, anyway, besides wait till the kid is old enough to fall under the Health Act? Are they Johos or something?

Jessie had said smugly, I told them you were the one. And hey, there could be good press in it for you. Inadvertently, of course. And money. The parents have got five grand tucked away for this.

Five grand, shmand—this sounds like a salary job. I’d sighed. My partner will kill me. I get to see the kid first, I’d insisted. Alone. Then I’ll decide.

I found the car keys inside my empty cappuccino-to-go cup, rinsed them, grabbed a get-well card from the wills vault, and swiped my secretary’s Happy-Birthday pot of chrysanthemums from Reception on my stride out. Twenty minutes later I faced the most desperate and drawn couple in the world, across a stolid table in the hospital boardroom. They shoved a photo in my face, proof of good parenting: four rosy boys clustering around a yellowed young girl. A bouquet of offspring, one stem too short to reach the water. Jenna merely hung on her brothers’ shoulders.

I began: I honor you for hiring your daughter her own advocate. Noble parenting. But I warn you, once I’m on for her, even though you’re paying me, I’m hers, not yours. And you might not like it. They nodded, mute, securely wrapped in their family’s seamless fabric. Jenna had been sick for eight years. To them, each day with her was a blade of grass, visibly greener than yesterday. She had been flourishing, they insisted, under their naturopathic regimen. She didn’t need this prescribed transplant at all. She had the right to try a naturopathic cure first; they wanted to try that place in Mexico that cures cancer. The government had no right….

I left them in that barren room to see Jenna for myself, musing over how the law had inveigled itself into the business of medicine. Illness is a pestilential wind, a stench of past and future strong enough to knock me, my LLB and my stupid flowers over. Jenna was so wilted, so close to her ultimate day, I thought, that I could see her initials carved in death’s door. “Your parents think I should be your lawyer,” I said, taming the riot of yellow and crimson in its pot, propping up my card. “The Chinese make tea out of these things, you know? Supposed to promote long life.” I’d stolen these blooms at their best: buds had burst into showers of transparent blood or fierce gold. “So, whaddya think about having a lawyer?”

That was when she requested the fireworks. Was she embracing life? Accepting death? Or attempting escape? “You know,” I ventured, “every year they have the Symphony of Fire, I think of it as an honor to the Chinese.” I paused. Miraculously, I had her interest. “About eight hundred years ago the Chinese invented gunpowder. And they made a conscious decision, as a society, to use it for fun, not for war. Isn’t that an amazing choice?” It was my second use of the word ‘honor’ since entering the hospital. As if I’d stepped over a hallowed sill, as if Jenna were a holy child, I had removed my legal mindset like a hat in church.

“You sound like my teacher,” she complained.

“Maybe you’ll be mine,” I let the summer sun show her the lines bracketing my eyes. I snapped off one blazing red-petaled star and handed it to her. “Tell me what you want.”

Four hours later I called Ken. Dr. Sawyer. How would you like to get outside that sticky little wonder clinic of yours into the sunshine?

In a pallid, stale consult room at the top of the aging hospital, a rundown prayer chapel off the main sanctuary of illness, Ken thumped an air-conditioner ineffectually and I cracked an illicit window open as we waited to meet with the famous transplant surgeon. The parents are naturo nuts, I told Ken. Think you guys walk on water. Want to give the kid every chance at natural healing before a transplant. Think she’s been doing fine, so far. The government doesn’t agree; thinks the parents are out to lunch, so they grabbed her. Problem, though–she’s sixteen and maybe can have her own say, according to the wonderful laws of this province.

What do you think I can do? said Ken. He has a quiet way about him, often preceding a velvet-gloved hammer blow into what you’ll be thinking by the middle of next week.

I shrugged; motioned him down the hall to Jenna’s room. He tiptoed past her open door, caught her yellow-petal face, returned like a failed gardener with a blighted prize. I can’t fix that, he said. Tell me, does she want to live?

I don’t know. Jenna was shaking my certainties, particularly the belief that my own child could grow up whole and safe, corroding the notion that my happily harried lawyer-life would go on like this, forever. The pale amber stem of her, laid across the bed like an autumn rose, the eyes following the sun on the last phase of its splendid journey rather than my speaking face—I couldn’t shake the conviction that this sick child knew the brevity of her fate. And my job, I added, is to see that she gets the chance to figure out how much she wants to live. As opposed to being the obedient daughter, you know?

“Who the hell do you think you are!” Dr. Stanwyck burst in. “That kid is going to have the next liver I get my hands on and no goddamned legal loopholes are going to stop me!”

“We certainly hope not,” said Ken, quietly extending a large hand. “Dr. Sawyer. I’m a naturopath.”

“Oh, great!” snarled Stanwyck. “Listen, this kid has already got a lawyer and all the real doctors she needs—”

“Who can’t deliver a compliant patient,” inserted Ken.

Stanwyck was not used to being interrupted. I leapt into his unaccustomed pause. “Relax. We’re on your side, personally. It would be great if we could get Jenna to informed consent. Maybe we will and maybe we won’t. But we’ll never get there if you don’t call off the pressure on this kid. And you can’t do the transplant unless your patient wants it—heart and soul. Right?” I had him there, I saw it. “I’m bringing in a psychologist. Every day. Get your nurses to work with us. We’re not the enemy.” Suddenly I was inspired. “Disease and despair are the only enemies,” I finished, and knew he was mine.

Just in time, too. “I’m Cyrus Asper!” The door banged open and a sidewinding hand struck at mine. His hair fell in scales, every which way, doubtless from the helicopter wash. “I’m Jenna’s lawyer, and I’d like to know who you think you’re representing.”

“Whom,” I reproved mildly, though he probably wasn’t in the mood for grammar. I tried a firm handshake but he slid away all but two fingers.

“The Superintendent won’t back down on this one! That child will have a transplant, now! We’ve all heard of the best interests of the child, no doubt, Ms. uh, I missed your name? You don’t practise much in this field, do you?”

