Shutout and Changeover, 23rd Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Wish me luck! I'm going to try and wrap up this long story that began way back on the 20th of Midsommar with one last post on the topic. 

I had just turned 30 years old a month or two before all this happened, and a week in the Caribbean isn't considered a success to a 30-year-old unless he gets laid at least once. I was out of my league with most of the entourage - socially, economically, and probably aesthetically, to be honest. However, in addition to being a developer, Charlie also owned a chain of restaurants and there were several hostesses and waitresses down there in Antigua with him for some reason (I don't know, employee-of-the-year bonuses, maybe?) and formed a sort of "outer circle" to the entourage. Even though I was allowed to sit  at the "big-boy" table at meals, I was in the same socio-economic class as that outer circle and it was at those other tables that I had a chance at satisfying my horny ambitions. I won't go into details (this isn't that kind of blog) but suffice it to say that on my last night on the island a bottle of wine may have been ordered from the bar and charged to my room (Charlie was picking up the tab) and consumed on the beach under the light of the tropical moon. 

We returned home the next day, and the trip back was memorable for two things. First, somewhere out over the Caribbean, the pilot let Charlie take over the Lear Jet's controls for a while, and in no time, we were hot-dogging over the water, spinning around in tight loop-the-loop circles at 500 mph. It was the equivalent of burning rubber in a car lot and as good an example of a Georgia good ol' boy playing with his high-price new toy as any. Can't say I wasn't relieved when the pilot took back control of the plane.

The second thing occurred after we landed back in Atlanta. I wasn't clear on exactly what happened, but when we got to customs and immigration, the agents detained Charlie for some questions. He wasn't arrested, but he wasn't free to pass through either and he waved us all on to go home without him. This was going to take a while. I later learned that the IRS had some concerns about a solar energy enterprise in which Charlie was involved, and 60 Minutes even did a second segment on the Barbuda/New Order of Aragon story, painting Charlie and the other folks behind the proposed development with their trademark suspicion and insinuation. I think Morley Safer just wanted another trip down to Barbuda and rather than becoming employee of the month at one of Charlie's restaurants, he convinced CBS to let him file a follow-up to his original story.

Back in the office, I started to piece together everything I had gathered on the island - the rainfall records, the topographic map, the well measurements, the salinity readings, and the chloride analyses. It was all very inexact and approximate, but nevertheless I was able to develop a kind of conceptual model: 

Imagine a perfectly round island, shaped as a single, rounded, hemispherical hill, sort of like a partially submerged beach ball. The water table will be at its highest elevation above sea level beneath the highest point of this idealized island, and at the shore the water table will be exactly at sea level. Since water flows downhill, all the water above sea level must come from above, rainfall, and not the surrounding ocean. My salinity measurements and chloride analyses confirmed that the groundwater on Barbuda was fresh, not salt, water, and the rainfall records quantified how much water was entering the system. 

Now, fresh water, being less dense than salt water, "floats" on top of salty groundwater, and something called the Ghyben-Herzberg principle, named for a pair of German scientists, states that, because of the specific gravities of fresh and salt water, for every foot above sea level that the water table lies, the depth to the fresh-water/saltwater interface is 40 feet. In other words, if the water table is 10 feet above sea level at the highest point, the depth to saltwater is 400 feet, while at the coast, where the water table is at sea level, the saltwater interface will also be at sea level.  From there, it's possible to calculate the size and the volume of the freshwater lens of the hypothetical, "perfect" island.

I applied that logic to the well measurements that I took on Barbuda. The island is about 62 square miles (r = 4.5 or so miles) and I calculated the volume of the freshwater lens if the island were that perfect hemispherical shape. But since the water isn't free, like some underground lake, but occurs in the cracks, voids, and cavities of the underlying limestone bedrock, I divided the theoretical volume by published values of the porosity of limestone. Then, since the island is neither perfectly round and hardly hemispherical, I cut that second volume in half to account for all the irregularities of the coastline and the lumpy topography. 

The result was still quite a bit of water, all things considered. There was potentially enough gallons of fresh water beneath the island for the demanding, start-up phase of golf-course irrigation. However, the scant rainfall on the island wouldn't replenish the water removed, and they'd essentially be "mining" the groundwater. But, I wrote, if that remaining water were managed very carefully after startup, it might be possible to maintain a course. I added some management recommendations about drought-tolerant grass like that used in Bermuda, the high-efficiency, drip-irrigation systems the Israelis were developing, and use of infiltration basins to help the rainfall that did fall to percolate to groundwater instead of running over the rocky ground surface to the sea.

It was all very speculative and needed further study and measurement for support, I concluded, but development of a course wasn't impossible, or to put it another way, one couldn't say that there categorically wasn't enough water for golf-course implementation.

I was quite proud of myself. My office manager said all that he expected me to find was either "it's an arid, desert island unsuitable for development" or "it's a lush tropical paradise with abundant water," but not be all analytical and quantitative about it. I was still in my first couple of months with the engineering consulting firm and this was my first major project, and I felt like I had nailed it. The kid who had been told at the Geologic Survey to turn around get back on the plane to Boston had completed his first challenge.

Imagine my disappointment when Ralph, the corporate president who sponsored the project, told me my report was unusable and figuratively tore it to pieces. "You don't know what's under the ground," he insisted, but I told him that's exactly what geologists do for a living - figure out what's going on underground - and that the wells are observation points into the subsurface. 

"I don't care about no Goober-Hymen principle!," Ralph declared. "We're not releasing this report!" After I expressed my certainty that it was all based on well-established, accepted scientific principals, Ralph finally said, "If Charlie gets his hands on this report, he'll know more than we investors," and that's when I finally understood. "We investors." Ralph had a stake in the project, and as long as he knew that the water was possibly (maybe, could be, perhaps) there, his investment was sound. But as long as Charlie was uncertain, he couldn't ask the investors to chip in much more. I may have been seated at the big-boy table, but they were playing an entirely different game than I.

