You're Retiring to Ecuador?: Are You Loco?

chapter 1

Retirement:

You’re Retiring Where? No Really, Where?

Estée and I woke up on a Sunday morning in 2004, looked at one another, and simultaneously said, Let’s retire. Where should we go? Oh, yes, let’s retire to Ecuador! By the way, where is Ecuador? Is that a city or a country? Or is it an island? That’s not what really happened, but that is what nearly all of our friends and acquaintances seemed to believe. While we are not averse to being whimsical at times, we do not approach a decision of that gravity with whimsy. While it might make a nice narrative, the real story is quite different.

When Estée and I met in Chicago and got married, some of our first conversations had to do with where we wanted to retire. These conversations usually took place from November through March and sometimes into April. Anyone who has lived in Chicago or a similar climate from November through early April will understand.

The thought of retiring can cause paroxysms in many people. There are so many issues and questions to consider. Answers to those questions are different, but generally equally difficult, for everyone. Is there enough money in the bank to retire? What will I do in retirement? Do I have hobbies that will keep my interest and sustain me for years to come? Can I stand living with my significant other 24/7? Does my significant other even want to retire at this point? What about health issues? Where should I retire? Near our kids—even though they might leave any time and take the grandkids with them? What will I do if my spouse dies before me? Would I even consider retiring in a foreign land? Retirement for many people is a terrifying prospect, for many good reasons.

While retirement was a long way off, we knew that we would not retire in Chicago, even though both of us love the city. The mayors Daley, father and son, both had profound effects on the city over many years. (There were a couple of mayors in between, but memories of them are less sanguine.) During most of the time we lived there, Chicago was under the guidance of Mayor Richard M. Daley—Richey to his friends. During his twenty-two-year tenure, Chicago blossomed into a world-class city that any resident would be proud to live in and brag about.

We lived in the first suburb west of Chicago, called Oak Park, where Hemingway was born and Frank Lloyd Wright had one of his studios. Hemingway referred to Oak Park as a suburb of wide lawns and narrow minds. Frank Lloyd Wright built over forty beautiful and unique homes in Oak Park, all with wide lawns. We did not have a Frank Lloyd Wright home. We did not even have a wide lawn, so I took some courage in the belief that I might possibly have a wide mind.

I moved to Oak Park in 1978, just in time for the famous winter of ’78–’79. All you have to say to anyone who was near Chicago during that time is the bad winter, and they will say ah, the winter of ’78–’79. The area was hit with three consecutive massive blizzards, each worse than the previous one. There was no time to dig out of the first storm, let alone the subsequent two.

Following the third storm, the temperatures plummeted to dangerous levels so you could not be outside for more than a minute or two before tender parts of your body began to freeze and crack as a prelude to falling off. The snow was so deep that the heads of the parking meters were completely covered. The Village of Oak Park actually had city workers and extra part-time employees dig down to uncover the heads of the meters. The Oak Park traffic police ticketed stranded cars whose owners did not feed the meters. To feed the meters from the buried sidewalks, one had to get on one’s hands and knees, or even lay on the snow, and reach down to put multiple quarters in the meter. Occasionally an Oak Park traffic policeman or policewoman would be lying on the snow to read the meter as the owner would be trying to feed the meter. This was a dangerous situation, and after several of these encounters, the chief of the Oak Park Traffic Division decided that the draconian measures being practiced by the Traffic Division could be delayed until the snow had been cleared, or at least practiced when the owners were not present.

Driving was out of the question, so both Estée and I took public transportation—something we wanted to do anyway, but not under those circumstances. To get to work at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center where I was an assistant professor and head of research in the department of radiation oncology, I had to take a bus to the El (for elevated) train stop, and then the El to the medical center stop, west of the city. At the end of the day, the trip was reversed. During and after the triple storms, commuting was an adventure.

Estée took a different El train that deposited her within a few steps of the beauty salon she owned called Estée Hanson Coiffures in the heart of Chicago. The fact that she was right downtown gave her a huge commuter advantage, since she could be one of the first passengers to board the train on her way back home to Oak Park.

One fateful afternoon after the third blizzard, at about 5:30, I went to the medical center stop to catch the westbound train for home. I marched up and down the platform to try to keep warm. I was marching up and down the platform with about fifty other people, and it brought back memories of army basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, eight years before. I considered calling out your left, your left, your left-right-left in the southern drawl that my drill sergeant used, but I resisted. The bad memories of the Vietnam War were still fresh for a lot of people in the late seventies.

