Goofballs Allegedly on the Loose

Leavenworth, WA: Officials released an earlier statement indicating that there may be at least two goofballs on the loose. Their exact whereabouts are unknown at this time, but they are believed to be gallivanting around in the Central Cascades. Police are looking for the following suspects:

1. Jane Doe 1

We do know that Jane Doe 1 often consumes obscene quantities of hot chiles. If you notice a trail of spicy remains, please alert local authorities immediately.

2. Jane Doe 2

Past reports indicate that Jane Doe 2 may be armed and should therefore be considered dangerous. 

Civilian eye whitnesses caught cell phone camera footage of the perpetrators in cahoots with Bigfoot who was recently sighted failing to kick his espresso addiction in Index, WA

Based on information gathered from this footage, police have deduced that Jane Doe 2 may have a propensity to take weird side-tongue action shots.

3. Killer bunny

Police declined to provide specifics, but the infamous Cascade Killer Bunny is believed to be connected to the goofballery of the two aforementioned suspects.

3. Mountain Goat Marvin?

Police need more evidence before determining whether or not Mountain Goat Marvin is an accomplice or a victim of the Jane Duo's goofy ways. Due to an earlier incident with Marvin, experts on the matter have said that they believe Marin has magical powers. So it is likely that he is involved in the Janes' charades.

These suspects have continued to defy law enforcement but have been sighted in the following locations:

The goofballs were most recently seen eyeballing Aasgard Pass in the Enchantments, possibly alluding to their escape route. Police would like to thank the lone mountaineer wearing the dashboard hula girl-printed ball cap for volunteering this information. 

If you have any information on the Jane Doe duo, Killer Bunny, Bigfoot, or Mountain Goat Marvin or if you see evidence of excessive giggling, wine drinking, overly zealous hiking, inappropriately graphic digestive conversations, or general goofiness, please contact local police immediately.

The stories my bike shoes would tell

There are a few reasons I still use Facebook. One of those reasons is random encounters with long lost friends in far fetched places. A few days into my trip to New Zealand, a bike mechanic friend (http://fieldwrench.blogspot.com/?m=1) noticed from my posts that I was in New Zealand and that he too was wrenching in NZ between seasons on the pro cycling circuit. 

I stayed with him in Wellington for a few days. While he worked, I hit some single track at the Makara Peak Mountain Bike Park which is within riding distance from the city center. The trail was fantastic, and there was even a little jump park! I Captured one of the few gorgeous weather days of "windy welly" as it is affectionately named. But I also captured more than I'd bargained for.

At the top of the climb, I met a random mountain biker whom I chatted up. I asked him to take the above photo of me. Then asked to follow his line on the downhill.There were some great berms and a few sick technical bits which elicited profanity on my part. But I kept the rubber side down. Noting that I had more or less kept up with him, he invited me to keep riding with him. It turned out, I had hit the jackpot on chance random mountain biker encounters. It was his midweek day off work and he had planned to spend it driving from one cool mountain bike spot to the other. We hit up Mount Victoria and another spot that had a short downhill track with an ominous name that I cannot remember. We kept riding until he went into a jump a little too hot and broke his brake lever. So we ended the day dropping off his bike at Dirt Merchants. They run weekly women's rides from the shop, though I didn't stick around in the city long enough to ride with them. Of course we had to make an obligatory stop at Garage Project which turned out to be my favorite New Zealand microbrewery just across the street from the bike shop. I picked up some brews to go for a BBQ I was to attend later that night.

The BBQ was at my friend's coworkers house. I never saw the random mountain biker guy again. But the mechanics at the BBQ said they knew the guy and that crashing and breaking stuff on his bike was par for the course for that guy. The cycling world is so small no matter where you go.

Barefoot Stories

It is easy to be fantastically adventurous in Abel Tasman National Park. Particularly when visited in May when most of the other visitors have gone home for the winter. I was joined by a brave San Francisco friend and former coworker for this epic journey. We sea kayaked for two days before switching to hiking boots to complete our multi-day, multi-sport adventure by getting picked up in a water taxi! (I should note that the water taxi stopped in a lagoon for a photo shoot to produce new material for their tourist brochure. We’re basically famous.)

Before floating into the focus of the wilderness paparazzi, we walked on the moon in the middle of the night. OK, actually, it was the bottom of an ocean lagoon at low tide. But it was certainly an otherworldly experience. Low tide was at 4 am, so we bravely set off before 6 am with the full moon and headlamps to guide us. I can’t emphasize enough the extent to which it looked like we were on another planet. 