At Ralph's direction, the report was shortened to mere documentation of my presence down there and my measurements, but the conclusions were deleted and the recommendation was simply that further study needed to be performed. Classic consulting move - "We've studied your situation and determined that you need more studies." My real-world education of how things actually work was just beginning.

Charlie was plagued by legal and tax problems for several years and the development never took off. There's no golf course, no new sovereign nation, and as far as I know, Barbuda is still pretty much like I saw it in back in 1984, only a few more tourist attractions for day-trippers coming over from Antigua. 

Five or so years later, I bumped into Charlie at a bar in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood. At first, he was cautious and defensive when I asked if it were really him ("who's asking?"), but once he realized that it was the hydrogeologist from Barbuda ("Ralph's guy"), he eased up and was most cordial. In fact, he seemed to enjoy reminiscing with a friendly witness to those times. I was sincere when I told him I really wished that it all could have worked out, and Charlie agreed, "it's was a great concept." 

Names have been changed here so I don't get sued to protect the innocent, but the person I'm calling Charlie shares a name with an all-star pro-football player, so it's difficult to Google any updates on him. All I get are sports links. Ralph has passed on but was with the company up to his very end. This old hydrogeologist, Ralph's guy, is now retired, considers himself some sort of Stoic-contemplative urban monk or something, and frequently finds himself an old man remembering the deeds of his prime.

Thanks for listening.

 

Seventh Ocean, 22nd Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Helios): Seventh Ocean, the 144th day of the year, although this is a leap year in the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar and we leapt over the 60th day so it's actually only the 143rd day this year. But still, an auspicious date, and there's a joke in there somewhere about the "grossest" day of the year, but we're better than that, aren't we?

Let's see if we can't use this occasion to wrap up the story of my adventures in Barbuda. It's Day Three of this memoir, and I haven't even gotten to the island yet! 

Tuesday morning, the day after I had arrived in Antigua, I met my client, the Atlanta developer Charlie, at the restaurant for breakfast. His entourage at breakfast turned out to be even larger than I imagined. There were about a half-dozen of us on the private plane down to Antigua, but there were at least a dozen more at the restaurant. Men and women, all relatively young (generally under 40), and all well dressed in appropriate island-casual clothes. It seemed to me that I was likely the only one at the table who hadn't previously spent an evening at a high-end Caribbean resort. 

I ate a proper English breakfast, and as the meal ended Charlie called me over and told me to go to the airport to meet the pilot who will take me over to Barbuda for the day. Neither Charlie nor anyone else from his entourage would be joining me. I took a taxi to Coolidge International Airport (it became V.C. Bird International the next year), and found the pilot, a not-altogether-reliable looking gentleman who appeared to be working off a hangover. But he had a single-engine Cessna and, with me as his only passenger, we flew the 40 miles from Antigua to Barbuda under clear blue skies, the Atlantic on one side of us and the Caribbean on the other.

Eventually, Barbuda came into view, a flat green spot out alone in the blue water. In 1984, Barbuda didn't yet have a modern airport like the current Burton–Nibbs International. We flew into the former Barbuda Codrington Airport, which had one, 500-meter runway. We came down for a landing, but to my surprise we only swooped down for a low-altitude flyover and then headed back up into the air again. "Goats," the pilot explained. "We have to chase off any goats that may be on the runway before we can land." He banked the plane around,  made a second decent, and we finally touched down on Barbuda.

I disembarked, and the pilot told me he'd be back around 5:00 to take me back to Antigua. He took off and left me there all alone in Barbuda. That was to become our routine for the rest of week - each morning, I met him at Coolidge Airfield in Antigua, and each day he ferried me back and forth between Antigua and Barbuda. Each time we strafed the airfield in Barbuda for goats before landing, and he never once looked 100% sober to me.   

Barbuda. The only town, more of a 'settlement" really, on the island is Codrington, population 756 (2011, it was probably even fewer back then). It's one of the most laid-back places I've ever been to. Nobody seemed to "work" - even the people with jobs, the storekeepers and so on, were in a state of near-perpetual leisure. People survived on subsistence fishing and handouts from Antigua, no one passed up an opportunity for recreation, and everyone was nonplussed over the sight of a white boy with a knapsack and a duffel bag full of sample jars, measuring tapes, and notebooks schlepping his way from the airport into town.  

In Codrington, I asked a shopkeeper if he knew of any wells or anything on the island I could look at. He suggested I go talk to the guy from the Peace Corps (incidentally, the only other non-Black person on the island). I think it says as much as anything about conditions on the island that the Peace Corps had a presence there. I also learned that there was a well-drilling rig on the island on loan from the Republic of Vietnam, and I was more surprised that Vietnam, not even 10 years after the fall of Saigon, was already in a financial position to lend aid to a seemingly random Caribbean island. 

I went to the guy's house and knocked on the door. After a longish wait, be answered, an American in his late-20s, shirtless, and seemingly awakened from an afternoon nap by my knock. But he was happy to see me - hey, he had something useful to do that day! - and invited me in to talk. 

Remember, my trip was supposed to be an intelligence-gathering, reconnaissance-level evaluation of the groundwater resources of Barbuda, but without any clearly defined strategy for gathering that information. The Peace Corps guy turned out to be quite the asset to my nebulous mission. First, he gave me a topographic map of the island, something I didn't even know existed but was a most valuable tool for my investigation. He also had been taking rainfall measurements for a couple of years, and was glad to share his readings with me. Rainfall measurements are essential to quantifying the water budget for a site of any size - the input, the amount of water entering the system.

As I was looking over the topo map, I noticed a symbol with the words "Spanish Well" next to it. He confirmed that there were several old wells - presumably dug by Spanish explorers centuries ago, but who knows? - scattered around the island. Studying the map further, I found several more of the wells marked. Wells, to a groundwater hydrogeologist, are the essential, fundamental observation points. The depth to groundwater can be measured at a well and samples can be taken for chemical analysis. Incredibly and improbably, all the pieces for an actual groundwater assessment - a detailed map, rainfall records, and well locations - were all falling into place. 

