I marvel that I lived for six months. If you ever thought that driving in Portland was bad, try Barahona, Dominican Republic. Usually we think of the octangular red sign that reads STOP as meaning, "Stop, or else...." and anyone who has ever been cited for disregarding that sign can fill in the blank. But things are different in the DR. The red sign is the same, except it whispers instead of shouts, "Pare...si quieres....." (Stop, if you feel like it....) Running a US stop sign may get you a $400 ticket, but in the DR, it will only get you to your destination faster.
I had agreed to the six-month stay before I stepped into the Spanish-speaking beehive of curious Dominican onlookers. The bees buzzed all around me. Their motorcycles buzzed, their music buzzed, their voices buzzed; buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, and I had no idea what any of it meant.
Someone told me I needed to get to Malecon, wherever that was, and that to do so I'd have to enlist the service of one of those buzzing mopeds. I guessed that was how bees got from here to there in these parts. I looked around.
"How do you catch a bee?" I asked myself.
Conchos are what they call themselves. Death defiers are what I call them. There's no rhyme or reason to your choice of motorcycle-taxi, although my companion Sarah swore by the red-hatted concho drivers. Ten measly pesos could hardly account for the ten ounces of agua you lose in beads of nervous perspiration during each trans-town passage. Near collisions, conversations between drivers while driving, sharp corners, children playing in the road. Closing my eyes makes me think I am dying, which is better than living through that ride.
The perspiration is, of course, in addition to the layer you already were wearing when you got up that morning to Nature's giant natural spa. Hot and sticky from dawn till dusk and then some. The sweltering 100 degree air made your breakfast of fried salami and peanut butter sandwiches especially unbearable.
The feeling just gets worse when you finally flag down a teenage boy on his old ramshackle motorcycle and warily gauge the mobile, wondering if it can carry you safely. You decide it can. You hand him your bag and the driver puts it in front of him, balancing it on the vertical bar between him and the handlebars. You step onto one of the footholds and hoist yourself up into the sidesaddle position your skirt requires, wincing as the cracked vinyl and missing foam pinch your sitter. He yells at you in Spanish, and you don't understand. He yells again, and a passerby joins in. They are all yelling at you, motioning at your skirt. Finally you understand. They want you to hold onto your skirt so it doesn't get caught in the wheel. Later on you find out that women have been de-garmented by the back-wheel monster. You are thankful that you finally understand. The concho starts up and enters traffic. You give a tiny shriek and gingerly grab your concho's shoulder the way you see other people doing, all the while being overwhelmed by the scent of the concho driver's cologne. Later you find out it is the default cologne for all Dominican males. You are on Nuestra Maria, the street with a huge cathedral. You remember this, your only landmark.
Splash! You feel water-or something liquid-splash onto your feet; your concho just zoomed through a ditch in the street. You notice women dumping garbage and compost into the ditches. You cringe, wanting very badly to wash your feet. The concho driver says something to you. You don't understand. Suddenly you remember you haven't told him where you're going.
"Malecon," you say, trying your best to repeat the word you've been instructed to say.
To your relief he nods knowingly, having guessed correctly that you are headed to the American's house on the main road in town.
"Good thing he knows," you say under your breath.
Finally he stops beside the road and you nearly fall off. Lighting onto solid ground makes you feel like an astronaut coming back to earth after a long space voyage.
"Treinta pesos," he says to you.
You recognize the word pesos, and awkwardly hold out the bill, now soggy from your sweaty hands.
He makes a face and says it again. You guess he wants more money, so you give it to him. He smiles, then leaves.
You go inside and are told you just got ripped off. You don't care, you're glad to be speaking English.
What was I thinking? Hurtling down cracked pavement at 50 mph...helmetless...holding onto a complete stranger for dear life...don't know where I'm going...at the mercy of the 10 pesos clutched in my hand...
I didn't think.
I thought later. Later-when I heard the stories of Americans being taken into dark alleys and stripped of their belongings by concho drivers. The fearsome tigres (gang members and drug traffickers) blended in with the innocent concho drivers, identifiable only by their tattoos and earrings. Why did I do it?
The answer is simple: because everyone else did. Because it was normal. And because I, just like hundreds of other tourists who have traveled that way for years, was more concerned with learning the language and adapting to the culture than thinking about the danger.
"Living for the moment" is a concept familiar to most people, perhaps extra-familiar to children. To the young mind, nothing is more important than RIGHT NOW!
I see myself wandering through the aisles of Shopko in Bend, Oregon. I am 5 years old. Between counting the red tiles that pepper the while linoleum floor I am touching everything that looks like it may have an interesting texture. I hold anything that looks soft. I stare at anyone who looks different. I am watching, learning.