The wet sand created a considerable amount of suction causing us to ditch our boots and then our jandles (flip flops in Kiwi speak) leaving us with numb wet barefeet against the sharp sea shells. Unfortunately, I had done a poor job of mapping out the landscape during the daylight hours the day before so we ended up overshooting the trailhead on the other side of the ocean crossing. We had to wait for a crack of daylight to locate the track. We found ourselves ever closer to being knee-deep in salt water as the tide rolled in. Darkness added to the drama of the situation, but we stayed calm. We really earned our porridge (oatmeal) that morning. We sat on the bank by the trail marker having finally completed the crossing, finishing up our remaining camp stove fuel for a hot meal.

aMERicA

Often when I tell people I am going to travel, people who probably do not know what they are talking about say things like, “Oh you will learn so much about yourself”, or “You will learn so much about the world”. And my favorite, “You will change and grow so much!” It is not that they are necessarily wrong. But at the time, it seems like traveling does not change me or catalyze personal growth in a significant way. I came back from my first big trip in 2005 from South America. Among other things, I recall being amazed at how much American culture encouraged unproductive multitasking. Coming off a sense of calm from my travels, I vowed to ditch my multitasking habit forever. I was thoroughly disappointed to discover that my laid back approach to life lasted all of three days, maybe four under the pressures of the American workplace. The thing about traveling is not that one comes back a changed woman. But that one can get to know herself in different contexts. When I am in the context of being home, I am the same as I was in that context before I traveled, except that now I have a better sense of how different (or the same) I can be in other contexts. 

Another benefit of traveling is that for a very brief window, I can view the context I was born into from the perspective of a semi-outsider. What follows are my first impressions of the United States of America after being in New Zealand for 5 months.

We are a land of immigrants.

Everything about this country is shaped by the fact that we are all immigrants. Sure, some of us are a few more generations along in the assimilation process than others. But at the end of the day, almost none of us are really native to this land. Immigrants are people who literally give up everything they have ever known, risking all that they know just to be here. Any time you have a place filled with people who really want to be there, it turns into a pretty special place. I have heard numerous stories from my successful professional friends who went to elite universities recounting things their parents and aunts and uncles did to get to this country. Including drinking their own urine on the boat to survive, escaping oppressive governments by getting onto an airplane in the middle of having a heart attack, and giving up professional jobs to live in poverty cleaning toilets on an immigrant “salary”. The rest of us probably have great grandparents with forgotten stories like this. We are bred from a self-selecting group of highly driven, courageous people with conviction and it shows.

We are driven to innovate and “good enough” is not good enough for us.

This view may be highly biased by the fact that I have most recently resided in San Francisco, California where Facebook, Google, Apple, HP, Oracle, Twitter, eBay, Intel, Pixar, LinkedIn, YouTube, and practically every other major tech company’s headquarters are within a 50 mile radius of the city. But it seems to me that Americans are driven to innovate. We have an almost carnal need to create something new, or be a part of something that has a large impact and in some way changes the way the world operates. Most of the people I know with successful careers who make good money and have endless opportunities seem to be unsatisfied. It is not good enough to just have a successful job and enough money to do the things you want to do. You have to do more. You have to build something. You have to create something that nobody has ever thought of before. Of course there are extremely innovative, driven people all over the world, but they seem to concentrate in the USA in a special way. 

While we are on this subject and because this post is beginning to take itself way too seriously, I give you the trailer to the new TV series "Silicon Valley", which is a show that is hilariously a little too close to home.

Back to the topic of innovation: it is an example of how immigration shapes our culture. According to Forbes Magazine, at least 40% of major US tech companies (including Google) were founded by immigrants or their children. For some reason, these entrepreneurial geniuses came to the USA before starting these companies. I think it is because we have a unique innovation culture in which enables impactful, world changing technologies. Moreover, the perception that we are innovators is a self-fulfilling prophecy because we attract immigrants with a propensity to innovate.

Yes, toilet seat covers!

No, that is it. I did not have anything else to say about toilet seat covers in public restrooms. I am just quite excited to be back in a place that has them.

We tip, service is better, and we are less happy with the service we get.

In fact, we are less happy with just about everything else, too. As a terrible side effect of our will to improve, succeed, and innovate is that by and large, we do not stop to be happy with what we have.

One of the first things I witnessed upon reentering the US was a woman cutting in line in front of me and the other 100 or so passengers waiting to check in for our delayed domestic flight. She yelled at the concierge, demanding that she be put on an earlier flight (though there was no such flight). She expressed outrage that she could have spent another 3 hours at home relaxing with her feet up and she rudely blamed the people behind the desk that the airline text alerts failed to inform her of the delay. It is not enough for her that we have devised a system to make large, pressurized metal tubes filled with human beings safely travel long distances in a complicated dance where thousands of flight paths are coordinated without incidence at once. Never mind that we have no control over the weather, and that each flight’s departure is contingent upon the successful completion of the flight before. Never mind that we have built mobile phone technology whereby automated mass text alerts are possible to keep passengers informed. None of this is good enough for this woman who is obviously more important than everyone else waiting patiently in line, many with fussy children. The more we have, the less satisfied we seem to be with what we get.  “Good enough” isn’t good enough for that lady. Nor was it good enough for the lady who loudly complained to the airport pizza guy that her pizza had too much sauce. She sent it back because “who in their right mind would put that much sauce on a pizza”.