“Glad to know you’re on our team.” I twisted a smile to match his hiss, and fended off that adversarial cobra stare with what I hoped was a look of fearless authority.

It didn’t quite work, but Asper had expended most of his venom in the first two minutes. He was retreating to Victoria on the next ‘copter, anyway. Stanwyck astonished his staff at the huge consult meeting by decreeing a ten-day delay in Jenna’s transplant, and our fledgling team was on its way.

Ken, Anna the psychologist, and I virtually lived in the hospital. Day by day the nurses smiled at us more tenderly, now relieved of exercising their sweet coercion—Jenna, have the transplant, never mind your parents, for your own good—like weary proselytes unexpectedly supplanted by angels. The parents smiled, grateful for the extra time with Jenna I’d wrangled for them, and for treatment from a doctor in their own style. Asper called from Victoria every few days; the head nurse spoke tersely to him. Jenna’s blood counts strengthened, and together with Stanwyck Ken and I meditated on her terrifying CATscan with growing optimism, with fierce irreligious prayers.

We all knew time was excruciatingly of the essence. When, on the ninth day, Jenna spontaneously told Ken she wanted the transplant, we rushed Stanwyck, joy bursting over us. Yet I deemed us not quite there, not at the state of grace the law calls Informed Consent, not quite confident of Jenna’s grasp of consequences, of the risks of either the transplant or the Mexican clinic where her parents were eager to take her first. “Wait,” I decided. “Anna needs another day or two to get the right evidence. After the fireworks.”

My apartment happens to face the Symphony of Fire, and I have one of my annual little parties during that season, however hectic my life. I took half of Sunday off from the grind at the hospital to throw some party food together, and at ten my guests and I floated out into the silken August night, for a closer view from the beach. My feet drew us all to the wheelchair area. Ken grabbed my arm. “Jenna!” he whispered sharply. And there she was, enthroned in the dark, attended by parents and brothers, all smiling, stroking her gently. A nurse stood behind her chair as chaperone, as I had arranged. Covertly we studied Jenna, reflecting her reactions to the chrysanthemums of fire bursting above her, loving her translucent face, vivid with a tender glow she could no longer have summoned from her own body. Tonight, Jenna was happy.

I shook off a stupid tear and squeezed Ken’s arm. “It is a far, far better thing that we have done,” I quipped, “than we have ever billed for.” He laughed. We both knew we were long out of funds for this case, and we both knew neither could quit.

I slept off the party and didn’t arrive at the hospital until eleven. Slurping my cappuccino, fumbling a sleep-slow arm around a fresh pot of chrysanthemums, I smiled my usual way down Jenna’s hallway.

Something was wrong. The place felt like a robbed church. Where nobody wanted to be the first to tell the priest.

Jesus, had Jenna died? Panicking, I suddenly ran the last meters, high heels clacking, and collided with Dr. Stanwyck in Jenna’s doorway. The flowerpot burst between us, a geyser of dirt and blood-red petals.

He didn’t stop. “Goddamn you!” he yelled. “Goddamn all you bloodsucking gutless lawyers!” I saw tears. I swear I saw tears as he flung away.

My white shirt and black court suit were rank with coffee, dirt, and plant lymph. Gingerly I stepped over the mess of my offering, into Jenna’s room. The bed stood strict and empty; the tables and sills forlorn of her stuffed animals, her girl stuff. Even my first pot of chrysanthemums was gone, as if our intensity had been my dream alone. His back a slightly swaying monolith of satisfaction, Asper stood looking out the window.

“Where is she?”

His padded shoulders shifted in a minimalist shrug. “Out of the country by now, I imagine.” He uncoiled and smiled winningly, but I ducked my head and bent my attention to cleaning up my dying plant and its scattered habitat, hiding my scalded face. Lawyers don’t cry.

“The best interests of the child demanded her custody be returned to the parents, once it was clear that she was ready to make her own decision. Agreed? I really have to thank you for getting her to that point, you know. Anyway,” he added in afterthought, “it wouldn’t be in the best interests of children generally for parents to sue just because their children happened to die while in the Superintendent’s hands, now, would it?”

Squatting, I swathed dirt into the pot with my left hand, tears falling in with soil, watering a plant that would never grow again. My right hand garnered red petals, still soft and yielding as flesh. He continued, “It was you who said the parents would sue if we did the transplant, wasn’t it?”

I stood up to his impeccable neatness, the implacable, fearsome logic of that elegant face. This was his chief joy, this joy of winning. I said, “We must shake on this. Congratulations!”

I grasped his unwilling hand, crushing red petals, while my left hand emptied the plant pot over his tidy widow’s peak, so soon to be airborne again to Victoria, seat of good government and near-perfect parenting.

Uncomprehendingly he stared through small rains of dirt from his pate at the crimson spillage. “Blood on your hands,” I said. And left.

Anna called my office a week later. “Dr. Juarez called. From Mexico.”

I shuddered with hope.

“Jenna died.”

My mail blurred abruptly. “Tell me.”

“She seemed to improve for a while,” Anna said. “Then suddenly she threw up a geyser of blood. Her parents were frightened, but she laughed. Fooled you, didn’t I? Then fountains of fresh blood, and she just…died.” She paused. “Like fireworks, he said.”

The flowers of war, whispered a voice, something like mine. Those were the flowers of Jenna’s war.

Put down the phone. Get back to work. The work I’m not so crazy about any more, but this is a law office, not a crying room.

There was enough room on my tape for a short memo to our Admininstrator: “Next time it’s somebody’s birthday, can we get out of the rut with the flowers? Chrysanthemums don’t…work for me. Try anything else. Thanks.”

