Las Pampas June 7, 2015
I am on the pampas in Argentina.
I race the gauchos on their horses. They cheer, they toss their flat-brimmed hats into the air, fire pistols at the clouds. I am king of the pampas.
I am a self-contained system. I have a motorcycle, a map and time; I have a computer, a tent, toothpaste and a pocketful of pesos. I can go wherever I want, and do whatever I want. I am as free as I can ever be.
I don’t care what illusions of grandeur I have built for myself about the romance of riding, They are my reality. This is the being I want to be.
I received the bike Wednesday afternoon. I watched the guys in the port open the crate and reveal the prize. I felt a bit guilty; I’m not comfortable playing wealthy American. They all wanted to know the size of the motor: 800cc’s. They agreed among themselves that it was good. There are many motorcycles in Argentina, but few are more than single cylinder affairs of about 200cc’s; many are smaller. These bikes are perfect for the city; they fill the gaps between the cars, park on the curb, and in a pinch you can pretty much pick them up and turn them around. American bikes are absurdly large. My bike at home is 1200cc’s; it would be a monstrous freak here.
My favorite thing in the world is to show off my mechanical prowess in front of a crowd. I tried to keep calm as I unrolled my tools. Fortunately, I was able to reattach the mirrors and access the battery with ease. The only hiccup was that the nuts for the battery terminals were missing. But this turned out to be an opportunity to enjoin the troops. Everyone in the warehouse examined the situation, many offered suggestions, and they produced a large enough collection of odd-shaped nuts to open a hardware store, but none of them fit. Finally, I got to play hero recognizing that if the nuts had been left on the terminals during transit they would have probably dislodged at some point, and might still be on the bike. Sure enough, i removed a couple brackets, pulled out the battery and there they were. I earned the respect of the warehouse; I could ride away without shame.
There was a moment of great relief when the bike started immediately and easily, and because I had ridden it before, I didn’t fumble too much riding out of the terminal. With only a couple hours of light, I haphazardly strapped my world to the bike, stopped for gas, and hit the highway. It felt very similar to leaving Houston: large trucks, too many vehicles, everyone going too fast. Oddly, there were no hotels on the highway, but after an hour or so, I exited and drove into the center of a smallish town. There was a party on the plaza; I stopped and asked about hotels; an old guy scratched his head and suggested there might be one down a couple blocks on the left. There it was, hidden on a side street. Old but charming, with enclosed motorcycle parking in the back. I unpacked as the light faded.
I spread my things across the bed… and the other bed, and the small table, and the floor. I believe in packing light, how come I have so much shit!? Logistics, managing the objects of travel, I kind of enjoy this. It involves lots of intersecting decisions, from the initial purchases to the organization in bags and suitcases to the daily rituals of use. And while there is no unique, correct set of answers, choices made well can dramatically improve the quality of travel. Which things need to go into hotels? Which things need to be accessed on the road? Which things need to be most secure? I contemplate these deep questions, and structure my reality.
Thursday, June 4, 2015. This will be my first real day on the road in South America. The odometer reads 65,500. I am on the pampas, the great plains from which Argentina arose, its wealth and power dependent on land and cattle. I’m not surprised that today it looks nearly identical to the American midwest. There are corn fields recently harvested and there are cows, lots of cows. There are stands of trees, and random groupings of barns and silos. There are windmills that remind me of Texas, and an occasional billboard advertising seed. One seed company is “Illinois;” it’s logo is an American Indian in a headdress; I ponder how they pronounce the name. There are few distinctive images, and yet everything shimmers with the sheen of South America. I suspect that sheen is in my own eyes, but I see it nonetheless. And I smile broadly when I pass the llama farm. I think I’ve seen a llama farm in Texas, or maybe even Idaho, but here it's magical. I am especially happy to see a pair of riders on horseback in the distance; they wear flat-brimmed hats. Why are we so pleased when reality satisfies our stereotypes?
The two lane highway is smooth, flat, and ruler-straight. I pass trucks hauling cattle moving 70 mph, and tractors moving 20. I get passed by SUV's doing far more.
I leave the main highway and head for a small town for food and fuel. A couple miles out, and the motorcycle stalls. I coast to a stop and pull off onto the grass shoulder.
Out of gas.
I have few obligations, but above all else I have a fundamental responsibility to know my bike. To run out of gas is humiliating; indeed, it strikes me as a moral failing. I have not done this on a trip before. There is no excuse. To be sure, I wasn’t oblivious; I knew I’d ridden about 180 miles since filling up, and I could see the digital gauge indicating low fuel, but I thought I had another 30 to 50 miles of reserve. Turns out I wasn’t reading the gauge correctly. I could blame BMW for a really lousy, ham-handed display, reminiscent of early cell phones, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s my bike, it’s my job to know it.
