We’re on St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. All the islanders we have met have been extraordinarily friendly: Life in the Caribbean just as we imagine it.

Dan has mastered the art of driving on the left side of the road with a right-side-drive car but the roads are a shambles. Sometimes a bit worse than that. On what should be a five-minute drive from our hotel to the restaurant, road work has reduced a fairly long stretch of road to only one lane wide. And a narrow lane at that. A construction traffic light is in operation, allowing each direction of traffic to move through the construction zone by turns. It is a long light because it is designed to ensure that all the traffic going in one direction has cleared the construction area before it gives the green light to traffic heading in the other direction.

We wait patiently through the long light on the way to the restaurant. But things have gotten worse by the time we return. The northbound lane is backed up almost as far as the restaurant itself. We get in line. A few cars come back the other way. Very few. We creep forward.

Eventually, the light is in sight. It turns green. No one moves. A few cars from behind us pull out to the right (into the lane for oncoming traffic) and speed toward the one-lane area, hoping to make it through before the light changes again. “There must be a breakdown up ahead in our lane,” we think.

The light turns red. A few cars come through the other way. But wait a moment! Aren’t those the cars that just went by from our side? We aren’t sure.

The light turns green again. Several cars pass by from behind us, and, seeing a small break, Dan pulls out into the moving lane. Or tries to. The car coming up from behind speeds up, honks angrily, and won’t let us in. Dan mutters his opinion of which part of the anatomy best describes the driver. “Idiot,” I agree.

The light turns red. Dan pulls back into our lane so as not to block oncoming traffic and decides to walk up to the front of the line to see what’s going on. While I wait in the car, I see cars returning down the oncoming lane. One car in particular is backing down the road very quickly, angrily, barely in control. I recognize the car. It’s the same guy who cut us off earlier. “Jerk!” I say to no one in particular. I didn’t consider that my car window was open to the warm island breeze. As was his.

He screeches to a halt, pulls up even with me. “What you say?” he demands. There are two men in the car, large men. The driver has a face as round as the moon, as black as the night. His features twist with anger. “What you say?”

I am a woman alone in an open car. “You shouldn’t drive like that,” I tell him, trying to be diplomatic. “You’re angry, you make everyone around you angry, too. Try to be a little nicer.”

“Don’t you go calling me no jerk!” He is almost yelling. Who knows, maybe I’m the third person today that has told him he’s a jerk. First his girlfriend, then his boss, and now me. I don’t know about the others, but as for me, he isn’t going to let me get away with it.

I have a moment of illumination. By being angry at him, I too am making things worse. I’m making myself a worse person, and I’m making him angrier. Which will make things worse for everyone he chances upon along the way. In his life. I decide I must take a stand.

“You’re right,” I say. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was wrong of me, and I’m sorry. I should have more sympathy. But you really should try to be a little nicer. It would make things better for everybody.”

We look at each other for a moment. He nods slightly and drives off. I like to think: not quite as recklessly as before. But I’m not sure.

I like to think that just possibly there might be one fewer jerk out there in the world today.

Who knows?

It’s time to confess. I am an electricity addict. And I am not alone.

Having arrived early for my flight from Boston airport, the first thing I did after getting through security and going to my gate was to look for a plug. Did I need a plug? No. I didn’t *need* to use my computer, and in any case, my computer was fully charged. But I wanted to save the charge for the long flight to San Francisco. Did I *need* to use my computer on the plane? No. I am carrying a camera, an iPod with 2,699 songs on it, a book I’ve barely started, two Smithsonian magazines, and a portable CD player with not one but two complete books on CD. But I thought I *might* want to use my computer, so I wanted to save the charge. So I needed a plug. There weren’t many plugs at the gate. In fact, I found only one fourplex, two of which were used by airport kiosk equipment and one of which was being used by a young man on his computer. That left one for me. Shamelessly, I strung my wire around the back of his seat, muttering my “Sorry”s and “Excuse me”s.

Sure enough, I ran out of computer battery power on the plane. Dan was supposed to get in at the same time as me, but my plane is ten minutes early and his is an hour and twenty minutes late. So I have to wait. Good time to charge up the ol’ computer. Unlike BOS, SFO has plenty of plugs. There’s a twoplex on every structural pillar. And as I walk down the long corridor from my arrival gate to Dan’s I notice that almost every twoplex is in use by two plugs attached by snaking cords to two computers in the laps of two people sitting as close as they can to the juice. The end seat in a row, if possible. The floor if not. I begin to worry that there won’t be a plug for me.

But here at Dan’s gate nothing is happening. No one is here. I occupy a fine end seat in a comfortable, empty row. And–ah!–I am plugged in.

California. Gotta love it.

Yesterday I was walking on the pedestrian/ bikeway in the long park between Fell and Oak Streets, heading west toward Stanyan, which marks the border between the park I was walking in and Golden Gate Park. Approaching Stanyan, I noticed an official-looking message stenciled in white paint on the dark asphalt. It showed the silhouette of an automobile, and the text read, “DEATH MONSTERS AHEAD”.