Normally, I like my birthday. It was always the last or second-last day of school, which meant it came with a built-in sense of joy and release for all participants but not quite too late in the year to secure an adequate number of guests for a party. As the possibility of partying became occluded with adult issues, like sick elders, kids’ graduations, or transitions like moving and traveling, I salvaged that day as Mine, All Mine–one day a year to spend as it pleases me and no one else. On the whole, people respond favorably to that claim–after all, who doesn’t need at least one day a year to please oneself?

Thus the past couple of dozen personal anniversaries have compensated for lack of festivity by being Splendidly Useful, days at whose ends I am once again on the right side of that adage, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Along with a generous snort of a precious liqueur like Mangalore or Ginger of the Indies at the close of My Day, I take a deep breath of courage for the next year, grateful for another chance to become who I ought to be. The Dutch housekeeper in me is mollified once more. Birthdays have become worth-days.

The last day of my sixty-third year could be an ugly-wugly one. It could, for that matter, be the last one. There lies my life, waiting to be Examined by the ultrasound of my intuition, blinking back tears of dread as it senses the look on my face while I wield the new and improved version of that instrument.

Last year’s cancer tinkered with my intuition machinery, showing me many more layers of knowing than I had guessed existed in the human psyche. What a shock to realise that the organism already knows everything! You are your own Ouija Board–ask only the questions whose answers you can face.

Maybe I mis-read the expression on the face of that ultrasound technician. On the other hand, she didn’t respond to my question about whether she was looking at the pancreas (Pancreatic cancer, I gather, is almost as quick a final solution as a firing squad). And then she decided to “do” the kidneys.

Oh, scheize…. The kids start howling the minute she asks me to turn onto one side. The pain is only a faint echo of what they endured during their ugly time, the years of domestic terror when Rescue Remedy must never be out of reach. That unique pain would kick me in the back so hard, I’d have to pull over, administer the RR, and just wait and breathe until my vision was no longer red-limned and the ears no longer crackled like a forest fire.

Engraved especially deep and red in memory is a night when I found myself driving frantically out to our home in the woods to rescue my ten-year-old. In those days I had a cellphone, which had rung in the middle of a rare occasion–dinner with a friend. “Come get your effing brat!” snarled the voice I’d married. “I’ve put her on the road with her effing toys!” Somehow the child had aroused the irrational in him and he was punishing her by dumping her and her equivalent of a security blanket on our unlit street in the forested village where we had chosen executive living on one of its half-acre lots. Anything could happen to her there, most of it bad. Instantly abandoning the idea of dinner, I persuaded my friend to come along for protection–in a previous incident, my husband had disabled my car, forcing the child and me to hide out with neighbors until the police arrived. He had a gun, you see. Several of them. And it was his habit to honor the laws about firearms more by breach than observance.

Small wonder the kidneys screamed as the adrenaline hit. My friend gaped as I crumpled behind the wheel and slewed the car to a stop. I gave him the wheel and my kidneys the RR. We completed that mission, successfully transporting a tear-stained little girl to safety.

Kidneys, I was coming to understand, are the seat of fear. And fear, if it becomes as big a part of a patient’s weltanschauung as it then was of mine, is fibromyalgia-genic. In my several studies of fibromyalgia (FM), I discovered that the element all the patients I interviewed had in common was a triggering event involving adrenaline, the body’s response to fight-or-flight situations. Most had had years and years of fight-or-flight life before the triggering event knocked them into FM. I noticed–and still notice–that my own organism habitually and instantly responds to fearsome situations with adrenaline, kidney pain and, if the fearsomeness continues, with renewed FMS symptoms.

Once a crisis junkie, always a crisis junkie, it seems. The organism has developed habits almost impossible to break. This goes a long way to explaining why, as an excellent naturopath friend once mused, “I can cure chronic fatigue, but not fibromyalgia.”

My theory of causation of FM became simply this: adrenaline poisoning–or at least adrenaline habituation. Damned hard on the kidneys, no doubt.

Might fear not also be carcinogenic, slyly suggests my new and improved intuition? If a couple of decades of second-hand smoke, a few years of exposure to asbestos’ “fairy dust”, or fifteen minutes at Fukushima can start cancer, why not a decade of domestic terror?

It can’t be easy for the ultrasound techs. Every patient wants to know the answer to the burning question right away: Do I have cancer again? And which organ is under the gun this time? Or–heaven forbid–organs?

After all, if somebody somewhere down the line didn’t suspect more cancer, why send me on a ferry trip all the way to this dinky hospital for an ultrasound?

There’s a sign on the wall begging patients not to ask the techs for results but to wait for the Word from their doctors. I confine myself to asking when results will arrive at the desk of one of my docs. Well, the specialist is in Turkey for the summer and my sweet young familyl doctor, when I asked her what she was telling those of her patients concerned about radiation exposure nowadays, said, “What radiation?”

A week. A week in which to worry, or to train myself not to worry. A week in which I’ll enter a new year, willy nilly, via a birthday that, at best, is not a pretty site [sic].

Any worth-day should involve the unwrapping of presents, however, and here we come to the Good and the Bad. In the interests of Feeling Useful, which is a healthy thing, it seems I have a new toy to share with you. A tool to help us live the Examined Life. Here goes.

There are lists online of the ten best foods and the ten worst foods wth respect to cancer. Now of course food alone does not determine whether cancer happens. The point is, food is a factor you can more or less control, unlike stuff in the air, water, earth and politics of the planet. This tool measures my level of control.

Let’s look at the ten worst foods first, because when people are asked whether they want to hear the good news of the bad news first, bad news always wins. Give yourself minus one point if you seldom ingest each category, minus two points if you sometimes eat this stuff, or minus three points if you need a fix of the stuff every day. If you never eat it, award yourself a zero. The biggest score you can get is -30.
These are the baddies:
1. charred food
2. red meat
3. sugar
4. salted, smoked, and pickled foods
5. sodas or soft drinks
6. french fries or fried chips
7. food additives, like aspertame
8. alcohol > 2 drinks/day
9. baked goods
10. farmed fish

My score is -9. A year ago it would have been in the minus-12-to-14 range. But we’re not finished scoring. This time, give yourself plus one for sometimes eaten, two points for often eaten, or three for near-daily or more. The best possible score is 30.

