AJ Green’s Caribbean Broadcast 08/01/2012
This is my formal declaration of an S.O.S. that I doubt many people will be able to do anything about, but at least it’s out there. There are eighteen of us at Entriquillo near the lake. The new camp location we’ve chosen seems secure enough, so I’ve decided to set up a rather permanent base here while we try to figure out what the hell is going on. Where was I? Ah, yes….we took off.
After we were airborne, it was hard to take stock in the situation. If it were only up to me, I would have went straight to Puerto Rico like we were supposed to…but somewhere in the flight, we heard about the flooding on the West Coast, so we decided to make for higher ground. I really wish our military was still making noise on the other end of our radio…it’s too quiet here now. We decided we’d head for Pico Duarte…it’s the highest point on the island, and we figured it was the best chance we had of not getting annihilated by seawater. There was a decent stretch of paved road that we landed on that was near the peak.
When we landed, we attracted a lot of attention to ourselves. There was a crowd near the peak that had flagged us down. Interesting lot of about a hundred or so. The quicker ones got to us first, explaining that they wanted to leave, something I assumed had to do with the flooding we’d heard about mid-flight. Amanda took this time to point out that in the middle of the ‘crowd’, there was a batch of locals with sticks, bats, and farming tools. I thought they were going to try to take the plane by force, but they were facing the other direction…they were fending off a bunch of their sick/dead/re-living peers. It seemed like they had things under control until I realized that there were only ten of them down the hill fighting off the . And only five of them were up with us. Hundred…fifteen…uh oh. Some quick mental math and I suddenly found myself back in the cockpit firing the engines back up. Two of the locals were overwhelmed by them when one of their sticks got stuck jabbed in an eye. I would’ve just dropped it and ran, but then again, I was already in the plane.
I remember hearing them scream “No en las sombras”…which means “not into…” something. I can’t remember what sombras means, but at the time I thought they were screaming ‘zombies’. It was really eerie hearing them scream like that. Despite the distraction of taking the plane off and the mental translation (and being on a tropical island), their cries for help still gave me the chills. By the time I got the bird off the ground, we had only lost three of the crowd. The silence from the cargo hold was their own homage to their fallen saviors. Not sure if that’s completely true, because I was busy flying a plane off of a mountain highway, but it’s better than the alternative of them being silent because they were dead and getting ready to eat me or something. Luckily this was not the case.
One of the survivors, Miguel Soto, decided to make a trip up to the cockpit. He sat in Robert’s old seat…It still hadn’t hit me that Robert was one of them now. Soto suggested we head North to the airport in Santiago. We cordially shot down his idea and Jack got out the charts to find someplace else with some decent altitude.
We decided to head South to the Baoruco Mountain Range. I didn’t want to land. Who knew the amount of damage that was going to be caused by this supposed flooding. So, I spent five hours practicing the four basics of fixed wing flight. Ascent, Descent, Turns, and Straight & Level Flight. God, I was bored. I always find flying boring when there’s a lack of destination, lack of somewhere to land, or a lack of ability to do power dives.
The Radio wasn’t much help when it came to decision making, so we decided to land on the range near the Haitian border before we were entirely out of fuel. Practical enough for me. 3,000ft is a lot of distance for the ocean to suddenly swoop up and consume us. I felt safe, and that’s all that mattered to me….because I was driving.
We waited on that range for weeks. When we did get a radio transmission, it usually involved something going wrong somewhere in the rest of the world. I think the worst part about it was the slightly clueless feeling anyone had when they spoke over the radio…almost as if they weren’t sure it was really happening. The weather was quite nice, and the view spectacular. To the south was more of the Caribbean, and on our North side were the mountains we just flew from about 40 miles away. Halfway between us and those mountains, a beautiful lake that shimmered in the sun like nothing else. Even in disaster, I could still find beauty in the world.
The weeks were spent finding new sources of food (couldn’t go eating all of the government issued emergency food for the Puerto Rican Flu survivors…so we only had half) and fighting off the occasional cluster of “Las Sombras” as the locals like to call them. It literally means “the Shadows”, but every time I swear I hear ‘Zombies’. Maybe I’m just paranoid. We stuck close to the plane…emergency situations were inevitable, we just weren’t sure when. It turned out to be last week.
I was tinkering with some of our emergency broadcast technology. I wanted to try and get the internet working and see if there really was any flooding. I could see to the ocean and wasn’t seeing any changes. It was then that I read about the disaster in Washington, the washing over of LA, and that we actually survived six hurricanes. I found it ironic that the first one this season was named AJ.
It’s time to start my building shift. Between the eighteen of us, we’ve been doing quite well for ourselves. The camp is centered around the plane. We taxied it closer to the lake to get a better view across it. We have one tower up right next to the plane that we use as the camp sentry, and we’re in the process of building more permanent housing, a stock room, and another tower at the edge of the lake. The tents from the plane are great and all, but I’m not a fan of mosquitoes. Or bugs in general.
Most of the locals can speak English, and most of us can speak Spanish, so I suppose that’s good. Soto’s been a big help here. He was an English teacher, so I sort of declared him the go-to guy when anyone really needs anything. And by anyone, I mean me, because I can’t remember a damn thing from the 3 years of high school Spanish I slept through. I can understand a lot more than I thought I remembered, but my head is so messed up with Polish, French, and German that I can’t remember my Spanish anymore. Odd to think that was ten years ago.
Can you tell I’m procrastinating? I really don’t want to go build, but I suppose being late to my own shift in a system I came up with would be a bad thing.
More from Camp Calloway when I can find time. I scheduled us to be busy to keep from getting bored.
Semper Paratus
Tags: AJ Green, Camp Calloway, Caribbean, Coast Guard, Dominican Republic, Entriquillo, Flu, H1N1, Haiti, Pico Duarte, Puerto Rico, radio, S.O.S., Semper Paratus, swine flu, West Nile, Zombie, zombiepocalypse