Last Chance Cafe

One of the weird things you get used to living in a third world country is the power outage. We're on number four in the past two days, and this past week has contained at least three others. Last night I was at the bar next door eating (bad) pizza when the lights went out. It was kind of fun as I followed the bartender on duty as he ran, flashlight in hand to go start the ancient generator.

By ancient I mean he had to start it by hand cranking, while another patron worked what I think was the choke. I think- because I also think it's a diesel and I don't know how those contraptions operate. I went back to my pizza and was reflecting on events when it struck me that I didn't turn off the computer in the house. At almost the same moment the bartender pointed to the streetlights. The outage had lasted less than five minutes.

I did a quick calculation as to whether the UPS would last that long followed by a mental shrug, as there was nothing to be done about it anyway. It did bring home again how precarious my expensive electronic gear's existence is as I just two days ago regained use of this laptop by some means that continues to escape me.

I can hear the generator from next-door chugging away in the background from one window and the birds and other critters making their noises through the one closest to me. The delivery trucks pulling up to deliver stuff to the mini market seem louder as does the banter from their drivers. When the grid is down it's easier to feel where we are, in a small valley up near the top of the mountain, cut through by streams and rivers, bugs, birds and big rocks spit out by the volcano long ago.

I can hear a dog barking like crazy somewhere up the hill. I was confronted by a dog the other night while I was walking to the main supermarket in town. A few times in my life I've been surrounded by dogs. They seem all too easily to revert, even after thousands of years of domestication, to the ancient pack mentality. There are nights I've experienced in both Costa Rica and Panama where there is just a feeling in the air that the dogs are out. That feeling is also thousands of years in the making.

I felt it the other night and less than a hundred yards from my house I saw a large black dog looking up at me from a few blocks away. It was easy to change my course after one bark, and he didn't come after me. A few blocks on I imagined I saw another, though he didn't see me, and I kept on the main road. I had to cut across town to get to the market and it put me on the road in front of the firehouse, which, for some reason is devoid of streetlights.

I felt a chill before I heard the dog come skidding to a stop alongside of me. About the only thing in my experience that I've come to count on in these encounters is that they won't usually attack you from behind. They seem to need to see your face, or at least your eyes, first. With more than one it's the big dog that gets this face time, the rest spread around the sides according to pecking order, and the smallest one is relegated to the rear to nip at your heels.

I glanced sideways to check out his size and he was small enough to throw if it came down to it. I've learned to never break stride, cross my arms so as not to give them something dangling to latch onto and never look at them directly for more than a moment at a time, especially not in the eyes. It lasted about twenty seconds until I got into the light coming from the supermarket and he backed off.

Last night in the dark, while watching Luis get the generator started I was bumped from behind by the big Golden Lab that my landlord keeps along with her Rottweilers. The dog has a big solid head and he was trying to push me out of the way so he could see what was going on. Sometimes on a Saturday night after payday I'll find him tied up at the bottom of my stairs to keep the drunks on their toes.