I asked him how I could best get to the well locations, so he took me outside and introduced me to Bully. I think his name was "Bully" - that's what it sounded like to me, but it could just as easily been "Billy" or "Pulley" or something else entirely due to his thick island patois. To be honest, we could barely understand each other speak but with the assistance of the Peace Corps guy, made arrangements for him and a friend to take me around the island in a jeep starting the next day to lead me to the wells. We settled on a "wet" (gasoline included) rate of $20 a day. 

Flying back to Antigua late that afternoon, I couldn't believe my luck. What seemed like an ill-conceived and foolish plan to "somehow" assess the groundwater resources of a distant Caribbean island was somehow all coming together, and I still had three more days to go. 

I was excited and tried to tell Charlie about my success at dinner that night, but he was much more interested in the conversations with the rest of the entourage than listening to my nerdy science talk. I think I got it across to him that I was happy with the way things were going, and that was enough for him. 

Dinners in Antigua with the entourage each night were interesting affairs. We didn't go out to restaurants so much as book the entire facility for the night so we were the only guests and there were no other diners but us. The cooks, waiters, etc. were all for us and us alone. Food and drink flowed freely, and each night, after a long day out in the sun and heat over on Barbuda, was party time with a bunch of high rollers whose company I otherwise wouldn't have likely shared. It was clear that I was the only working stiff among them - their conversations were about snorkeling that day, or sightseeing, or shopping. Not measuring groundwater depths with Bully. 

One morning, over breakfast, it came out that the plans for the day included topless volleyball at the nude beach on the island. There were few things I wanted to do more that day than play topless volleyball on the nude beach with that group of young, good-looking people, especially the photographer's model with whom I had flown down from Atlanta (word was they were there scouting locations for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue). Searching for Spanish wells on Barbuda with Bully wasn't high among the things I'd rather be doing. But I wasn't the idle rich, wasn't one of the hedonistic yuppies in the entourage, and once again took a taxi to the Antigua airport, met the maybe-sober, maybe-not pilot, landed in Barbuda after strafing the runway for goats, and rode around with Bully and his friend in a vintage International Harvester jeep trying to find the Spanish wells on the map.

Outside of Corrington, the island is a rugged landscape of cactus and limestone outcrops, an overgrown, roadless, uninhabited terrain. I would show Bully the well I wanted to examine on the map, but I don't think Bully could read maps. Nevertheless, he took me to wells that he somehow knew of, had come across and remembered in the course of his long life on the island. The paths, I can't really call them "roads," were so overgrown that sometimes Bully sat on the hood of the jeep with a machete, clearing the route ahead while his friend drove the jeep slowly along the road.

"Wells" to a hydrogeologist means any access point to subsurface groundwater, usually a cased hole in the ground, a pipe extending down to the water table. But the Spanish wells on Barbuda were the classic stone structures beneath a roof and equipped with a bucket and winch to fetch water, sort of like what you might see as decorations in some suburban or rural yards. At each well, I measured the depth to groundwater, used a salinity meter to test the saltiness of the water, and took a sample to bring back to the lab for chlorides analysis. But at most wells, while I was doing all this, wild horses, donkeys, and goats would show up, thinking I was going to fill the adjacent troughs with water for them (there was always an adjacent though). The animals were so skinny, all ribs and matted fur, that it felt criminal not to fill the trough for them, and I always did. 

And so the routine of that week went - breakfast, flight to Barbuda, ride around with Bully measuring water in wells and watering the animals, flight back to Antigua, and then dinner and partying at fabulous restaurants. Hey, it's a living. 

One day, the routine was interrupted. While I was at the Antigua airport waiting on the pilot to sober up pick me up, a black limousine pulled up. A door opened and someone inside requested me to "get in." I was understandably reluctant to comply - I'd seen enough Godfather movies to know how these things turned out. I had no reservations about riding around in the Barbuda backcountry with two men I'd never met before, both armed with machetes, but the person in the limo had to get out and tell me that "Prime Minister Bird wants to talk to you" before I reluctantly agreed to get in. I didn't really have a choice. No one acted in a threatening manner and no handguns were exposed, but when you're told that the Prime Minister of the country you're visiting wants to talk to you, you really have no choice but to talk.

We rode to a unassuming office building in St. John and I was led to a second floor suite where the Honorable V.S. Bird, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, was waiting for me (the current airport in Antigua is named for him). He calmly and politely told me that he knew what I was doing, evaluating the groundwater of Barbuda in consideration of future development there. It's a small island, and word gets around. P.M. Bird offered me his Minister of Natural Resources, who was there with us in the room, for some additional information he thought I'd find useful. He was doing me a favor, I was led to understand.

"We've studied the island already," I was told, "and there are no significant amounts of groundwater to be found anywhere to support further development." He didn't offer me a written report or other documentation to support his claim - I was supposed to just take him at his word. "Thank you," I said, and I should have just left it at that and got out of Bird's office as quickly as I gracefully could, but me and my big stupid mouth just had to add, "However, I may have found a freshwater lens in the Highlands area that looks like it might be usable."

Wrong answer. Both Mr. Bird and his minister frowned, and the minister emphatically stated, "No, there's no water for development. We looked into the Highlands, too, and there's nothing there." They had made their position clear to me - they opposed the development and any feasibility studies to support the development, and they had their eyes on me. They had made their point and with that, they took me back to the airport and allowed me to hop across the water to Barbuda with my sure-he's-probably-more-sober-than-not pilot for another day of well hunting.

At dinner that night, Charlie was furious with me. It's a small island and word gets around. He pulled me aside, which he rarely did, and told me, "I've called Ralph (the President of my company and manager of the project) and he's flying down right now to relieve you. You're leaving tomorrow and you can go back to your room right now." I insisted to Charlie that I had no choice but to get in the limo, and that I merely listened to their opinion about the resources of Barbuda but didn't agree to anything. "Yeah, I know," Charlie laughed. "I'm just fucking with you."

"Ralph's not coming down?" I asked.

"No, Ralph's not coming down." 

I think the whole point, just like with P.M. Bird, was basically to let me know that he knew. Both had their intelligence systems and ways of knowing who was doing what and for whom. They both had their eyes on me.