The marching did absolutely no good. I was freezing. Everyone was straining to see if the headlights of the westbound train were visible. There was no train. The fear was that if you gave up and walked the ten minutes back to the nearest warm building, you would miss your ride. I gave up, marched the requisite ten minutes, and spent precious time warming up. Then it was back to the platform to join the now nearly one hundred soldiers marching up and down the platform. My gamble had paid off, though, and I had not missed the train.

Excitement rippled throughout the gathering on the platform as someone thought he saw the headlights of the westbound train above the tracks. It was a feeling of anticipation similar to the one I had at a concert waiting for Elton John to take the stage. (In that case, it turned out that he was actually on stage, but I was so far away out on a lawn with poles and trees in my line of view that I could not make out his short, stocky figure prancing around the piano.)

And yes, there they were, headlights moving westbound at two miles an hour. Like Elton John at the concert, the headlights looked miles away, so I thought we would all be dead, frozen on the platform like the unlucky German troops surrounding Stalingrad in WWII. We would be found with our frozen legs and arms in different directions with peaceful expressions of anticipation on our faces. Perhaps our surviving relatives could get Elton John to play at our mass funeral. Like the gravity of a black hole, we collectively drew the headlights toward us, and with sighs of relief, we watched as the train painfully pulled into the station.

What happened next nearly brought war to the platform. The frozen metal of the train car doors creaked and groaned as they slowly slid open, emitting a cloud of collected breath from the passengers within. The huge size of the cloud suggested that it had been formed from a lot of breath, and it was. Not only breath emerged; passengers near each door were involuntarily disgorged from the train from the pressure of the packed humanity within. A tin of sardines had more free space than that train. The surprised expressions on the faces of the disgorged passengers coming from the office buildings, banks, and shops of downtown Chicago quickly turned to fear. Their suspicious and darting eyes were matched by the expressions of fear on the faces of the nearly frozen medical center soldiers on the platform. Who was going to have the privilege of being the next sardine in the train car?

The events that followed could not really be described as pushing and shoving. It was more like clawing, tripping, yelling and shouting, jabbing, swearing, and otherwise acting like English thugs at a soccer match in Berlin. I am not good in those situations, so I clutched my briefcase and trudged back to the warmth of the medical center. This time I had a hot cup of coffee, called home, and gave Estée a briefing on how extraordinarily rude some people can be.

A full forty-five minutes went by, and I thought that surely by now the number of people coming from the city would have diminished and I could zip home to a glass of red wine, a hot meal, and the warmth of a fire to prepare for the same ordeal the next day. I marched back to the train stop to find nearly one hundred more people waiting—not a good sign. I recognized some from forty-five minutes ago, which was a terrible sign.

Everyone knew the drill by now. There were scouts who looked for the headlights and there were troops who marched up and down the platform to keep warm. After what seemed like hours but was only a few minutes, another train slowly crept into the station. Lady Luck was on my side this time, because with my marching, I was inadvertently positioned near a door when it creaked open. A huge cloud of breath emerged and some human sardines spurted out of the doorway, pushed by their fellow sardines in the train. In the ensuing scrum to push others aside to get onto the train, I was carried into the doorway and onto the train without actually taking a step.

While that was quite amazing, what I found in the train was even more astonishing. It was packed so tightly that where any body part was at that moment, it remained for the duration of the ride. My left hand gripped the handle of my soft briefcase, which was pressed painfully into my left leg. I could feel the metal clasps on the side of the leather case pushing into my thigh. As I was being transported into the train car, I had instinctively put my right hand up toward my chest in a defensive stance, and there it stayed. More clawing, tripping, yelling and shouting, jabbing, and swearing was going on behind me; but miraculously, I was on the El train, and I was on my way home.

The train pulled slowly away from the din of verbal disappointment and outright abuse that arose from the medical center stop and settled into a bumpy to-and-fro motion that, on a normal ride, can lull one to sleep. This was not a normal ride. As soon as my mind cleared and I realized that I had made it onto a train that was only slightly warmer than the platform, I became aware of just how packed together everyone was. That slightly greater warmth came from body heat, which carried with it, shall we be kind and say, a certain musky odor. I could not move at all—not a foot, not a hand, nothing. Only my head could rotate. Like some strange physical law, everything else had to remain exactly where it was in space.

