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Januarius Graceful Venezuela, little kids on the street doing the samba in place, the sliding lane-shift flow of a Caracas freeway, frigatebirds soaring over long coasts, the way trucks lurch down a red-earth mountain track, the Orinoco Each morning's first frigatebirds fill the huge eastern proscenium minutes before sunrise Iberoamérica. Venezolana, venezolano On the mudflats of a vast Caribbean lagoon on the Orinoco Delta coast a tight standing flock of common stilts face an east wind. The rear ones step ahead pushing the front ones forward To be at the top of the immense vertical continent with the ability to drive off south through the equatorial double tropic into the far, ocean-bound cold exterior pendant peninsula of Patagona approaches a Paris-to-Beijing Eurasian scale and is glorious In awe study the huge scaly yellow legs and talons of a common black hawk waiting silent in the shroud of a mangrove over a roadside tidal pool like a dark Madonna in a shrine Piña, papaya, caraotas negras, arepas de maiz, queso blanco y café Stunned in the presence of a harpy eagle, an avenging angel nearly a meter high, head ruffed and bushy, divided crest that goes hornlike when erect, thighs barred black, massive tarsi, bare. Black chest patch clearly visible, tail marbled and barred with black The caracaras, abrupt and crazy like few things in nature and barely more than half the size of harpy eagles, plunge around flying low off from roadkills The facial skin color of caracaras changes from normal orange to bright yellow when excited Caracaras, Caracas, caracaras but no caracaras in Caracas. Spilling from its high mountain valley with over six million people now Caraqueñas, caraqueños National piece of mind in Venezuela a matter of the price of oil. Up and it's head for the mall, down and it's angry embitterment With a democratic constitution for almost fifty years now and almost ninety percent literacy But a demagogic head of state, wacko ultra-nationalists angry at soft borders, inflation, Brazilian gold miners invading the Venezuelan Amazon, Columbia narcos operating across that border, a Columbian government claim to the Gulf of Venezuela. And the old Guyana territorial dispute over the vast, wet Cuyuni between Georgetown and the Orinoco Of the twenty Venezuelan states, know eight and the Federal District. Nueva Esparta, Sucre, Anzoátegui, Miranda, Aragu, Caracobo, Yaracuy, Falcon The winter league here, eight teams, finishes in time for spring training in the States Una cuentista "Art is the conscious apprehension of the unconscious ecstasy of all created things" She leans back and laughs about los literatos neoyorkinos Larrupping along In Nueva Esparta on a red-earth mountain cutbank above the sea, mushrooms appear one night like smooth-cap parasols (Leucoagaricus naucina), frosted silvery so white as to glow in the false dawn A buffy hummingbird singing nearby in first light. Flies away, flies back in and begins to sing. See her tongue when she opens her tiny long beak California-Arizona-Mexico hummingbird familiarity but never before have heard one sing. Know their ragged twittery calls and chattering chase notes but nothing like this Before the sun is up, another buffy hummingbird and a female ruby-topaz in an arroyo farther along the hillside Search for the ruby-topaz male, crown feathers to the nape glittering ruby red, back dark olive brown, throat and upper breast glittering topaz orange, a tuft of down white feathers on the flanks, tail rufous chestnut tipped black, three and a half inches long Within the hour the sun will burn and bleach and quiet it all except for the wheeling black and turkey vultures But either the ruby-topaz male is not here, or if he is somewhere in the acres of steep hillside brush, when looking one way he's behind, when looking left he's right, when looking back behind he's foreground low in front One tropical hillside is a big place for a darting hummingbird Topaz is a magnificent dark orange yellow, redder and duller than amber Eighty-six species of colibries, tucusitos, and chupaflores in Venezuela, while in the cold, unfloral northeastern North America there's one The families are the Sunangels, the Pufflegs, the Brilliants, the Lancebills, the Violetears, the Mangos, the Sabrewings, the Starfrontlets, the Coquettes, the Woodstars, the Emeralds, the Goldenthroats, the Sapphires, the Hermits, the Barbthroats, the Hummingbirds Within a half hour of the female ruby-topaz, spot neotropic cormorants, the clumsy feather-duster plunging around of a smooth-billed ani, tropical mockingbirds, brown pelicans, an osprey, eared doves, ruddy ground doves, a carib grackle, black-faced grassquits, a bicolored conebill And on deck in the straits skirting the Isla Coche for Punta Escarceo and Cumaná, there it is, half a meter long, yellow eyeball close off the rail for half a minute Its twisted spoon-shaped tail streams unmistakable, the hulk gliding singularity of a pomarine jaeger Great circumpolar skua that ranges from Baffin Island and Greenland to the tropical waters off the northern coast of South America, November to March, to avoid the arctic dark That opportunistic voracious jaeger in sight of the coast of Sucre state's canyons and mountainsides all resplendent with nectar-sipping hummingbirds The Cumanagotos were the first mainland Indians with whom Columbus and the Spaniards who came after him had to do The city of Cumaná is full of Cumanagoto faces The elegant Tainos were Arawakan brothers of the Cumanagotos, who except for language were gone in a lifetime after Columbus hit, every Taino on the planet dead within fifty years of 1492 The Tainos left these words, savannah, maize, hurricane, tobacco, cigar, canoe Talk baseball with an old ballplayer car rental guy who was a boxer