Here are the goodies:
1. cruciferous veggies like Brussels sprouts, bok choy, cabbage, cauliflower, kale and broccoli, and darkly colored veggies like spinach, romaine, beets, red cabbage
2. pink-colored foods like shrimp, salmon, and certain veggies for the astaxanthin
3. artichokes (salvestrol)
4. grapes or red wine (resveratrol)
5. legumes like peas, beans, lentils (saponins and protease inhibitors)
6.berries, especially blueberries (ellagic acid and anthocyanosides)
7. flaxseed (alpha-linoleic acid)
8. garlic, onions, scallions, leeks, or chives (allicin)
9. green tea (catechins)
10 tomatoes (lycopene)

My score is 20. Last year it might have been about 15. So, I’m improving. Yet, subtract the baddies score from the goodies and the answer is, well, at least positive–6. Now all I have to do is remind myself that I can raise the score 24 points by changing what I eat, thereby giving this theory of cancer-preventing foods a good run. Certainly I’ll be healthier, little doubt of that.

Pretty good Worth Day after all. My cake is going to be salmon-and-veggies quiche with tiny little baked beets for decoration! Libations of cab sauvignon with green-tea chasers all around! Eat hearty, everyone!

Delightful as it might have been to bump our way straight back to Las Penitas after my survival of the El Cerro Negro torture test and sink, battered and bruised, into a sling chair with a cold one in hand, the stockings hung up on the beach chair with care and all that, Lenin the Superguide was not about to fall short on providing us with every last possible Christmas Eve adventure.

Out of the gate of the national park we bumped. Just as I heaved a sigh of relief at the thought of the “repaired road” giving way to something more navigable, Chinto took a sharp left onto another soft dirt road, boogying along at 60 kph or more where I would have been hesitant to gallop a horse or stand on the pedals of a bike.

Have you ever dreamed of going back in time to sail a Spanish galleon across the Atlantic? Tame wild horses of the American West? Chase Moby Dick? Hunt buffalo over the jump? Those experiences can be yours in Nicaragua if you merely shut your eyes as you take a trip in a four-by-four on secondary and tertiary roads a few weeks after the rainy season ends—but waves and earth seem to have turned to concrete! The ruts and rocks and branches are reality bites much harder than you could have imagined!

We lurched to a stop just feet short of a broken oxcart. The front shaft had snapped and the cart had keeled over, spreading thousands of cobs of the original red, black and gold American corn all over the road. The farmer had already hitched the longsuffering oxen to the other end of the cart, with a view to pulling it free of its heavy load and righting it. A woman stood alongside, doubtless thinking how late dinner was sure to be. We offered help, and I could envision flinging corn cobs across the earth’s surface for the rest of the afternoon. These hardworking people didn’t need us, however, and directed us to an alternate route.

I understood perhaps half of what the farmer said in his directions, enough to fill up my already shaky body with dread. A sensible person would, of course, have switched to horseback, but we were not sensible. So I hung myself up in the vehicle at 45 degrees for an hour or more, first one way and then another, using the grab bars with all my strength while thinking kindly on my travel companions who had to manage their unwieldy sacks of muscle and bone and water around the beltless, benchless back of the van.

Chinto, I decided, was a very smart boy. I would give him a tip for his efforts, perhaps C20 (95 cents).

We came to a wallow with meter-deep squiggles delineating its boundaries. Chinto was brilliant, choosing exactly the route that I, the ancient Yukoner, would have opted for. He definitely deserved that tip, a cincuenta (C50, or $2.50) if I had one on me.

Then there appeared The Place of the Rock, Gully and Tree. No longer feeling chatty, I did not tell my companions that this spot reminded me of nothing so much as a certain bridge my old Jimmy once encountered on the way to the long abandoned American airbase of Aishihik, Yukon. That bridge, a handmade wooden construction over a fifteen-foot creek gully, was missing the last fifth of itself. The correct—and only possible—technique in that case had consisted of driving onto the bridge, carefully exiting my truck, edging along its side to the back of the vehicle, dragging the first fifth of the bridge alongside the truck to its front while side-stepping carefully all the way to a point even with the front bumper, situating Bridge Portion #1 in front of the truck more or less reliably as BP #5, and gunning the bitch while urging her in full voice to leap across the remaining gap, giving one’s feet their head on the pedals to help her chew her way up the chest-high embankment. What a good truck! And then, of course, on the way back, one had to do the same, in reverse.

The Rock, Gully and Tree situation seemed even more complicated, all three items seeming immovable. Moot point: in seconds, we were truly stuck, anyway. Suggestions in Spanish came from the back of the van, and I suggested lightening the chariot of the passengers, but Chinto simply applied the Chretien philosophy of running a country: “First you rock it forward; then back; forward; then back; get a leetle poosh, and pretty soon you’re on the road again.” I was quite prepared to get out and poosh, something I used to be good at, but it proved unnecessary. Chinto gave his feet and hands their head, and somehow the truck yearned and churned its way free.

I decided Chinto was a bloody genius. He was worth a tip of at least C100.

Just before I expired, we arrived at national-park location #2,and the “short walk” to the lagoon where we were to enjoy lunch and a refreshing swim.

I held up my trusty flop-flops, a.k.a. slippahs, Hawai’i’s national footwear. Lenin shook his head. Nugatory. They would not do. Sadly, I pulled on the crunchy sox, the desperately dirty shoes. Their pretty pink and rose Velcro ties were not enthused about coping with the grains of lava interfering with their competence but I managed to jess them on. The idea of a lagoon, the holy grail of fresh-water cleanliness, pulled me out of the truck, clutching a towel and bathing suit in anticipation.