The craziest thing is that I have spent a great deal of my life barely taking notice of this type of behavior, writing it off as normal and expected.

I cannot think of a single instance where I observed people openly complaining about service for the five months I was in New Zealand. It is not customary to tip in New Zealand, so service is kind of crappy in my opinion. There is no incentive to do more than the bare minimum as a server. But nobody seems to be too bothered about this poor service. The expectation is lower. I am not advocating that we should all lower our expectations and be satisfied with mediocrity. I am just pointing out that there seem to be some negative side effects of our compulsion to always do better. It drives innovation which impacts the entire world, and we are less happy because of it.

We think that our work is so important that we only need two weeks per year vacation to attend to everything outside work including family and enjoying the fruits of our labors with recreation or travel. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the developed world enjoys at least 30 paid vacation days per year. On top of that, there are 178 countries in the world which provide guaranteed paid maternity leave and the US is not one of them. (Fortunately, there are many private US companies who have realized the benefits of offering paid maternity leave and do so voluntarily). But I think these statistics make a very big statement about our priorities and our regard for pleasure verses accomlishment relative to the rest of the world.

We are a rule-bound people choking ourselves with litigation and regulation.

“I’ve lived part-time in America for the past decade, but I would never dream of starting a business in America”, said the millionaire Kiwi business man who started one of the most successful bungee companies in New Zealand. “There is too much liability and too much regulation”.  Americans do a lot of inefficient and expensive things to avoid a lawsuit. So much of the wealth we create gets tied up into insurance litigation, malpractice suits, and complicated procedures to avoid expensive law suits. In New Zealand, it is illegal to drive drunk, but it is technically not illegal to drink while driving, provided the driver never exceeds the legal limit. (This means that passengers can enjoy a beer in the car, by the way). I am not advocating that we scale down alcohol driving laws, but I am citing this as an example of how other places in the world accomplish safety and orderly conduct without imposing laws that are technically unnecessary to the goal of maintaining a safe orderly society. There are pros and cons to a society that more strictly or more loosely following rules. But it seems to me that many of our rules are arbitrary and stifling. Had I been in the USA instead of New Zealand, I do not think I could have just showed up at a farm (transported there in a mail truck), worked for accommodation, driven a tractor, pulled off the highway to independently hike through a wet cave, or ridden in a water taxi where the captain decided to drop a fishing line along the way while transporting passengers just for the hell of it. I think we are at risk of deteriorating our culture of innovation and personal responsibility if we continue to escalate the degree to which we finger-point and litigate.

The USA is a world power, but not in the way it was during my parent’s and grandparent’s generations.

I have a friend from Paraguay who grew up with no telephone. To make a call, she walked a small distance to her neighbor’s house where she paid them to use their land line. Now she has an iPhone. I use Facebook to keep up with my friends who live in the middle of the Amazon. They are prolific posters. “Google” is a verb on remote New Zealand islands. I did a work exchange at an online ad agency in Chile for two weeks. Their tactics, case studies, strategies, and best practices were simply recycled and re-framed, slightly outdated variations on US online advertising.

Photo credit to Funny Tweek

For most of American history, we have been a world power largely due to our strong military and partially due to our strong currency and relatively high GDP (which many would argue grew to be strong due to all the wars we have fought). It would be ignorant and inaccurate to say that we are not still a strong military force or that we have evolved past traditional military force. But I would argue that our greatest modern influence in the world is through the technologies of our innovative immigrants and citizens outside the scope of our military might. Besides the anecdotes I have shared of how technology developed in the US has reached just about every corner of the world, the Arab Spring is a perfect example of how privately developed US technologies have enabled and influenced major changes in the world.

There aren’t a bunch of Europeans rudely telling me how much they dislike my country.

Numerous times, I have been floored by how comfortable many Europeans and Australians (but not New Zealanders) seem to be telling me negative things about my country to my face. They do this with no prompting and no context. The only trigger some of them need seems to be, "Oh, you are American? Let me tell you everything that is wrong with America…By the way, nice to meet you." Sometimes, they try to slip in inferences that their negative view on America somehow doesn't apply to me since I'm "different" as a traveler from San Francisco. I find this inference ignorant and offensive. Newsflash: San Francisco is part of America.

