The Mighty Saco: A River at Risk

Two years ago some friends and I ventured to the Saco River in Fryeburg, Maine for a weekend of canoing and camping. We went in September, had beautiful weather, and cruised the lazy river in such high spirits that we organized a return to the Saco this past weekend. Quel horor.

The scene we encountered on the Saco was a pitiful, offensive, unsanitary mess of frat party proportions. Admittedly we were also there for a party, and I don't blame people for letting loose and having a good time, but it was worse than anyone could imagine.

Our fellow outdoorsmen were roudy packs of half naked "meat-heads", drunk, tatooed, and totally unbridled. We would frequently have to muster up intense paddle sessions in order to pass obnoxious campers that looked like they might heckle us---or worse.

In fact, the mayhem on the river was undeniably dangerous. A group of beefy dudes were launching water baloons from a stretchy rubber catapult just across from our launching point. They were sending their grapefruit-size ammunition flying out across the river, hoping to hit anyone, not just their friends. So right off the bat we had an obstacle. We joked about desperately not wanting to see that group again. But we were also totally serious. [And rightfully so, an article in the Boston Globe today reported the arrest of a man who blinded someone with a water-balloon to the eye on the Saco last weekend.]

As we continued down the river, we realized what a debaucle it was. Practically everyone we came across was wasted. They were funnelling beers, taking shots, wrestling in the shallows and setting up beer pong tables. We even saw some guys shaking up beer cans and spraying them in another's face. It was ridiculous. We did our best to ignore the worst of it, and were fortunately able to enjoy ourselves on our own floating raft of canoes.

At about 5pm, we were ready to come ashore and set up our camp at one of the many sandy beaches on the river bank. Tough luck. The place was overrun with people and the beaches were lined with tents and picnic tables and bands of young men and their scantily glad girlfriends. I kept thinking of how vulnerable those bikinied girls looked amid all the inebriated brawn. With the steroids and the testosterone, the beer and swimwear, I couldn't help but think about rape.

Actually, it was weird how many all-male or mostly-male groups there were. One paddler sidled up to our canoe and admired our girl-to-guy ratio (50/50). Thanks buddy. But true enough, girls were certainly outnumbered---a fact made obvious by a guy with a neckfull of mardi gras beads standing near his giant sign that said "Beads for Boobs". Clearly business was slow.

Across the river from that fool, a group of guys were plunging into the water off a rope swing. As a former lifeguard, traveling with another former lifeguard and a nursing grad student, I could feel our collective cringe. And later when we were getting nervous were weren't going to find a free beach and were stopping to ask about the nearest mile marker, a woman on the beach joked about finding the nearest hospital, as blood, having dripped from the back of her head, stained her wet yellow t-shirt. Apparently she got hit in the head with a beer can. She said she was feeling fine though. We paddled on uncomfortably.

Now, while all this sounds really disturbing, I have to point out that people were generally in good spirits. I didn't see or hear any altercations, and people were talkative and friendly, and only midly verbally offensive. It was after all a beautiful day. There were even some families on the river (to my shock, horror and sorrow). Plus most of the disturbing scenes were good fodder for jokes and sarcasm. So there was humor to be found. Like the guy in spiky blond wig and neon green Borat-style thong bathing suit, or the guy with the roaring chainsaw, who was slicing up some nice kindling for his fire. Such memories I could not have attained elsewhere.

But in the morning, after we had packed up our camp and were canoing the last few miles back to the landing point where a bus would take us back to our launching spot, we passed the abandoned tent cities from the night before. The place looked like a war zone. Trash and empty crushed beer cans littered the beaches. Black dusty fire pits and burned debris smoldered, and in some cases still flickered. A beer funnel and countless other items lay submerged on the riverbed. It was horrifying.

"What kind of person could just leave all this?" my friends asked repeatedly. Each time we rounded a bend in the river, there was a new trash heap to behold. We stopped and picked up some beer cans, but we didn't have much room in our own trash bags to spare. Plus, I was seriously concerned about the quality of the water. There were no bathroom facitilies. People were expected to bury their output. But there were so many people and so little respect, I didn't dare step foot in the water or on the beaches. (We ended up camping in a seemingly clean woodsy area well above the water level---though I was still grossed out by the possibly contaminated forest floor).