This path proved easier than El Cerro Negro’s. You know what ninety degrees looks like? Straight up and down? Where El Cerro Negro seems just a tad less than straight up and down—whatever the posters say!—this path to the lagoon varied from halfway to straight up and down (45 degrees) and 60 degrees (2/3 of straight up and down). Ol’ Shaky Legs, here, was concentrating every remaining erg of energy on refusing the many invitations from rocks to step on them and re-experience the joy of sliding downhill.

My wrists were yelling, “You stupid bitch! You’ve broken us twice before doing this!” I told them to shut up and shoved them into my pockets so it would take longer before they threw their martyr selves out to “support” me if a fall did happen.

It did, my weight proving unequal to the task of cushioning the fall. I landed on a rock and have a purple grapefruit on the butt to prove it. The wrists, however, never made it out of the pockets in time to be part of the disaster. There was nothing to do but pick my sorry body up and continue.

There might be six humans on the face of this planet who would term the descent to the lagoon far below “a short, pleasant walk” but I have not met them. Me, I just kept muttering how much easier going up would be.

The lagoon lay still and cool under a fabulous view of volcanoes Momotombo and Telica rising above the jungle. Lenin had brought snorkel gear and plunged into the lake as soon as he had exhorted Sandy and me for the third time to be very, very careful, as the lagoon had a sudden drop-off just a few meters in. Evidently neither Sandy nor I had impressed him with our physical competence.

I hadn’t the slightest intention of easing his discomfort by telling him I had begun my illustrious teaching career by convincing adults terrified of water to stick their heads under the surface of a swimming pool.

Tentatively removing an eager foot from the hot, graveled shoe, I placed it on the mud nearest the water. Ant’s nest! Not quite so hot as fire ants, but oh! how they make you hop! I retreated to a rock, there being not a single seat or table or bench in this national-park rest stop, to consider the important question before me—how to change into a bathing suit in the wild, surrounded by three guys, knowing that in the nude you most closely resemble a brochette of Swedish meatballs, until you manage, on shaky hypoglycemic pins with no so much support as a table or tree, to don the Magic Bathing Suit that Forgiveth All Iniquities?

Every cubic centimeter of me longed for that water, but I couldn’t figure out how to get out of my long pants and into the Suit without breaching manners and modesty.

Someone fancying himself an arborist had decapitated trees at the seven-foot level, leaving them two leaves each to gather sunlight with. Salvation! I struggled out of the filthy pants while seated on the rock and then hung it and everything else on the nearest remnant of tree, after examining it for ants. Then I walked sockless in the gravelly shoes to the edge of the water, and stepped into the lagoon with bare feet.

Another good reason to wear plain back undies—they easily double as swimwear.

Lenin returned from his snorkel and seemed surprised that his client who had proven inept at flying or walking could definitely swim. Sandy and I had been treading water and comparing masters’ degrees and opinions on economics and ecology for some time, and Lenin jumped in with information about Nicaraguan species in trouble. Although his master’s degree is in herpetology, he mentioned manatees early on, which is doubtless the water mammal I most resemble. Those gentle creatures, like anything else in Nicaragua that stands still long enough, are in danger of being gobbled up by humans. Sadly, the prevailing philosophy Lenin—and others—report goes like this: If it moves, kill it and if we can’t eat it we’ll sell it. Eco-education is a slow business in a country where literacy is as low as corruption is high.

There we hung in the delicious water, three highly educated people from India, Europe/Canada and Central America, vaguely depicting the triangular map of Nicaragua as we enacted another few lines in the Great Conversation on Earth’s future. In the old-fashioned quiet of birdsong and insect-hum, long missing from my own country, I fancied I heard whispers and echoes of that Conversation from across the planet. Would that everyone could have this kind of education!

Tourism bad; traveling good.

I seemed more sure of foot on the path upwards, although I had to stop three times to catch my breath, each time rewarded with spectacular views. Lenin stopped too; I noticed he was equally out of breath. “This is good for me,” I said.

“Me, too,” he said. That startled me a little. After all, he does this trip four times a week. Maybe, like many Nicaraguans a little better off than most, he smoked.

Mercifully we did not have to return to the highway by way of Rock, Tree, and Gully Road. The lagoon was close to Leon Viejo, Old Leon. On this pleasant sot with its marvelous view of the whole chain of five volcanoes, the Spaniards started their city in 1524. They build first with cane, then mud, and finally in brick and stone. Surprise, surprise! Whammo! A volcano blew, big-time, in 1617, just as the place was really getting going, and they left, lock, stock, and casks of gold, to rebuild on the present site of Leon. For 250 years Leon Viejo lay forgotten under layers of ash, until rediscovered as a historic treasure in 1967. Lots of cruelty took place in the square where we so peacefully strolled through history. Possibly the best story is about Nasty Guy #1, who decapitated Nasty Guy #2, then the Big Cheese, and took over as the next Big Cheese. #1 died of syphilis at age 93. So what do historians find buried under the church? A headless skeleton lying right next to one whose remains proved syphilitic—friends at last!

Poetic justice will get you in the end.

What got me at the end of the day was my first experience of a quesillo and a drink of chiste. We stopped at a local eatery, dirt and tile floor and everyone dressed in checkered blue-and-white headgear and apron. To make a quesillo, you lay a thin slab of local cheese atop a tortilla; then roll it and stuff it end first into a sandwich baggie; then ladle a generous portion of liquid cheese into the center and hand it to the unsuspecting customer, who may then add as much chile or salsa picante as desired. Chiste is a cold drink made from corn, cane, or both—I couldn’t find out—served in a gourd stabilized in a wooden or bamboo ring—very pleasant but a bit too sweet for sugar-loathing me. The quesillo is the real challenge. First, peel back the baggie so that you don’t ingest plastic. Your first five bites consist of just the taco and the first cheese, since all the liquid has pooled in the bottom of the baggie. “Now what?” I asked Lenin once the taco had gone down the hatch. Aha. The technique nicaraguense. Twist the empty end of the baggie around and around and then tie it in a knot. If your knot is not tight enough, you will be a mess, guaranteed. Now up-end the baggie and tear off a corner of what was its bottom. Again, be careful not to eat the plastic. Now just suck the baggie empty! (This is the moment when you wish you had used either more or less salsa.) If you were a tidy baby before weaning, you’ll stay relatively clean. If not, well, the local dogs will want to kiss you and your clothes.

