The Universe don’t take no mess

Posted on December 10th, 2008 in Argentina, Personal Philosophy by Jeremy Kaye

Inspector Gadget is a unique mix of educated realist and eccentric spiritualist. She is articulate, intelligent, well-read. She is professionally employed, fiscally responsible, and comports herself with integrity. But this is also the woman who convinced me to accompany her to a “sonic healing session” in Soho where a handsome dandy dressed head to foot in white linen played conch shells and didgeridoos to repair the wounded psyches of the crowd. (The audience, btw, was comprised mostly of single women whose psyches were all fixated on the penetrating blue eyes behind the didgeridoo).

If my past experiences were any indication, I knew that our trip together was bound to have a few - how shall we call them - alternative moments. We spent some time in Colonia, Uruguay while she sifted through a pile of crystals to find ones with the necessary properties and somewhere in the Parque de Los Glaciers she wandered off to make a little prayer to the mountain gods. This type of behavior I was prepared for. What I wasn’t expecting - and perhaps this is a recent development, for I never noticed it before - is that whenever the ball bounced Inspector Gadget’s way she would roll her head heavenward and say out loud, “Thank you Universe.”

For example, if the horizons were particularly bright and the air singularly crisp that day, she would look up and announce, “What a gorgeous day. Thank you Universe!”

Now, I have personally never put any stock into the notions of fate or destiny or of the existence of guiding forces. In my world The Universe has always been an uncaring soup of condensed matter and random chemical reactions. So naturally the thought of The Universe as a mid-level bureaucrat stamping APPROVED on the daily weather report of our lives was all rather amusing to me.

Thing is, I started to take notice of the string of extraordinary luck that seemed to accompany her during our travels. It seemed that everything and I mean EVERYTHING on this trip went her way. The inevitable hardships that befall even the most carefully planned vacations never materialized, or if they did, they made a heroic about face.

Need some examples?

  • A good sum of money was dropped out of her jacket pocket one day. Yet instead of blowing away in the ferocious winds of El Chaltan it remained moored to the dry grass, right in front of the hostel for us to find (and for no one else to stumble upon) a full hour later.

“Thank you Universe!” gushed Inspector Gadget.

  • We hear from other travelers that for the past week the weather has been horrific up on the Fitzroy mastiff. People have been drenched and frozen and generally made miserable on one of the most scenic hiking routes in all of Patagonia. Not having the time or flexibility to wait out the storms or alter our plans, we take to the trail anyway and what do we see as we round the path to the mirador? Why a perfect view of the legendary spires - hardly a stray tatter of cloud anywhere in the sky.

“Thank you Universe!” I heard again.
  • We miss our flight from El Calafate to Buenos Aires. Don’t ask me how, but neither Inspector Gadget nor I realized that instead of freezing beneath a glacier in a summer tent we should have been making our way to the airport. The following afternoon we approach the offices of Aerolineas Argentinas with hats in hand, fully prepared to cut out an entire leg of our trip and to pay through the nose to reschedule. I explain the problem in choppy Spanish and get this, the airline not only squeezes us onto the next flight out of El Calafate - departing in a mere 5 hours - and switches our flights around to accommodate for the lost day, but they don’t even charge us for these new tickets or to make the changes!

“Thank you Universe!” went the familiar refrain.

From one thing to another the dice kept coming up in our favor. It was incredible. If there were storm clouds, they cleared. If there was a bus leaving shortly to where we wanted to go, we caught it. Things were falling out of the sky and into our laps with improbable regularity. In all my life I have never traveled with such ease and at times there did in fact appear to be some benevolent power shepherding us along from fortune to fortune.

This got me thinking.

Oh I remain as cynical as ever to horoscopes and salubrious didgeridoos, prayer and prostration, crystals and chants, beads, baubles and talismans of every kind. But maybe in this mixed bag of fraud and misplaced faith there was one truth, or rather, one trick, that actually worked. Maybe there’s something to this whole gratitude toward The Universe thing after all. Wouldn’t that solve everything? All you had to do was thank The Universe and you could get whatever you wanted.