Scolding myself accomplishes little, and in fact, I laugh a bit. First day, first test; this is the essence of travel. I know there will be bigger tests; let me handle this small one with grace. I got out a sharpie and a pad of paper; I wrote the word GAS. I held it up. There was little traffic, but it only It took about 20 minutes for a car to stop–it was maybe the 7th or 8th that had passed. The guy grumbled a bit that I didn’t have a gas can, but he said he would return, and in a remarkably short time, there he was, smiling with a gallon jug of green fluid. The color was a bit disturbing, and it smelled like detergent, but he assured me that all the “super” grade gas is green. Of course, he refused payment adamantly. I poured in half of it, and off I went, clean and green.
I’m now riding with half a gallon of super strapped to my bike, and I now know the limits of my tank and the peculiarities of the gauge. I’m guessing I won’t have this problem again (he says, crossing fingers, hoping not to foreshadow future misadventures). I might also mention that this green stuff is expensive. Gas down here is about $7 a gallon. I appear to be getting about 45 mpg so I could easily spend more than $50 on fuel for a full day of riding. Fortunately, motorcycles get to pass for free through the apparently random toll booths. (Well, I had to pay two cents at one booth; inflation does strange things to prices.)
At the end of the first full day, I stopped at Trenque Lauquen at a brand new Howard Johnsons. Yeah, it was more than a little weird to see it there, but it was exactly where I intended to stop, it was reasonably priced, and they let me put the motorcycle in the foyer. People can be strange about motorcycles; they are often more concerned about them than I am. Really, some guy from Trenque Lauquen is going to sneak into the parking lot, break the locks on my motorcycle and haul it away? Call me naive, but I just don’t see that happening.
Is it morally OK to sleep at a Howard Johnsons in Trenque Lauquen? I wrestled with the question, and I think as long as this doesn’t become a pattern of behavior, I’m probably OK. While I do suffer from addiction to bourgeois comforts, I nearly always prefer funky, decrepit charm over sterile modernity.
An aside on towels: I think four hotels is sufficient from which to make a generalization. At four otherwise quite different hotels, towels have been offered in pairs, one large, one medium, no wash rag. I am intrigued by this. How do Argentinians scrub the dirt from the pampas? Do they carry their own personal washing devices? Do they prefer to soak off the dirt in the tub? Are they just natural exfoliators? My solution has been to use the medium towel as a massive wash cloth, but I can’t help feeling as though I’m acting outside appropriate norms. Even more disturbingly, I find myself speculating about Argentinians visiting hotels in the U.S. What do they make of the tiny square cloth? "Oh look," they must exclaim, “a towel to dry the cavia!”
On a similar topic, I’ve noticed that the person who supplies paper napkins for India apparently does the same for Argentina. I use the words “paper” and “napkin” loosely. God forbid that I should ever spill anything; these tiny squares of indeterminate material are about as absorbent as saran wrap.
The sun is lazy. I can’t detect first light until 7:40; at 8am it's still below the horizon. It will complete its day by 6. Ten hours is plenty time to ride, but I will miss the midnight sun that accompanied me in Alaska and Norway. Darkness is a constraint, a limitation. If I’m not off the road by sunset, I turn into a fool.
The second full day begins like the first, but the traffic thins quickly. I plot a Westward path that will take me away from all main roads. Just let the map be correct, the signs be readable, and the compass point North. I am successful; I find myself alone on a road too insignificant to even have lines. I stand up on the footpegs to stretch my legs. The road is still absolutely straight, but I’m beginning to cross some rolling hills. After awhile, the terrain looks very much like Texas Hill Country. There are trees that aren’t mesquite, but they might as well be; everything is dry and brown. The road is perfectly smooth, the weather is ideal; I could ride like this for hours. And I do.
Is it boring? It is at times. Is it uncomfortable? Frequently. Is it exhausting? Almost every ride. It’s strange that I am compelled to keep doing it. There are moments of exhilaration, they come in waves, unexpectedly. There’s a sense of accomplishment with each passing mile. But it’s not easy. There’s a part of me that thinks, I could just ride straight to Santiago, Chile, find a nice hotel and spend the next 2 1/2 months doing much of nothing. But I would hate it after a week.
The day passes uneventfully. I cover 400 miles and I arrive in San Rafael nearly exactly at the moment I had calculated. My test comes at the hotel in the center of town:
I speak Spanish very fluently, as long as all I have to do is order beer and empanadas. When I have to park around the corner half in an unmarked garage it can be a different story. Wow, what a comedy of blundering doofuses I am. I thought he said bring in your things, and then we’ll park the bike. Apparently not. I thought he said, follow me. Apparently not. I thought he said… I ended up going the wrong way down a one way street, with people honking a cops yelling, and…
I can say almost anything in Spanish, and some of it makes sense. I can understand almost nothing. This morning the same guy at the hotel who has ample evidence of my ability, and who by the way has similar proficiency in English, nonetheless proceeds to tell me a joke in Spanish! Something about a sheriff and a town, and it’s too small for both of them. He frowns when I don’t laugh at the punch line. That’s not fair! Jokes are the last thing that come when you learn a language. Now I have to work on my Spanish.
Road signs mock my illiteracy. I passed one this afternoon: A 1000 metros: Fin de… it was followed by a paragraph of gibberish. In a 1000 meters something’s going to end! But what exactly? The road? The world as we know it? Modernity? in a 1000 meters nothing happened. Or at least I don’t think it did. Maybe that’s what the sign said: In a 1000 meters everything will be exactly as it has always been. Maybe it was a joke.
Yesterday I passed numerous signs that said: Precaucíon: Zona de nieblas. You don’t have to know much to recognize that this announces the entrance to a Zone of dangerous NIEBLAS! But what the hell is a niebla?! Do they fall from the sky? Do they carry rabies? Did they vote for the socialists? Perhaps, as auto-correct keeps suggesting, it was a zone of nibbles! Yes, that would be worrisome.
OK, I looked it up. I have a very good Spanish dictionary on the computer. But no, I’m not going to tell you the answer. I’d like to preserve an element of mystery in my story. The unknown, so much more powerful than the known: Shrouded by the nieblas, the land was haunting and damp. He rode cautiously, peering deeply into the nibbles (stop that!), using low beams.
This evening my family is together in Houston at the Rothko Chapel. There is a memorial service for my nephew, Paul, who died recently. I’m listening to recordings of the music that will be performed; the world is as small as the speed of an email.
I wrote to them saying that ceremonies like this are important because they create meaning. I believe this. As individuals, families, communities, and nations, it’s important that we make an effort to mark what we intend to be significant. Funerals and weddings, proposals and romantic dinners, national holidays and monuments. These things are all similar in that they serve primarily as markers/creators of meaningfulness. They affirm what we value.
It’s easy to mock attempts to create meaning, especially grand gestures. They nearly always paint the world in brighter colors than the reality, and they don’t contribute a product of substance; they function primarily as symbols. In my late teens, for a year or two, I rejected Christmas. What a stupid, wasteful scam, celebrating a non-existent God by lining the pockets of global corporations. Fortunately, even though the criticism is legitimate, I recognized that there’s more to the story. In our extraordinarily awkward way, Christmas is American culture’s most sincere attempt to ground our way of life in meaning. In many respects it’s a miserable disaster, but in many respects, so is our culture. In others it’s quite wonderful. Christmas reflects the full range of our reality.
As humans we need meaning nearly as much as we need food. I have heard people argue that spending money on the Olympics or festivals or monuments or fancy parks is a waste of resources. The marketplace should decide what is worthwhile. I disagree because the marketplace doesn’t know how to price meaning. To the extent that meaning can be bought, it’s nearly always a worthwhile purchase, though no spread sheet may make this obvious. There is always room to criticize particular projects, and argue details, but by and large, our current culture is inappropriately prejudiced against the grand gesture. In Houston, the debate over the Astrodome is a perfect example; we have the opportunity to take a building that has already accumulated a half century of significance, and to turn it into something unusual and special, something like a massive indoor park. The only thing that stands in the way, is the willingness to spend money. We are near to destroying our city’s greatest symbol for want of a few dollars.
This trip, and this blog, are also attempts to create meaning. In fact, they are grand gestures, even self-consciously symbolic grand gestures. That I think of them this way, colors how I write and act.
But if existence has no structure, surely it has no meaning or purpose either. So what delusions of significance am I rambling on about?
In the scheme of the philosophical story I want to tell, this is out of order, but it is one of the more important points: Contemporary philosophers often distinguish the physical, external world which presumably exists independently of us, from the realms of morality, meaning and purpose, which are in many respects obviously human phenomena arising from the way we interact with, represent, and interpret the world.
To be sure, there have been philosophers who have imagined that meaning and morality are just as independent of us as the earth below us and the stars above us. Decreed by God, morality is absolute and eternal, precise as mathematics to those who will know it. For such philosophers meaning and purpose are likewise prescribed by the divine plan. For each of us, there is a reason to be, and a path to achieve our purpose. But in a world without God, it’s much harder to see how meaning and morality can be absolute, external or independent.
Indeed, many young philosophy students embrace a radical relativism toward meaning and morality. Dismissive of God, and exposed to the existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre, many of these students are convinced that meaning and morality are illusions foisted upon us by some combination of our own fears, cultural habits, biology, and corrupt institutions.
I identify with these students; I was one of them. They are typically good philosophers. They are ruthlessly reflective and self-critical. They are unsentimental. They are led to radical relativism about meaning and morality by arguments like these:
1) What is most real is the world as described by science, and in that world of mass and velocity, billiard balls and molecules, there is no room for meaning and morality. Since meaning and morality are not made out of molecules, they could only exist if they had some completely different source, like God. But since there is no God, there’s nothing left to be the origin of meaning and morality, except for our own beliefs.
2) Morality is exactly like etiquette, and everybody recognizes that etiquette is just rules that humans make up. There are no facts about which fork one ought to use to eat salad. It’s the small one, in case you don’t know, but this is merely a convention that someone made up. Moreover, in the middle ages, upon the introduction of the fork, there were objections. Traditionalists proclaimed it offensive before the creator that we find our hands inadequate for eating. When you see such examples, it’s hard to ignore that just about anything can be a matter of moral belief for someone. There is no bright line separating morality from etiquette, and if there are no absolutes of etiquette, there need be no absolutes of morality.
3) As is only too familiar, moral belief varies by culture across history and geography. There is no belief so weird that some culture hasn’t embraced it. Create list: human sacrifice, infanticide, pedophilia, etc.
There are replies to all of these arguments, and yet there’s clearly something compelling about them. The last two don’t even mention meaning, but whither goes morality, meaning follows.
I suppose it’s worth pointing out that these young students beguiled by radical relativism, are nonetheless highly moral. If they’re like me, they’ve spent more than one evening of existential turmoil, staring into the empty void of existence, creeping horror shrouding the soul, like zombies in the zone of nibbles. A 1000 metros: Fin de significada… And yet, most of these students don’t commit suicide, and most of them don’t kill all their friends. In fact, recognizing that you don’t actually have to do what anyone says, can instill an astonishing sense of responsibility. I am who I am because I make the choice to be this person.
I’m merely rehashing the themes of existentialism, but surely this is where one should start with philosophy in the 21st century.
In many respects I have never overcome the radical relativism of my youth; in many respects I’ve only sunk deeper into the abyss. But in other respects, I’m no longer a relativist at all.
Among those students who embrace radical relativism about morality, most nonetheless assert that there is an external world as described by science. This is their new bedrock; the truths of science are the new gospels. In fact, as mentioned in argument 1 above, the fact that they see meaning and morality as incompatible with science is one of the main reasons to reject it. But for others, the terrain is even less firm. If moral beliefs are “made up," how can we be so sure the same isn’t true of scientific beliefs?
You might make the obvious objection: One can see that the chair is red, but you can never SEE that the chair, or even a human behavior is morally right or wrong or meaningful. You watch a killing on TV, you see the knife plunge into the heart. Do you SEE that it’s wrong? No, you see the up and the down, and the spurt of the blood, but the rightness or wrongness is only in the interpretation. In fact, if it’s the hero defending herself from evil, you may interpret the killing as good. This is just a restatement of the fact that morality is something we make up.
But wait, do you even SEE the red of the blood? Well, we say we do, but is the color in the blood itself, or in our own interpretation? In fact, philosophers have long recognized that color may not be one of the features of the world as it is in itself. It may be painted on by the brain, so to speak, a useful fiction for quick distinctions. To be sure, physics may have no more room for the experience of color than for morality. Note that many animals don’t have color vision; it we didn’t have it, would we miss it? The more we learn about vision, the more we realize that it’s not what it appears. Rods and cones in the eye are stimulated by photons, and from this paltry input the brain constructs a model of reality. When we see, it feels like we’re looking out into a three dimensional space lying before us, but what we experience is at best a mental reconstruction. If you’ve ever looked at a "magic eye” picture, in which a 3D image emerges from a 2D scene, you recognize the power of the mind to project reality. Is our mental image truly faithful to reality?
This is not where I had intended to stop, but I ran out of beer. I suppose the internet will still exist tomorrow. I am in Mendoza, the Andes rise outside my window.