On dining with random animals, complaining about the weather, and dodging the cops in Nicaragua (vol. xxviii, no. 3)

Dear Family,

I’m appreciative of you who have inquired and expressed concern about Crystal’s ailing back. (I’m also appreciative of you who haven’t. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and would like to, feel free to read last month’s letter.)

Physical therapy and pain meds are helping, but she’s still in frequent pain and struggles to walk normally. The consensus is that a disc herniation as large as Crystal’s generally requires surgery and so that has been scheduled for April 16th. 

Everybody I know who has had this surgery tells me they felt better immediately thereafter. Obviously, we’re hoping it goes this way for Crystal so she can get back to being her normal, active self again.   

Stay tuned for updates.

Another Running Update (I promise not to do this every month)

As it often does, March marked the start of the year’s racing calendar. I continue to be a middling runner, not really getting any faster and mostly just trying not to slow down as I slowly plod through my early 50s. 

The start of the year was marked by some minor nagging soreness first in my right calf and more recently in my right quadriceps. I tended to these injuries in the same measured, responsible way I do most delicate challenges — by plowing headlong through the pain and waiting for it to dissipate. It generally did, but not until 4 to 5 miles into any given run. A more patient/responsible runner probably would have shut things down for a few weeks to to allow for proper healing, but that requires far more patience than I am capable of exhibiting. Fortunately, all systems seem to be functioning (for now, more or less) and I’m just grateful that I am able to continue doing this thing that brings me so much happiness and peace of mind. 

It brings me happiness even though I’m coming to terms with the very high likelihood that I’m never going to be very good at it. Sometimes I think it would be nice to actually excel at something I love doing. “Basic competence” seems to be my ceiling with running and numerous other things. 

But I’m okay with that, because most of the races I’m currently signed up for are in connection with my new role as a “captain” in the Athletes Serving Athletes Wingman program. This is the thing that I think most of you already know about where I help people with physical disabilities participate in mainstream running events.

Running makes me happy, and being part of ASA makes running even happier. The athletes we push are some of the most joyous and fun-loving people I know. Training with them and racing with them lifts my soul. 

I started with ASA last year as a wingman, and for some reason they asked me to be a captain this year. I’m still learning what all that entails, but as best I can tell, the biggest differences between being a wingman and a captain is that captains need to be able to a) assemble and break down the joggers and b) help ensure that their team of wingmen maintain a proper pace — mostly by making sure we don’t get going too fast and drop anybody. I’m actually terrible at both of these things and so I have no idea why they asked me to do it. It must be my winning personality. 

March began with the Annapolis 10k. I got to be part of Team Dave, an outgoing guy in his early 30s with cerebral palsy. It was a cold and rainy morning, but Dave smiled through it all while he sang along with the music we blasted from speaker atop his jogger. We had a ball. 

My other race this month was the Rock n Roll D.C. Half Marathon. ASA doesn’t participate in this race and so I raced it alone. That made it a little less fun, but the weather was perfect and I got along okay. It took me a few miles to get loosened up (as usual) but after a tough hill on mile 8 climbing out of Rock Creek Park, the final five miles were my fastest of the race and I finished in an hour and 51 minutes. Nothing special, but it was the third- or fourth-fastest half marathon of my life (I think) so I’m calling it a win.

Seven Nights in Nicaragua

Crystal, Ari and I spent spring break in Nicaragua with Crystal’s sister Liz and Liz’s husband Joe. Liz teaches at an international school in Managua while Joe, a relatively young retiree who was smart enough to take a job at Amazon back in the early days and ride its stock to independent wealth,¹ engages in various hobbies and other pursuits. 

I did not know until our arrival that our visit to Central America coincided with what Liz and Joe described to us as the “hot and dry” season. I have learned that the words hot and dry mean different things to different people in different contexts. I eventually came to understand that hot in this particular context meant temperatures in the upper 90s) and dry meant “comparatively little rain.” 

Sadly, dry did not mean “low humidity.” Dew points in the mid-70s every day meant it basically felt like summer in D.C. 

Worse, actually. The highest dew point I recall personally experiencing in D.C. is 74 degrees, which is horribly oppressive. While we were in Nicaragua, it routinely reached 76, which is downright stifling (especially when you try to run in it, as I stupidly did a couple of times).

(If you don’t know what I mean by the dew point, feel free to look it up. Basically, any dew point over 65 degrees (F) is uncomfortable (my running performance starts to degrade when it hits 60). If you don’t live in a humid climate, then you don’t have any reason to care about any of this because you are unlikely to experience dew points anywhere close to the 60s. But if you do live in a humid place, then the dew point is the only practical way to communicate how suffocating the air feels. Please, please don’t ever speak to me of humidity in terms of a percentage. Relative humidity is an utterly useless datum, especially as a stand-alone figure. Inane observations like “the humidity’s 95 percent” betray your ignorance in this area and compel me to immediately change the subject in order to avoid speaking to you in a rude and condescending manner.)

All this is to say that it’s basically hotter (and humider) than a billy goat with a blow torch in Nicaragua right now, but thanks to Liz and Joe, we had a great time anyway!

We traveled to Nicaragua on something called “avianca,” an airline with which I was not previously acquainted. My unfamiliarity, coupled with the company’s apparent aversion to capitalization, initially made me a little nervous about putting my life in their hands. (Flying always makes me at least a little nervous.) I subsequently discovered, however, that avianca is the flag carrier of Colombia. I figured Colombia probably needs reliable aircraft and skilled pilots to support its global drug racket, so I felt reasonably safe booking with them. 

Avianca’s brand tagline is “the sky belongs to everyone,” which sounds lovely and inclusive and all. Unfortunately, things that belong to everyone often aren’t that good for anyone. This may not be true of life’s most important things, but it’s certainly true of airlines. And it’s especially true of airlines for people who are more than six feet tall. 

More to the point, they need to change their tagline to Sky for all; Legroom for none.

We paid extra to sit in the “Plus” section of the plane. (They don’t have first class, but the first 3 rows were designated “Premium,” which, in hindsight, is what I should have paid for. But even in “Premium,” the legroom did not look a whole lot better than the Plus rows, which required me to wedge my knees firmly into the seat in front of me in order to sit down. I was miserable and trembled to contemplate what the non-“Plus” seats must have been like.

Fortunately the flights weren’t all that long. A little over four hours from Washington-Dulles to San Salvador and less than an hour from there to Managua.

Clearing immigration and customs in Nicaragua took longer than it should have. In France, the guy looks at your passport, asks you why you’re visiting, stamps your passport, and the whole thing takes like 30 seconds. In Nicaragua, the guy took my passport and spent the next 10 minutes typing I-don’t-know-what into his computer. Then he thumbed through my passport again, looked up at me again, and spent another five minutes typing. He then extracted $10 in U.S. currency from each of us and repeated the same painstaking process with Crystal and Ari. 

It probably didn’t actually take as long as it seemed, but it seemed to take forever.

We were further delayed when Ari’s 28-pound mermaid tail attracted the attention of the customs agent x-raying our luggage. Ari had to stand in a second line so some other people could more thoroughly examine the contents of their suitcase, but it wasn’t that big a deal and eventually the Nicaraguan gatekeepers kindly let Ari and the mermaid tail (and the rest of us) into their country.

Joe and Liz were waiting for us just beyond customs. Seeing them was a delight and a relief. They had suggested we rent a car out of concern that our three extra bodies and luggage (and mermaid tail) might overwhelm their Toyota RAV-4. This turned out to be good advice.

We wound up with a red Toyota Hilux pickup truck from either Avis, Budget or Payless — I can’t remember which because the desk agent was wearing a shirt with all three logos. It was like back when I used to get lunch at the local “KenTaco Hut” — one of those joints that somehow manages to be a KFC, a Taco Bell and a Pizza Hut all at the same time.

We rode the “A-Bud-Less” shuttle to the place where they keep the cars. A guy carrying a military rifle over his shoulder opened the gate for us, and we drove into a place that resembled not so much a rental car garage as it did a chop shop (or at least what I imagine a chop shop would look like if I ever actually saw one in real life).

What followed seemed like another 15-minute process of walking around the truck with the rental agent — mostly to document the vehicle’s innumerable dents, scratches and dings. The agent then lifted the hood and invited me to inspect the engine (which enabled me to conclusively ascertain that the truck did, in fact, have an engine). He then made sure I knew where to find the jack, road flares, and spare tire, none of which made me feel any more comfortable about this whole transaction. 

The three of us tossed our luggage in the back of the truck and climbed into the cab.

I engaged the clutch, started it up, shifted into first, and said a silent prayer that I would be able to pull out of the garage without stalling the engine and embarrassing myself in front of the rental car guys (who clearly could already tell that they had just handed the keys over to a complete and utter moron). 

Driving a stick is one of those things at which I am reasonably competent but do not excel (see above). But I managed to get out of the garage and cover the 10 km from the airport to Liz and Joe’s fancy gated-community house without stalling (and only accidentally shifting into reverse once.)

Driving in Nicaragua was an adventure and an education. Over the course of my roughly 8 hours in aggregate behind the wheel in the country, I learned that stop lights are largely optional, speed bumps can appear anywhere (including in the middle of multilane highways), lane markings are more suggestions than anything, and there is no practical limit to the number of humans that can fit into the back of a pickup truck.

Presiding over this chaos was an extraordinarily large police presence. Joe suggested I use Waze to navigate as that apparently is the app everyone in Nicaragua uses to let everyone else in Nicaragua know where the cops are positioned. This was helpful in a way, but also a bit superfluous since the police were absolutely everywhere. When Waze barks Police Reported Ahead at you every two miles, you start to tune it out after a while.

I only got pulled over twice. The first time was ostensibly for crossing over a solid yellow line (I thought they were optional) which I needed to do to avoid hitting a motorcyclist who was cutting me off. At least this is what I gathered from the police officer who, upon ascertaining that he and I did not share a common language, drew an illustration of my offense in ink on his hand. I have no idea what I did the second time I was pulled over. In both cases, my charming “no habla español” defense seemed to go a long way, and I was was able to drive away without being formally cited. 

So we’re calling that a win.

Fortunately, we didn’t need the car for the first half of the week, which we spent on Big Corn Island, some 50 miles off Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. 

We got to Big Corn from Managua via a twin-propeller plane, which we shared with 50 other people and one barking dog. It’s hard for me to feel at ease being that far above the ground on the strength of something that sounds like an overtaxed lawnmower engine, but the flights were short and uneventful. Miserably hot, but uneventful.

We thoroughly enjoyed Big Corn Island, so named because of its size relative to nearby Little Corn Island and not because the island is large by any stand-alone measure — the runway on which we landed extends most of the length of the island. Three days was long enough to hear the reggae version of every popular song ever written pumped onto the beach from the hotel bar, and to get thoroughly acquainted with the many friendly dogs, cats (and occasional horse) that roamed freely around the hotel and restaurants where we slept and ate. 

As is usually the case when we visit tropical destinations, the only place I ever really wanted to be was in the water. (At any beach, tropical or not, I’d almost always rather be in the ocean than on the sand. I hate the sand. I only tolerate it because it’s often the only gateway to the ocean.) 

My time in the sea was highlighted by snorkelling off a glass-bottomed boat that took us to a nearby reef and a sunken pirate ship. (All that was left of the ship were its cannons strewn across the sea floor, but those were pretty cool.) Having ridden the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney World back in December, it seemed fitting to be able to swim around the remanants of a ship once sailed by actual pirates in the actual Caribbean.

Oh, and I also had an exciting encounter with a nurse shark! But I don’t have an underwater camera, so you’ll have to trust me.

We flew back to Managua from Big Corn Island and spent the next three days visiting Grenada, Lake Nicaragua (passing by several of the lake’s 365 islands on a boat ride), Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, the allegedly dormant Mombacho volcano, Catarina and La Laguna de Apoyo.

Notwithstanding the oppressive heat, unpredictable traffic, overbearing police force, and lack of legroom, Nicaragua is a truly beautiful country. Liz and Joe were incredibly gracious hosts and I am grateful for their willingness to show us around. 

We connected through El Salvador again on the way home, arriving at Dulles a little before 5:00 this morning (Easter morning). We got home a little after 6:00 a.m., and Crystal and Ari immediately went to bed because we have to be at Easter services in just a few hours. I can’t sleep and so I’m working on this. You’re welcome.

Meanwhile, the White Oak Ward is about to find out what the organist sounds like when he hasn’t slept in like 30 hours. That should be fun for everybody!

Grace

Tonight at 7 p.m., Grace and the rest of the Southern Virginia University’s Chamber Singers will perform an Easter concert at the Washington D.C. Temple Visitors’ Center. I hope to see you there!

The Easter concert will be the culmination of a busy month for Grace — one that also saw her turn 19 and receive her temple endowment. I’ll refer you to Grace for any questions you might have about why she chose to do this and how she felt about it. But I get the sense that it was a positive experience for her. It certainly was for me.

Anticipating two questions that some of you might be asking yourselves right now: 1) Grace is not engaged (or anything close to it, as far as I know), and 2) Grace has no immediate plans to serve a mission.

Life comes at you fast, and I suppose these answers could change at any time. Again, for these and all other questions, I refer you to Grace.

The Washington D.C. Temple is the only temple I’ve been in that doesn’t have an aisle down the center of its endowment rooms.²

The no-center-aisle configuration means that even though men and women sit on opposite sides, as they do in every other temple, there are five or six pairs of seats in the center where a man and a woman can sit next to each other (and hold hands or otherwise be affectionate in non-obnoxious ways). These center-most seats are generally among the first to be taken as patrons file into any given session. 

Whenever someone is going through the temple for the first time, one pair of these highly sought-after seats is reserved for them. This meant that not only did Grace get to sit next to her mother (not unusual for a young woman) but she also got to sit next to her father (which is less common and typically impossible, except in the Washington D.C. Temple). I should probably say that I got to sit next to her, since we didn’t really ask Grace who she wanted to sit with. But it gladdened my soul to be there with her, surrounded by all our local adult relatives and a handful of friends from the ward. It reminded me of how happy I felt sitting between my parents in essentially the same place as a 19 year old when I received my own endowment. 

A lot has changed about me in the intervening 33 years. But the older I get, the more I love and appreciate the unparalleled comfort and peace of the temple. Encountering friends and family there makes it even better.

And speaking of Grace, Happy Easter! May you sense the loving, warm reassurance of our Lord’s infinite and divine grace as you contemplate his resurrection and atonement today.

Love,
Tim

1. The story is actually more complicated than that, but the statement is basically factual
2. I haven’t been inside very many temples. For all I know, there are dozens of others that configure their endowment rooms this way. I just haven’t seen any.