The Summit of São Nicolau

Mid-morning yesterday, two Bretts and I — stomachs full-to-bursting with hash browns — set out from Brett's sea-level home toward Monte Gordo (Mount Fat, as I translate it). Five short hours and many cows/splinters later, our surprisingly-manly selves reached its breathtaking 1,312 m (4,304 ft) peak.

I know that may not sound very high if you're from Colorado or Nepal, but you have to remember that we're on an island. So from 1,312 m we actually saw Fogo (Cape Verde's active volcano, part of the distant southern archipelago), and the visible ocean stretched more than a hundred miles in every direction around us.

(Ok, so it was cloudy in the north, but that was cool too.)

On my side

Drunk people will come up and ramble to you just about anywhere, and Cape Verde is no exception. I've had my fair share of encounters here, and most were fairly uneventful experiences. Today was different.

I was at the beach, sitting under a little grass shelter not unlike the one at Wind 'N Sea in San Diego. I was reading Everything is Illuminated, a beautiful book. The shelter, which covers some pull-up bars and cement blocks that serve as exercise equipment, was being used by one of the local youth when a lanky man in his middle years walked up to me and greeted me ebulliently.

Over the course of the next hour, he identified himself alternately as Ranealson or Richard, explained that he has abnormally sharp front teeth either because he is a lion or a vampire, and mentioned several times that he wishes he had a time machine so he could travel back to the year of his birth (1973) and change some things. When he realized that I look like Harry Potter (air-ee potta!), he pointed out that I could use magic to power his time machine. I told him that he should seek help from the church, but he was pretty sure that they don't want his kind. We debated at length the differences between Zeus, God, and love, eventually settling at the conclusion that they are all the same thing. Several times, while pointing either at his heart or the spotted bend in his left arm and repeating the name "Ra," he knelt down on the sand to draw the Eye of Providence. Most of his sentences were built from some combination of Creole, Spanish, and English, as if he'd learned some of each but not enough of any particular one.

I could tell that the exercising youth was watching us (and trying to hold in his laughter), but he left before it was entirely clear that Mr. 1973 wasn't asking me for money, so it's possible that he was laughing at me for being naïve.

Thankfully, another witness — this time a young boy — joined us before the conversation was over; he came to sit with us under the grass roof, watching us and smiling.

I finally decided to cut things off by walking away; Mr. 1973 walked a few feet with me, shook my hand one last time, and asked one last time for English classes (he promised to bring his own pen). I cheerfully said "no" and then bid him farewell. We started walking in opposite directions. After a few seconds, I turned back to face the young kid and shrugged with my palms toward the sky — as if to say, "I have no idea what just happened." He smiled and shook his head in agreement.

This kid didn't think I was a hapless branco. We enjoyed Mr. 1973 together. Today, at least for a minute or two, I fit in here.