After a short time, I realized that my right hand was touching something quite soft and warm. Gravity was pulling my hand slowly down into more softness and warmth. Living in a big city in America, one learns either quickly or harshly that eye contact in public should be avoided under almost all circumstances. Everyone in that packed train was either looking up at the ceiling, at the station maps displayed at intervals on the walls of the train, or, if possible, out a window. There was no eye contact. I decided that it might be important to break that rule and have a look downward at what was so soft and warm. I looked down toward where my right hand was disappearing, and into the gaze of a short, sixty-something-year-old obese woman with long, red-dyed hair, dark eyes, and jowls that shook with the rhythm of the train. We were front to front, and from the feel of her whole body, which was pressed oh-so-tightly into mine, I could tell that she easily outweighed me even though she was about 5 ft. 2 in. compared to my six-foot, not-so-small frame.

My heavy-duty Eddie Bauer goose-down parka, which was advertised to keep me warm to negative twenty degrees, was not helping insulate me from that body. My right hand was slowly sinking in between her voluminous soft and warm breasts. The motion of the train caused a jiggling that could, under other circumstances, be titillating, but in this particular circumstance caused sheer panic within my very soul. All I could think of was the tawdry novels that my religious mother tried to protect me from in my adolescence, the ones that contained the phrase as his hand slowly sank between her... I tried to extricate the offending hand, fearing that it would be the cause of far-greater consequences down the tracks. I absolutely could not move. The only thing I could do was to apologize, so I weakly said, Sorry about this. Her dark-brown eyes met my blue eyes, and I received a wide smile without a tooth to be seen.

In the ensuing eleven years that I worked at the medical center, I took the train perhaps five more times. I did not make eye contact with anyone ever again, and I always wondered if she would recognize me if she saw me, and what she would do to me—or for me—if she did. I shudder to this day.

Although no winter in Chicago since then has risen to the level of discomfort that people suffered during the infamous winter of ’78–’79, it was clear after that winter that Estée and I would not be retiring in the Midwest or anywhere north of there. At that time, there was no great rush to make a decision; we had years before we had to get serious about retirement. Occasionally, however, I did consult older friends and colleagues about their thoughts on retiring.

On one such occasion, Estée and I were visiting a friend and colleague, Dr. John Ainsworth, one of my favorite mentors during my professional training. He and his wife, Caroline, lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and were considering retirement in a few years. John was the civilian director of a military laboratory in Bethesda where the military director held sway over operations. The military position was rotated every four years, and each service had its turn, so one four-year span saw a director from the army, followed by the navy, then the air force. Some military directors were great and some were, well, not so great. During the not-so-great years, John would go to Costco and buy the largest tub of Vaseline he could find and keep it in his deep, left-bottom drawer. When a not-so-good military director would enter his office, he would retrieve the vat of Vaseline, plop it on top of his desk, and begin difficult conversations with the request to please use the Vaseline, and please be gentle. I adopted this practice with some of my bosses during the years, and it got me through some bad times; however, I had some bosses for whom there was simply not enough Vaseline in the world.

John and his wife took us to Rock Creek Park, which had many beautiful nooks and crannies in which to wander around. During the wandering, I asked John if he thought a lot about retiring. He replied, Only when I am awake; at night, I dream about it. Perhaps it was after that comment that Estée and I started to get more serious about the prospect.

One of the hobbies Estée and I share is SCUBA diving, so we let our minds wander when we were diving at locations like Belize, Honduras, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Grand Cayman Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. One location in particular struck us as a great possibility for a retirement destination. We fell in love with Ecuador.

My introduction to Ecuador years before was less than favorable. I was ten years old, sitting captive in the Nashua Bible Church in rural Iowa. Nashua was a typical dying farm town in the Midwest with a population of about eighteen hundred people. When I left seven years later, it was populated with about thirteen hundred people and falling. Nashua is near the fictitious town featured in the book and movie A Thousand Acres.

Nashua was, and I am sure still is, a great town in which to grow up, but once you graduated from high school, there was little to do to make a living other than working on the family farm. My family did not have one. My parents were religious people, especially my mother, who insisted that my older brother and I attend Sunday school, then the regular Sunday service, then, later that night, the Sunday evening service. To top it off, we were dragged on most Wednesdays to an evening prayer meeting. All these church services proved to me beyond any doubt that Einstein was correct: time is relative, and under some circumstances, time stops.

