Warren and Clyde

I had a dream about spiders a little while ago.

I dream about spiders a lot.

Most of my dreams about spiders involve sinister-looking gray and black spiders, which pervade the safe spaces of my psyche and veer precariously close to touching me -- a kind of psychic taboo I have yet to shed.

This dream was different. It was one of those dreams where you dream you're awake and in the room where you're sleeping, but you're obviously not.

In my dream I was in my bed, which is basically just a mattress on the floor of my apartment. And above my head there were two spider webs, with two black and red and gold spiders in them.

Even in my dream, I recognized the spiders. They are the residents of the jungle porch belonging to a friend of mine.

My friend, for whom I have to come up with a suitable pseudonym, is building a house on a half-acre patch of overgrown wild land down the road from me. The house, located on steep embankment of jungle underbrush, is really not much more than a room right now.

It is a nice room, however, with large bay windows, a sunny awning and hardwood floors that conceal magically anal retentive storage space on the floor.

And ringed with the circular metal frame of what will be a second story, and possibly a third, the house-that's-really-a-room holds enough promise of being a real house someday that it seems pleasantly habitable.

The first time I came over we constructed a fence together on his porch -- to keep in check a very large and very friendly Rottweiler he co-habitates with.

Having already taken me on a hike, during which my spider phobia was laid bare, my friend warned me ahead of the excursion about the spiders. And, of course, he had to walk me, shaking and pulling at the collar of his shirt, down an intentionally brambly path (to keep the neighbors out, of course), also populated with large, hovering spiders.

After the descent, having the deck spiders at a visible but safe distance was a bit of a relief. Still, the whole time I cut wooden fence posts with a metal power saw -- which I suspected was some kind of sly test of my constitution -- I kept one eye on the webs.

As I have been spending more time on my friend's deck, of late, the spiders have become slightly less terrifying. I still traverse the rocky hillside with my head down, staring at the ground and counting my breath until we cross the threshold of fallen trees on the main road.

But, I have given up -- almost, but not entirely -- keeping my eyes on the deck spiders, maybe more out of a psychic memory that reminds me not to tread too far in one direction or the other than actual acceptance.

Also, in my dream, I tried to keep an eye on the spiders and failed.

I would wake up -- or think that I would wake up -- and see them there, hovering. I would try to watch them, only to fall asleep again, knowing that I was at the mercy of arachnid restraint.

There was no resolution to the stalemate -- it just went on.

When I woke up, I told my friend about the dream. I told him I thought the spiders were the psychic price for spending time with a free-spirited jungle dweller, that with him came spiders.

I think this satisfied him -- if not deeply, then at least bemusedly.

Sometime after my dream, I decided to name the spiders. I was thinking something heavy handed and mythological. My friend, however, immediately shot that down.

"Something simple -- like Warren and Clyde," he said.

And so, Warren and Clyde they are.

I think the names help. I can't be certain though, as I am still on the fence about the spiders.

lovely views

The best part about living on an island is that you can never go too far without seeing the ocean.

also....

today.

introductions...

My first week here on Guam, I had an assignment to cover a Halloween-themed storytelling festival in Talofofo.

It was held on the private beach property of an aging hippie and his sunglasses-wearing wife, who I suspected at the time were the Guam equivalent of crusty activists. My suspicions were confirmed some little while ago, when I heard one or both of them railing against nuclear armaments at a recent EIS hearing.

At any rate, the stories were an odd mixture of mundane and macabre, with some detailing merely odd incidents, like the sighting of a passed-away relative in the back of a car, and others more elaborately structured, like miniature stage plays on a sandy moonlit beach.

The most compelling of the evening, I thought, was a story about a red-eyed giant ghost spirit the teller met on a pig trail one afternoon.

He referred to the creature familiarly as Taotaomo'na. Literally translated as 'those who have come before', Taotaomo'na is, according to the very helpful guampedia.org, the embodiment of Chamorro ancestors and spirits who once walked on the island with the living.

It was my first week on the island, and it was probably my second or third assignment. So I was stuck asking all sorts of uncomfortably obvious questions, like, "where did this story come from?" and how do you spell "ta-to-mono?" -- to which the teller balked, "Uh, I made it up..." and "I don't know."

I think I spelled it wrong in my article -- after unsuccessfully googling several creatively misspelled iterations of the word -- but I'm pretty sure an industrious copy editor fixed it before publication.

Since then I have figured out how to spell Taotaomo'na, and have run into references thrown out here and there, by locals who still say little charms before entering into the jungle governed by Taotaomo'na or refer fondly to hijinks carried out by the forest spirits.

Over Christmas I interviewed a Chamorro couple, who annually descend into jungle brambles to collect fresh moss for their alter to baby Jesus. Christ-worship notwithstanding, they spoke in semi-seriousness about Taotaomo'na, who often played tricks on them, stealing machetes and getting them lost.