Wendy, the Singing Dog at my hotel, would probably have kissed me anyway.

I think I slept twelve hours. My last thoughts dwelled on the poetic justice of putting my impaired sense of balance through the tests of the day, and the possibility that the old body would get the message, straighten up and fly right again at last.

What’s the perfect Christmas gift for someone who has lately been saved from cancer (not to mention the fact that she also lost her mother and a beloved dog in the same year)?

Isn’t it obvious? A trip to the lip of an active volcano in the tropics, complete with opportunity to sandboard down the mountain, swim in a volcanic lagoon, and view with her own eyes the remains of the wacky history of said tropical locale! Oh, yes, topped off with healthy snacks and a local specialty guaranteed to turn the tidiest guest into an unspeakable mess. The Full Nicaragua.

You will have guessed, correctly, that the wise old lady I have become asked all the right questions before deciding Christmas Eve would be the perfect time to conquer Cerro Negro, a black cinder cone some 400 meters above the plain which birthed it. Never having regained my pinnacle of muscular youthful perfection after a broken a leg twenty years earlier, and finding myself still waddling carefully around the many irregularities of colonial streets and devil-may-care beach towns so as not to bonk my bean or fall and break a wrist again, my extra poundage announcing my arrival six inches in advance, I did not allow visions of clearing volcanoes in a single bound to cloud my judgment. I wanted the easiest of the many volcano tours available in this steaming, rock-pimpled land, and that was Cerro Negro. You walk up, you walk around, and then you have a choice of taking a sandboard back down in just a few minutes, or walking down, which takes a little longer.

The entire volcano trip takes about three hours. How much trouble can you get into on a guided tour of only 180 minutes? After all, as an ex-Hawaiian I am well versed in lava, volcanoes, calderas, fumaroles, sulphur fumes, and what not to do around volcanoes. Besides, I had bought a small painting of Cerro Negro in all its fiery glory during its last eruption, and the thought of creating a connection with it by spending at least part of a day on the mountain attracted me.

For an extra five bucks, I was to be picked up at 5:45 a.m. right in front of my hotel. Good deal. I was more than ready, sick as a dog who has wolfed down a plastic bag of chicken bones, my own private plastic bag being beer, even one. Not that Nicaraguan beer is not good—Tona and Victoria and Brahva are all terrific, as is the world-class rum, Flor de Cano—but on the rare occasions I so much as sip the stuff, there will be a price to pay, and both ends of me were busy paying it as the four-by-four van arrived.

I wondered briefly why we needed a four-by-four on such an easy trip as I politely refused breakfast. Chinto, our driver, seemed about fourteen years old, a dead ringer for curly-haired boys on Greek vases. If I were his mother, I wouldn’t let him out of the house without a brawny chaperon, but Chinto had obviously been manhandling a four-by-four since God was a kid. He roared up the carretera at twice the posted speed, where there is one, and passing and missing everything on the highway—mule carts, horses, trucks, buses, bikes, pedestrians with stuff topping their heads like oversized flower pots. I managed to click the seatbelt into its prescribed position and thought, I should have begged off the trip.

But hey, you can’t do that to one of these eco-tour places. My impression of a slumping tourist trade was reinforced by the fact we picked up only one other client, an internationalista born in Mumbai who had lived in at least four countries other than the land of his birth and was still looking for a home, with eight languages under his belt. Sanddep had very competent-looking camera gear slung about his person, and was planning to sand-board down the volcano. Our green-eyed, latte-skinned, rasta-locked guide, a powerful young man improbably named Lenin, took the two of us in at a glance and I thought I heard his soul sigh, “Why me, God?”

As the old lady of the group, I snagged the passenger seat without a murmur from Lenny or Sandy, and soon was grateful for the handles up and forward. Chinto left the paved carretera for some charming soft dirt roads which swiftly reminded me of Yukon. I wouldn’t have risked a horse or motorbike down these twisty, rutted roads at the speeds that he apparently thought perfectly normal. At his age, of course, he had a touching faith in providence, a faith I hoped would not be tested too stringently today.

Up to the gate of the national park of Cerro Negro, I was able to consider with approval my friend Chris’ idea that Nicaragua is a lot like Yukon, certainly with respect to roads. Many a time I had mired by Volvo in impossible bogs and slogs on the way to my cabin on the marge of Lake Lebarge, affording ample opportunity to curse the Yukon Terrified Government for failing to maintain our road. I almost felt a smile touch my lips at the thought, but then Chinto opened the gate, leapt back into the driver’s seat, and introduced us to the joys of the so-called “repaired road” between the gate and the visitors’ center.

Okay, Forget Yukon. These meter-deep ruts and porker-sized rocks are worse. Mercifully the road was short and I climbed out of the truck carefully to sign my name in the guest book, use the ladies’, and admire the captive iguanas as I managed to down a sweet local banana.

Lenny, you lied to me about the iguanas! When I asked why they were penned—at least thirty baby iguanas piled on top of another in a kind of doghouse, you said they would probably be released into the wild when they were bigger! Later I found out they are destined for dinner!

Just as well, perhaps. I might have lost my cookies—uh, banana—if I’d known the truth.

Off we trotted for our short hike, water bottles in hand or picket or pack. Sandy was fitted with his sandboard strapped through his backpack, so that he resembled an arthritic, badly designed eagle. We chatted pleasantly about the various kinds of lava rocks, as defined by the Hawaiians as we negotiated the beginning of the trail, me thinking, Somebody from here should visit Haleakala and Kilauea to learn how to build trails through lava flow.