I would be considered ignorant, rude, and an example of everything that is wrong with America if I, an American met a new German friend and started telling them their culture is flawed given that their people enabled Hitler to come to power, pushing his horrific ethnic cleansing agenda. Similarly, I would not be well-received if I met someone from the UK and said, "Wow, you guys sure killed off a lot of indigenous people with all that colonization you did back in the day." Well these are essentially the sorts of comments other travelers feel comfortable making to me about the USA upon meeting me for the first time and learning that I am American.

Photo credit to Alternet

In any case, I'm not necessarily disputing all the complaints Europeans lodge against me on behalf of my entire nation (as if I am somehow representative of a diverse 300 million people).
In case you are curious, their complaints can generally be summed up as:

1) We are military bullies.
2) We drive in our cars too much and don’t do enough to protect the environment given the resources we have at hand.
3) We are on average more ignorant about the rest of the world than they are and we have an attitude which is obnoxious and perpetuates ignorance in that we appear to believe we are superior to the rest of the world, therefore, we don’t think we need to know about the rest of the world.

Again, I am disputing the general assumption that it is not impolite to America-bash to an American you just met when there is nothing about the previous conversation or situation that should stimulate such a discussion. Just to be clear, I also met some wonderful, educated, polite Europeans who did not try to put me on the defensive.

We have freedom of speech.

For example, I have the freedom to write this editorial about my own country. Others have the right to comment and disagree with me. I am expecting some hate comments. Bring it.

Dental Hygiene

From the back of the cab lurching through I-101 San Francisco rush hour traffic, I notice the tagline “Superior cloud computing architecture.” Oh yeah, people here think it is normal to mass market enterprise software platforms on freeway billboards. I am not in New Zealand anymore. 

Photo Credits to Tony Wasserman

Fighting off backseat taxi car sickness, I symbolically swap NZ$ for US$ from my sweaty money belt to my wallet. I silently recall where I was when I woke up this morning. (Or what seems like “this morning” after traveling for 20 hours straight). A blazing pink sunrise flushed my cheeks and the wind woke me to alertness as I brushed my teeth with my tooth brush stub and hydration bladder. (By now, I had broken off the handle with my bare hands to save weight and more easily fit the toothbrush in a zip lock. Is it not annoying that tooth brush handles are perpetually just a tiny bit too long to fit in the baggie?).  I could have used the rain water catchment sink around back. But why perform routine personal care at a sink when there is a grassy hill overlooking the bay and Christchurch’s Banks Peninsula to stand atop?

I saw the San Francisco skyline and looked back through time and space into this moment of dental hygiene bliss where I had observed myself from 20 hours and 10,000 km earlier. I awed over the incogitability that I would soon be on the other side of the planet in another season and metaphorically in another world. A little toothpaste dribbled down the side of my mouth to punctuate the point. Stray scraggly mountain sheep witnessed that instant in the sunrise. At the same time, the other 50,000 people trying to crawl up and down the 101 corridor also bear witness to this moment here.

My commute to the Christchurch airport consisted of a short two hour hike from the Packhorse historic backcountry stone hut built the year my grandfather was born, in 1914. From there, I hitched a 45 minute ride with my tramping mate to the international airport. I felt a little like I was cheating the system to tramp straight out of the bush and into the airport. But this was in New Zealand and of course there was an amazing trailhead less than an hour from the runway.

Fortunately for the passengers of Air New Zealand flight 8, I found an airport shower before heading through security. I even had a clean square of towel left over! (I had cut my already small pack towel into smaller squares to save weight when tramping and to ensure that I always come back from the bush with a clean towel to work with). Unfortunately, the only shower I found happened to be in the handicapped restroom. I felt anguish about occupying this stall. I should know better. After all it was not all that long ago that I spent two months in a walker. I learned firsthand that for a handicapped person it can take every ounce of available energy to move a short distance. What if a handicapped person needed the toilet and could not get to one on time because of me? But then again, would it be any kinder to the world at large if I were to get on the airplane unwashed? Oh, these are the moral conundrums I seem to find myself in.

So here I am, washed and back in the United States of America. I proceed to walk on the left side of the terminal, thinking “why does everyone keep walking into me?” I realize my mistake, switching over to the right side of the walk when it hits me: I am in America and I am an American. I know this should not seem like a revelation for someone born and raised in the land of the free, but it is. I don’t normally think of myself as an American. No, I don’t think of myself as being from another country, either. But when I think about my identity as a human being, it normally does not occur to me to list “American” as one of my defining attributes. I just take it for granted.

I struggle to remember which side of the escalator I’m supposed to pass on. I have to wait for someone else to do it first to be reminded. I consider what it means to be “American”. I’m not sure I have an answer that would stand the test of time, but now that I am seeing my home country for the first time after being away, I have made a few observations, which you can read about here.