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to a motley group of free-spirited former mainlanders, who had been living in the wild refuge of Guam for some years as professors and cruise-boat owners. We ran into them on a road while walking the incredibly friendly rottweiler with which I have recently become acquainted, and they invited us up to their "sunset" at a house on a hill in a still wildish area of Chalan Pago called Fa'ma. The group was made up of several extended families, neighbors who had known each for what I guessed was decades.

After the sun went down, we headed from the hilltop house, where we had eaten cheese and crackers and done a number of what I suspected were home-brewed shots, to a property called affectionately "the Ranch."

It had been built by hand, over the course of decades, by a tall, white-haired, gregarious guy named Bruce and his family, who, according to one of the daughters, had slept in half-finished rooms for most of their lives.

The place, sitting on a sloping hillside, was impressively built, with open-air concrete kitchens and showers, and large loft-like platforms built underneath a carved wooden A-frame that I'm told had to be transported from the nearby jungle after the last typhoon. Out front of the cluttered garage a large electric peace sign beckoned welcoming.

Bruce gave us the tour and invited me back for Scrabble night sometime, apparently a Friday night ritual. Before I left, I was told that I had to partake in a short ceremony, which apparently all new visitors to the ranch have to undergo.

They had had some problems back in the day with Taotaomo'na. One of the younger sons, now in early adulthood, had fallen in a hole once and "gone all Lord of the Flies on us," Bruce casually tossed out.

There had been middle-of-the-night scratching, visitors at the door who weren't there. It got bad enough that at some point they brought a priest, who, upon entering the property turned around. He needed more stuff -- his holy water and crosses not being sufficient.

"There are some things the Catholic church cannot explain," he told them.

Since those early days, they have found a way of appeasing the forest spirits, by offering them introductions.

Bruce walked me, along with several other new additions to the Ranch, a young guy visiting from Japan with one of the daughters, and a somewhat bewildered Japanese teenager, who spoke little to no English, out onto a deck ringed by large disinterested spiders that looked out onto the wild regions below.

He, once again, brought out the home-brewed shots, served up in tiny ceramic shot glasses. And shouted out to the woods, "Taotaomo'na.... Taotaomo'na..." following with a few sentences in Chamorro, before turning to us all and asking us to shout our names.

I shouted my name out to the jungle, and half-expected a response back.

There wasn't one, but that's not how these things work, I think.

gray days...

Living in New York the past few years I spent many days in parks, lying on my back looking up at the branches of trees against the sky. With so little green space, it was a way to block out all the cars, and the noise, and the impending need to get back on the subway and go home or back to work.

Being here, parks are almost beside the point, as the green space that is hedged in around buildings pales in comparison to the greens and blues of ocean and jungle that hedge in everything else.

The other day I got off work a little early, and decided to walk over to the park in downtown Hagatna.

Downtown Hagatna is kind of a funny place. I work down there, but rarely spend much time outside of my car.

Just on the other side of the Cathedral Basilica is the Plaza d'Espana -- I think that's what it's called -- a large, open field, spotted with a few wide-branching trees, and remnants of colonial and military buildings from various eras of administration by Spanish, Japanese and American governments.

Because everyone drives everywhere here, and there's no real "downtown" to speak of -- just a series of office buildings surrounded by parking lots -- the park is mostly empty most of the time, except for a predictably timed busload of Japanese tourists unloading during lunch break on their whirlwind island tour, and several homeless people who live in the half-shelter of the open structures.

The park has several old(ish) stone and wooden buildings. Most everything from the Spanish era has been completely destroyed, but there are remnants of remnants. There's an old gazebo, called the "chocolate room" or something like that, because it was used to serve Spanish aristocrats hot chocolate. That building is gone, but the Americans built something similar in the same place, and used it for official functions (again, I think -- I read the plaques all rather quickly).

What's there now may not have survived any of the massive World War II bombing either, but instead may have been built after the fact as a replica.There are few rotting structures and stone archways that might date earlier, but it's hard to tell exactly. They reminded me of Pirates of the Caribbean, despite the fact that it's the wrong colonial government.

Most of the decomposing buildings mark only places, where something older once stood, but which were summarily destroyed by war or typhoon or both.



There are some very lovely spots though -- and in a place where so much has been lost by wind and tide and the march of progress handed out from (often) military overlords -- the little bit of history still left seemed important.

I wandered around for a little while, took pictures, and waited, as I often do in parks.

I sat under the large branches of a tree, looking up a the sky, which was pleasantly gray that day. Lately the weather here has been cooler and drier, and the humidity has been perceptibly less.

And for a second, feeling with the cool wind and looking only at brown branches, bereft of their green leaves for only a few days before they will sprout again, it felt almost like fall.