I'm getting close to the end of this story and can probably wrap it up in one more installment. If it's any consolation, I knew it was going to be a long story when I started, but I had no idea it was going to take this long. Old men and their never-ending stories. . . 

 

Dispersal of the Primal Cloud Mass, 21st Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Electra): The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime. I'm not going to recap yesterday's lengthy post, other that to note that in 1984, I was chosen to go to Barbuda to perform a groundwater evaluation of the Caribbean island for a, well, "colorful" group of clients.

In that Orwellian year, I was barely four years out of college and had just finally completed my Masters thesis in hydrogeology two years earlier. For most of the time between graduation and getting shipped off to Barbuda, I had worked for the State of Georgia's Geologic Survey, an experience I found quite miserable. The Survey was my first real job in my chosen field but, having lived and gone to school in Boston before that, I had no prior experience with and no knowledge of Southeastern geology. But in response to an epic drought in 1980, the Georgia legislature had granted the Survey's Groundwater Division additional funding to hire some new staff. Calls were made and my thesis advisor, who had also once taught the head of the Groundwater Division, had recommended me. So I wound up at the downtown office of the Geologic Survey with no experience and no knowledge of Georgia hydrology, other than the academic basics of the science.

It turns out they didn't know what to do with me. There was no clearly defined job description for my position. Most of the other staff were experienced geologists and were continuing their post-graduate or doctoral studies in Georgia geology, and were investigating very specific aspects of the state's geology and groundwater resources. They immediately sniffed me out as an imposter, lacking, as I was, any knowledge of the state or of how to plan and conduct a proper geologic investigation. They didn't like me and I didn't fit in.

"You should just turn around and get on the plane back to Boston," one otherwise very charming woman there told me. Conversations sometimes stopped as soon as I entered a room and I was mocked for talking like a Yankee and having Yankee mannerisms. Once, when a bunch of us went out for some afterwork pizza and beer, someone pointed me out and said to the rest of the group, "Hey, everyone - look at how people from the North hold their slices!" (I had folded a particularly greasy and limp slice lengthwise to manage the drippage). I was an archetype to them, a Yankee who talked with a funny accent and had no idea of what he was doing. "You don't belong here."   

They were right, actually. But, hey, don't blame me - I didn't hire me. What the Survey should have done, in retrospect, was team me with an experienced geologist so that I could learn how investigations are performed and get up to speed on the regional geology. I would have gratefully accepted the mentorship and both I and the groundwater resources of the great State of Georgia would have benefitted. Instead, after I floundered trying to identify some new specific and unique problem to investigate, I was assigned various odd jobs with no real value. And the pay was poverty-level awful.

I'm surprised that I lasted three and a half years, but it was job experience and I didn't have an alternate career plan. But I did learn a lot on the job about Georgia geology and eventually answered an ad in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and got a new job with an engineering consulting company for a better-defined and better-paying job. 

The difference in mentorship was like day and night. Those engineers mentored the hell out of me. How to write a proposal. How to dress for the office. How to tie a knot. How to take field measurements. How to document findings. How to prepare invoices. They knew precisely what they wanted from me and how to get me there, and I, in turn, responded enthusiastically. I wound up working for them for twenty years.

Among the many things they impressed upon me was that a proposal had to be a precise document. When signed by a client, a proposal becomes a contract, and a contract has to stipulate exactly and without any ambiguity what services are to be performed and the quantities of deliverables to be provided, and the schedule and deadlines have to be clearly identified. There was no room for "gray area." If the contract is not clear, I was taught, a disappointed client can initiate a lawsuit claiming they expected something different, and it will be up to a judge, or worse, a jury, to decide what the contractor was supposed to provide.

So imagine my surprise when I was told there wasn't really a written proposal for the assignment in Barbuda. "It's kind of a reconnaissance," I was told. "Spend a week on the island and see what you can find. Write a report when you get back." As a contract, it couldn't have been more vague.  

My shock was compounded by the fact that the project was  managed not be some other newbie like myself, or even one of the usual office or project managers, but by one of the Presidents of the company. There were several Presidents in the company for the various corporate subdivisions, because everyone knows the title of Vice-President is so common in corporations as to be almost meaningless. 

I had sat through a Saturday seminar on how to write precise and defensible proposals, only to discover that a corporate President could tell a developer (a notably litigious class of client), "Yeah, we'll send someone to your remote Caribbean island to see what we can see."

To this day, I don't know why they picked me for the assignment. There were several employees with more seniority than I who would have liked an all-expense-paid trip to the Caribbean and had their hands up volunteering but were passed over for me. It's interesting than none of them seemed to resent me for getting picked. Unlike that otherwise-very-charming-woman at the Geological Survey, they understood that I wasn't the one who picked me for the project, and there was no reason to be angry at me for doing what they would have done had they been picked.    

I did some homework before I left only to find that, as I had suspected, that there wasn't a lot of literature on the groundwater resources of Barbuda. This was at least a decade before the internet, so I had to leaf through printed catalogs of the publications of the U.S. Geological Survey and visit the library and work the card catalog to ascertain that there was little to assist me. And by "little," I mean "nothing." All I found were some textbook discussions about the general principals of groundwater dynamics of islands and a lot of warnings about seawater intrusion.

I was told to meet the client, Charlie, at a small, non-commercial airport just outside of Atlanta on a Monday afternoon, and he'll get me to Antigua and arrange transport for me from there to Barbuda. No need to buy an airline ticket or book my own hotel. Charlie will take care of everything. But when I got to the airfield, I found that Charlie was already in Antigua. However, his Lear Jet and personal pilot were waiting there for me, along with about a half dozen or so members of his entourage.  

That entourage was an interesting group. Not only was there the pilot and copilot, but also an architect, an engineer, and a photographer and his model. As far as I could tell, there were no Aragon royalty. There were a few other people who only introduced themselves as "advisors" but whose role wasn't further explained to me; intuitively, I knew not to pry (I could read a room). They were all very nice and friendly people, generally youngish, and all very attractive, and as far as I could tell, I was the only one "on the clock," the only one working, except possibly for the pilots. It was single-row seating on the jet and it was a night flight, so we mostly all dozed on the four-hour trip, except, hopefully, for the pilots.