On a Sunday in 1956 during the regular service, Pastor Max Ward announced that a special collection was to be taken to help the spouses and children of five missionary men who had been brutally slaughtered in the jungles of Ecuador by members of the Waorani tribe. I had never heard of Ecuador, let alone the Waorani tribe. The phrase brutally slaughtered sounded serious—especially to a ten-year-old—so I had a lot of questions, but my parents hushed me. An article in the Des Moines Register that provided more details of the brutal slaughter was read from the pulpit the next Sunday, so the news stayed around for quite a while, especially for me.

The thoughts and unanswered questions I had as a ten-year-old came back to me as American Airlines flight 932 began its decent into Quito, Ecuador, in 1995, nearly forty years after the brutal slaughter. I really did not know what to expect, but I thought that surely things had changed and we SCUBA-diving tourists would not be set upon and brutally slaughtered by the Waorani tribe. Surely Bruce, our group leader and owner of a dive shop in Chicago’s Villa Park, had done his research before arranging the trip to avoid such a headline event. Still, I envisioned my colleagues reading the short two paragraphs on page ten of the Chicago Tribune with the phrases brutally slaughtered and if only they had planned better. I let the other passengers disembark first just in case. There was not a Waorani tribesman to be seen.

Quito was a modern city of about one-and-a-half million people, although there had not been a census for a long time. After a night listening to the barking dogs of Quito (a direct quote from an Ecuador guide book which implored travelers to bring industrial earplugs and that I read after the trip), we took off for the Galapagos Islands for two great weeks of diving and sightseeing. At the end of the dive trip, we spent a few days north of Quito. We found the people of Ecuador to be fascinating and the valley- and mountain-scapes stunningly beautiful.

Our next trip to Ecuador was in order to see orchids in their wild habitat. This is when we met Pepe and Ingrid Portilla, the owners of Ecuagenera, an orchid company headquartered in Gualaceo, about thirty-five kilometers east of Cuenca. After many discussions with Pepe and Ingrid, a great deal of encouragement from them, and the promise of help getting settled, we decided to do our due diligence and get serious about retiring to Ecuador. Let the fun begin!

Our decision to retire to Ecuador was met with what could politely be described as a mixed reaction. Most of the mixture was amused disbelief, folded in with incredulity and a touch of anger by some, but mostly disbelief. Are you out of your minds? was a frequently voiced sentiment. Are they out of their minds? was the phrase used among our family, friends, colleagues, and clients. Our Latino friends used the term loco. Our good friends and neighbors, Bill and Bob, simply would not accept our decision. One friend and colleague, a professor at the University of Chicago, was convinced that he would see pictures in the paper of us in a pot of boiling oil as we were featured on the menu of the local tribe eatery. Our daughter sputtered when we announced what we were planning. Her first thoughts were of abandonment, forgetting that she and her husband were considering moving from the Chicago area, first to the West Coast, then to the East Coast. It had not occurred to her that we could leave. After all, we were the home nest and she was the bird free to fly off and set up her nest somewhere else. She had no qualms about her moving but a lot of qualms about our plans. When our plans were announced to my mother, she calmly asked, Do you plan to be buried there? On the list of the hundreds of questions I expected from her, that was not even on the list.

Estée’s clients at her beauty salon had a more honest and selfish reaction. The most frequent comment was, But what will I do about my hair? Why are you doing this to me? I know that a great hairdresser is one of the more important people in one’s life, but neither Estée nor I were prepared for the reactions. The parking valets, who were Ecuadorians and who worked in front of Estee’s shop, were particularly vexed. They had spent huge amounts of money and many long months or years making their way from Ecuador to Chicago. And now, two gringos are spending huge amounts of money and time to go to Ecuador. The irony was not lost on them as they asked, Are you loco? In many respects, the reactions of our family, friends, colleagues, and clients were a great compliment. Indifference would have been devastating.

Now it was time to make our lists of pros and cons—to refine them, to do research on every aspect we could think of, and to do everything we could to make certain that we would not end up in a pot of boiling oil, either figuratively or literally. The pro list was extensive and included climate—meaning the lack of Chicago winters. Cost of living was a positive, especially considering property taxes that were costing us about $14,000 a year in Oak Park. The excitement factor was very high on the pro list as well. I was anxious to pursue my hobby of photography, and there was so much to pursue.

The con list was much shorter, but it was headed by one very important item: missing our family and friends. We extracted promises