An open letter to Joe Holley of the Washington Post:

Joe. Word. So in reading your obituary of Ted Kennedy -- an overall fine piece on a senator’s senator -- I was struck by one piece of what seemed like casual hyperbole, in this line: "Kennedy served in the Senate through five of the most dramatic decades of the nation's history."

With all respect, that seems a bit of a bias toward the recent. I understand, though. I’m partial to the 1980s, because of Transformers toys, New Order, the fall of communism, “Amadeus,” my birth, Tetris, and 1984 not turning out like 1984. Great. For other drama, there’s the crack epidemic, “E.T.,” our bully incursions into Latin America … but would we call this one of the most dramatic decades in U.S. history? Nah. Bottom half.

What about the '90s? We enjoyed a splendid little war in Iraq, a comparatively pissant World Trade Center attack, Rodney King riots, Oklahoma City bombing, Super Nintendo and a president whose predilection for chubby intern BJs allowed his enemies to grind the government to a standstill. Granted, we’ll all remember where we were the day we returned the Panama Canal to Panama. But could any reasonable person label this one of the most dramatic decades in U.S. history? Not unless you’re inclined to label Sunday brunch one of the most dramatic meals of the week.

Mountainside mining in southeast HaitiThe road from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic is one of those drives that reminds you: No matter how nowhere you think you are, you can always be somewhere more nowhere.

We sped east through the manic traffic at day’s end, passing first through the urban ruins of this sprawling metropolis, which gave way to the grass and sparse cinderblock shacks, which then gave way to adobe huts and fields. Those gave way to cacti and scrub brush. We saw men straining the scree they mine from denuded hillsides here (see the photo above) and a woman sifting through a smoldering dirt pile, looking for charcoal – the fate of a scary number of the trees here. Then we passed a lake that has been rising so fast the roads are disappearing. In this country, humans and nature are locked in a constant landscape-wrecking contest.

The taptap: carpooling as conceived by Haitians
After a morning given to tagging along on a drive around Port-au-Prince, let me now celebrate the indispensable bus/taxi trucks that trundle around, picking up workers and students and literal hangers-on from designated stops.

Haitian subway, thy name is taptap. I only wish subway cars were painted with such obvious aplomb. But then, subways have a way of keeping curls of dust from overtaking you as you sit along the insides of a moving pick-up truck.

Not all are emblazoned with English slogans; some are in Creole, others in Spanish, still others in Hebrew. Some feature little more than a skeleton of a cap above a truck bed; others, as you see in these photos, display a touch more style.

I have yet to partake but if plans hold my esteemed host and I will be hitching on the Dominican version later as we head across the border on the way to Santo Domingo. Which may make for sporadic contact for a couple of days. But what's new.

It’s a curious thing when you know the lasting image from a day in one of the world’s truly overwhelming cities will be one of the last you saw.

I mean, we went from the hotel down a slalom of thisclose pedestrians and past a shocking flipbook of commerce and chaos. We met with, broke bread with, overlooked ravines with, visited a cockfighting arena with and visited the home of a Haitian national who was deported from South Florida to Port-au-Prince 11 years ago after his rap sheet got too big for the States to hold. We dropped in on a small business in which women weave recycled litter into purses and wallets and sandals for sale here, in the States and online. And we took the long way home, past the citadel that is the U.S. embassy and the U.N. outposts and one of the longest, craziest lines of traffic I’ve ever seen, dodging motorcycles, entrepreneurs, hello-down-there! potholes, crossing dry creekbeds with a goat foraging on one side of the bridge and a hog on the other …

Then a quarter-mile from home, we hit a damn dog. Poor thing was a variation on what I’ve come to call the Haitian national dog: a rangy long-tailed tawny dog that plumps itself to 24 pounds on the garbage it scavenges ahead of the chickens. The dog wandered into the street right in front of us, sauntered through our lane, decided better of getting hit in the oncoming lane, and backed its way under our tire. It screamed, wretchedly. Men on the sidewalk winced, then yelled at us to pull forward. The dog cried as it limped away, its back right leg now a useless gray looseness. As we had braked, we had dragged it.

It was a fuck-all rotten way to end an otherwise fine day of reporting. But it reminds me of a line from Tim Cahill’s “Road Fever” (which I’ll address more fully later): “There are no old dogs on the Pan-American Highway.” Petionville either.

I was happy hours later to dance to Cat Empire with a dog named Tarzan on some U.N. workers’ patio.