We got to the hotel, more of a resort, really, around midnight. The facility had luxurious rooms, a casino, restaurants, numerous swimming pools, and a private beach. It was lovely - I've vacationed at far lesser destinations. I was too wired after the flight to go straight to bed, so I went down to the casino and recognized Charlie at a blackjack table from some of the photographs I had seen. Before introducing myself, I watched him lose $4,000 on about six straight bad hands. 

He understandably wasn't it the best of moods after that, but I still felt obligated to introduce myself anyway and tell him I had arrived. "Oh, so you're Ralph's guy, huh?," he asked (Ralph was the corporate President representing my firm). I suppose I was, and Charlie gruffly told me to meet him at breakfast at 8:00 am and he'll get me to Barbuda tomorrow, and then went off to his room for the night.

Charlie. If you've read Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, the novel's Charlie Croaker isn't a bad approximation of our real-life Charlie. Forget the Netflix adaptation - it wasn't at all faithful to the book and Jeff Daniels' casting as Croaker was way off the mark. I like Daniels - he's a great actor but he looks like he could be a professional baseball player and the Charlie Croaker of the novel was a former Georgia Tech running back. Little in Daniel's appearance suggests "football player." But as I watched Charlie trundle off to his room, a blonde woman on his arm, I could imagine him as having once played football,

I didn't play the casino after he left - it was a high-rollers kind of joint and I was decidedly not a high roller. But at least now I had a plan, such as it was - meet Charlie at the restaurant for breakfast and find out how he was going to get me over to Barbuda. That was as much of a scope of work as I had so date for this nebulous project, but I still had absolutely no idea of what I was going to do once I arrived on the island.

 

From the Touchstone Breath, 20th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Deneb): One of my favorite previous dandelions, the 18-year-old me, was a fan of the English rock group Pink Floyd. Not the Dark-Side-of-the-Moon Pink Floyd, that album didn't come out until a year after my 18-year-old dandelion, but the earlier, gnarlier, less harmonious Pink Floyd. Later dandelions would divide the Floyd discography into two categories, pre-Dark Side and post-Dark Side, and much preferred the earlier division, as it was the music of our formative teenage years. 

Anyway, this isn't a post about Pink Floyd, just a roundabout way of introducing the lyrics from their song Free Four (from Obscured by Clouds, 1972), "The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime." Not many rock songs from that era were about aging or old people, and before you say, "What about Old Man by Neil Young?," I said "not many," not "none," and besides, Young was using the old man to assert his own relative youth, not identifying with the old man like in the Pink Floyd song.

But anyway, those lines have stayed with me for years - the whole song, really - and this old dandelion of today can vouch for the truthfulness of those lyrics. "You shuffle in the gloom of the sickroom, and talk to yourself as you die." I'm not in the sickroom, at least not yet, but I do talk to myself and like everything living, I'm also dying, as in, "he who is not busy being born is busy dying" (Bob Dylan).

There are so many memories crowding my head, and like all old people, I'm virtually bursting with stories that no one else wants to hear. The decades-old tales of old people's lives are as irrelevant to younger people today as stories about dreams. Nothing turns off a listener more than the words "So, I had this dream . . ., " which translates to most people as "let me tell you about a bunch of shit that didn't actually happen" (save it for your shrink). An old person saying "I remember back when . . ." has about the same effect on listeners. 

Anyway, this isn't a post about a dream or the song Free Four - that was all just a roundabout way of introducing this old man's memories of deeds from his prime. Further - surprise! - the deeds weren't committed by my 18-year-old dandelion, either. That was all just a set-up to introduce the words of Free Four, a set-up to the set-up, as it were, and I better get on with the story before I start endlessly circling the drain.

The story involves my 30-year-old dandelion, not my favorite incarnation and one that I don't associate with all that much any more. Too materialistic and too self-centered, although not without some redeeming qualities, IMHO. But if you asked me for the most interesting, as in the most entertaining, story in my life, this would probably be my pick. The story involves medieval dynasties, third-world politics, tropical paradises, groundwater geology, skinny-dipping with supermodels, and runways infested by goats, with appearances by Morley Safer and Rossano Brazzi (if you're old enough to know who they are). Also, warning: this might be a long story and could take a couple of posts to complete.

Historical background and context: The Kingdom of Aragon is located in what is now eastern Spain, adjacent to coastal Catalonia. The area was part of the Western Roman Empire until the Romans were displaced by the Visigoths, who were displaced by the Moors, who established a vast Crown of Aragon all along the Mediterranean coast. The Moors were eventually expelled from the territory by the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella of Christopher Columbus fame, and Aragon is now an autonomous region of Spain. 

That's the short version. European history is crazy, with countless monarchs and rulers rising and falling over the millennia, and city- and nation-states appearing and disappearing. Suffice it to say for our purposes that Aragon was once a big deal, among many other big deals, but no longer exists.

Anyway, sometime in the early 1980s, a group emerged from within the jet set of Europe who claimed they were displaced princes and princesses of Aragon, royalty who no longer had a Kingdom. They weren't asking to be given Aragon back - they weren't crazy - but they were looking for a sovereign land somewhere over which they could rule. They probably had in mind some little enclave like Liechtenstein or Andorra (which itself borders Aragon), or if anyone had an island somewhere for sale, they'd consider that. 

Meanwhile, Great Britain had just conceded independence to the Caribbean island of Antigua in 1981, and one of the conditions for independence was that Antigua also had to take the adjacent island of Barbuda off its hands. Barbuda was still relatively undeveloped, just a couple of sustenance-level fishing communities and one remote, ultra-exclusive and ultra-private resort for the ultra-wealthy out by itself on a peninsula. The resort was tiny, but the kind of place that, say, Jackie Onassis might visit to get away from paparazzi and everyone else, while still having her every whim satisfied in luxury. But the rest of island was still wild, just a rugged landscape of limestone cliffs covered by yucca and cacti and the occasional gravel road. In other words, a perfect candidate to be developed into a New Order of Aragon.