Suddenly I begin to look this way and that, and the desperation in my small heart spills out into tears as a tiny sound escapes the lips that had earlier been humming to the beat of my skipping.
"Mom?" I say in a quivering voice. Suddenly the colored tiles of the floor don't need to be counted anymore. The toys on the shelf don't need to be touched. The man in front of me doesn't need to be stared at. Terror has replaced curiosity.
I am lost.
By now I know my way around Shopko, and I've discovered the wonder of intercom: "Would Maggie's mother please come to the front desk? Your daughter is waiting for you there." But in my Shopko déjà vu I am not just lost in a department store. I'm lost in the maze of my own life. I imagine with trepidation being handed a script entitled "Your Life"; what is it rated? Is there a plan, a good plot? Do I stay up all night furiously editing and changing scenes, trying to maneuver a better ending?
"A donde vas?" asks your concho driver. He wants to know where you are going. Behind the blank look on your sunburned face a scene from Disney's The Jungle Book is running through your mind.
"Whatcha wanna do, fellas?" one vulture cackles to another.
"Aww...I dunno...Whatch you wanna do?"
"I dunno...I asked you first!" Apparently nothing has died lately. "Whatchya wanna do?"
"Oh...now, don't start that again!"
Normally you'd laugh, but right now you feel strangely akin to those buzzards. "Do I know where I'm going?" you ask yourself.
"Malecon," falls out of your mouth, but your mind is far from that noisy street in Barahona. His words are running through your mind. "A donde vas?" Where are you going?
For most people, religion is like a worried mother, always checking up on you, asking if you've changed your socks, confessed your sins and ready to punish you if you've messed up. We like caller ID; and the "ignore" button on our cell phones. But eventually you have to talk to her. Mothers have their ways. "Where are you going?" she asks. You feel like the vulture.
Every morning for six months I buzzed through Barahona on the back of my Malecon-bound bee. I knew which mopeds were most comfortable. I knew the right streets to take. "Malecon," I'd say, like a magic password.
We all have our daily password. Nirvana, Reincarnation, Heaven, Purgatory...a subconscious expectation that gets you onto your concho every day. It lets your concho driver know if you need to make four stops a day to pray to Allah. It tells him if you need to head over to mass or confession. It tells him if he can expect you to steal, kill, or commit adultery. If you miss one of your stops, the cracked vinyl seat always seems to pinch harder, the way seems bumpier, and a whiff of fear stronger than your driver's cologne whispers that you may have lessened your chances of a blissful existence when you reach your destination.
So what is this password that defines our fate-a Mapquest printout of driving directions between birth and death, if you will-how do we know what address to key into the "Destination" box? Where is the "Get Directions" button?
Just like I didn't have time or even the ability to search out all of Barahona's methods of transportation, none of us could ever live long enough to search out all of the world's religions. "Broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it," Jesus said, "narrow is the gate which leads to life, and there are few who find it." Few who find it. Few who find their way to Malecon.
I sometimes wish Barahona's town square posted nice, touristy "How to Ride Our Bees" in multiple languages. But it doesn't. Life doesn't either. In fact, I found that information buried within several hundred gold-edged, leather-bound leaves: the Bible. "I am the way, the truth, and the life," Jesus beckoned, inviting us to jump onto the back of His concho...with a promise of a better destination than we could ask for: "He who finds Me finds life..."
You could look all over Barahona and never find a concho handing out that kind of hope.
"Concho!" I yell, sweating from the hottest August day I've ever lived through, not sure if I'm going to finish living through it.
In answer to my shout, a red-hatted concho ("What luck!" I think to myself) stops in his flight and wheels awkwardly to my spot of the sidewalk.
Great, I think, He's got a tiny bike and a bad seat. Hoisting my sixty-pound army duffel bag onto the front of his bike, I climb aboard with six-months of experience in my step.
"A una casa de la playa, por Malecon y en una calle por la izquierda," I say with confidence in my tone and accent, the concho being now well aware that I know where I'm going. He starts off down Nuestra and I correct him, saying I think traffic is better on Uraguay. He concedes and we're on our way. I pull out my ten pesos and relax. To my surprise, I am enjoying my very last concho ride. I'm actually going to miss the "concho cologne", the liquid filled ditches that we splash through every morning, the feel of the breeze on my helmet-less head. I'll miss the death defy-ing as my concho jerks and jostles all over the road. Tears start to gather in my eyes. Or is it just because I'm sweating?
We arrive.
"Aqui," I say. He stops, his skinny arms trying to heave my duffel bag down onto the ground. I hand him the ten pesos. He looks at me with a frown.
"Treinta pesos," he says. I frown back, then grin. I hand him twenty and tell him to have a nice day. It is my last concho ride, after all.
Works Cited
The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New King James Version. Ed. Bruce M. Metzger and
Roland E. Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
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