The Life Quixotic

Quixotic [kwik-SAW-tik]

1. Resembling or befitting Don Quixote.

2. Extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary, impractical, or impracticable.

3. Impulsive and often rashly unpredictable.

            Don Quixote is a character made up by an author with a dream, not unlike any other character. However, unlike just about all others, his life would be not ephemeral, but eternal. The guy has his own adjective! And just as Don Quixote roamed the countryside armed with a donkey, a thirst for adventure, a simple but insightful squire, and the knowledge of a long-forgotten era of knighthood and chivalry, there are people today roaming all parts of the globe in search of adventures of their own. I unwittingly joined them for about a week in Bocas del Toro, Panama and tried to decide if what they do is noble, quixotic, or simply dumb.

            I am not the most rugged traveler, nor the softest. I tend to stay in cheap hotels or motels over hostels, or on friends’ couches over hammocks in the woods. On this trip I would stay in a hostel at which I paid $14 per night for my own bathroom and shower. The place featured the three most important elements an accommodation can possess – location, location and… cockroaches. It wasn’t high living, but it certainly did the trick.

            My friend Max stayed down the hall in a room shared with up to five other people during our stay. They came from Argentina, Spain, Canada, Czech Republic and other parts of the US. We would meet many more people along the way from Finland, Israel, Germany, Brazil and El Salvador. Each of them had a story to tell. The whimsical kid in me wanted to join them to jump on the next sailboat across the Caribbean or on a bike ride to Tierra del Fuego. The logical adult simply wanted to ask what they fuck they were doing with their lives. Somewhere doing neither of these things an answer started to surface.

            A few different ideas had come to my head regarding these travelers. Many people would, and do, refer them simply as backpackers, but I think that fails to differentiate them. I see backpackers as well-to-do college graduates with new dreadlocks and six weeks to explore before rejoining the real world. These other people are road warriors. This is their life. I just wondered what the war was.

            I started talking to Jeff and got a strange, but comforting vibe. He kicked his kickstand in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska twenty months ago to ride from the northern tip of North America to the southern tip of South America. Geographically speaking, Panama is barely halfway to southern Argentina, but he has no plan to hurry. He knows how to pace himself, though, because he has also ridden the entire north-south length of Africa after serving in the Peace Corps in Ghana. The light was low and he sounded young, so hearing he was 37 was somewhat surprising.

            Not much older was the guy who would come to be known as “Lo Tengo.” Max and I were surfing a fun reefbreak before dark one evening with just one other guy in the water. A man with long blonde hair and a wide build paddled out in the channel then outside of us. When a set came in he paddled deeper than Max and I, who had been waiting for said set (this is a no-no) and yelled “lo tengo” (I have it) in heavily American-accented and grammatically improper Spanish before taking off. (He should have said “la tengo” because the word for wave, ola, is feminine.) Picture Spicoli learning Spanish and you have some idea of how this guy butchered this beautiful language. A couple days later he and Max exchanged words, squashed it, and Lo Tengo and I got to talking.

He was from North Carolina and immediately began to talk shit about everyone from pro surfers who had come to surf this particular spot, to a prominent surf photographer who he claimed to have smoked repeatedly in their younger days as surf competitors, as well as the “Niggerastas” who dominate the break. He got excited when I told him I was from San Diego and quickly told me a story about him surfing 20 foot Black’s. The guy could only accurately be described as a complete douche.

A few days into the trip a young couple from Argentina showed up with their baby and a Quebecois. The baby was absolutely adorable though annoyingly out of control. She paints murals and henna tattoos, and I wasn’t sure what he did. When I stepped on glass he supplied the tweezers and rubbing alcohol, and was very friendly.

Around the same time as the Argentine couple arrived, three girls from Argentina in their early twenties moved into one of the rooms. One was clearly the hungriest and rather unfortunate looking, while the other two were very cute. Of course, they didn’t speak English and Max and my Spanish can make it difficult to work any type of decent game. We tried to talk to them and figured we just weren’t their type. Turns out they are what Argentines call Tortas – lesbians. Max tried his best and I gave him odds that if there was a chance, he had it, but it was not to be.

            The story could go on for a long time, as Don Quixote’s certainly does, but it did not take much research to see what was going on. There was a time in which being a rebel meant telling the government to suck it and going to live in a different country. Hippies soon followed, sans rebellion but with attendant garb.

There is a saying in Bocas that people who travel there are either wanted or unwanted – wanted by the law or unwanted by society. In a time where people are expected to do certain things and live a certain way, not everyone is going to fit the mold. Instead, some of these people choose to explore. Some explore drugs, while for some the drug is a new town every other week, a crazy hike and some colorful sea life.

Their mission is certainly quixotic in that is closely resembles that of Don Quixote, which seems to be to fight battles that don’t need to be won. However, how many of us do fight necessary battles or do anything that offers great impact on the world? Are we somehow leading more noble lives by going to work everyday rather than working three months to roam for nine?

I suppose that with some clarity comes more fuzziness. At the same time I envy these warriors, I am glad I am not one of them. At the same time I am working on an MBA that seems like it will take forever to finish and much longer before it will pay off financially, not to mention pay dividends of satisfaction, I want to figure out a way to roam around places I’ve never been in search of battles that do not need to be won or even fought.

In the film Waking Life a group of scholars walks by a man working power lines and one of them says, “We’re no better than he is. He’s all practice and no theory and we’re all theory and no practice.” If nothing else, I envy these quixotic warriors for deciding that it’s ok to be all practice and no theory, because I can never seem to find the right balance for myself.