The princes were intrigued and discussions were started to negotiate a purchase of the island from Antigua. I don't know how seriously Antigua took the proposition, but a public-relations campaign was started with Italian actor Rossano Brazzi of South Pacific fame selected as the handsome face of the campaign for some reason. The architecture firm of John Portman & Associates was approached with the intriguing, once-n-a-lifetime concept of designing an entire nation from the ground up, including an airport, a capitol district, hotels, beachfront, roads and a power grid to connect it all, and so on. The goal was to transform Barbuda from possibly the last undeveloped Caribbean island into an independent Kingdom of Aragon, with an economy, like many other islands, based on tourism, gambling, and off-shore banking.

Before the development and negotiations got very far, however, some journalists discovered that the "princes" weren't really royals, had no money to speak of, and no claim to any sovereignty. The whole thing, in short, was a con job intended to fleece European jet setters. 60 Minutes even ran a segment covering the scam, having great fun mocking the "princes" along with amusing clips liberally edited in of Brazzi singing Bali H'ai from South Pacific. Hilarious stuff. 

That would have been the end of it all, but an Atlanta developer got wind of the idea, probably from Atlanta-based Portman, and thought that with or without the New Order of Aragon, developing a Caribbean island from the ground up was still a pretty good - which is to say, profitable - idea. He went about rounding up investors and planners and generally promoting the idea of Barbuda as the next big Caribbean hotspot.

Much of the planning centered around a golf course. The beaches were there all around the island, but you can't have a vacation destination without a golf course, and a golf course requires green grass, and green grass requires irrigation water.  A course in that climate needs a lot of irrigation water to first establish a grassy ground cover, and only slightly lesser amounts of water after that to maintain the cover. The problem is that Barbuda is a Leeward Island with most of its rain falling during hurricane season in September and November, with recurrent droughts in between. Further, the irrigation water has to be good-quality fresh water without salt or a lot of chlorides, which is hard to find on a small island surrounded by the salt-water sea. The groundwater resources of Barbuda were not well established, and it was not at all apparent if there were sufficient reserves of suitable water on the island to support a golf course, and if there wasn't the whole idea of a new Caribbean paradise was doomed.

In 1984, while all of this was going on, I was a groundwater hydrogeologist who had just taken a new job with an Atlanta-based engineering consulting firm. My firm won the contract to make an initial evaluation of the fresh-water resources of the island and in only my first or second week on the job, I was chosen to go to Barbuda to perform that evaluation. 

I warned you that this was a long story, and I've reached the limit of what I want to say today. Now that I've intersected with the narrative and am now myself finally a part of the tale, I'll pick the story back up again tomorrow to continue.

 

Laws of the Dark Trance, 19th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Castor): Consider the dandelion. 

No, no, no, seriously, consider, for a moment, a dandelion. Picture it in your mind. The immediate image that comes to my mind is a bright yellow, multi-petal flower on a soft green stem.  But that's only a part of a dandelion's life. Most of the year, it's a green, broad-leafed, deep-rooted weed, the bane of many a lawn. Later in its life, the yellow petals are replaced by a whitish puffball, and when the wind blows, feathery, parachute-like spores sail through the air, each of which are individual dandelions in and of themselves looking for a place to take root.

We can all probably agree that a dandelion is more than just a yellow flower. It's a continuum, really, from spore to weed to flower to puffball and back to spore again. We might be tempted to think of the dandelion as more of a process, a verb, than a thing, a noun. It's life "dandelion-ing" through existence, following a script written by millions of years of evolution. For all I know, it might even be consciousness dandelion-ing through existence, if you can accept the premise that plants have some low form of consciousness.

So it is with animals and so it is with people. Everyone you know, everyone you meet, even everyone you imagine, is in one stage or another of "people-ing" through life. Every old person was once an infant, dependent on its parents for its immediate survival, was once a child wanting simply wanting to please those parents, and was once an adolescent, perhaps (or not) rebelling against those parents as it sought to establish it's own independence. This old man carries memories and awareness of the various stages he's been, and sometimes I can even image what 15-year-old me, or 21-yar-old me (apparently two of my favorite previous incarnations for some reason) would have thought of one thing or another.

I often get frustrated, even peevish, when people seem to perceive me only in my current phase. Yes, an old man is asking you for directions or doesn't understand how something works, but damn it, I wasn't always this old man. I'm more than just this old man. At least to me. 

I assume other people often feel the same way - mothers and grandmothers resentful that people no longer recognize the attractive young woman of years before, fathers who don't understand why they're suddenly "invisible" to teenage girls. 

I know this, but I fall into that same trap of not seeing people as processes, only as their current appearance. All the time. I forget my neighbor, a mother of three, was once an eight-year-old playing Simon Says, and that she still carries that eight-year-old with her in her mind. I forget that the teenager taking my coffee order is still in touch with the nervous schoolboy hoping the teacher doesn't pick on him for an answer. I forget the guy putting new tires on my car once operated a jeep in Afghanistan. 

We're all processes, verbs not nouns, we all have multiple personalities, and we've all inhabited different bodies in this lifetime.

Today is Castor, a sitting day, and I got my usual 90 minutes in today. But I bagged my attempt to sit cross legged after 10 minutes today. It was just too uncomfortable, and I found that I was sitting there simply agonizing through discomfort, my mind preoccupied with how much time had passed and how much remained, and not at all doing anything I would call "meditating." I used to be able to sit cross-legged quite comfortably for 90 minutes and longer, but that "me" was one of those previous phases I've dandelion-ed through. This current me doesn't have the flexibility of the me of even a decade ago, even though I have much the same tastes and preferences, and even wear a lot of the same clothes. 

That middle-aged man sitting cross-legged in the Zen Center is now this self-described "urban monk" who has to kneel (seiza) to get through 90 minutes of zazen. He's also that 21-year-old who probably could have sat for hours on his head if he got a mind to try that. 

But I need to work on seeing others as life processes and not just as their current appearance, because it's a process that's presenting itself to me, not the static impression my mind creates of them.