Then the fun began. The trail steepened and roughened, and I began to realize I might have overreached my abilities. Okay. Just monitor your energy and stop when you think it’s half gone, I said to myself. Less than half an hour in, I was there, not least because the trail simply stopped existing. Lenin had leapt from precipice to precipice like a surefooted goat, and apparently expected me to follow suit.

“I think this is it for me,” I told him. “I’ve used up about half my energy and clearly I’m not going to make it. I’ll just go back to the truck and hang out until you guys get back.”

“Nothing doing,” said Lenny. “You can’t go down. You can’t turn back now. This is the hardest part. It’s easy–“ he pointed vaguely upward—“just up there.” He reached out a competent young hand. What could I do? No wonder his parents had named him Lenin.

“Just up there?” I narrowed my eyes at him. He nodded encouragingly in the direction of a spot no further away than twenty feet.

Knowing I couldn’t rely on just my legs, I climbed “the hardest part” on all fours—all hundred-some feet of it. Don’t even ask why that section of the so called trail had never been rebuilt—probably the same thinking that had gone into labeling that travesty of a road as “repaired”.

Once more a bipedal creature, I acquitted myself not too badly. Lenin and I frequently stopped for Sandy to catch up as we climbed the 1,200 feet and I used only little of my water. The higher we rose, the more fiercely the refreshing wind blew. I wondered how Sandy felt with that wind tearing at the wings of his sandboard. My hair was whipped around my face in a disorienting way, and I wished I’d brought a bandanna or shaved myself bald. Why didn’t the tour company tell you these things?

As we topped the rim, Lenin encouraged us to stop to take pictures of the vistas of breathtakingly gorgeous Nica countryside and its string of volcanoes. What a country! Equally impressive, however, I thought as I gingerly turned around slowly to free my camera from its little pack, was the precipitous trail we had just climbed. Indeed, Lenny was right: there was no possibility of returning the way we had come. Descending is invariably more difficult than ascent, and all that scree, those loose rocks, and that horrible no-trail patch amounted to a promise of broken legs or worse.

Cerro Negro, it turns out, holds two caldera in her black cinder mouth. We peered down into the fearsome interior of the first one. Good heavens! The damned thing was alive and well and thinking seriously about giving us a piece of her mind! Every eight years or so, Lenin answered my question about the frequency of eruptions. And when was the last one (presumably depicted in my painting)?

Christmas Day, 2002.

Heh heh heh. Given what 2010 had dished out so far, fireworks would end the bitch perfectly.

A squiggly white line limned the crater rim, about as certain as a drunk crossing Vancouver’s Georgia Street in rush hour. “Please tell me that isn’t the trail,” I begged Lenny.

He gave me that lovely green-eyed smile, so wasted on an old broad. “It isn’t,” he said.

He spoke truth this time. The white line turned out to be some sort of calcification, embroidered curiously in one spot with the tattered remnants of a tee shirt, the circumstances of which I did not care to speculate on. Besides, the trail itself was enough to give that drunk on Georgia Street the willies, never mind me, hovering at the edges of the dread hypoglycemia, a condition in which I am about as useful as a short cooked noodle and twice as slithery.

The trail wound around the top of Caldera #1, on its way to show the visitor Calera #2. Sometimes it was ten feet wide, which allowed me to take a breath; sometimes it was about a foot and a half, which left me thankful, for once, that I was to heavy for the wind to blow over, either into the crater to be cooked like a hapless lobster, or over the cone’s edge, ample bum over deficient brain. Sandy, slightly built, was not faring well in the changing direction of the wind, which threatened to launch him towards Leon without a promise he would get there as it whacked away at his wings. “Please,” he called, “can we take this thing off?”

Lenin the goat-footed god pranced back along the rim to relieve Sandy of the sandboard, while I stood on the rim of one of the world’s most active volcanoes and called myself many names, none of them complimentary regarding my intelligence.

We impressed our footsteps on about 300 degrees of the remarkably perfect circular rim of Caldera #1 before coming to the second one. Although perhaps a little less impressive, it throws in a feature that astounded me: fumaroles, right there. No, not at the bottom—at the top of the rim, right at our feet! You could stand on top of one and roast your runners, were you a goat not needing footwear to negotiate a way out of this little bit of hell. The predictable sulphur smell assailed our tender nostrils and we each stuck out a hand towards the steam. This mountain is so-o ready to remind us forcibly of what lies just under the planet’s crust. “This,” I announced, “is the closest I’ve been to the devil since my marriage!”

This would have been a funnier comment had my companions chosen some gender besides male, but no matter: they had another thing going. The approach to the second caldera as frankly terrifying: it appears to—and does—end in the middle of the air, 1,200 feet up, just a foot or so beyond the steaming fumaroles. The photo op consists of having the guide take one’s picture as one leaps joyously 1,207 feet into the air, coming to land, hopefully, not in the caldera but on the relatively safe rim.

I hoped Cerro Negro was not ticklish.

We strolled back along about 100 degrees of the circle, with me looking eagerly for a reasonable footpath leading down. Lenin left the circle abruptly, walked a few feet, and said something idiotic, like, “Here we are.”

“We are?” I said stupidly. Where was the damned footpath? We stood atop the face of the mountain adjacent to the rocky torment we had just climbed. This face drops almost straight down, at perhaps a 75-degree or even 80-degree angle. A sort of slide carved a darker line down the mountain, where, I understood, the sandboard was destined to carry Sandy—if, of course, he survived—back into the land of the living. But where were the facilities for walkers? Pedestrians? The aged and infirm?

Lenin pointed to the spot before me, where evidently something had awkwardly descended in the past. The thing was, the line of descent, if one could call it that, ended in mid-air, somewhere far below—there was no promise that that last hundred or two hundred feet were not a sheer drop onto the rocks below.