So basically, the poor, beautiful, mighty Saco, as they called it at the canoe rental joint, has a real problem---a drinking problem, to say the least. The solution involves limiting the number of canoe rentals from places like Saco Bound, who, by the way are making a killing at $105 for a two-day canoe rental (I hope that money goes towards clean up efforts of some kind. I must find out), and getting rangers to patrol the river. According to an employee at Saco Bound, most of the riverbank is privately owned land. I can't believe what owners wouldn't care about the state of their own land, as well as the liability they may be facing.

But even more so, I cannot believe how little Saco visitors care for the Saco. It's a beautiful spot that is being poisoned by alcohol abuse and ignorance. Please spread the word. The river needs an intervention.

Reactions: Brokeback Mountain

I just watched the much-acclaimed Brokeback Mountain and my reaction is a bit mixed. But first, I loved the story. The setting—the time period, the community and the natural landscape—is entirely fresh, and the acting seamless and believable. But there are a few production issues that irk me. With the exception of Anne Hathaway, who is too young, the film is well-cast, but the portrayal of age is a struggle throughout the film. Heath Ledger’s character has a daughter who grows from a baby to a nineteen-year-old, but he barely ages at all. Only his on-point acting and a bit of pasty makeup show that he’s supposed to be a man of fifty years. It wasn’t convincing enough. Jake Gyllenhal has a mustache and a paunchy belly, which help. He aged the best out of all of them. But when she’s supposed to be 40 or so, Anne Hathaway looks like a 16-year-old dressed up in her momma’s clothes. I just kept noticing these things. It was distracting.

I loved the music in the movie. The bitter sweet harmony and discord of simple guitar chords was beautiful, and complimented Ang Lee’s graceful cinematography. It perfectly matched the tone of the story. In fact, it told the story.

But then another thing that seems unconvincing was the fact that the two fishing buddies never actually fish on their weeklong trips together. I get that it’s just an alibi, something to tell their wives. But they have all the gear, nets pole, etc., they are camping in the rural mountains and they just seem like the fishing type. Why don’t they fish? Not finding a note tied to his fishing pole is unrealistic. Men like that would fish, even if it isn’t the true purpose of their rendezvous.

Another question: why does Jack Twist’s father-in-law consider him an un-manly man? Sure, we know the father-in-law has reason to think so, but I never see Jack acting like a wimp, or effeminate or anything. He’s interested in the rodeo, he’s a good salesman and he stands up to the old man. Why does the old guy offer digs at the Thanksgiving table about wanting his grandson to grow up to be a real man, implying that Jack isn’t one?

However, I like the treatment of Jack’s death. The flashback scene of the beating offers just enough gore to be frighteningly violent, but it’s not overwhelming. It’s more a suggestion you want to ignore but can’t. You want to believe the wife’s story of how he died, but you know he was murdered by Daddy.

And speaking of Daddy, what about Jack’s father? Jack mentions he would never go back to his daddy’s ranch. And yet he went back there long enough o gush about Health Ledger’s character and the other bearded man he met. If his father was such an intolerable—and intolerant—man, why would Jack go back. And why would he ever mention anything about his boyfriends? Seems strange.

Alas, these are details. A few minor points of skepticism. If one must knit-pick to find problems, the work of art can’t be too flawed. The film was sad and great.

Ecuadorian Mountain Dish: Traveling by bus through the Andes

The one thing that stood out the most about the bus ride from Guayaquil, Ecuador to the mountain town of Banos, was a the music the driver played. It was salsa, merengue and reggaeton from the radio, and it was really loud. But it perfectly complimented the festive array of stickers stuck to the wall behind the driver’s seat (like “Yo [heart] Jesus”) and the red velour curtains with tassels that bounced as we jostled down the dirt roads. It was vibrant—as life is in Latin American countries. Animated vendors hopped on the bus at every stop to sell us plantain chips, pork sandwiches and ice cream. The music was a soundtrack to their rapid conversations and it set the tone for the whole trip.

