The Wait

“You are American?” the Thai custom agents asked.
“Yes,” I said somewhat cautiously not knowing how the Thai felt about the USA these days.
“We love you,” they echoed each other. “Yes, we love Americans. And we love New York.”

After untold hours in cramped jets, days in airports, thrust into a time warp where space and time collided, to hear I was loved from total smiling strangers was striking a celestial chord within. I love Thailand. I love Bangkok. I gathered my things and went off to seek shelter and shower, happy to be back in the land of the friendly, even if only a twelve hour layover.

Fifteen minutes from the airport the Regency sounded like a royal night of slumber, however, my body wasn't understanding where it had been dropped into - sleep escaped me and the roosters next door crowed non stop from 5 a.m. - the airport would be the better place to hang out until my 2 p.m. flight to Nepal. I had been warned. Royal Nepal airline is not the best for schedule. I could relate to that, not having a propensity towards keeping to schedule myself.

If you're going to be stuck at an airport, Bangkok is the place to be. I was ready for Thai food and didn't care when my flight to Kathmandu was delayed a couple of hours. Questing for my favorites, green curry and Thai iced tea, was easy since there are so many culinary delights at the Bangkok airport. The airport is multi-level and layered with shops that sell everything from dried fish to new camcorders and Chanel perfumes. There are even massage salons and after the food frenzy and a two hour out of body massage, I thought I was ready for anything.

Royal Nepal Air gets to their ticket counter whenever they damn well please. When it finally opened, the line was expectedly long with well-traveled people, mostly aroma-ripened Euro-youth, some brightly dyed and dreaded, who had obviously been backpacking across the planet since they could walk. Two more flight delays and seven hours after the scheduled departure, the jet taxied off into the dark. But the flight is a party plane, packed to capacity with laughing, chattering, diverse languages. Cheap synthesized music plays old movie themes and the stewardesses aren't seat belt gestapos. The cabin smells of musky stoutness and urine, and there's a river on the bathroom floor that you have to step around carefully. The back dozen seats are filled with dark skinned men joking and gesturing. My window seat, carefully chosen to maximize the view of the Himalayans, showed only the pitch blackness of sparsely populated regions. The plane finally rattles its way up into the night for the three hour flight.

At the Kathmandu airport, the customs agents push luggage through a non-functioning scanner. They don't even bother pretending that they're looking for anything, they just take your $40 visa fee and send you along to the throngs of hawking taxi drivers and hotel screamers. Fortunately, the kind people from Hotel Karma are there to greet me.

Through unlit streets we weave – dark glimpses of cattle scurrying through open doors in narrow passageways, cars, motorbikes and pedestrians vie for position and dogs own the night. An impossibly large bus is trying to navigate its way through a narrow corridor where electric wires and lights are hung for tomorrow's contrived World Tourist Day celebration. My driver refuses to budge in his futile attempt to get by the bus blocking the road, where the oncoming traffic has the right of way, while onlookers are imploring him to please back up. Finally, he decides to comply - the plug removed things progress through the tightly curving city. The air is acrid as we arrive at the noisy center of Thamel, the tourist district of Kathmandu, where the hotel is located. A band is playing next door, motorized vehicles and rickshaws are honking, people are yelling and there's a faint smell of urine in my room. I pull out my sleeping bag and cocoon into dreamless sleep, knowing Kathmandu will be waiting in all its squalor in the morning.

High Road

By the time you read this I'll be gone... trying to sleep in some unlikely quiet corner of the Bangkok Airport after twenty-four hours of plane changes, airports and squished knees, awaiting a flight to Kathmandu in another twelve hours. But it wasn't easy. Packing was far more difficult than I had imagined, even though I knew I didn't need things like Italian boots, leather jacket or lipstick. The panic stemmed from not knowing what to anticipate on a trek in a fourth world country, hiking for weeks along narrow yak trails between teahouses at very high altitudes. Unlike hikes through Italy where there was the promise of a hot shower, fabulous food, and succulent wines waiting after a glorious walk through medieval countrysides... and you knew which shoes to bring. Teahouses... the name sounds so civilized. British formal tea with scones and clotted cream. Japanese tea ceremonies. New York's Russian Tea Room.

“You need to bring your own linens,” a friend recommended, “because none of the teahouses have sheets or blankets. And you'll want to pack your own toilet paper too.”

I once guffawed about the story of a woman hiking Everest who took her espresso machine along. At the time it seemed absurd, however, as caffeine is one of my main daily staples it started to look more reasonable after realizing that there wouldn't be good espresso, let alone a plain ol' cup 'o joe until I return in a month or so. Intentionally, I had bought only a small backpack considering the length of time and various climes I would encounter. Certainly not enough room for an espresso pot. In fact, it was looking minuscule as things started accumulating in the corner reserved for the pile of possibilities where any item that came to mind as remotely necessary would get tossed into.

I hadn't been camping in over 30 years. I didn't even own a sleeping bag. After five summers back in the Butte, I was the proud owner of a condo, a cat and a ‘72 VW Bug, three and a half townie bikes, four pairs of skis, five down coats and thirteen pairs of hiking boots... but no sleeping bag. Like Dracula taking the dirt of his homeland along for survival, I felt it was imperative to buy a local bag instead of in Nepal.

“You have to get into the bag itself to see if it feels right,” Ryan at the Alpineer suggested. I wondered, what does a right sleeping bag feel like? I tend to sleep thrashed across an entire queen feather bed with two down quilts and high thread-count sheets so a confined space where I can't move my toes feels claustrophobic. Ryan assured me the bag was specifically designed for a woman's body, which is why they must have manufactured it in dirt sucking pastel blue instead of a disguising dark color. I now finally owned a sleeping bag that would take me to new levels of snore induced nirvana upon the sheetless teahouse beds along the Annapurna trail.

Bogged down with the normal work load crammed into a compressed time frame so I could leave earlier, coupled with my habitual routine of procrastination, time was not on my side and was rudely moving towards the departure date with increasing velocity. I still hadn't ordered half the things I thought I would need as a traveling journalist – light weight cameras, video equipment, solar chargers and a herd of batteries and memory chips.

“So, you're going to Nepal with a sharpei? Those dogs know how to guide you on the trail?” my mother had asked. “Aren't you afraid or worried about being so far away with strangers?”

“No mom,” I chuckled, “I'm going with a sherpa not a sharpei. They're the friendly native guides there.”

It was then that I recognized that I really had everything I needed for this trip – namely, a sense of adventure. A few days before the planned departure, I had pretty much eliminated everything except minor toiletries, underwear, a camera and charger, mini netbook, a handful of buffalo jerky and my new sleeping bag. It's about a new experience seen through the first exposure to a wondrous new environment, untainted by someone else's interpretation. And the certainty of knowing I'll be returning home to one of the most incredible places on earth with the anticipation of another Butte-teous, deep powder season. Wishing you who are on the road wandering a safe journey…

Rhythm of Life

It could be the combination – the uncatalogued uniform of the traveling musician in tight black jeans, leather jacket, guitar bag draped across a shoulder and some hip-funky, long, fluid hair worthy of shampoo commercials – that triggers an instinctive reaction spiraling deep into the labyrinth of inner cochlea. I secretly become Goldie Hawn's character in The Banger Sisters. It's not just because at heart I'm really a groupie – the gypsy road gig warrior in me is envious. I want to schlep my guitar across the universe and get paid for being a bohemian troubadour songster again.

Coolly moving to his own beat down the airport's people mover, he steps in time to my ipod blasting John Cougar Mellencamp's “Hurts So Good.” Osmotically, music speaks in an invisible language of the air. We are connected. I sigh, thinking he's probably going to some fat gig in New York or California and head to my own gate that flashes “Tampa/St Pete NOW BOARDING.”

The seats are packed with retirees, young tan bodies, and a few excited Disney bound kids who are already bouncing off the non-existent space between seat backs. As we reach cruising altitude, a stewardess is frantically looking for the traveling partner of an unconscious woman in the bathroom while 3 medically related passengers head to the stern to help. The captain turns on the seatbelt sign, announcing that we're heading into thunderstorms as Tom Petty wails about “Free Falling” in my sequestered world of rhythm oblivious to sharp, bumpy drops in altitude, calamity gawkers and screaming children.

Three hours later the Florida gulf coast comes into the port view. The captain says broken clouds and 90 degrees. I start peeling off the Colorado layers; the thick air drenches my desert skin as the palette instinctively craves an iced refreshment – a minty mojito in hand, I head down to the sand for the daily ritual sunset celebration. I'm thankful it's an evening solar party and not morning, although there were long nights we sat on that same beach as teens watching “the sun rise from the bottom of the sea”… even though we were on the wrong coast for that. But it didn't matter. We were experienced.

My mother's 80th birthday party was to be somewhat of a surprise. You just can't pull the wool over mom's eyes. She's also experienced. She’s seen it all at this point, heard every excuse in the book and saw right through every fabrication of why you're home after her dictated curfew. By the time my four younger brothers came of age, I had already ruined their chances of getting away with anything.

What mom didn't know was that we were arriving at her door in a 15-passenger stretch limo stuffed with her grandkids, best friend, champagne, chocolates, flowers and me. I would later swear I had been drugged to have agreed to ride shotgun-chaperone, confined in a throbbing disco-lit padded cell on wheels with all those hyped-up kids. Mom looked thoroughly surprised and somewhat confused to find herself cruising the beach in a pimp mobile. It was after the exquisite dinner for 30 of the immediate family that we realized a surprise party for an 80-year old, who was already exhausted from constantly caring for the 90-year old relatives, maybe wasn't such a good idea – although we're pretty sure she enjoyed the limo ride more than the ambulance.

Hospitals have so many unnecessary rules that shouldn’t apply to large Italian families of musical and theatrical persuasion.

“It's ok, we're with the band,” one of my musician brothers nodded in his best stage smile to the nurse who was reciting regulations governing how many people were allowed into the emergency room with their mother.

“Wait... she's in the band?” the nurse's suspicions were justifiably tweaked but by that time the entire entourage had slipped into mom's room, closing the door behind. Musicians have a back stage pass to the world.

Hours later, and a battery of tests seemingly unrelated to any of her symptoms, mom was declared perfect and we left with her.

“Don't worry, we'll send you the bill,” the desk nurse smiled and waved and then added, “What's the name of your band?”

The clan of bleached and dyed haired, leather clad attendants in tight jeans clung firmly to their mother and smiled back, while the bass player brother of the family shot a sideways quip, “You didn't give them her real name and address did you?”

Old Standards

What is old supposed to look like? At one time I thought I knew but, as you discover later, at 17 you know less than you think. I simultaneously laugh and shudder when someone starts out with, “at your age you should...” From the time I turned 35, the music industry was telling me I was too old to rock. A few weeks ago an online opinion article, probably written by some teenage girl, snidely demanded that no one over the age of 30 should be seen in the latest fashions... mini skirts, tie-dye tees and bathing suits... as if anyone under that age was around the first time those fashions were flaunted back in the 60s and 70s. I still wear the originals. One click away was another story about how Elton John, Madonna and Mick Jagger, along with all the others who paved the road to heart pounding, rocking music should get off the stage and retire.

Don't get me wrong – youth is great. But I don't want those little guttersnipes telling me what to wear, how to live or setting limits based on what they perceive old should be doing. True, at one point in all our lives we thought 30 was ancient and most of us never planned to live that long. But now that we’ve survived, most of the Boomer generation knows no limits.

“Have you ever thought about cutting your hair short... like, up to your chin to highlight your cheekbones? Older women look younger with that cut,” an acquaintance offered.

“I like my hair long…” the hair on my neck bristled.

“But you'd look younger...” she slurred as her fingers went for my locks.

“No, I'd look like an older woman with shorter hair,” I snorted, ignoring her as I grabbed another piece of sushi and shot of sake while the younger set bounced somewhat rhythm-less to a rap beat.

“Women your age shouldn't have that color blonde. You need to lowlight your hair. Aging women need to look softer...” she said as her legs gave out and she sat down on the floor.

“Wait...” I curtly cut her off, “you’re saying I should lowlight a color that's not found in nature to try to make it appear more natural? Obviously, I'm not trying to convince anyone I'm a real blonde. I like to wake up to light-sucking, shockingly bright hair... it’s like an instant shot of incorporated caffeine. ‘Soft’ is a description I use for people not right in the head and has nothing to do with the way I want my persona to project.”

It doesn't matter what hairstyle, color or fashion you sport if you're too drunk to stand, or speak without spitting. It's all in the carriage. If you carry yourself well, people will follow the statement you create. In the 80s of New York's East Village culture, design spies would scope out the street wear of the neighborhood locals because they were so unique. You'd see a modified version of it in the following season's lineup.

Not that bleached platinum is anything unique or different. My idea of fashion is more theatrical since the world is my stage and my modus operandi involves creating my own reality. If chin length layered hair chunked out in wide, tri-color bands of red, gold and brown makes you feel younger – then you are. The trick is to be confident and walk like you mean it. Yeah, that's right, I intentionally put this chartreuse bolero with hot pink pants, and you bet... my hair color matches the shoes and the outfit. Wanna dance?

There is no age or fashion appropriate in my world... as long as the golden rule is adhered to (Do unto others…). Which of course, brings up the family thing. For some reason, it sent my then 10-year old daughter crying hysterically, burying herself into her bed covers, when I came home with strands of hot pink and electric blue tresses in the mid-80s.

“But you have to meet my teacher!” she sobbed. It was the one time I reversed a decision about appearance.

Perhaps brilliant color triggers responses from the time when little old ladies emerged from salons with blue hair... which they still do. It's like a bright warning light to MOVE OVER when you glimpse their fuzzy halo shining from behind the wheel of a 40-weight car veering ominously in the left lane with the directionals blinking continually – keeping the driver in the car behind guessing which way the devil with the blue hair is really going.

My mother turns 80 this week– and she stills drives but doesn't have the traditional bluehead of the Florida elderly. Having survived my rebellious teen years, wading through the experimental styles of the flower child love era of the 60s, she's wizened and always more amused than offended with any hair color, threads or lifestyle choice. As my grandmother would say, “What’s important is that you're true to yourself, kind to others and loyal to your family... but make sure you know how to dance well…”


PS: I'll be in Florida this week dancing quite well at mama Belloise's 80th birthday party.

Almost cut my hair
It happened just the other day
It's gettin kinda long
I could have said it was in my way
But I didn't and I wonder why
I feel like letting my freak flag fly
Cause I feel like I owe it to someone – David Crosby

From the musical Hair:

...I want it long, straight, curly, fuzzy
Snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty
Oily, greasy, fleecy
Shining, gleaming, streaming
Flaxen, waxen
Knotted, polka-dotted
Twisted, beaded, braided
Powdered, flowered, and confettied
Bangled, tangled, spangled, and spaghettied!
Oh say can you see
My eyes if you can
Then my hair's too short