I checked out about midday wishing I was going to stay several more days but the daily rate was high. I could have had a new girl every day and I wish the bank balance would have been able to stand it. I said goodbye to Lucia and got a wet sloppy kiss of thanks. Me getting thanks for fucking a beautiful woman. Wow. I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole.
The flight from Curacao to Caracas on the mainland was 39 minutes. I only climbed to three thousand feet before leveling off. The clouds were scattered at seven thousand. The ride was a little bumpy below the clouds. I have found out that under scattered clouds it is often bumpy. I learned from a weather course that under each cumulous cloud is a column of air supporting that cloud. Between those columns of rising air is descending air. The sun heats the air at different rates and that differential causes rising and falling air. As the plane moves from one column of air falling to one rising the old carnival ride can get rough.
Simon Bolivar International is a weird airport. It is like two airports that got put together but don’t quite match. There is a pretty standard looking two runway airport parallel to the ocean north of the city. Then there is another runway and taxiway that they stuck down but misaligned with the other, like you cut and pasted but missed. Why would you have two runways pointed out so that they cross as soon the planes are in the air? Nuts.
ATC brought me in on the separate runway with a pretty good cross wind. I turned base and saw that the runway ran uphill with a pretty good hump in it. Before I started flying I always assumed runways were flat. Wrong. This one had a real upwards slope.
When I was learning, my flight instructor took me to a runway built up on a mesa. The first time I landed, once I was down, I looked down the runway and thought, ‘Shit the runway ends right there,’ and hit the brakes hard. The instructor yelled at me to get off the brakes so hard. Turns out the runway had a hump in the middle and I couldn’t see the end so I thought the end was close. We slowed and crested the hill and the end of the runway was another thousand feet away. Oops.
The runway at Bolivar was sideways to the wind and uphill. Why they build runways next to the ocean sideways doesn’t make sense. Of course you are going to get strong crosswinds. Duh. I wrestled the plane down with a lot of cross control. As I started to flare the wind suddenly died, allowing me to get the tail wheel down and weight on it, I could stay straight.
The city of Caracas was built away from the ocean because of the pirates in the Caribbean. Yeah, there really were pirates of the Caribbean, but they weren’t like in Disney. They were mostly British and Dutch sailors preying on the Spanish bringing back to Europe all the gold and silver they stole from the Aztecs and Incans. The Dutch and English were just playing Robin Hood stealing from the thieving Spanish, at least, that’s the way they saw it. The Spanish saw it differently. The Armada sent against England wasn't just because the Spanish were bad people; they were pissed at all the gold stolen by those English pirates! The city was built up in a valley with mountains around to screen it from the pirate raiders it so it sits in a picturesque location. It is also the Capital city and the economic center of Venezuela, kind of like Washington and New York rolled into one.
Since I didn’t have much reason to stay in Caracas proper, I stayed at the airport hotel, planning to leave the next morning.
But God can be fickle. I checked weather the first thing in the morning and there were heavy clouds all along my route. It was expected to clear up the next day so I extended my stay in the city. I wandered around the airport area for a couple hours finding a hole in the wall lunch place that had excellent food; empanadas, fish, and other things that I don’t even know what they were.
One thing I have found in travels is that often the most remembered meals have been local places away from the tourist areas where I couldn’t even talk with the waiters. But the International language of smiles and enjoyment made up for that. When you travel, get away from the tourists and meet the people. And keep an open mind and a smile on your face. Then you will have the best time.
I was thinking as I ate that I was in Heaven. I know I say that a lot about food. I guess food is my heaven. What a funny concept, Heaven. The other day I found a list of the 100 best books. I was interested enough to take it home. That night my sister was over for dinner so I went through the list with her and we marked down which of the books we had read. One of the books, Dante’s Divine Comedy I marked as read. Sis asked, “Did you read the whole thing?” I had to admit I read parts 1 and 2; no one reads Part 3 about Heaven because it is boring.
That got me thinking about literature in general, how come the best lines are always given to the devil? Milton’s Satan has all the best lines, “I’d rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Faust’s devil gets all the good lines. In the musical Damn Yankees, it is the devil and his girl, Lola, who get all the good lines. ‘Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets…’ I could go on and on. What is it about Heaven that makes it so boring in print?
I wrote a story, Rapture, that had this concept at the heart of the story. I gave each person their Heaven exactly as portrayed in their religion. The Muslim got a garden with wine that never made him drunk and virgins that forever stayed virgins. You can see why people from Arabia would imagine Heaven as a garden. Now ask an ancient German who was surrounded by dangerous forests and his heaven wouldn’t be a garden, it would be a walled city to keep out the forest denizens. The Born Againers got a Heaven where they sang God’s praises, forever. Talk about boring.
What is missing from all these depictions of heaven is strife; the thing that grates on us in life is what makes life interesting. Take away all strife forever, and you take away all interest, forever. Portrayals of Heaven are always boring because doing the same thing forever would get boring no matter what it was: humping a playboy centerfold or singing God’s praises. We need a little strife in our life to give it color and variety. We need challenges to overcome to make life worth living. Happiness is overcoming challenges. Happiness isn’t standing on the mountain top; it is overcoming all the obstacles getting to the top. That’s why things we get for free don’t have value to us. Attendance awards don’t mean much. Winning the race makes us happy. A Blue Ribbon given for finishing last will wind up in the trash. I suspect it is why so many lottery winners wind up unhappy. It isn’t money we really desire, it is the ability to make money, to show our value; to be valued, that makes us happy.
And that’s the problem with all these literary portrayals of Heaven. They all wind up removing the strife from Heaven, and in so doing; they all make Heaven deadly dull.
Of all the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go any length for it-risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself. And what do you think he has done? He has left it out of his heaven! Prayer takes its place. – Mark Twain, Notebooks
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Copyright Rod O'Steele © 2009