Oh, also, lest you think the Third World isn't actually on this planet, here's what was playing on the dueling flatscreens over a hotel bar last night:
Aqua Teen Hunger ForceBrett Favre

Port-au-Prince: A view of the city from the Hotel Montana.While in some ways I’m a freeloading parasite, crashing in the spare bedroom at the hotel-run standalone house where my friend Jonathan lives, I occasionally feel that my perspective as a first-time visitor to Haiti has its value. One instance: when I reminded him, a few nights ago, that I was surprised to see the parking lot attendant inside the walled gates of one upscale hotel/restaurant toting a shotgun as he helped us scrape out a parking spot inside the crowded lot. This is the kind of job – "a little further back, a little more, you’ve got plenty of room on this side" – I’m used to seeing in the hands of crustached teens wielding nothing more menacing than a wallet chain. Since then, though, I’ve noticed security all over this town casually brandishing single-barrel pump-action shotguns. The guy at the gate of our hotel sometimes leans on his while seated, as a tired man might lean on an umbrella. Yesterday, as we left a grocery store, I noticed their rent-a-cops included one who surveyed the bustling street with, yep, a friggin’ shotgun strapped over his right shoulder. After two years here, following two more in the Dominican Republic, Jonathan is so accustomed to seeing shotties on the way to buy rabbit steaks and 8-year-old rum that he barely notices them.

Some Sundays you wake up at noon, sweating like Patrick Ewing at the free-throw line, wondering things like, Why is my head full of snot? Why is it so hot in here? Is my camera really broken? Why is my shirt covered in wine stains? Has the 1997 Geo Tracker that broke down and nearly stranded me on the streets of greater Port-au-Prince at 4 a.m. had its headlights scooped out and tires pinched by hoodlums? What the hell happened last night?

Point-by-point sometimes is easiest. My head’s full of ecoplasmic mucous because I’m fighting off whatever microflora have crept into my system despite drinking nothing that doesn’t do a stint in a bottle first – though noshing a 2 a.m. cup of conch from a street vendor carrying a giant silver pot and brandishing some kind of gut-nuke hot sauce was probably not the most prudent course of action. It’s hot in here because it’s noon in the tropics and the jalousies let the A/C bleed out and the sunlight stream in. My camera, it turns out, is not permanently busted; rather, it decided the connectors between the body and the lens needed cleaning – that’s Error 99 on the Canon 30-D, in case it befalls you. Three people separately guessed that it succumbed to voodoo. Its fagging out on me prevented the thorough photo-documentation of a farewell shindig at the razorwire-trimmed compound of the French Red Cross here in town. There convened a cross-strata of the headiest local foreigners: NGO staffers, diplomats, consular functionaries, cell phone company sorts, entrepreneurs, journalists. For some reason there wasn’t a corkscrew to be found in this French-run manse, so someone opened a bottle of red by stab-ramming the cork into the neck of the bottle, and as he filled my cup, the wine gouting out along the blade, my white shirt soon looked like Leatherface’s apron. This is why I wake up looking like I got my nose bloodied the night before. C’est la vie.

Mentally I checked out of the party once I realized that I was hands-down the least interesting person there and that the playing of “Informer” wasn’t a mistake or foray into ironic 90s-nostalgia but an actual harbinger of the other anachronistic abortions that would be popping up on the iPod. It was time to go clubbing. Of course, clubbing turned into drinking and dancing, and dancing turned into flailing like a fawn on slick rocks compared with the locals, then led to bouncing across the street to a Haitian-mook bar called Barak where I proceeded to gulp lager with an ebullient Irishman, which convened into a near-disastrous mechanical collapse on the part of Katz’ car that involved swift bilingual mechanical fiddling, a pointless battery swap and at least 10 neighborhood dudes poking, pulling, suggesting, testing and generally swarming the vehicle on the dimly lit street while a kid of about 11 implored me, in melodious English, “Hey, chief, why don’t you just give me some money?” We wound up hitching a ride home in the SUV of a Red Cross worker who had joined us at the bar and who suggested us, prudently, to pay one of the guys 500 gourdes (about $12.50 American) for their time.

The vehicle survived the night. Mechanics swapped out some insulated tentacle from the starting system and we were back on the road Sunday morning. “What a fucked-up night,” I told Katz. “The capper on the evening is that everything broke.”

“If you like that,” he replied, “you’ll love living here.” With those words, I introduce you to a prescient video of our drive around Petionville on Saturday:

These are my friends Ashley Harrell and Mike Mooney*, seen here in their usual morose state of unfaltering sobriety. If you have the sort of idle time afforded mainly to victims of skiing accidents and the tiny-dog rich, I suggest you curl up with one of their stories. Here’s Ashley detailing the plight of a crackhead mom snitch who fingered a murderer then suffered bizarre consequences and Mike writing about a triple-digit screwdriver-stabbing crime of lesbian passion. Yee-haw.Ashley and Mike

*Bonus points for recognizing Brantley Hargrove, author of this methodical takedown of a one-time near-decapitator turned multimedia pastor, in the background.

It's not the greatest balcony view I've ever seen, but with the sounds of the slum (music, mostly, with the odd yelp or rooster caw or school collapse) echoing up and the trees in blossom, this man's roost ain't bad.Jonathan Katz

Went last night to the Hotel Oloffson to see RAM, a Port-au-Prince rasin band that incorporates rock, kompa, roots and folk elements of voudou, rara and petwo. At one point, I counted something like 17 performers on the floor and stage at once (sort of like half a Wu-Tang reunion, in that regard) -- all in a packed lobby that felt like a South Beach crowd transported to the house that inspired former resident Charles Addams' illustrations. I couldn't even begin to explain it. Here's a moving, talking picture instead.