too Talk Julio Machado, the relief pitcher from Maraciebo with the poet's name. He says he's read some Machado, as there are old gringo ballplayers who've read, say, Robert Bly Ultramarine yellow, yellow ultramarine, and light chrome yellow Only ten years after Columbus came to the Caribbean, Bartolomé de las Casas arrived in Hispañola, in 1510 became the first priest ordained in America and started a model Indian community in Cumaná He was like a nineteenth century humanist, standing against Indian slavery and medieval Spanish free-booting lust and greed Las Casas went to Peru in 1521 with a royal cédula prohibiting enslavement of people there, became Bishop of Chiapas in Mexico before going home to Spain His magnum opus, Historia de las Indias, wasn't even published in Spanish until 1875. Another of his books translated into Dutch served as evidence that northern Europe used against Spain for three hundred years Focusing Catholic colonial issues that people still argue about Ask the ballplayer about Las Casas and he grins, goes even more enthusiastic about Cumanagotos being his people, this place, his face, he points to his face and repeats, "¡Cumanagoto, cumanagoto, cumanagoto!" Onshore in Sucre state Walking from the ferry slip Against the sun going down in salt-coast haze an alpomado falcon hunting high over a yellow grass bajada. Its white-barred blackish tail obvious in the indirect light, hovering there it looks twice as large as a kestrel At dawn the birds appear like gifts. Oriole blackbird, scaled dove, gray kingbird, great kiskadee, boat-tailed grackle, yellow oriole. Golden-fronted greenlet, scrub greenlet, tropical gnatcatcher And in the same flock of tiny insectivores in a mangrove swamp beside a Radio Sucre transmitter, a male prothonotary warbler as brilliant yellow as he'll appear nesting in the North, as emphatic as Bartolomé de Las Casas seeing God in Indian slaves' eyes Climb the first mountain pass on the way west to Caracas, a waved woodpecker's hatchet-shaped head shows up over a switchback hammering on a tree-size cactus, woodpecker speckling, red cheek and ear patch back toward its nape Driving out of lightly populated Sucre toward Anzoátegui and Miranda Before Barcelona and Puerto La Cruz, each river's green canyon, bananas, maize, Muscovy ducks, sheltered hamlets on blacktop lanes off the coastal highway, red sand beaches inside the coves and inlets Yellow earth impure yellow ocher on the headlands and mountains above the bays, and underlying five hundred years of post-Columbian history on South America's solid northern coast Oxide yellow is yellow ocher on the cutbanks and bare rock-face passes headland to headland down along the coast A hundred kilometers west, colonial Barcelona's numbered-street barrier grid with wrought iron grills and sixteenth century carved hardwood doors Venezuela colonial barrios like old back barrios of Sevilla, Cádiz, Huelva, which afterall is where the people were born who came here five hundred years ago The Andaluz A rock guitar mass going on at dusk in Barcelona's big white early-Baroque cathedral on the plaza Boyacá The quiet plaza encircled by high elegant patios, blue-screened TVs inside high windows Evening coastal glow off the Paseo Colón in adjoining Puerto La Cruz Come upon a big bright meat-smoke restaurant churrasco style managed by a homesick Peruvian from Lima Talk Sendero Luminoso, Brazil, the future. He goes on about Lima like a New Yorker about New York In the dawn from a river bridge west of Barcelona watch yellow-shouldered parrots flying out from roosts in twos and threes. They turn their heads toward one another on the wing and talk away Range down the river through the brush. Greenlets, seedeaters, a plumbeous kite, a smooth yellow-headed caracara lifts off fast away from the river bank with a thin brown and black snake in its talons Down on the river see three green kingfishers with riparian territories a tenth the size of what North American kingfishers claim Road signs for El Tigre all across Anzoátegui state tempt but there is no time, down and back at least a long half-day's drive out of the way Adjoining El Tigre is a little town named, with typical Venezuelan charm, El Tigrito Once in a tienda far down the western slope of the Cerro Desmonando in Jalisco state, nowhere near a road and reached only by sea, saw many dozens of tigre skins piled high on a counter and draped in piles on poles hung from the beams P’ritu's blue woodwork along the coast, parks and trees laid out below long hills, the aspect of a New Zealand North Island town Sand tracks around Laguna de Unare to Boca de Uchire. Stilts, dowitchers, spotted sandpipers, five kinds of herons, scarlet ibises rising and then disappearing behind big mangroves. Empty flats, wide salty beach with white-yellow sand, pounding surf, a brisk, hot offshore breeze Double-striped thick-knees, stone curlews, often kept in semi-domesticity around Venezuelan homesteads to keep the insects down Into Miranda State where not only the river canyons but everything is green, hamlets become like villages, villages like strip mall towns, approaching the capital where one quarter of all Venezuelans live The freeway up to El Marques at the eastern lip of the city's mountain bowl and on in down the urbanized high mountain valley Massive mountain highrise cityscape, nearly a thousand meters above the sea with its freeways and its teeming fringes reaching down almost an hour's drive away to the Caribbean Pico Ávila in the range between Caracas and the sea overlooks everything, is 2,250m at the top of all that city, all that green A single consciousness in all of that huge city might seem less than one wave's swash on that glorious coast Less than a leaf on one of the center's grand old mango trees

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