Thing is, I don’t have the personality or the patience to wait around for The Universe’s munificence. I’ve been on the road for 9 full months and after a mugging, a parasite, a stolen camera, a horrifically dislocated finger and a string of countless road rejections, it’s clear that The Universe owes me big time and needs to pay up.

Inspector Gadget says, “Thank you Universe!”

The Universe replies, “You’re welcome darling!”

and there is suddenly space for us in a fully booked hostel during peak season.

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Jeremy says, “All right Universe listen up. I want fame and fortune and the capacity to grow facial hair like the members of ZZ Top. Instantly! Got that?

The Universe replies, “Up yours Kaye!”

and arranges, scant moments after the above picture is taken of me threatening It (no lie, less than 10 seconds later) for my camera to drop on the pavement, breaking the mechanism which houses the lens. I had to seek out a repairman and shell out about a third of the cost of a new camera to get it fixed.

This is the point where I would predictably start raging on about how I am Anti-Universe, and about how I will hereafter devote my energies and attentions to The Universe’s undoing (oh how super-villany of me). But quite frankly, I am frightened of the consequences. Do you know what The Universe could do to me if it wanted?

Listen, and understand. The Universe is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

I can only hope that The Universe forgives my insolence or becomes distracted for the next two weeks because guess where I’m heading?

I’ll be on a boat cruising around the White Continent. If I don’t post a blog entry about my little side trip before the new year you can assume whatever macabre tale you fancy - that I was attacked by rabid penguins, capsized by storms, crashed into an iceberg or froze to death after the boat stalled in the Arctic cold like a rusting old Chevy. Just remember that when it comes time to submit my life insurance claim you can skip right over that Acts of God part. You’ll know who - or what - is really to blame.

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Look, dig this.

Papa didn’t cus,
He didn’t raise a whole lot of fuss.
But when we did wrong,
Papa beat the hell out of us.

James Brown, Papa Don’t Take No Mess

Inspector Gadget

Posted on December 6th, 2008 in Argentina by Jeremy Kaye

When I got the frantic email from Inspector Gadgetinforming me that her plane had been delayed in Atlanta and that she missed her connecting flight to Buenos Aires, that they were having difficulties rerouting her and that she might even have to cancel her carefully planned vacation altogether, one thought and one thought only ran though my chimpanzee mind.g

Umm, how does this affect me?
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Oh sure, I had glanced at the itinerary Inspector Gadgetemailed me the week prior - a 9 column flowchart specifying dates, locations and proposed activities with projected costs of our upcoming Patagonian adventure. I even remembered some of the names: El Chalten, Puerto Piramides, Gaiman, but had little idea of what these places were supposed to contain (answers: glaciers, whales, and the Welsh). But it got worse. Inspector Gadget was bringing down more than just her carefully planned itinerary and manic attention to detail. She was also bringing down all of our camping equipment. If she wasn’t able to make it I would have to *gulp*pay for equipment rental myself. (See also: http://www.unsurefooting.com/?p=437).

Luckily the airlines found space for her on an alternate flight and we met at the agreed upon hostel in El Calafate a short 24 hours later.

