Sinkhole Pioneers: Ireland

During the twelve days I was in Ireland, I counted MLB baseball caps. Here was the final tally:

New York Yankees: 67
Boston Red Sox: 1
Rest MLB baseball teams: 0

This surprised me. Previous to my informal poll, I had thought that Boston and Ireland had a special bond.

This discovery reveals an interesting love triangle:
Boston loves Ireland;
Ireland loves The Bronx;
The Bronx loves itself.

In this love triangle, nobody loves Boston.

I can imagine the three of them at a party. The Bronx is telling stories loudly and never wandering far from the keg. Ireland is sitting on the couch seductively, legs crossed, staring dreamily at The Bronx. Boston is sitting on the arm of the couch, hoping to catch Ireland’s eye, hoping for a more-than-near-kiss.

Sinkhole Pioneers: Mohonk Mountain House in upstate NY

I spent the weekend as my girlfriend’s guest at the charter school world’s equivalent of a Star Trek convention. The convention was held at a castle-like hotel/lodge deep in the heart of the most secluded section of upstate New York. The lodge had been, at one point in its history, a ten-room building, but subsequent additions had increased its size to six floors and about 1,000 rooms. The lodge’s tack-on growth gave it a disjointed feel: hallways were illogical and sometimes dead-ended suddenly, sound carried through walls and between floors, the carpeted hallways had small undulations in them that initially caused me to stumble about, and the lodge’s many carpeted stairwells were difficult to find.

Although my plastic-sheathed nametag listed me as a “significant other,” it only took a few minutes for me to realize that this somewhat overstated my importance in the eyes of the convention planners. After eating an early breakfast with my girlfriend and hundreds of charter school gurus in a large formal dining room (jackets required), my girlfriend was whisked away for ten hours of presentations, role-plays, and panel discussions. On my fancy convention agenda sheet, from the hours 8:30am to 6:30pm, a single word was printed: freetime. I took advantage of my "freetime" and explored the far reaches of the near-empty (everyone else was in the conference room) rambling lodge and became familiar with the idiosyncrasies of its layout and its staff.

While I am not usually especially sneaky (my ankles crack when I walk), having all the time in the world allowed me to stake out areas and let my prey come to me. As I sat in the library pretending to read, I overhead two of the staff members make a pact to ignore “Mabel.” While clinging to the side of the pool and catching my breath during a pause in my swim workout, I heard one lifeguard tell another that she couldn’t wait to get "blitzed” later that night. And while dozing on a couch on the landing of a secluded stairwell, I heard one bellhop say to another, “I can get along with anyone who isn’t easily intimidated.”

The rest of my day was spent shooting racks of straight pool in the billiard room, snowshoeing through the surrounding wilderness, and setting all the time trial records on the N64 Mario Kart that I found hooked up in the game room.

By dinner, I was actually was looking forward to rejoining my fellow humans, but after the day-long grind the conference-goers were zombie-like and mostly incapable of holding normal conversations. So I kept myself entertained by taking two unofficial polls:
Question #1: Can you name the title of any show that has ever aired on the Spanish-language television channel Telemundo?
Question #2: Can you name any American distance runner, past or present?

Of the 37 people I polled, 3 were able to name a Telemundo show (all three referenced “Betty La Fea,” the show that spawned “Ugly Betty”). Zero of the people polled where able to name an American distance runner.

I found this fascinating, especially since the greatest run in the history of American distance running may have occurred just last month when Ryan Hall, running without the benefit of a pace-setter, beat the American half-marathon record by one minute and twelve seconds. Hall’s first mile was in 4:38. His time, 59:43, was the 9th fastest all-time. (Incidentally, if you look closely at the picture of Hall finishing, you can see where he wrote his split times in ink on the back of his hand. Who needs a GPS watch when you have a BIC pen?)

At a time when even the casual sports fan knows so-called fringe-sport athletes, such as Lance Armstrong, Michelle Wie, Travis Pastrana, and Tony Hawk, American distance runners are virtually unknown. In an effort to educate, here are five other long-distance running performances that might also be considered the best in American history:
1. Craig Virgin, the little known contemporary of Steve Prefontaine, won the World Cross-Country Championships in 1980 and 1981.
2. Billy Mills won the gold medal in the 1964 Olympic 10k. His winning time of 28:24.4 was almost 50 seconds faster than he had ever run before and set a new Olympic record for the event.
3. Bob Kennedy was the first non-African to break 13:00 in the 5k (12.58.21).
4. Two years after becoming a U.S. citizen, Khalid Khannouchi won the 2002 London Marathon in a World Record 2:05:38, becoming the first person to break 2 hours and 6 minutes in the marathon.
5. Seven years after becoming a U.S. citizen, Mebrahtom "Meb" Keflezighi won the silver medal in the marathon (2:11:29) in the 2004 Olympics. Meb also holds the American 10k record (27:13.98).

After dinner, my girlfriend and her convention-mates, with nametags askew and matching robin’s-egg-blue folders in hand, funneled back into the main conference room for their 7:30pm - 11:30pm night session. I stayed behind in the now-deserted dining room and methodically ate all eight of the mostly-untouched lemon sherbet desserts that remained at my table.

Some additional post-dinner exploration turned up a small basement room with a comfortable couch and a 42inch flatscreen TV, and I settled down to watch Phil Mickelson lose to Charles Howell III at the Nissan Open. I was disturbed only once, when a staff member entered and asked if “everything was okay.” I recognized him as the Mabel shunner, and I said, “No, everything is not okay. My life has gone to shit since you stopped talking to Mabel.” He left the room looking exactly like the scared twenty-year-old he was.

I felt bad for spooking him, but after having been alone for most of the day, I was beginning to believe that isolation was something worth protecting, and like my Sentinelese brethren, I felt it necessary to shoot arrows, verbal or otherwise, at intruders. After the staff member left, I went back to attempting to maintain an interest in a Tigerless, early-season professional golf tournament, but found my mind wandering to other things, such as how Florida's impending submersion will affect 1. the game of golf and 2. the dwelling place of my parents.

Sinkhole Pioneers: Chiang Mai

I missed an opportunity to watch Super Bowl XLI at 6 AM in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We arrived in town later that morning. Had the game been more exciting, my watching it at 6 AM in a faraway place would have survived as an anecdote of the sort that I use to prove my pioneer worldliness. For instance, I once bought valium at a poorly regulated pharmacy in Timbuktu. I found out about 9/11 on the morning of the 13th, perhaps one of the last few Americans to know. I am the first white person a nine-year-old Fulani goatherd ever saw.

Chiang Mai is no remote outpost, of course. My girlfriend and I stayed at a pleasant B&B and paid to travel north toward Chiang Dao to see a hill tribe out in the bush. We were accompanied in our van by our Thai guide; our Thai driver; an older Dutchman; a pederast from Oakland, CA; and a mumbling Englishman, Rowan Atkinson with gray tumbleweed eyebrows. As a young sailor the Dutchman had taken shore leave in Bangkok so exquisite that this time he’d only changed planes there on his way to Chiang Mai. He didn’t want to spoil the memory. He bullied Rowan out of a stop at the cobra farm; he and the pederast wanted to press on to the hills.

The hill tribe, the Karen, is advertised on the posters of Chiang Mai tour agencies as “Long Neck Big Ear People.” Some of the women wear gold rings around their necks, adding a ring each year. This does not stretch their neck, exactly; rather, it lowers their shoulders. Other women wear large earrings that stretch their lobes. The village was composed of a dozen wooden huts set into the side of a single hill and a string of small shady enclosures that served as souvenir shops. The long-neck and big-ear women wove on looms and were photographed by us. Their scarves and opium pipes (known as “San-Tana Dunn Dong”), as well as souvenirs found everywhere in Thailand, were on display, and when a visitor touched an item a small girl with rings around her neck recited the price. The Karen are refugees from Burma put here by the Thai Department of Tourism, and they were repaid in trinkets, which they then sold to us. There were also chickens and a puppy with a frightening growth on its back. A low day for my pioneer heart.

On the drive back, the Dutchman and the pederast remarked on how nice the people were, which was true. The Thais ate peanuts and chatted about television shows. Rowan fell asleep in the back, dreaming of the venom-milking portion of the cobra show. I donned my imitation Ray-Bans and thought about the Sentinelese, 1000 km SSW of us on North Sentinel Island, hunter-gatherers who live naked, without the knowledge of making fire, shooting arrows at approaching vessels.