Out the window were little towns whose streets were lined with bustling markets and barefoot kids on bikes. Chickens were everywhere. At one point when the bus pulled over there was a woman selling red meat from a pushcart directly beneath my window. Her stand featured a bloody chopping block, raw steak hanging from iron hooks and some hungry flies circling about. I took out my camera for that one. As we drove on, I snapped photos of wooden huts elevated by posts, horses, cows and white cranes, and miles and miles of Dole plantations. The landscape changed dramatically as we pulled further from the muggy metropolitan city of Guayaquil. It turned into rural countryside, growing greener, steeper and more lush by the mile. A young woman with a leather jacket and a bag of fruit handed me a tree mango to snack on. Small and yellow and exceptionally messy to eat, it wasn’t as tasty as the plumper green mangoes I’m used to. I was stuck holding the half-eaten fruit for ages until I spied a plastic bag trash in the aisle.

As our bus climbed higher and higher into the Andes, the beauty of the mountains revealed itself. Every inch of the towering green slopes was mapped by the neat geographic fields of farmers. Their ability to farm such vertical land astounded me. Dirt paths zigzagged up the mountainside, offering a gentler angle for people and livestock to ascend and descend. And as I watched from the bus, many workers stood upright but on all fours, more or less leaning against the slanted earth as they tended their growing fields of corn, yucca and potatoes. The landscape was truly marvelous. As our bus hugged the road on the edge of a ravine I felt as if I was looking out the window of an airplane. Similarly, the pressure in my ears grew immensely painful. I chewed gum. I yawned. I tugged at my earlobes. Nothing helped.

In the hours that passed, we twenty-or-so passengers chatted, slept and at times became a captive audience for a handful of hop-onboard entrepreneurs. A man selling herbs bent our ears for fifteen minutes, trying to get us to buy his wares. My Spanish isn’t great, so I didn’t feel as guilty when he leveraged his unfortunate life circumstance to get people to reach for their money. But my Ecuadorian boyfriend is an exacting translator, so I did buy a necklace from a young Columbian girl, traveling the country seeking asylum in Ecuador. It was a silver chain with a cross for $2. She threw in a jingly bracelet for free. I immediately put both on because they seemed appropriate. And in light of the increasingly wild bus ride, I thought a Christian cross around my neck couldn’t hurt.

The air was thin and eventually I fell asleep, despite the volume of the relentless music. When I woke up I was groggy, but I became immediately alert once I heard the song that was playing. It was reggaeton and to my New England ears it seemed super inappropriate for a public bus. Well, maybe not super inappropriate, but certainly R-rated. After every set of rapped lyrics, a seductive female voice would gasp, “Ay Papi,” in perfect time. The song definitely wouldn’t play on a public bus in the States. But then again, in the States, the bus I was on probably wouldn’t be road-legal. I wondered if the parents of the few kids on the bus were disturbed. I doubted it, as the whole scene just seemed so outrageously ordinary. Yet I admit, the steep and winding mountain roads seemed less treacherous with such spirited music in the background.

After six hours of driving, that included one mango, 32 photos, one nap, and two aching ears, we arrived in a small town and had to change buses. I was relieved that the new bus was comfortably close to empty. But as we drove through the town with the door open, the conductor leaned outside hollering “Banos!” to all passers-by, many of who hopped on the bus. In three minutes, every seat was filled. But that didn’t stop the conductor from continuing to advertise at the top of his lungs. At one point we pulled up to a school in the middle of nowhere and a gaggle of school kids boarded the bus. They each wore navy wool slacks and a navy wool sweater, with a white dress shirt and red tie underneath. They were kids as young as 8 and as old as 16. A few were standing practically in my lap as I sat in a seat by the door. Despite the squeeze, it was fun to watch them chattering and ribbing each other. Drowning out the music, they were our only distraction from the uncomfortably crowded bus. It was incredibly hot and dusty in there. My flip-flopped feet looked filthy and the backs of my legs were drenched with sweat. Plus my ears were still blocked. In fact, I was a little frightened that the pressure had permanently damaged my hearing. But that was irrational. Finally we arrived in Banos.