 

Council of the Million Visitation, 15th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Sometime around 7:30 last night, after the HVAC guy had left, I had completed my sitting, posted to this blog, and finished my dinner, my power went out. Boom! A transformer somewhere down the road blew and I was in the not-quite-yet dark.

I thought for a moment that it might have had something to do with my AC - the power drain more than the transformer could handle? Of course, it wasn't, but the mind always looks at the most obvious recent event as it tries to establish cause and effect. The power was back on by 9:00 pm.

It's primary day here in Georgia. I early voted on Thursday, but I feel like American democracy in 2026 is a fucking joke - Tweedle-Dee versus Tweedle-Dum while this whole shithouse of a country burns to the ground. Circus clowns masquerading as politicians while dividing up the remnants of the wealth like scurvy dogs fighting over table scraps. All this under the bleary, bloodshot eyes of the Stable Genius, that cancerous polyp on the undescended testicle of the American body politic. 

The corruption, the racism, the intolerance, and the greed are more than we as a nation should have to endure. At this point, if I could, I would vote for a blood clot to end this long national nightmare. 

Let's hear it for Blood Clot 2026!

 

Signature of Light, 17th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): I've previously spoken here about Saint Willis of Carrier, the patron saint of the American South - the man who invented air conditioning, without which life here in Georgia would be, if not impossible, at least very uncomfortable.  

We're most aware of Saint Willis when his invention is absent, as in yesterday afternoon when I realized my AC was just blowing warm air, and the temperature was slowly rising in the house. I called the service company and they scheduled a technician to come fix it today, which he did.

This happens every year. Since 2021, I've had a maintenance contract on my HVAC, and every year they come here, usually in March or April, for annual maintenance. No charge - it's a part of the annual service fee. But every year, after their annual maintenance and the weather begins to warm up, I have to call them and make a second appointment because the air won't start, and then after that it works fine for the rest of the summer. 

This happens every year. Every year. There's no cost for the second visit either, so it doesn't seem to be some sort of scam.

In any event, after a warm but not too uncomfortable 24 hours, I can once again feel the spirit of Saint Willis in my house.

It's Aldebaran, a sitting day, and a year ago, almost to the date, I missed my alternating-day sit waiting for the technician for the second maintenance appointment of 2025. I made sure that didn't happen again this year and after I settled down following the tech's departure, I did my sitting. I noticed the incense burned faster in the moving air from the overhead AC vent. Instead of a stately column of smoke trailing straight up from the stick, and smoke eddied and swirled in the chaotic air currents, and a stick that normally lasts well over an hour had already burned out by 60 minutes.

I'm still working on my cross-legged posture. I was able to sit through the first half hour cross-legged, but I started fidgeting during the second half hour. The trouble with fidgeting is that once you adjust the body to alleviate some ache or pain, you've told your mind that you can control the physical sensations and then the adjustments don't stop. Moving this leg out a little relieves the tightness in the calf, but now the left heel is digging into the right shin. Fix that and then the lower back starts calling for some attention. Then the neck. Et cet., et cet. Halfway through the second half hour, I quit with the criss-cross bullshit and went back to seiza.

It was about the same for the third and final half hour, although I think I made it well past halfway and certainly longer than the second period before I abandoned cross-legged sitting and returned again to the kneeling posture.

The body is like clay - stiff clay to be sure, but with time and patience I believe it can be molded and stretched as desired, even for old men. But believing is one thing and seeing another, and I'll believe it when I see it as I keep working toward my ideal posture.

 

Spectre of the Lapse, 16th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Helios): Everything's impermanent and nothing lasts forever, even - maybe especially - the epic run of gorgeous weather we've been having here in Georgia. Today was notably hotter (upper 80s) and more humid, with occasional light rain. I'm under a severe thunderstorm warning right now, but I think it will pass without major incident, other than a little rain and the rumble of distant thunder.

The long-term forecast shows rain and thunderstorms for eight of the next ten days, and overcast, cloudy (and probably humid) conditions for the other two days. Might do something for the drought, however.

It's Helios, a walking day, and I got a Madisonian 4.4 miles in before the sound of approaching thunder made me call it a day. The heat and humidity made it a bit uncomfortable to be out walking, but what I would give for a day like today when the Dog Days come rolling in later this year.

I read that after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a Democratic Presidential candidate has never won a majority of the White vote. I thought that had to be bullshit - surely we're not that racist, are we? - but I looked it up and it's true. The closest a Democrat came was Jimmy Carter in 1976 (48%). Bill Clinton got only 39% of the white vote in 1992 but improved to 44% in '96. In 2008, Obama also got 44% of the White vote but fell to only 39% in 2012. Biden got only 41% in 2020.

I'm still not sure there's a direct and singular causal correlation between the Voting Rights Act and the electoral demographics. I mean, ever since man landed on the moon, a Democrat hasn't won the majority of White vote, right? Ever since The Beatles disbanded, a Democrat hasn't won the White vote. Ever since women were allowed to apply for a credit card without a male co-signer. Et cet. But the data doesn't put White Americans in a very flattering light, does it?    

If it's any consolation, Kamala Harris got a higher percentage of the White vote (42%) than Hilary Clinton (37%). Must have been the emails.

 

Dream in the Rock, 15th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Electra): I have a confession to make - ever since August 2024, when I began in earnest my current practice of alternating walking and sitting days, I wasn't literally sitting every other day. I was instead using what's called the seiza posture, a form of kneeling, with the zafu (meditation cushion) under my butt for support. I have a seiza bench but rarely use it - it's more for the convenience of guests although I admit I used it once or twice during last December's Rohastsu intensive practice period.

Traditionally, there's nothing wrong with seiza - it's still zazen, but just kneeling instead of sitting. Everybody's different and every body is different, and for this old man who's sacrificed some or most of his flexibility by sitting behind a desk for some 30 years, and then loafing in retirement for the past seven, cross-legged sitting is difficult. 

