Comparatively Sparse

The road south from Leon back to Managua and on to Granada.  I told everyone about the perfect cone I’d seen on the ride up that we’d pass on the ride south: Momotumbo. The road passed through what I might call dry savannah.  I marvelled at how sporadic the cultivation was.  Some cane.  Some reeds.  Then vast, seemingly uninhabited stretches of scrub.  In China, every piece of earth would be used, for something, would have been used for something, for as long as anyone could remember.  It struck you how comparatively sparse the population of the new world was to nearly anywhere in China.   

We stopped at bluff, beside Lake Xolotan.  The wind was fantastic and the lake was covered in white caps, as if this were the Black Sea.  Across the way the beautiful cone of the Momotumbu stared down over the lake.  Smoke rose from the top of the shape and then even more intensely from a lower plateau.  My driver explained that there was a power plant there, harnessing all this activity.  He used the word “atomic” but though clearly this would be a singularly insipid place to locate a reactor. 

I was finishing my Kizner book about the Nicaraguan revolution.  First, I needed to bang out a perfunctory spreadsheet that seemed well suited to a brain dead long drive.  The book was much more interesting.  Kizner was building to a climatic finish: peace in our time.  Again, I am reminded of it all; this history I lived through.  How much I hated the young, pompous Elliot Abrams when he was part of the Reagan cabinet.  Again, it comes back how this conservative cabal, unnecessarily prolonged a civil war that killed scores of people every day.  Vietnam is shellacked over with Iran Contra, which is shellacked over with Desert Storm, which is shellacked over by Shock and Awe.  It is painful to peel each one back and remember that none of them ever healed.  Here Kizner strikes such a balanced tone, his indictment of Reagan and his team is all the more somber. 

Unfortunately I had built up the trip to the volcano.  We arrived to find that the park was closed to the public until further notice, do to “recent activity.”  This was clearly a bummer on the one hand but an exciting bummer, nonetheless.  “Does that mean it’s going to blow?”  “I don’t know baby.  We’ll have to look it up.”  I had written off the volcanoes of Costa Rica, as we were to have seen so much of this activity here.  But now I am dusting off precisely what is possible, down south of the border. 

After some time in the Masaya craft market, we rode into Granada.  First impressions were that this town was broader in scope and more like some confectionaries city, with the picture perfect Cathedral and the wedding cake like buildings that form the square around it. Kizner suggests that Granada was the right-of-center town to Leon’s cradle of the revolution wellspring. Perhaps.  We climbed up to the top of the tower at the Cathedral and soaked in the view. There, beneath the sky was the uninterrupted gaze, out to the lake and beyond.  Did the pirate Morgan really ply these waters?  Did my overambitious countryman William Walker of Tennessee, really try to annex this country here and set this city alight when he left? 

It’s dark.  I have a glass of wine.  Everyone was very tired.  Everyone but me has been fast asleep hours.  I don’t think it make sense to have dinner after our late, late lunch.   But I am tempted.