When I got off the bus, I noticed the temperature change immediately. It was cool. I was only wearing a sundress and I couldn’t wait to pull on my sweatshirt. We lugged our bags, my boyfriend rolling his suitcase along the uneven sidewalks, to the city center, where we found a youth hostel for $7 each per night. We dropped our stuff, and headed down the street. We were starving and the first order of business was food. We saw lots of backpackers from Europe and Australia, sitting on patios of restaurants, drinking beers and playing cards. It was a backpacker’s town.

We settled into a restaurant and ordered some traditional mountain dishes like Yapingacho (fried potato with cheese and egg) and churasco (grilled steak with french fries and friend) and chifles (fried green plantains). Then, completely stuffed, we strolled down to a beautiful colonial church. Its white steeple, gleaming against the bright blue sky read 1929 in blue paint. Inside the cathedral was a striking gilded ceiling with detailed design and lovely murals. Attached to the church was a beautifully manicured abbey that held a sink and tap of holy water. It wasn’t crowded, but the few visitors were blessing themselves and lighting prayer candles at a nearby candelabra. One man came in with a Tupperware pitcher and filled it to the brim with holy water. He either had lots of sins to wash away or he was doing some divine cooking. But this pretty much summed up the spirit of Banos. The place is all about its water. The sentiment towards the waterfalls cascading down the mountainside and filling the hot springs reminded me of Bath, England. It’s the same idea. Water is powerful.

After strolling around a while, we settled into a wooden booth in a random bar. We each ordered tall cervesas, Pilsener, the national beer of Ecuador and started playing card games. My boyfriend taught me a long, complicated Ecuadorian game he remembered playing as a kid. I preferred rummy. The proprietor came by and solicited us for a nighttime ride up the volcano. I hadn’t even realized there was a volcano. The guided trip was $3 each. We hadn’t any plans for the evening, so we accepted the invitation and bought tickets. At 9pm, we climbed aboard the colorfully-painted La Chiva (the female goat, in English) to venture up the volcano.

Loud music again! Sitting on beaches on top of the vehicle, with no seatbelts or even a suitable backrest, we charged up the steep mountain road, having to duck every time we came across a low hanging telephone wire or tree branch. Oh, and we were speeding. Had it not been dark, the cliffs we were escalating may have petrified me. But even as dark as it was, I was still tense. I was thoroughly jostled and I bounced up and down on my wooden seat. Plus, our guide brought his pet Rottweiler onboard and tied her leash, which was a tiny metal chain, to a bench. As she was darting under and around the bench, the “leash” eventually snapped and let her free. To my supreme relief, she was well-behaved. The ride up the mountain was terrifying enough.

I was the only gringa on the trip and no one but me seemed scared. I just kept thinking about how dangerous—how ridiculously dangerous—the trip was. But the songs helped me stay calm, and when a song I loved came on, I almost felt safe. But if anything, the trip was exhilarating, and when we got to the top we saw a beautiful view of the city. Our guide ignited a bonfire and told us the history of the Banos and the story of the volcano’s most recent eruption in 1999. Regrettably, my limited Spanish prevented me from following every detail and I had to settle for the abridged translation from my boyfriend. But the atmosphere up there – the bonfire, the view of the city and a cool fire show performance by two bohemian locals gave me a pretty good impression of Banos. It was kind of like summer camp. I sort of wished I hadn’t been so nervous on the ride up there. It should be expected that adventure usually involves at least a little danger. Nevertheless, on the way back we sat downstairs.

After a few days of touring waterfalls, eating hand-stretched taffy and hearty mountain food, we decided to depart Banos for the warmth of the cosmopolitan coast. We packed up and hopped on the next bus to Riobamba, where we would catch our connection to Guayaquil. It was only a short, hour-long drive to Riobamba and the bustling market we stumbled on when we arrived was awesome. They were selling chickens in pens, and all sort of fruits, vegetables and crafts. I wish we could have browsed more, but we had to taxi over to another bus depot, or else we’d have to spend the night there—and at that point, we were hankering for our home base. Plus I had a feeling that when the market packed up, Riobamba did too.

Finally we found ourselves back en route to the coast. Our bus had the characteristic loud tunes and the colorful scenes of villages and landscape out the windows. But the sky grew gray and raindrops peppered the windshield up front. Still, passengers got on and off the bus at the most random points. I tried to imagine living my life in such a rural community, farming the steep mountainsides and taking the bus to Guayaquil to see a doctor or buy hard-to-find supplies, rather than to dance in some night club or swim at the beach. My thoughts were interrupted by the sudden silence on the bus. The music had abruptly turned off. However, I immediately realized there was new media to replace the radio. On this bus, we had a TV.

Moments after the radio cut out, a grainy Universal Pictures logo appeared and the opening credits of King Kong rolled out. The film had only just come out in theaters in the States, not to mention Guayaquil. Yet here it was, playing on a rural mountain road in Ecuador. The crude, bootlegged copy was dubbed over in Spanish and the picture quality was pretty bad. I decided I wasn’t in the mood to watch some American blockbuster while I was on vacation in South America. But the fact that it was playing made it very much a part of Ecuadorian culture. Life here is infused with snippets of America, Mexico, Europe, you name it. But I still read my book anyway, occasionally looking up at the screen. It was like on an airplane when you decide not to watch the movie, but then you end up watching a lot of it anyway, without sound.

By the time Kong had been wrangled onto the ship and was being taken to New York, the rain was coming down pretty steadily. And the bus started to slow down. Then we were inching along in bumper to bumper traffic. I paused my iPod and asked my boyfriend, “What is taking so long?”. At that point, the driver turned off the engine. So there we were. Stopped in traffic with the engine off. With no AC. The bus slowly started to warm up until it became unbearably humid. I was sweating. The Indian baby next to me was fussing and its mother began nursing her. A lot of the passengers got off the bus to see what the hold up was. My boyfriend left to investigate. I figured we’d be up and running in a moment so I stayed put. I cracked the window and tuned into King Kong.

It’s hard for me to understand Spanish on TV when it’s dubbed. I need to see the lips moving or I’m lost. Fortunately, I knew the story. And fortunately I’m pretty good at reading lips in English. After terrorizing New York City, Kong was finally killed and plummeted to his death from the Empire State Building. It was sad. Do people realize how sad and awful the story is? They visit a foreign land, take back a magnificent souvenir, exploit it and then kill it. As I sat there on the bus, I really did feel sad. Plus the movie was three hours long and the bus still wasn’t running, my boyfriend wasn’t back and I had to go to the bathroom. Naturally, the conductor had the key and he was way down the road. What was going on there?

Finally, my boyfriend and some others returned. One man had picked a bunch of bananas from the side of the road and began distributing them amongst the passengers. People were getting restless and were laughing and joking. My boyfriend turned to me and recounted what he saw down the street. A mile down the road another bus had slid off the slick pavement into a ravine. They had two tow trucks there, trying to pull it back up, blocking the one-lane road from both sides. We weren’t out of the mountains yet and it was still very steep. People had gotten hurt and some had probably died. Ambulances had come and gone so nobody really knew. I was a bit shaken at how it could have easily been us. Finally the driver started the engine and after about 30 minutes of inching along, we passed the eerie scene. The tow truck workers were drenched with rain and sweat. The bus was still lodged in the ravine.

We cruised into Guayaquil at 10pm and took a taxi home from the bus station. We were wholly exhausted. I was too tired to be hungry, but my boyfriend was starving, so we dressed up and went to Nato’s steak house in Guayaquil. Nato is slang, meaning flat nose or no nose. The place is owned by a former soccer star of eponymous facial features. The steak comes out sizzling with French fries, dipping sauces and a pitcher of lemonade and already on the table. The meat was so incredibly delicious that I ate without an appetite. Que rico! I left feeling totally full and even more sleepy. I doubted that anyone else on our bus finished the journey quite like us. For many people who travel the steep mountain roads, it’s a risky trip of necessity, sweetened only by feisty radio and fantastic movies. But for us, the trip was adventure, infused with music and entertainment, and just enough real danger to keep us on the edge of our seats.