The Brewha Hostel squats on a cliff-edge virile with rainforest. The view is soul-warming---the cliff cascades down 1000 feet to the Orosi Valley floor, a straight of grassy fields fissured by the azure Rio Macho, a river that saturates the grassland to swamp during the rainy season. In the morning, if the morning is right, the sun peaks over the acme of the mountain chain flanking the opposite side of the valley, striking the low, flat clouds that skim over the river hundreds of feet below where I'd smoke my morning stoag and drank fine Costa Rican coffee.
The hostel was run by four hard-core travelers, Pete, Jackie, Zach and Taylor. A couple of them had been former Castle Tam employees, but decided to split off to create a joint that wasn't a hospice for the socially-retarded. They were all around my age and had been connected in some way, from country to traveled country, for years. I thought they were siblings at first (well, two of them are); it wasn't due to any physical similarities, but instead their repartee, which oscillated between humorous riffing and whiny kvetching, all with love.
Two BK girls I met at Castle Tam bused it to Brewha with me via Cartaga. LES and Glitter both lived in Bushwick, where LES ran an unlicensed bar and show-space. Hipster kids raged at the speak-easy every weekend, LES working the bar and matching the custies shot-for-shot. She had grown up in Spanish Harlem in the 90's; her parents had gone with the local flavor of the era and were heroin addicts. At the end of a hike down to the valley floor, the 22-year old LES told me she was never exposed to nature as a child. This was her first-ever hike.
Or so she told me. After the two had left, Zach and Jackie informed me that she might have made this up, seeing as she was obviously a compulsive liar. I somehow dodged the telling tales that would have revealed this (perhaps she had avoided telling the more bodacious whoppers around me; I was supposed to travel to Panama with her; now I am not).
I had observed the propensity travelers have for serial lying from New Paltz, my post-up for the prior eight years. New Paltz used to be a big traveler town, the main drag scattered with clots of camouflage-adorned characters before the University cops, who were technically state troopers, gained authority over the town and started arresting them for whatever bullshit they could think up with on the spot.
Traveler-lying makes sense (according to logic): no one knows your past, no one knows if what you're saying is true (create yourself anew); repulsive.
~
The sun was shining for once, for Washington State, for the rainy season. I was in a rare good mood, even though sober (lies, alcohol was nothing but misery and foul-tasting mornings out there). I boosted along a side-street of Olympia, hair unintentionally down to my shoulders, beard out to my chest, clothes rank. On the side of the road I passed a Planned Parenthood. In front of it, manning the sidewalk, were a series of Christian protests hefting well-lettered signs. Always interested in both protesters and extreme views, I read the signs as I passed. The holders, who, both in clothing and hygiene, were diametrically opposed to me, stared.
"How ya doin today?" One of them inquired.
"Oh, good, good."
"Can't be that good, with your whole life on your back." He pointed at my rucksack.
I smiled. "Naw...got most of my stuff at home back in New York at my parents house....I graduated college a few months back, and just decided to travel around the US for the next six months...always wanted to, and this just seemed like the best time to do it. After six months, I have a job waiting for me in the city...y'know, New York City."
The Christians looked incredulous.
"Havin fun so far?"
"Oh yeah, havin a blast."
We chatted for a few more minutes, about my traveling, about my past and future. I walked away wondering if they believed my bullshit.
~
Brewha was a grand time. Each night I quaffed fine, hostel-brewed stouts with the Hostel owners and then did stupid shit, ranging from sloppily playing Bananagram to building complex forts in the main room to waterboarding each other (yeah, in like Iraq!) (JUST like Iraq!). I've been to hostels across Europe, the US and Central America, and this is by FAR the best I’ve been to.
~
Two of the folks at the hostel were Jehovah's Witnesses, on vacation from their missionary work in Guyana. I did not know this until someone told me, even though I had conversed with them in-depth several times. They were attractive, late 40's, with soft, semi-southern Maryland accents: a married couple.
For whatever reason, there were oodles of Jehovah's witnesses around New Paltz. My limited experience with them involved them trying their darnedest to proselytize me. In a particularly manipulative instance, I crookedly looked outside my apartment early one morning to find a stunning, well-dressed girl in her early twenties myopically looking around my trash-strewn parking lot as though lost. Being the gentleman I am, I sprinted outside and attempted to aid her. We chatted for a while, flirting lightly. She said she was "canvassing" (probably for NYPIRG or Obama '08, I thought) and that she wanted to get me some material from her car, which was parking just around the corner. She passed out of view, and I heard her foot-falls decreasing in volume, a pause, then the steps becoming more audible again. And...
(BAIT AND SWITCH)
...out stepped a rock-faced crone who talked my ear off for the next half hour while I tried to subtly figure out her minion's name.
Sneaky.
The couple at the hostel were solid, though. They actually had senses of humor, and good ones at that. Neither of them had what I like to call Krazy Khristian Eyes (wide, blank, and far too bright). They drank a little wine with us one night.
~
COMING from an extremely liberal part of the country, I see a lot of religion-bashing. Kinda like beating a dead horse (in our bubble, anyway) I've always thought. But people still do it.
Still, my New Paltz-bred biases must’ve still been in affect, because I tried to…make them question their faith?…trick them?…make them appear ignorant? Allow me to explain.
According to my limited research, much of the Jehovah’s Witness’ perception of metaphysics is based on a verse in Revelations, which is interpreted as meaning that only 144,000 true believers will be admitted into heaven. The main way to GET into heaven, however, is to convert others to the Witnesses’ faith, to make them true believers, part of the 144,000.
The logical corollary to this is: IF!...the only way to get a limited-edition ticket to heaven is to convert others, to get them their own tickets, doesn’t each conversion dilute the chances of the converter to enter into God’s glory? Isn’t it a paradox that you must dilute your own chances at glory to get into glory?
So I asked them. I’m not sure what response I expected to get, but it was my feeling that JW’s would kinda FAKE try to convert people, since they couldn’t be morons, and had to realize the paradox. Or maybe they didn’t.
“Mmmmmmmmmmmm……….that’s not really how it werks,” responded the Hubby JW. “Y’see, I KNOW I’m not goin to heaven, that I’m not one of the chosen.”
“Same here. I know,” wifey JW chirped in.
“Y’see,” he continued, “the 144,000...which is actually mentioned three times in Revelations…are kind of the governing body of the earth. They’re up in heaven, looking over the rest of us….y’know, this place is beautiful, with the rainforest and the river (he nodded to the view), but there’s a lot of the earth that’s a toxic dump by this point, because we’ve abused it. But after the new age comes, it will all be natural and beautiful, like it was in the beginning, and everyone will be happy. The 144,000 will just be like the…caretakers, looking over us.
~
“I was raised in a very religious household,” I continued, forking some Be Bim Bop, “at least for the part of the country I was in. But I lost my faith in an instant when I was like…11? Since then, I feel there’s been a certain part of my life that’s been lacking. I wished that it wasn’t, to an ever-increasing degree, because without spirituality, I feel humans are nothing but complicated machines.”
The Witnesses, Amy and Mark, nodded.
“A few weeks ago, though, a few days before I left the states, I had a bit of a revelation. It’s still something I have to work on, but I really want to.”
…
and it was raining a winter rain like stinging ice wasps and I didn’t give a shit and stuck my arm out to the wasps and there was noone in the lot and
-Your arm is your own.
-There is no one else to feel this rain
-Therefore, the only reason the rain exists is because you are feeling it.
-You create your own universe; the universe is your own. The rain only feels horrid because you are making it that way
…and the rain turned warm, like puddles being plashed by joyous children in the summer.
…
I paused. To explain.
“I mean, it wasn’t really a….traditionally-religious revelation.”
“Well, it’s really not about being religious,” Amy said with kind eyes. “It’s about being spiritual.”
~
“We used to not be happy people,“ Amy admitted.
“Yeah, we were, we were, real party animals” grinned Mark without regret. (They were sipping on Clos at the time, so I suspected they meant hard drugs).
“…but we’re happy now…and isn’t that what everyone wants?”
Know I do.
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