Of course I was looking forward to seeing her after so many months, but along with the excitement there was also a nagging disquiet.
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Women love to accessorize, and Inspector Gadget is no exception. The difference here lies in the type of the product she obsesses over. The rest of her gender stocks their closets full of shoes and handbags, but not Inspector Gadget. She prefers to collect camping baubles. She accessorises not with cute leather slingbacks but with high-density, polyvalent long johns and plastic poop shovels. And again like most women, Inspector Gadget takes her shopping to extremes.
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I’ve seen Inspector Gadget buy enough gear to pack the trunk and the entire back seat of a mid-sized car full to bursting for a simple weekend camping trip into rural New Jersey, and here we were about to depart for two weeks into the icy tips of Patagonia, to the “uttermost reaches of the Earth” (a phrase coined by the book of the same title published in 1950 by Lucas Bridges). I privately wondered how many Argentinean porters would meet their fate on the frozen mountainside trucking all of our equipment up to base camp for us.
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When I finally saw her it appeared that my panic was ill-founded. To my astonished delight she was slung with only three bags - a giant backpack, a black duffel bag, and small knapsack. I don’t know what it was - the six months since we’ve seen each other, the anticipation of this day finally arriving, the delays at the airport and the threat of cancellation, but whatever it was when I saw her I simply couldn’t contain my emotions any longer. I bounded towards the bags and swept them up in a giant bear hug, blinking back the tears.
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She said, “Hey, I’m over here . . . It’s great to see you!”
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“I know, it’s great to see you too,” I replied, dislodging her black duffel from my embrace long enough to give her an affectionate pat on the shoulder. “You look so . . . unencumbered.”
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“I feel great. And I can’t believe I’m finally here after that debacle at the airport! I don’t even want to talk about it - I just want to leave all that crap behind me,” she declared.
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“Oh I couldn’t agree more!” I enthused. “The less baggage the better. Hell, let’s leave it all behind!”
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My elation was short-lived. The disquiet roared back to life once we adjourned to our room and began to organize and itemize the contents of her luggage. Watching her unpack her bags was like watching a magician who just keeps drawing more and more ribbon out of her sleeve, more and more eggs out of her mouth.
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3 bags somehow contained 6 bags worth of gewgaw and gimcrack. Everything she packed was a high-tech, space-saving, miniaturized version of itself. I was stunned with the ingenuity of the Lilliputian devices she hatched, one after another. A flat plastic disk somehow origamied into a leak proof bowl. A tablet the size of hotel hand soap unfurled into a quick-dry towel. Even a pack of Doyle playing cards was half the size of a standard deck.
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Nervousness was giving way to terror as I watched Inspector Gadget stuffing items into her backpack and then stuffing the overflow into mine. Did she realize that there were no escalators on the mountain?

I saw her busying herself with a little pocket mirror.

“Why are you packing make-up for a camping trip?” I asked.
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“It’s SPF 15!” she replied in shocked and slightly offended tones, and applied some protective lip gloss.
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“And that razor?”
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She looked at the bag and then sheepishly back to me.
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“I didn’t even know that was in there!”
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Go go Gadget depilation.

Well, for all my grumbling we made it to the campsite with no incident - a few back cramps, sore shoulders and nothing more. We staked out a spot for our tent, let our stuffed bags hit the floor with a resounding thud, pitched our tent after I made a few mandatory insert-tab-A-into-slot-B jokes, and that’s when we kicked the absurdity of the situation into hyper drive.

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Here is what we were sleeping beneath:
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And here is what our tent looked like:
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I looked at the tent, then looked up at the snow-covered mountain we were about to spend two nights under. Back to the tent. Back to the snow. Why did our winter tent have screens all over it? Great question. Let me pose it to the Inspector.
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“Hey why is our tent made out of mesh screens instead of heavy fabric?”
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“It’s a 3 season tent,” Inspector Gadget said.
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Guess which season we were missing?
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Go go Gadget hypothermia.
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We had to use rocks and wood and excess clothing and emergency first aid blankets (the kind you wrap around dying people in the wilderness) but we somehow McGyvered the tent from insect netting into a serviceable winter habitat. It appeared to be functional, but I was a little embarrassed by how it looked. Everyone else sported crisp winter tents, pulled taught and anchored into the ground in tight geometric patterns. We had to collapse the sides of our tent into a crumpled, lop-sided heap to keep the wind out and we ended up lining the floor with our waterproof clothing to keep our sleeping bags dry.

There was no doubt about who the trailer trash of this campsite was.

Well, at least we weren’t going to freeze to death, I thought. I was sure I’d feel better about the whole thing after a hot meal.

Inspector Gadget pulled out a box no bigger than my fist and transformed the contents into a cooking stove complete with wind shield and a pot to cook in.

Go go Gadget kitchen.

OK, we were ready to make dinner and not a moment too soon because I was starving. “Let’s light this baby up!” I shouted triumphantly. “Where are the matches?”

Inspector Gadget looked stumped.
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25 out-turned pockets later, holding a portable solar cell phone charger in one hand and a bag of individually wrapped, bio-degradable hand wipes in the other, she said, “Bad news, I forgot to pack them.”
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Next time Gadget . . . next tiiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmeeeeeee.
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There are worse views to wake up to: