It was late on an unusually warm June afternoon, and Richardson and I sat alone, talking on the patio of the Common Market Southend. The 26-year-old had spent a few years in a much hotter place, and he had made the drive up from his Lake Wylie home to tell me about it. In Iraq, scalding afternoons topped 120 degrees, and some of the locals weren’t OK with him being there. They proved how they felt by trying to kill him with little pieces of exploding hot metal shot in his direction. In the Marine Corps, he didn’t make a living dodging automatic weapons fire, though; he was paid to seek it out. His job description included finding the enemy and enticing him to shoot at him. And then shooting back at them even harder. Richardson’s eyes are ice blue and serious, and he speaks with a Long Island, N.Y., accent softened by a decade living in the South.

He’s been on the receiving end of no less than 15 IED (improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb) attacks in Iraq. As he explained the “pucker effect” – how certain anatomy puckers in anticipation of trouble when driving through dangerous intersections, serving as an accurate sort of sixth sense, the after-work beer crowd streamed in and quickly filled the surrounding tables. Boisterous laughter began to drown out the rumbles of thunder growing in the distance.

“You always knew something bad was about to happen when all the Iraqi civilians would suddenly vanish from normally crowded areas,” Richardson said.
“The force of an IED explosion is massive,” he continued. “My first one happened in Fallujah. A pretty good-sized IED exploded underneath our truck as we rolled over. When we stopped, everyone checked in on the radio, and there were no casualties. The vehicle was mangled, and there were a couple of concussions, but everyone was fine.

“Then the corpsman (medic) started yelling that he couldn’t feel his feet.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Richardson’s 5-foot-9-inch frame is burly, and he could be the all-American good guy in a cable TV action show. He projects an intensity that must have served him well in the Marines. So far he had delivered each of his answers in a methodical, factual manner that would make the Corps proud.

“His feet were fine though,” he continued. “The explosion had blown a piece of shrapnel up through the floor right up between his boots, and they were just numbed from the force of the blast and the vacuum created by the shrapnel. He was back on patrol the next day.”

Richardson did have the benefit of riding in the armored Humvees that were a favorite topic of the media a few years ago. It was a huge improvement over the unarmored “thin skinned” trucks that were easily destroyed early in the war. But getting blown up by an IED is still not ideal, and the armor makes it only about as safe as a face shield protecting a hockey player from bodily harm. He continued talking as dark clouds rolled in overheard.

“Another time we got hit by a pretty small IED. I mean it was so small that our truck wasn’t even really damaged that much. A piece of shrapnel slipped in between a tiny gap in the armor plating, though, and came in through the back seat and hit one of our guys.

“He was talking the whole time, and they got him back to medical pretty fast.” He paused for a minute, looking down, rolling his thumb over the graphics on the can of Monster.
They just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

“He was fine. I mean, he was talking the whole time. They just couldn’t stop the bleeding.” He nodded his head, looking up, as he repeated this to both of us.

“They told us the next day that he didn’t make it.”

The joke told two tables over was a hit and the group erupted in raucous laughter. A single girl at the next table lit another cigarette, and the first few drops of the summer thunderstorm began to fall.

Richardson’s initial job in Iraq involved keeping one of the most bomb-riddled stretches of highway in one of the meanest places in the world – Fallujah – clear of danger for convoys. The road was a critical supply line for coalition forces.

“We were basically a heavily armed highway patrol,” he continued. “Insurgents would come out almost every night and plant new IEDs, and we’d deal with them the next day. This wasn’t official policy, but it was pretty much understood that if anyone was going to get blown up by an IED, it was to be our patrol and not one of the convoy vehicles.”
When I asked him how he felt about that, he shrugged. “All part of the job I guess.”

A common ambush tactic of Iraqi insurgents is to plant an obvious IED, knowing that an American patrol will stop when they spot it. Insurgents then rake the vehicles with small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and the occasional Chinese- or Russian-made heavy machine gun. This was how Richardson’s first firefight began.

“What was that like?” I asked, realizing I had moved toward the edge of my seat. “Did you take it personally when you realized for the first time that someone you’d never met was trying to kill you?”

“Yeah, it got my attention when I could hear incoming rounds hit the truck, but you don’t really think about the danger when you’re in the midst of the fight,” Richardson said. “They weren’t coming that close to me anyway.” He laughed. “For the most part the Iraqis can’t shoot for shit.”  Richardson went on to describe how they identified two MAM’s (military aged males) shooting at them from an irrigation ditch about 200 meters away. Even despite his rigid, chronological delivery of the facts of the story, and frequent use of military terms, I could still see the angry orange muzzle flashes and tracers slicing up a postcard-pretty desert sunset. Palm tree silhouettes swaying in a warm desert breeze.

“We killed one and the other guy took off. We searched a nearby house but didn’t find anything. I remember right after all that happened a really big sandstorm rolled through.

“It was ominous.”

He glanced over at the group of hipsters comparing tattoos at the next table, and back to me.

“I was never really scared during a firefight. Instinct and training take over and you know you have to kill them before they kill you,” he confided. “It’s afterwards that you really think about it. Kind of like, ‘Did I actually really do that?’

When I was a kid, I loved the sound of the CSX freight train passing behind my neighbors’ houses and the park across the street.  Lying on the bed I shared with my older sister, I listened for the train that would whisk my imagination far away from my tiny Wilmington, Delaware.  Maybe I could jump through the open door of a boxcar and hang out with the hobos.  The sound would lull me to sleep and to far-off places.

Sometimes, I ran to our bedroom window when I heard the whistle, and if the trees were bare I could catch a glimpse of the train, hoping that this time it would be an Amtrak.  Passenger trains set my imagination wild with dreams of adventure and escape.  Only recently did I find out that Amtrak never used that CSX line.

My mother warned us to “stay away from the tracks.”  For the most part, we did.  Once, my oldest brother put a penny on the rail and it was flattened by a passing train.  Lincoln’s profile had melted to look like the face in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” The vision of being mashed under the sharp, hot wheels was enough for me to keep my distance.  Yet, my curiosity never waned.

Mother never found out about the time my childhood friend David and I threw rocks at the train from the safety of the woods, or how in the summer we pretended the rail was a balance beam, never checking behind us for a train.  Train tracks have a certain stinging odor when the tar gets hot, and as I looked down the tracks as the heat rose like a mirage, I thought, “If I kept going, I could walk right out of here.”

Two of my uncles visited my family one weekend.  At breakfast, they asked us how we could sleep with the sound of the training whistle blaring all night.  We looked at each other.  “What whistle?”

Thirty years later, I’m in the Business Class car of Amtrak’s “Carolinian” Train No. 80 out of Charlotte, headed back to Delaware.  The ride will take eleven hours, versus one-and-a-half hours by plane or eight by car.  People look at me with bewilderment and ask:  “Eleven hours?  What do you do for eleven hours?” For me, riding the “original steel horse” is like spending a stress-free day back in time.

The train pulls out of Charlotte at 7:40 a.m..  I prepare for the long journey by extending my seat and  footrest, opening my laptop, getting out my DVDs and books, and cracking open the thermos of hot coffee I will sip for the next five hours.

We slide pass the industrial underbelly of NoDa and as we gain speed, the window becomes a green blur as kudzu takes over the scenery.  Along I-485, a red barn and silo with a giant white cross emerge. It’s surrounded by row after row of identical vinyl-sided houses where the farm used to be.  Pasture meets progress.

The attendant gives us pillows and blankets and a complimentary drink.  We’re soon upon Kannapolis, where the landmark smokestacks for Plant No. 9 are a memory, and in their stead is the North Carolina Research Center.  We stop to pick up passengers and continue on through the gritty part of Landis, where their textile factory has closed.  The history of the South is along the train tracks that go through small, forgotten towns that are now decaying.  Their church graveyards hold more people than the towns themselves.  The train whistle blows, letting people know life is passing by.

China Grove has a Main Street and mill houses, but no more mill.  The tracks run along the backside, where work got done and people got their hands dirty before the manufacturing jobs fled overseas.  Bungalows have chipped paint and speckled windows where worn-out faces peer to watch the train.

We’re soon upon the “American Century Home” plant and its empty parking lot.  The cars are all at the correctional facility down the way.  Farther, a billboard reads: “Foreclosure affects the whole family.”  Less than a mile later, another says: “Be happy, have fun.”  An old house with a gazebo, grand in its heyday, drips with ivy and sadness.

The romantic, faraway places I dreamed of as a little girl have turned to rubble.  Vacant factories and textile plants represent abandoned ideas and a bygone era of middleclass America.

It’s 8:30 a.m.  Long ago, people would be filling these factories to start another day.  Co-workers would say, “Good morning!” and share stories of their boys’ Little League games or their girls’ dance recitals or of how their oldest was graduating high school and hoped to get a job in the mill to carry on the family tradition.  What happened to those families?  What happened to their town?

In the approaching distance, “The North Carolina Finishing Company” was imploded. The water tower with the company name stands among the crushed bricks—proudly, quietly—as if to say, “Something great was produced here.”  The train rocks gently past with respect.

Riding past these towns is like having a front row seat at a funeral.  Rusty trailers, rusty cars, rusty people. Across the aisle, a woman watches a movie on her portable DVD player.  How can she watch a motion picture when real-life drama unfolds outside her window?

We close in on an empty single-story factory with the delivery dock facing the tracks and an abandoned blue pickup truck in the weed-infested parking lot.  A living-room chair and a folding chair are outside on the dock where I imagine coworkers sat and laughed over a good smoke.  Now even the cigarette factories have vanished.

We stop in High Point and then, toot-toot, we’re off to Greensboro, Burlington, Durham, Cary, Raleigh, and Selma.  It has begun to rain and streets are glistening.

As the train speeds along, snapshot images zip past: rows of soybean and cotton, a forgotten field, boarded-up shacks like in Walker Evans’s black-and-white photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  The whistle blows again, soft and gentle, and the cows don’t look up from grazing.  A red pick-up truck waits behind the railroad crossing gate.  We catch glimpses of life, landscape, and loneliness.

My mind drifts to my first train trip to New York City when I was a teenager.  Penn Station and its crush of people, high ceilings, and organized confusion was intoxicating.  At my house in Charlotte, occasionally, I hear it in the distance — if the night sky is clear and traffic is quiet—a long chooooo, then two short choos.  A far-off train calling me home.

A woman sits next to me in Wilson and awakens me from my wide-eyed slumber.  We exchange pleasantries and I go back to writing.  She opens her cell phone, and from the conversation I hear that she’s traveling to Washington, D.C., to see her 19-year-old niece’s premature baby in the hospital.

A family is socializing on the porch of a house facing the tracks.  They are African-American.  Their daily view, and entertainment, is this.  One man lifts his hand and waves, and I quickly press my hand to the window, trying to make a human connection from a speeding train.  Seconds later and two doors down, an elderly white couple shuffles to their tired, old car outside their rundown antebellum mansion, all past their original glory.  I wonder if these two families, so close logistically, even know each other.

At each stop, the ebb and flow of passengers continues.  As the train pulls away from the Rocky Mount depot, we approach the shopping district, and I see the reflection of the moving train in the empty storefront windows.  A middle-aged man stands with his arms crossed and a “take me away” look in his eye while his three daughters lean lazily against the doorway of an ornate, vacant bank. I want to wave, but they are gone.

There’s a certain beauty about these Carolina towns trying to cobble together an existence.  Whitakers and Enfield fly the American flag and have town names on water towers, fire departments, and post offices.

We slip out of North Carolina into Virginia and towns dissolve into a landscape of green farmland.  At a train yard, a blonde man in a scruffy green t-shirt and jeans carries a duffle bag over his shoulder.  Hobo, I think.  They do exist.

We pass downtown Emporia at 2:20 p.m. where “The Virginia Hotel” boasting “Polite Service.  Friendly” has been converted into an antiques store.

I head to the café car to briefly eat my packed lunch in one of the comfortable, cushioned booths.  Across from me, a young man wears earbuds, blocking out any noise or potential conversation.  Two people in the back play cards.  I return to my seat.

We have run out of towns and are moving fast.

“I love trains,” the woman behind me says with a Boston accent.

“I used to work on the railroad in college,” replies the man across the aisle.  He says he’s watching the rails and is carrying a 1972 railroad timetable.

North of Richmond, we pass through a storybook town called Ashland, home to Randolph-Macon College, where the Victorian houses and trolley make it look like Candyland.

Out of nowhere, we’re on a bridge that carries us across a wide, stunning river with herons and fishermen dotting the surface.  Suddenly, we’re upon a group of men and women in uniform practicing a drill.  “Quantico Marine Corps Base, Virginia. Crossroads of the Marine Corps.”  We slow to a gentle stop at the commuter station, barely long enough for anyone to board.  Maybe no one did.  In a short hour, we’ll be in Washington, D.C.

The phone of the woman sitting next to me rings and it’s her sister. I can tell from her hushed tone the baby didn’t make it.  Throughout the trip, I’ve been so busy writing and taking pictures, and she’s been listening to music, that we haven’t talked much.  But during the last leg of her journey, we put down our distractions and bond over the loss of a child, not here long enough for the whole family to meet.

The Washington Monument juts up from horizon and then the dome of the Capitol.  The train takes us right through downtown where she will depart with a heavy heart.

The conductor says we’re parking at Union Station for 15 minutes.  I want to dart inside for a coffee and a croissant, run up the escalator, spin in the atrium like Mary Tyler Moore.  But he warns: If you miss the train, you miss the train.

I’m looking forward to sleeping in my old room where the furniture has not changed since I was a little girl.  And once again, I will be lulled to sleep by clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack as the train hits that one spot on the tracks that still sounds the same after four decades.

~ Sheila Saints

[tweetmeme]

I’m thinking, “Wait a minute. Why am I going? Isn’t this one of the world’s most desperate places? Don’t they kidnap people there? Sixty years of civil war between the leftist FARC and ELN, government sponsored paramilitaries massacring entire villages—am I crazy? We sponsor the government there with billions—Plan Colombia—which would make Americans an obvious target, hmmm.  I remember the FARC captured three Americans several years ago and they only recently were rescued. There’s still a war going on!  I didn’t mention the narcotics trade with Colombia at its core. You know, cocaine, marijuana, the drug cartels? This could be a grave mistake. I should buy more insurance.
ColombiaWith Cartagena located on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, you can see why the drug trade starts here. Centrally located between the US and the cocaine growing parts of South America to its south, it’s a just short hop across the Caribbean and you’re in the drug import/export business.

Nonetheless, Cartagena is an architectural jewel. It has 500-year-old buildings and intact, original city walls—murallas—with intact bulwarks and towers, surrounding the entire original city. An official UNESCO World Heritage site, it also has Castillo San Felipe, the largest fort Spain ever built in the New World. It took 100 years to build and looms large over the city.

Flying in on Avianca, an airline that serves as the flag carrier of Colombia, getting free drinks, I’m thinking, “This may not be too bad. Drinking helps. “More whiskey, please?” Upon landing, the entire plane erupted in loud cheers and rapturous applause.

Though the taxi leaving the airport went through the nicest parts of the city, along beaches and the better neighborhoods near the water, I had a sinking feeling that I may not have made the wisest vacation choice. The beaches had dingy, coarse, mud-colored sand, and the weather was more humid than Charleston in August. The streets were garbage strewn, filled with questionable looking people. I didn’t notice the drug dealers or the prostitutes—both male and female—until later, as they generally come out at night. The taxi driver overcharged me and wanted a tip. Even getting a taxi was a pain, as everyone near the cab had an outstretched palm.

The place my wife Beth and I chose in advance was both windowless and airless. Pulling into the street of the hostel was a disappointment, to say the least. Again, hordes of people outside, wandering like zombie extras from “Shaun of the Dead.” One aging beggar had his hand out before I even had my bags. The street smelled like rancid garbage, gasoline, and spilled cheap liquor. The old city looked more like a crime-ridden dump than a UNESCO heritage site, but I resolved to wait out initial impressions. I gave the place a chance to impress, and it did—eventually.

Cartagena is a cultural cousin of Havana in geography, appearance, musically, and even the strange accents, where the locals drop not only endings but consonants as well. Here salsa is king, and nearby was the city’s most famous club, the Café Havana. People outside the club were dancing in the streets—one even dancing with a broomstick. I visited the club often, drinking fabulous mojitos—Cuban or Colombian rum only—and realized, This place rocks. Watching the teams of bartenders—mashing the mint leaves, adding double shots of rum, all done with  a flair—was worth the small cover. It looked like the place was brought over from Havana brick by brick.

I found other bars as well, all interesting, some dirt cheap—ice cold beers 60 cents each—to more classy types in the old city, like the intimate Via Apia, where every night is a party. You can live large like a tourist and drink at American prices or you can drink like a Colombian and drink heavily for next to nothing. Word of warning though: do not drink too much like a Colombian because when you get the cheap stuff from the corner gro, the bottles aren’t sealed and they sometimes add water or worse. When I bought rum at the corner store they would pull out a little paper cup and let me sample it. Many locals drink aguardiente, literally “firewater,” which, when good, tastes like licorice flavored swill—worse if you get the cheap stuff.
Cartagena Colombia
Our Spanish school, Nueva Lengua, was good. My teacher for three weeks, Daisy, was great. The school was more expensive than most in Latin America, and the teachers were uniformly excellent. Residing at the Swiss Residial (that’s its name—no sign on the street), we made friends, practiced our Spanish, figured out the local accents, and began frequenting clubs while exploring the city of two million and its surrounding countryside.

One excursion was visiting the Totumo Mud Volcano about an hour away. It’s a shabby, sad little volcano, maybe 150 feet tall. You walk to the top on some rickety stairs to the crater, filled entirely with mud and plop yourself in. It’s hundreds of feet deep but no one sinks. You lie on top and the local dudes give you a total rubdown and massage before you can escape. It’s pretty inexpensive, so you do it all and the locals expect and receive well-earned tips. After the mud rubdown you walk shakily to the nearby lagoon and the local women grab you, strip you, and wash the mud from you. When it’s over you feel shook up but better than when you started. Their beautiful lagoon where you wash the mud off is a polluted affair so you hold your breath as long as possible, never daring to swallow anything. Any money you happen to have on you during any of these processes is stealthily removed. Most of us left our valuables behind in a locked, guarded van.

In Cartagena we worried at first about crime in our neighborhood, Getsemani, not known for its safety after dark. Seemingly populated by shadowy characters; bums, drunks, drug dealers, hookers, beggars, and loud, screaming (sometimes singing) vendors and hucksters—people selling anything from coffee to Chiclets to jewelry.  It was cheesy yet romantic, just like the movies. It seemed like half the population was sleeping on sidewalks or in doorways. On one street there was an internet café next door to a love hotel—pay by the hour, please—and then a restaurant/bar with speakers blasting, then hookers, then the corner gro where beer was cheap and you drink outside and there was always a crowd of drunks, many already collapsed on sidewalks. Those places attracted hookers who smell easy money when they see it.  Drug dealers were added to the street mix, well spaced along the way. I didn’t notice them at first until my Spanish improved. Then I realized they were whispering, “Coca, marijuana, chicas, muchachos?”

Luckily, my personal reality was different. First, the crime problem is not as bad as it seems. Unlike most large South American cities, you really can wander around old Cartagena at night, even in our section, Getsemani, which is on the verge of gentrification. Once the street people see you more than once, they don’t bother you. The entire country, especially the touristy old city, has soldiers and police on every corner. Not oppressive figures, they say hello to you when they’re not on their cells talking to their girlfriends. All carry machine guns, at first disheartening, to say the least, but their job is just to be visible. The authorities don’t want tourists and travelers robbed, kidnapped, or raped, and the system works. As a result, the old city really jumps at night and you don’t need to take radio taxis at night like other Latin cities.

Armed with our improved Spanish, we continued exploring. Unlike our loaded Euro pals, Sebastien and Susanne, who opted for tours, we set out on our own. We headed north in the vicinity of Santa Marta, another old, historic Colombian city. Taking a break from the heat and humidity, we opted for the mountain village of Minca, fifteen miles into the Sierra Nevada above Santa Marta.

Up a huge hill, we rented a cozy cabin shaded by a fully loaded mango tree. Owned by a German expat named Cris, he explained, “They call me Cris, short for Cristobal, but my real name is Ronald. Why they don’t call me Ronaldo, I’ll never know.”

From our cabin hiking trails extended farther into the Sierra. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of following trails like this in Colombia.  Talking to Cris, he said the rebel group FARC hasn’t been active here in ten years. “Last time they came through they broke into the local liquor store and stole 20 bottles of aguardiente. Eight years ago some tourists were kidnapped and killed (actually it was 2003) on the way to the Lost City, but it’s been quiet ever since. They just wanted people to know that they’re still around.”

Several days in the mountains brought cooler weather but the drawback was no hot water so we returned to the lowlands—the torrid zone—so at least cold water showers would be tolerable. After two days of torrential downpours and no electricity—we couldn’t even find our cabin after dark—we headed for small beach town/fishing village Taganga and then Tayrona National Park, farther up the coast.

Taganga was an enjoyable, tranquil, trippy place, but we left to visit the nearby tropical paradise of Tayrona National Park, as it was our mission to get off the grid. A fisherman took us in his boat, to the most distant part of the national park. Because of guerrilla activity, Tayrona Park is often closed by the Colombian authorities, seemingly at random, as they do not want any international “incidents.”  We got dropped off at what we thought was the most isolated part of the park, but it was crawling with backpackers. So much so that there was a water shortage, no showers and high prices for just renting a hammock in miserable, fetid conditions. I soaked my hat in cold water to cool my brow and someone yelled (in Spanish), “Stop wasting water!” We immediately hiked out, taking a trail to Arrecifes Beach, where we were pursued our agenda of hammock testing and beachcombing. Under every shade tree were tiny restaurants, juice stands, potato chip vendors, even horses and mules.

We continued our beachcombing—funny this was guerrilla territory not long ago—visiting a place called La Piscina—the Pool—where our touring Euro friends, Sebastien and Susanne found us. They say anything can happen in Colombia and it usually does, and this was a perfect example. We joined them on their tour, though we’d already covered the areas they were going. We decided to meet them later that evening at their hammock spot, located outside the park, in Los Angeles—Los Angeles, Colombia, that is.

We hiked out of the park, walking a good six miles through dense jungle foliage, dodging blood-sucking insects and horse, burro, and mule traffic, finally getting a ride near the end from a park service shuttle. We flagged down a local bus, Colombian style, on the highway to Los Angeles, and then it was another brief hike to our new hammocks at another palm-sheltered, secluded beach. When our friends finally showed up, after dark, they thoughtfully brought many cold Aguilas, the local brew.

Back in Cartagena, I learned to love the shabbiness, the sleaze, the music, the smells, the sultry ambience, the casual way the people dress. The local people are so happy seeing visitors that they shake your hand, telling you how brave you are to visit their country.
But, I still had some problems. Once, several delinquents jumped onto our slow-moving van as it slowed for a curve. We didn’t know if they were robbing us or just aiming for a free ride up the mountain. Another time someone grabbed me while I was walking alone down a dark Cartagena street, demanding money. I pushed him out of my way and just said no.

By then I had my favorite juice bar, the Ceiba, where they showed me pictures of fruits I never heard of, like maracuya and nispero. Their inexpensive juices, blended with milk, were an entire meal, rich and tasty. Though the Cartagena beaches were not good—crowded, polluted and filled with vendors—the only way to get away from them was staying in the water.  I finally found a rooftop pool that was spectacular, catching breezes and with a million dollar view. Too bad it was my last full day in seedy Cartagena.