Walking to the grocery store today, Margot and I saw a bus approaching. Up on the top of the front, where they usually put the route number and destination, this bus said, “NOWHERE IN PARTICULAR”. I did so much want to get on, but we had somewhere we had to get to. I wonder where that bus is now…

Everyone loves to love The Incas. This includes their descendants and those of their close neighbors, the Quechua peoples. Quechua is one of the two official languages of Peru (along with Spanish). In the highlands, there is a certain look to the people. Quechua blood is strong here. But even our tour guide in Cuzco – gentle, erudite Marco with his necktie and umbrella, Spanish-looking and European educated (with a degree in anthropology) described an event as “good for the Spaniards, but bad for us.” Us. Although Marco and most of the people in Cuzco are of mixed blood (I asked), it’s very clear which side they identify with. I was fiercely glad about this.

Okay. So why do we all prefer the Incas to the Spaniards? On the surface of it, the answer is obvious. The Spaniards were illiterate, intolerant bullies who arrived with their superior weapons and their European diseases to decimate a civilized culture, and thought so little of it that they melted down the brilliant Inca artwork and crafted items in silver and gold for bullion to pay their armies. They enslaved the people. They not only forbade them to practice their religion, but also made them tear down their own temples (rather than which many of the Incas preferred to commit suicide). They obliterated their culture and never even knew what they had destroyed. We value that which has disappeared, especially since the little we know of it has beauty and wisdom.

But on the other hand. The Inca empire was less than a hundred years old when the Spaniards destroyed it. All the evidence indicates that the Incas did to other, earlier civilizations exactly what the Spaniards did to theirs – obliterated religious practices; destroyed whole towns as well as temples, sometimes demolishing them stone from stone; transported entire peoples into slave labor in remote regions. The Incas destroyed a pre-Columbian and relatively advanced civilization in Equador so thoroughly, dismantling entire cities stone from stone and relocating entire populations, that had the events not happened within the living memory of some of the people met by the Spaniards, we would have no record of it at all. Like the Spaniards, the Incas ultimately extended their empire too far and, overextended, helped bring about their own downfall.

I think the main thing one can say about the Incas as opposed to the Spaniards is that they took from the peoples they conquered arts and culture, not just material wealth. They were willing to learn. Much of the art of stone-building at Ollantaytambu and other Inca sites (such as Machu Picchu and Sacsayhuaman, among others) clearly came from the Tiahuanacu people, whom they conquered. The Incas forceably relocated the Tiahuanacu stonebuilders and others to Ollantaytambu, thereby solving two problems at once. The Tiahuanacu had not wanted to join the Inca empire (as had many other groups), and because they had fought against the Incas, they had to be subdued and punished. The Ollantaytambans had also fought rather than submitting, and since they were close to home, the Incas had to keep them under control. The Incas decided that a significant structure (Incas seemed to combine monument, fortress, and temple into one concept) was needed at Ollantaytambu, and the Tiahuanacu were the people to build it.

Ollantaytambu, Sacsayhuaman, and Machu Picchu were never finished. The Inca empire lasted less than a hundred years and had only four emperors before the Spanish came. Building projects involving thousands of people over fifty years ground to a sudden halt when the smallpox swept down, ahead of the Spaniards, followed shortly by civil war. By the time the Spaniards themselves arrived, it was already over.

The other factor that keeps the Incas so alive in our hearts and spirits is the interplay of light and heaviness. It’s hard to comprehend a culture that had such a love of stone and such a mastery of its workmanship, while at the same time worshipping the sun. Yet only the dominance of both of these factors can explain the magic of the structures we find. Machu Picchu is magnificent – but it is not unique (except in how well preserved and how [relatively] accessible it is). The Incas built on the shoulders of the mountains, where they could mark and celebrate the rising and setting of the sun. Watching the sun set or rise over Machu Picchu shows clearly how inconceivable it is the Incas would have built in the dark river valleys, or on the unsubtle, exposed peaks. At the same time they built of the material of the mountains, fitting and polishing each unique stone, rejoicing in the size and power of the rocks, and working their structures right into and around the natural stone formations.

One more thing. Quechua (and perhaps even specifically Inca) culture is far from vanished in Peru. Our deeply Christian guide at the convent in Arequipa spoke not only of Christ as Love, but also of the power of the earth as manifested in certain root vegetables (long, phallic ones). The condor representing heaven, the puma representing the earth, and the serpent representing the world below the earth are all carved into the stone façade of a church on the main square in Arequipa. One of the chapels of the cathedral in Cuzco, beautifully carved of native wood, has deliciously fertile naked women carved into every armrest of every seat. Tour guides point out these features proudly. We are Catholic, they seem to be saying, but in our own way and on our own terms. The computer geek who copied my camera’s full flash card to CDROM in Cuzco paused to admire a photo of a condor in flight. Condors, we were told more than once, are the guides of the soul from this life to the next. Our guide in the Sacred Valley carried an Inca cross, the three-stepped cross representing the worlds below, on, and above the earth, and the four directions of the Inca roads out of Cuzco, the navel of the world, to all the world’s quarters. (I love this elegant symbol of the entire universe, and now have one of my own, with a jewel representing Cuzco, which means navel in Quechua, in the center.)