Difficult, but not impossible, and today I decided to sacrifice some comfort and sat cross-legged, not in the lotus style with each foot on the opposite thigh (now that's impossible for me) but relaxed, with each foot on the floor near, but not on, the opposite knee. For the record, I used to sit that way regularly from like 2003 to at least 2013. 

It was a bit intense, especially at first, but I could feel the tendons and muscles or whatever stretching back out. Strangely, the meditation periods seemed to go by faster as my mind was focused more on my body than in idle daydreams.

There's no "right" or "wrong" posture for meditation - whatever works for you is fine. In my case, I want to take charge of my body and reorient myself to sit cross-legged while I still can, before the triple threat of sickness, old age, and death dictate that I can't sit at all anymore. Besides, it's good to have goals and something tangible and physical to work on as I practice my zazen.         

       

 

Separation of the First Stage, 14th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Deneb): At the risk of sounding repetitive, another beautiful day today. High in the mid 70s, low humidity, perfectly clear, +25-mile visibility.

I walked a 6.2-mile Quincy in the afternoon. I did take a shortcut this time, and even though I shaved off 1.5 miles, my phone recorded only 0.7 miles less than it did on Wednesday, when I avoided that shortcut. There are mileposts along the route, so I'm fairly confident I actually walked at least eight miles on Wednesday and 6.5 miles today.

Regardless, my walking hours are also my podcast listening time and today I listened to a very good conversation between Buddhist scholar and author Pema Chödrön and podcaster/journalist Ezra Klein. No great quotes to repeat and no new revelations for this old Zen student as it was fairly familiar ground to me, but it was still nice hearing them talk. Klein didn't quite come out as a Buddhist himself, but talked about his own meditation practice and techniques. Okay, one quote (from Ezra!): "Meditation is not a vacation from irritation."

It was one week ago today that I buried Eliot. I still half expect to see him whenever I walk into my den/tv room (his favorite hangout). I still am not quite sure what to do with myself at 7:00 pm (his routine feeding time). I'm more surprised than not that I don't hear his meows after the clock radio starts in the morning but I'm still laying in bed. There's no one to remind me when I've spent too much at the computer.

I miss him.   

  

 

Day of Fallacies, 13th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Castor): Yet another beautiful, picture-perfect day, continuing the long string of lovely weather we've been enjoying here in the South. I voted today, the penultimate day of early voting for the Georgia primary. I wonder how many more years I'll be able to freely vote, or at least vote in meaningful elections  

For some reason, the New York Times ran a long think piece today about Buddhism in Nepal, the first of a three-part "travel series" about the spread of Buddhism across Asia. The series, titled The Prince's Journey, is written by Aatish Taseer of Delhi, India, and future installments will cover Buddhism in Thailand and in Taiwan. Long on history and providing a broad overview of Buddhist teachings, it as informative and well written, although I'd hardly call it "travel" journalism. 

I found it amusing that when the author asked a teacher of Newar Buddhism, the indigenous variant of Buddhism practiced in the Kathmandu Valley, about the tension between the different branches of Buddhism, he was told, “When you look at a tree, you don’t concentrate on its different branches. You try and see the tree as a whole.” And then readers responded in the comments section with complaints that the author had overlooked this movement or that school or some other specific teacher or writer, all focused on the branches and not the tree. To his credit, Taseer personally replied to a great many of the complaints with grace and in a dignified manner.  

Separately, I saw a post on Facebook today by jazz trumpeter Steven Bernstein (Lounge Lizards, Sexmob), who I saw at Big Ears last March playing the music of Sly Stone with his Millennial Territory Orchestra. He was announcing, in a roundabout way, his new project, the ResoNation Trio, and noted, "I love blowing into a piece of metal and creating a sound, and using that sound to interact with other musicians/artists and making something new."

"My trumpet teacher, Jimmie Maxwell, was a Buddhist," he wrote. "We would talk about trumpet satori." 

I hadn't heard of Jimmie Maxwell, but a quick peek at his Wikipedia page tells me Maxwell (1917 – 2002) was an swing trumpeter who played with Benny Goodman's band from 1939 to 1943, later performing on Goodman's tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. He played on hundreds of recordings and commercials from 1950 to 1980 and worked as a sideman for, among others, Duke Ellington, Oliver Nelson, Gerry Mulligan, Maynard Ferguson, and Quincy Jones. He worked as a studio musician for NBC, playing on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show (1963–73), contributed the solo trumpet theme on the soundtrack of The Godfather, and taught from the late 1970s onwards.

And apparently was a Buddhist.

 

Day of the Rainhouses, 12th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): It's happening. Cheating Brian Kemp, who first got elected Governor of Georgia by suppressing minority votes as Secretary of State, had said that he would not redraw the State's electoral boundaries for this year’s elections (the primaries are on Tuesday). But today he called for a special session of the State Congress to redraw electoral maps for the 2028 election. Georgia is but the latest southern state to initiate new electoral maps after the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.

Kemp said the session will focus on “enacting, revising, repealing, or amending” district lines for both the state legislature and congressional districts. Among other things, the Republicans may seek to eliminate the district of Democratic representative Sanford Bishop, a Black member of Congress who has served since 1993. 

The Supreme Court ruled last month that the districts Louisiana drew in accordance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prevents racial discrimination in voting, were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Effectively, the court’s decision dilutes Black and minority voting power, reversing years of civil-rights law.

My Arya Sansa list goes "John Roberts. Brett Kavanaugh. Clarence Thomas. Joseph Alito. Neil Gorsuch. Amy Boney Carrot. The Stable Genius. Mitch McConnell. And Aaron Judge," because the Yankees suck.  Also, not to forget the ladies: "Erica Kirk. Candace Owens. Kari Lake. Megyn Kelly. Lindsey Graham."

Meanwhile, another beautiful day today as the gorgeous weather here in Georgia continues. No rain, which is a drag, but day after day of temps in the 70s to very low 80s, low humidity, and clear skies, with pleasantly cool nights in the high 50s (good sleeping weather). I walked my usual 8½-mile Van Buren today, but for some reason the pedometer app on my iPhone only credited me with a 6½-mile Quincy. I swear I didn't take any shortcuts!