“I am frightened,” I said Name it and tame it. I explained how my body had never fully recovered from a terrible fall in the past.

Like his namesake, Lenin remained unmoved, although he was not unkind. “The safest way,” he showed me, “is to face sideways and put one foot down”—it slid half a meter in the scree, and I winced—“and then the other foot down”—he slid another third of a meter—“like that.” Big sweet smile. “I will be right behind you,” he added, as if that would help.

Sometimes life gives you weird choices. I could do this crazy thing. Or I could stay on this volcano rim until the mountain blew up, maybe even tomorrow if it had a reliable alarm clock.

I decided the broken left leg must be the upper leg. If I fell, I’d fall against the mountain. Gingerly, I put the right foot down.

Horrible. I slid a foot, and two or three bits of a’a immediately sneaked into my shoe, which, by the way, is one of a pair belonging to my mother, who had never traveled as much as she wanted. Mom, this one’s for you, I said to myself, and put down the left foot. More slide, and approximately four hundred small rocks entered both shoes.

Three feet down, eleven hundred ninety-seven to go.

The sun was out in full force by now, and the wind was blocked by the mountain face. I prayed Lenin would stay far enough behind me to prevent black dust from choking me, or I’d never make it off this face. I held out my chubby arms as if I remembered my ballet lessons, but fell a couple of times anyway. My shoes and pants filled with rocks. A fine black dust covered my hair and face and clothes. The once-broken leg began complaining and wouldn’t stop. I occupied my mind with math: how many times must one perform this movement if each slide covered a foot? A yard? A meter? What fraction of the slope had I descended and what the hell was beyond the apparent precipice?

What a shame if my last thought on this earth was how different the law of negligence must be in Nicaragua compared to that of Canada!

The precipice proved to me more of the same, but even steeper. Straggler was my second name by the time I struggled to the truck, poured centuries of lava from my shoes and heaved myself into the seat on only the third try. Sandy, of course, had been down for ages, but was gracious about it. Not a word was said by him or Lenin about my fears or frailty, or of the possibly posthumous telling of the tale of Wolffy’s last Christmas.

My mother would have had a fit if she’d known what was accomplished in those shoes of hers. They’re washed clean of the black dust, now, ready for the next adventure.

Wal…ls?

“Something there is, that does not love a wall….”

Something, perhaps, but not humans. We love walls from Pyramus and Thisbe to Wall-E. We are the only large apes on the planet who build walls, as if we were frustrated ants or bees. Very strange, no doubt, in the eyes of an elk, salmon, or wolverine. Wolves, bears and rodents, on the other paw, probably spend quite a lot of time on boring winter afternoons thinking about how to persuade us to build their winter dens for them. Beavers no doubt think we’re the kitten’s mewl when it comes to building—there’s probably an entire graduate-degree track at Beaver U dedicated to studying and adapting human wall-building to beaverish agendas.

We are emperors of walls. Perpendicular walls, sloping walls, circular and spiral walls. Pretty walls, just for the hell of it. Protective or proprietary walls; dividing and guiding walls. The Great Wall of China, monument to a costly failure. “Chinese walls”—a set of protocols designed to protect the confidentiality of lawyers’ clients. Walls of thought built atop foundations of belief laid down by our ancestors, often centuries ago. Walls of strict discipline, erected to prevent the next tsunami of emotion from overwhelming our fragile hearts.

We love building walls! Take a stroll through Vancouver’s Yaletown, lifting your slack-jawed face in wonder to the tops of the steel, glass and concrete canyon walls, thirty or more storeys high. Not so high as Dubai’s wonders of the new world, of course, but then, construction on the planet’s highest erection has perforce been stopped. It seems our species had to play Jenga to a hundred storeys or more in order to manifest an obvious truth: building must end somewhere up in the uncertain air. One would think humanity had learned that lesson in biblical times: what was Bab-El, after all, but a set of over-reaching walls?

Will Yaletown’s toilets still be working perfectly in 2060? Will the fabulous sheets of glass still be up there as windows, or down on the street in shards?

Stroll with me a moment down a Nicaraguan street of walls.

It is the Latin custom to wall off family life from the street and neighbors, creating a convivial courtyard where one instinctively relaxes in the safety of home. Walls create privacy. In a Nicaraguan beach town, however, nearly half the walls are vestigial, never rebuilt after the wallop of a tsunami, the howling hurricane, or the terror of terremoto (earthquake). At the picturesque sight of a pretty bit of surviving wall, still idiotically in place decades after being struck by a “natural disaster”, we, the very animals who have lifted wall-building into a fine art we call architecture, understand, without a word being spoken, why the culture of Nicaragua is moribund. Fighting for its last breaths, it is unable to defend itself without walls.

For Nicas, at best it is a time of love among the ruins. Fractured gates, roofless houses, and broken walls are everywhere, taken over by rampant bougainvillea, feral cats and half-wild dogs. The streets are littered with awkwardly hand-lettered signs tacked haphazardly to what is left of the gates. “Se Vende” For sale. What am I bid for this fine ruin? As one frequent (Canadian ) visitor says, “I love it. But the country’s a disaster.”

Much of the time, it’s too hot in Nicaragua to think about re-building, even if you could lay your hands on enough materiel for the project—problems Canadians have seldom had. Nicaragua’s heartbreaking history of exploitation and chicanery has accustomed Nicas to the sight of tumbledown; they will be less surprised than we when economic and social walls begin to fail.

Let us aspire to a Nica level of graciousness in the face of downfall and disaster—like them, let’s not forget the civility and conviviality of courtyards, galleries and gathering places. More than that: when walls fall, let’s use all that privilege we’ve enjoyed all our lives as a so called First World country to re-build only useful walls, using two tools that will prove essential to recovery from cultural and economic disaster, flexibility and transparency.